Readers will have noticed that over these trying months I have not written about any of the many inventive efforts to present opera in part, to keep the artform’s footprint alive under conditions that have more thoroughly suppressed it than the economic crisis of the Great Depression or the mortal extremities of World War Two. There are two reasons for that. The first is that these strivings are about survival, of both individual artists and the institutions that employ them. As such, they merit attention and support. They are about jobs, people’s livelihoods, and are thus proper objects of advocacy, not of criticism. To apply normal critical standards to them is inappropriate, if not downright abusive; to define critical standards downward, or to apply what poses as the language of serious evaluation to what is actually an act of advocacy or promotion (particularly from one who identifies as a critic), is a betrayal of the critical mandate and, in the long run, a disservice to the art.

The second reason is that, along with the attempts to present theatre in part, dance in part, symphonic and choral concerts in part, nearly all these efforts at opera in part have been virtual, or, rarely, some combination of a live component (the eye part) with a virtual one (the ear part). In what I take for a majority of the cases, this has not been a matter of preference. For the duration of the pandemic, artists and artistic institutions have had only the choice of virtuality or nothing. But one of the results of this predicament has been to add to the almost overwhelming pressures toward the acceptance of virtuality as the natural habitat of the arts—grotesque as the misfit is for the performing arts of the high culture—and to herd them further toward the enclosed pasture of home entertainment. It has also encouraged the already-active exploration of alternate venues for the presentation of opera, a logical search for those without an opera house or reasonable facsimile at their disposal, as well as for those who seek disruption.

As I’ve several times had occasion to note, I am fortunate in my readers. Saying so, I guess, verges on tautology—they wouldn’t be following something called “Osborne on Opera” without an a priori interest in opera and a tolerance of Osborne, so they’re almost bound to please me. But what especially satisfies me is the level of discourse among those who correspond with me. Many are professionally involved with opera in some capacity, and some are critical colleagues. All are devotees in the best sense—people who think and feel about opera as something at the root of their being, and are engaged at a primal level with argumentation about it. Over these four years of exchanges with them (and by extension, for longer with friends, acquaintances, and students), I’ve become increasingly aware of the extent to which our discussions of singers, productions, and works (the main categories) seem to have a common premise, but actually often do not. My constant referent is the live experience, theirs, some version of the virtual. By “constant referent” I do not mean a case-by-case, side-by-side comparison of live with virtual, but a hard-wired sensory hook-up for the reception of operatic sights and sounds.