I don’t find much time for trawling the net or scanning the social media. But I have friends, colleagues, students, and readers who do, and from several of them in a two-or-three-day period I heard of the dust-up referenced above, and the range of their reactions (outraged, fatalistic, gleeful, etc.) on a topic of such central interest to me was enough to pique curiosity, and then some. The Musical Director of the Metropolitan Opera, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, has  been conducting master classes with a select group of young singers at the Juilliard School. His notions about vocal technique (or, to be more precise, his evident unawareness of the technical implications of some of his expressive preferences) came to the attention of a somewhat mysterious site called “This Is Opera.” I don’t know who’s behind this site. A couple of people told me it’s out of Croatia, a couple more that it’s not the work of a single person, but of several, in which case our new gender-woke imperative of using a plural pronoun for a single identity might be applicable. In any case, they is extremely impolite—so much so that some influential entity (presumably the Met, but perhaps Juilliard) exerted sufficient pressure on YouTube to have TIO’s initial assault taken down. A less discourteous version was then reinstated; but the reportedly lively thread of comment at slippeddisc.com (which I came to the party too late to view) was withdrawn. In a more thoroughly supported (but still strongly worded) article, Thomas Prochazka has taken up the subject on the Viennese site Der Merker, as part of his splendid ongoing series, Die Oper—Kritische Zeit fur eine Kunstform? ^(I)

At “This Is Opera,” they fires from the hip. In their manners-and-context-be-damned fashion, they’s incensed about the same devolutionary trends in operatic singing I’m concerned about—so I know how they feels. They are (returning to English) especially exercised on the failure to cultivate the chest register in female voices and the quality we call “core” in voices of both sexes, and they rag incessantly on the subject of “fake modern singing” vs. “real operatic singing.” They aren’t fussy about apples-and-oranges fairness. (Example: TIO shows us a video clip of Kristine Opolais singing the opening of “Sola, perduta, abbandonata” in the recent Met production of Manon Lescaut, and contrasts it with a recording of Virginia Zeani in the same brief passage—video vs. audio and, one could say, a restrained, inward interpretation, sung while contending with the little torture chamber of an inverted pyramid on the Met’s ridiculous set, vs. the emotionally effusive, borderline reckless, audio-only version of a latterday verista.) Nor are they always very selective with their illustrations. (Why, for example, would one choose short takes of the older Gigli ramming through some phrases, the full voice turning stiff and brittle, the once-ravishing mezza-voce into a mouthy croon, instead of an earlier sample? And however turned-on one may be by the sound of a Del Monaco high B-flat, why would he be one’s choice for any phrase from “O Paradiso“?) There’s a lot more in this vein, leaving TIO open to charges of cherry-picking, and sometimes with sour cherries. Also: fearless pronouncements look a lot less fearless when they’re anonymous.