First, by avoidance. For a full-time critic, Ross doesn’t write all that often. When he does, mainstream events and “standard” repertory aren’t usually the focus; when they are, it’s generally because he’s sought out an “innovative” or transgressive approach to a program, or wants to express disapproval at the lack of same. And opera naturally receives only a share of even this seemingly reluctantly granted amount of attention. Until the last couple of decades, we might have expected this selection and critical stance from a writer for The Village Voice, or perhaps The Nation, where Danto held forth for 25 years. The “alternative” has been normalized.

I’d say that it’s hardly fair to pick on a music writer’s choices of subject at a time when live performance is almost non-existent, except that Ross’s are seldom much different from his usual ones. On August 31 of this year, he wrote at unaccustomed length on “Wagner in Hollywood,” a re-arrangement and, in a few spots, expansion of the equivalent chapter in his book, with particular attention to racist and Nazi connections. On September 21, he grappled with the same set of social justice issues, including the debate over the inherent whiteness (or not) of Schenkerian music theory, that I looked at from other angles in my “Racial Moment and Opera” piece (9/11/20), and on September 28, Ross’s topic was the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s struggle to get back up and running (Ross devotes much attention to the West Coast scene) with an online video series that mixes classical and non-classical genres and artists. The column of October 26 features the “sublime chaos” (“antic, raucous, confessional, sordid, semi-sublime”) in the work of Irish composer-digitizer-performer Jennifer Walshe, particularly one work (Aisteach) that invents the fictional history of a queer Irish avant-garde, and another called Ireland: A Data Set, “a gleeful deconstruction of national cultural clichés.” And on December 7 Ross surveyed the plucky efforts of some of our established institutions to keep body and soul together via streaming. Here, he gives supportive passing notice to renditions of established classics (Dvorák; Verdi excerpts) and conservative modern ones (Barber; Copland), but gives pride of place to two pieces by Tyshawn Sorey, a jazz-to-classical sojourner who is, like Walshe, “unclassifiable” (a common compliment of Ross’s), heard as born out of the spirit of one of his favorite composers, Morton Feldman, and to a new work of Nico Muhly’s presented as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s initiative in innovative programming with cross-genre performers under Esa-Pekka Salonen. He concludes with a rather forlorn vignette of passersby giving only fleeting attention to a countertenor/horn quartet sortie by the NYPO’s Bandwagon on a pedestrian island down at B’way and 29th.

Though, as I said, these columns are not atypical, they don’t bring Ross up against the central subject of my own work, the survivability of our operatic legacy. So I took a look back at some of his New Yorker contributions over the past decade. This was a pretty scattershot retrospective: I decided to pick an article per year, selected by title, setting aside any (like one on the acoustics of performing spaces, or another on the employments of music as a weapon)  that turned out to not engage with my central concern,^(I) in favor of one that did. This still left me with some examples of advocacy related to opera only in postoperatic juxtaposition, such as Chaya Chernavin’s Infinite Now at the Flemish Opera, Ghent, or Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit (a “philosophy opera”! Danto was right!) at a downtown New York venue called Dixon’s Place—both 2017. And before moving to aspects of Ross’s encounters with established operatic repertory, I would take note of an irony in Ross’ attitude toward these recent works. At several times and places, he has worried in print over our uses of “genius,” “masterpiece,” and other terms that attach to great-artist veneration. In his piece on Soper, for instance, he is concerned that they “place an impossible burden on contemporary artists, whose creations are so often found wanting”—the anxiety of influence again, still potent after some 150 years. For sure, the Romantics went quite far in this worshipful direction, which like all worship had its irrational, cultish elements. (And nearly the whole lot of ’em white and male, for which they’ve scarcely apologized to this day!) But could it be that they had a point? After all, here’s their work, still. Might it be that the problem isn’t the terminology, but the work itself, the achievement? Is this towering, lowering, looming, lurking body of work for the stage somehow unfair? And here’s the irony: Ross does not hesitate to label Soper’s creation a “masterpiece,” a word he also applies to Harrison Birtwistle’s Minotaur and other pieces he wishes we would not be canonically judgmental about. True, he refrains from religious language in his reports on Soper, Sorey, Chernavin, et al. But they are pure advocacy—he has not a single reservation, a single alternate thought, to enter about these artists or their creations. They are evidently flawless. They must be works of genius. How can I trust such reports, lacking as they are in any trace of critical perspective? Oh, right—we’re in the Posts.

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As you have probably concluded, I have fundamental disagreements with Alex Ross and with the use of The New Yorker‘s precious pages for his purposes, and these disagreements are aggravated by the fact that he is an effective spokesman for his cause—his thoughts are often interesting, his writing persuasive. To expatiate on these basic differences here is both too large and granular a task for even a long-form article, and in a sense is unnecessary for my readers, since I’ve set forth my own views at some length in my posts and my book. So I’ll shave the arguments down to two that are crucial to opera criticism, though perhaps not to music Postcriticism: singing and staging. And random as it was, my rummaging in old New Yorkers did turn up Ross entries on Meistersinger and Lohengrin at Bayreuth (2018), William Tell (2016), Lulu (2015), Macbeth (2014)—these last three all at the Met—Written on Skin at Covent Garden (2013), Götterdämmerung at the Met (2012), and Barbiere and Turandot out at Tulsa and Kansas City, respectively (2011). Of these, I had seen the four Met productions (though in a couple of cases, with some cast changes), and the same production and cast of Written on Skin when it came to the Koch Theatre at Lincoln Center in 2015.