I make the score 15-0. I was going to put it in the books at 9-0, which in major league baseball is the score designated in the rare event that a team does not show up, or field a full complement of players, or, if it’s the home team, it or its fans commit some egregious infraction that does not allow the game to be completed. In those cases, a forfeit is declared, and one run per inning is assigned to the forfeitee—hence, 9-0. However, the Berg team, after long, hard practice, did suit up, take the field, and make every effort to compete. They just couldn’t score against the overwhelming Kentridge lineup. And since Wozzeck has not nine innings, but fifteen scenes, and since in Little League or certain other games fifteen runs is often the margin at which a “Mercy Rule” is invoked and the game terminated, 15-0 seems just and proper. Although the game was over almost before it began, I’ll file a report on it down below. First, though, I’m going to back up and look at some aspects of the opera itself and its performance history, particularly here in New York and in my lifetime—as it happens, two coeval chronicles.

New York and Wozzeck grew familiar, if not intimate, over a span of twelve months in the years 1951-52. True, there had been the American premiere under Stokowski with his Philadelphia Orchestra, in a production designed by Robert Edmond Jones, in 1931, and it had traveled to the old Metropolitan Opera House for a single performance. After that, nothing but concert fragments for twenty years, during which the opera, widely produced in Europe after its 1925 world premiere (Berlin Staatsoper, under Erich Kleiber) was choked off there by Nazi censorship—save for a brief run (remarkable, given the nature of the regime) at the Rome opera in 1942. That production had Tito Gobbi and the American soprano Dorothy Dow as Wozzeck and Marie, with Tullio Serafin conducting.^(I)

Then, in 1951, Wozzeck, presented in the New York Philharmonic’s subscription series, became the most audacious of the concert-opera projects Dmitri Mitropoulos undertook before leaving the orchestra for opera proper at the Met and elsewhere. Those performances also provided the materials for the first complete recording of the work, on the Columbia label. Exactly a year later Joseph Rosenstock, in his first season after taking over the musical directorship of the New York City Opera from Laszlo Halasz, led New York’s first run of theatrical performances, in English, directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky and sung by a cast that included Marko Rothmüller (also Covent Garden’s Wozzeck that same year) in the title role, Patricia Neway as Marie, and two of Mitropoulos’ principals, David Lloyd (Andres) and Ralph Herbert (The Doctor). These three performances sold well, and the opera was brought back for two more in the Fall ’52 season.^(II)

Not long ago, around the time of my post on Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Juilliard master classes, I was grousing to a friend about both them and another example of online vocological weirdness, in which a pedagogue in an influential academic position was attempting to instruct us in registrational and other laryngeal occurrences by means of a combination of  technological readings and demonstrations in falsetto. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” she answered, perhaps a little impatiently. “All that laryngoscope stuff has been going on for decades now, and I don’t think it’s affected the teaching of singing in any mainstream way. I can think of ten problems more important than that for young singers.” 

“All right,” said I, not one to leave a thrown gauntlet on the ground. “Where’s your list?”

My friend is herself a singer, still quite young, and while I am in touch daily with the world of young singers through my students and colleagues, she has been living in it. She’s an excellent singer and musician and, as you’ll see, smart and articulate. She’s been through respected academic programs, a residency as a young artist in a major European opera house, and in the years since, a representative mix of the performance, audition, day-job, and postgrad study options that young professionals find open to them here in New York. Not to get cute about it, I’ll call her Jane, as in Jane Doe, unoperatic as that may sound. It took her a while (Jane’s busy), but she has finally completed her list.

What I love about it, and find unusual, is that although Jane is personally involved with the aspirational struggles young singers endure, with all their emotional ups and downs, she is also able to step aside from that involvement and adopt an analytical perspective on it.

Naturally, I also love it because I agree with nearly all of it. And in that regard, I must emphasize that while Jane and I do of course exchange thoughts about singing and about performances (she attends the opera frequently), she is a decidedly independent thinker. She confesses that she doesn’t read my blog, and though she loyally ordered her copy of Opera as Opera, has read only sections from the early part of it. So these are very much her observations, which I shall present without comment from me. For my own take on many of her points, refer to Opera as Opera, particularly the chapters entitled “Singing,” “We Go to School,” and the Epilogue, and to my series of posts called “Before the First Lesson,” which are in the archive.

My review of the seasonal Met revival of Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades,” promised last time, follows Jane’s list. I give the list pride of place, because the issues it raises are more important for the future of our art than any single performance event, and this first post of a new year seems an ideal time to ponder them. Jane says:

So here’s “the list.” Each of these eight items could probably receive its own article-length exploration, but this is my rough attempt to get some reasonably succinct thoughts down in writing. These are what I believe to be the largest systemic issues affecting the talent pipeline and talent development of young singers, which—to the extent that one believes there has been an overall decline in the level of quality of operatic performances over the past half century or so—are among the likely contributing factors to that decline. There are, of course, plenty of exceptions, and I know of many singers who have combined world-class talent with painstaking work and their own unique humanity to achieve substantial and well-deserved career success. But as when speaking about any set of complex systemic issues, the effects of these macro-trends are seen in overall tendencies, at the population level, and don’t rule out the existence of truly excellent outliers (although they might make them rarer).