Looking back through these pieces, two things struck me. One was the long, deep dive of the  Sunday Times’ arts section over the past twenty-something years. It takes only week-to-week glances to expose its status as both chronicler and pace-setter of cultural decline. The second was that I found myself heartily agreeing with myself, which is not invariably the case when I glance back at the former C.L.O. If I were writing the article I’m presenting today, I would choose some productions other than the Peter Sellars/Craig Smith Mozart cycle to illustrate postmodern auteurism, and would omit the even more quaint reference to record stores. Otherwise, I wouldn’t alter a thing within the confines of an article (oh, perhaps an adverb or three), though I would long to expand and further elucidate. I debated which of two essays to reproduce here, and decided on the one below almost arbitrarily. (The other one deals with the realistic tradition in American theatre and its applicability to opera.) It focuses on what became a core subject in Opera as Opera—the metanarrative associated with the artform’s maturity in the 19th Century, and the effect that its rejection has had on creation, production, and performance. So here it is—minus, sadly, compensation for either the paper or myself, but suitable to my present purpose—exactly as it appeared in the NYT on Feb. 17, 1991 save for a few punctuation and paragraphing restorations and its layout, illustrations, and subheads, which of course remain the property of the Times. The title itself is a compromise tweak between the one I submitted and the one the Times chose.

Since World War II, we have done something remarkable with opera. We have whisked it from view. This has not been easy, for opera’s sheer bulk and ungainly shape make it a poor object for concealment. But we’ve mastered the trick through an old detective-fiction dodge: leaving the body out in plain sight. We’ve disguised it, naturally, to render it unrecognizable to next of kin. If apprehended by folks in search of it, we can always shrug, point, and protest that it has been there all along. We have been particularly ingenious with opera of the Extended 19th Century, the 150-odd years beginning with Mozart that produced what is still referred to with some accuracy as the standard repertory. The Extended 19th has had us in a pickle for decades. It offers riches we cannot do without, but these constitute an oppressive patrimony. It is not only that E-19 stands as an embarrassment to our own creative struggles. It persists in the revalidation of aesthetic, philosophic and political principles incompatible with our own, with views of society and behavior we itch to obliterate and dare not look in the eye for fear of what may be reflected there.

Because of this fear, we have constructed a series of musical and dramatic evasions that enable us to present the standard repertory in mock performance. These evasions will be considered below. First, let’s take a peek at the corpus dilecti, and ask why we have such an interest in embalming procedures. If we examine the world of E-19 and the activity it encompasses, several attributes can be identified by adjectives, among which some of the more unarguable are: Continental European, Christian, patriarchal, class-defined, heterosexual, nationalistic. Audiences are not invariably invited to endorse these attributes. But the institutions, laws, customs, and systems of belief implied by these adjectives are givens of the world of E-19. They are among the assumed circumstances of the lives of its characters, crucial in determining both character and action.