Singing: I noted above the grain-of-salt attitude I take toward interview responses. On the other hand, spontaneous answers to time-constrained questions can sometimes make for a clarifying directness. In the Cowen interview, the host nudges Ross about the present state of Wagnerian singing. His frame of reference is the 1950s and ’60s, when we did indeed have the likes of Birgit Nilsson, Astrid Varnay, Régine Crespin, Leonie Rysanek, Rita Gorr, Wolfgang Windgassen, Jon Vickers (in a couple of roles), Hans Hotter, Gottlob Frick, and a few more, only one or two of whom have so much as a viable counterpart now. Why, Cowen asks, don’t we hear their level of expressive power today? (His awareness apparently does not reach back to the interwar decades, when not only was the top of the line better yet in several categories, but the depth of field was far greater.) After advancing the wan excuse that every generation looks to some previous era as a Golden Age, Ross harks back to his fin de siècle and to the singing heard on the earliest recordings—”cylinders,” by which I assume he must mean early acousticals of any conformation. (This was another surprise, since Ross has never shown any familiarity with early recordings or with the evolution of singing techniques.) He notes that comparison is difficult, because these earlier singers presented their voices so differently from today’s (that much is true), and their voices were so small. He says further that we have many wonderful Wagner singers now, and that he suspects Wagner would be surprised at the sound of today’s big, ringing voices.

Small? Small!? Many wonderful!? Big and ringing!? What can he be talking about? Does he truly believe that Lilli Lehmann, Lillian Nordica, Olive Fremstad, the de Reszkes, and Anton van Rooy (to name only artists that Ross himself cites in his book) had small voices? Or that, in a time when we’re lucky to locate, worldwide, a single more-than-barely-adequate Brünnhilde or Isolde, Siegfried, Tristan, Tannhäuser, or Wotan, we are in plentiful supply of Helden-ish instruments? It is an accident of timing that Ross (b. 1968) has not had a chance to develop an expectation of voices of dramatic calibre and quality in live performance, but beliefs like these can be held only by someone who has never learned to listen to vocal recordings or to infer the impact of voices from a combination of listening and a sensible reading of credible contemporaneous assessments. And I connect this failing to my distrust of Ross’s descriptions of singing today, and to the lowly position he usually assigns to it in his reviews. I understand that in writing about Götterdämmerung as the final piece of the then-new Lepage Ring, it was obligatory to devote the attention due to the largely deplorable physical production. Yet as I took in this event, the thought came back afresh with every scene, with each new vocal entrance from the First Norn on, that if the cast of my first Götterdämmerung were down there, the dopey contraption of a set would fade to insignificance, and this stupendous work would still land. Ross allotted a few words each to the Brünnhilde, the Hagen, and the Alberich, but none whatever to Gunther, Gutrune, the Norns (important!), the Rhinemaidens (not chopped liver), or—SIEGFRIED. Possibly Ross agreed with me that nearly all these were in some important way inadequate for their assignments. In that case, this may have been the “just say nothing” option, also known as going AWOL, at work.