First, a quick note re Opera as Opera. The book has received one more highly favorable review, this one from Will Manus in Lively-Arts, a West Coast-based online journal with a broad scope. An unanticipated pleasure, to receive such attention this long after publication. Here’s the link. Incidentally, the book’s inventory is getting quite low, and there are no plans for a third printing. So, if you or anyone you know . . .

In the interim since my last post we’ve had further pandemic-related developments that are no less discouraging for being predictable. In my home city the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the entire theatre community have all extended the moratorium on live performance until at least September of 2021, and performing arts organizations across the country have announced similar cancelations. The situation overseas is not much better, though the more general recognition of the arts as public goods has at least provided something of an economic buffer. (Even Boris Johnson’s UK administration has coughed up extra subvention at a level that may not satisfy all its constituents, but which looks mighty appealing from here.)

There’s no way to put a happy face on all this. But one thing we can do in such a prolonged time of inactivity and attrition is to think over what sort of operatic theatre we want. There will be vacuums into which entities will eventually be drawn, and it would be good to influence some of those entities in artistically productive directions. For me, this means working toward a company whose training and rehearsal processes rid us of auteurial, conceptualist approaches to production, and instead burrow into the manifest content of works. It is fair to ask exactly what that implies, and what such work would consist of. So today I am focusing on one aspect of it—the individual performer’s preparatory exploration of character development, as seen through a single example. It’s hard to approximate the experience in words, but I’ll give it a try.

At the end of today’s post, you’ll also find some informative updates on the last one.

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In search of interpretation, operatic performers have three sources to draw upon: the text, oral tradition, and something we call “imagination.” All three are necessary, but the one I want to concentrate on here is the third. It is the one that separates transcendent performance from admirable (or less admirable) recitation, and yet the one I find most often left to chance. Indeed, I’ve come to believe that if what we are trying to do is mark a path toward transcendence (and in opera, where else would we be headed?), we’re going about it backward. We need a craft of imagination, a technique for the release of the performer into vocal and physical action. It is nascent in all talented young performers, but it needs encouragement and guidance, and I think that in our current systems of training we tend to suffocate it in correctitude. So while I will sometimes refer to both text and oral tradition in what follows (in fact, we’ll begin with an examination of text, but not in the usual musicianly way), I will be concentrating on this “craft of imagination.”