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).