The main purpose of today’s post is to share with you a kind of “Wanted Dead or Alive” compilation of persons and tendencies who are contributing to opera’s current problems. It’s part of an email from Fred Kolo (ID below), who has periodically sent thoughtful commentary almost from the beginning of Osborne on Opera three years ago, and it wasn’t originally intended for publication. But I liked it, and like the general idea of including such assessments from professionals in our field, as I did with “‘Jane’s’ Great List,” (1/3/20).  So I obtained Fred’s permission, and present his list herewith.

This will be the final post until September. After several years of high-intensity activity with the publIcation of Opera as Opera and the maintenance (at first biweekly, then triweekly) of Osborne on Opera, I had long planned a summer hiatus, and the lockdown of live performance gives further reason for a pause. I will have plenty to keep me busy. My teaching always comes first. It goes forward via Zoom, a technique that, though not without its limitations and annoyances, has functioned better than I’d anticipated for both my students and myself. And I’ll be working on my essay for Marston Records’ release of the recordings of Lawrence Tibbett, which in terms of both quantity and quality will, I think, be the definitive monument-in-sound to this great American artist.

Over the summer, I shall also be pondering the most productive future role for serious opera criticism disseminated by this now-retro means, the no-frills, long-form blogpost. It’s official that in New York there will be nothing resembling full-scale performance until midway through next season. Even that, I believe, is very much in doubt. Of all the hard-hit sectors of our economy, there is none further from the “ready, set, on your mark” line than the performing arts. Already-fragile companies will permanently close, and the survival of the Met itself is not guaranteed. Since live performance in the theatre is the only “site” on which opera as opera actually happens, we could say that not only are culturally significant works Missing In Action (which has not stopped me from writing about them), but that the artform itself is MIA. Its secondary manifestations—its audio and video recordings, its critical and historical literature—contain a wealth of material worthy of examination, but without the presence of the living art they are there-and-then documents without a here-and-now context.

“Systemic” is a word we’re hearing often these days, most often with regard to race-related social justice protests and initiatives, and to our ways of apportioning and paying for our health care. The use of the word seeks to establish an awareness that the obvious injustices and inadequacies that present themselves daily are not localized anomalies, but symptoms of biased assumptions built into the structures that govern these crucial social territories. That, in turn, implies that while there may be value in publicizing and demanding redress for individual occurrences, that value will be limited so long as those fundamental assumptions are not identified, then acted upon in a constructive fashion. I used the word as I began writing the Introduction to the completed typescript of Opera as Opera, in 2016. I was recounting my strategic withdrawal, fifty years ago now, from eleven years of hot-and-heavy reviewing of records and live performances. I wrote that “. . . I had come to perceive the performance problems I was seeing and hearing more as systemic than as particular to given occasions and artists. To write about them regularly was to risk turning into a repetitive scold, a severely compromised temporizer, or an outright collaborationist of the ‘educative,’ ‘appreciative,’ or promotional sort.” I go on to describe how developments of the intervening years, and the further clarification of my own thinking about these systemic problems, had brought me to the start of my work on the book.