All the verisimilitudes so far described (perhaps we should initial-cap and recite them, like The Beatitudes) are of the eye, and they are extremely important. But of greater importance in opera are verisimilitudes of the ear. Again they start with the first impressions that last: the aesthetic quality of the voice (“I love that voice,” or not) and its size relative to the demands of the music (e.g., “very nice, but too small for the role”). They go on to include a timbral element that we recognize as native (or if not, well adapted) to the ethnic/national coloration of the music, all the aspects of technique that add up to a mastery of the materiaI being sung, and all the aspects of interpretation—musical, stylistic, and linguistic—that fill out the impression of “rightness” for a given assignment. The more trained the listener’s ear (largely through habit and absorption), the more crucial is this “rightness,” and by extension all its nuances.

It’s obvious that no operatic performer, living or dead, has incorporated all the verisimilitudes to the highest degree, especially when we consider the range of dramatic characters and musical styles a major singing actor will encounter in the course of a career. What we respond to in a great performer is the presence of a remarkable level of achievement in some of these areas, to consistently draw our attention away from relative weaknesses, and/or a charismatic temperament and freedom of emotional expression that simply sweeps away our reservations. In opera, this last has usually come primarily by vocal means. But that happens with far less frequency now, so what we have increasingly tended to look for in recent decades has been a superior cultivation of the verisimilitudes, accompanied by vocal attainment sufficient to support them. As to why, in my view, that is so—that’s what my book and my blog are, in large part, about.

It’s interesting, at least to me, to contemplate August Wilson’s abhorrence for “colorblind” casting (see above). It involves, he pointed out, the enlistment of performers of color in “a play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture.” In other words, it necessitates the taking on of all the above verisimilitudes in a convincingly white fashion, losing the black identity in a white one. Wilson recognizes that unless that is achieved, a large measure of credibility is lost, and the work suffers. No doubt he was thinking of what the impact of a white actor in one of the plays in his own cycle about generations of African-American experience would have been. And that would have to be some actor, though I’m sure there are rare ones who could overcome the handicap of the first-impression verisimilitudes that last, and win acceptance. Wilson had a further reason for rejecting “mixed-race” theatre: he saw it as “a tool of Cultural Imperialists who view American culture, rooted in the icons of European culture, as beyond reproach in its perfection.” And, while I hardly find that culture “perfect” or “beyond reproach,” I wouldn’t challenge the basic truth of that observation. White American theatre certainly is a continuation and adaptation of European cultural models, from Shakespeare and Molière onward, if not back to their originating icons, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. To join it is to accept that truth.