Loudness and stage/pit balance aside, there are several other means of evaluating the playing of an opera orchestra, the most obvious being attack, accent, the overall timbral impression and center of gravity in the sonorities (high-end or low-end-dominant?), the profiling of phrases and their purely musical sense of destination, and above all, dramatic intent—the quality of sounding like a participant in the unfolding of onstage events, conveyed by the above-mentioned means and through instrumental inflection and coloring, tension and the building of suspense through an underlying pulse, and the sense of arrival or of surprise at a significant occurrence. Measured by these benchmarks, this Siegfried was the palest, feeblest, most neutral reading of any Wagner score I have ever heard. This is true even by the going standard of comparison. Over the past thirty years, the Ring at the Met has meant James Levine, except for a couple of recent Walküres led by Valery Gergiev and Loren Maazel. As readers of Opera as Opera know, I have never been a fan of Levine’s work, and hold him responsible (who else?) for the general condition of the Met orchestra—technically proficient and sometimes aesthetically rewarding, but increasingly inert in its “Bandsmen as Mimes” properties. Levine at his ongoing, make-nice worst, though, was better than this by a goodly margin.

And this is where I must invoke an older standard of judgment. I am repeatedly confronted with the question (in my case, generally posed by a young singer) of why this is relevant, of why each new effort cannot be judged simply on its own merits. And for the second time in the past month (see Samson Lite Update, Apr. 19), I find fortuitous kinship with Hilton Als, theatre critic of The New Yorker. He’s a great admirer of the plays of Sam Shepard, and writing of the current revival of his “Curse of the Starving Class” (see The NYer, May 27), he says that much as he wants us to “experience the extraordinary power of Shepard’s alternately disciplined and unwieldy language,” he doesn’t want us to see and hear Shepard under “less than ideal circumstances. You might get the wrong idea about what he was up to . . . ”

When it comes to opera, this is an ongoing perplexity. When a student or a friend asks me, “Should I go see Opera X this week?”, I want to tell her yes, of course, and you should see Operas Y and Z while you’re at it, all operas, as often as you can. But it’s frequently hard to say that without all sorts of prefatory precautions, because usually I’m pretty sure that only hints of Opera X’s true qualities, of whatever power one knows it to possess, will be revealed. My student or friend might get the wrong idea, or no idea, of what Wagner (for instance) was up to. She might even conclude that he wasn’t up to all that much, and that would be tragic. But we do have older standards available, at least in some important respects, in the form of recorded performance. And in most cases where the canonical repertory is concerned, those standards are enough higher to afford us a much better idea of what a Wagner, a Verdi, a Mozart, et al., was up to, and give us some thrills along the way. Then you don’t have to set so much store by the memories of codgers like me—though in this instance, codger memory and recorded evidence happily overlap.