There is also an aspect of ritual, of a repetition that is also a renewal, equally on the performers’ side (the story being told, and the telling of it) and on ours (the agreement to gather and submit). This ritual aspect reinforces a sense of social continuity, of participation in an ongoing narrative, and this is so irrespective of the story-of-the-evening’s aesthetic posture and content—even if the latter urges social discontinuity, revolution. It carries with it the prospect of initiation into a practice, a circle of understanding. That soon becomes apparent in the behavior of individual audience members, who, willy-nilly, display their levels of initiation,  with respect to both the performance (knowledge of the work and the singers, awareness of the appropriate moments and measures of applause, etc.) and to the social desiderata (best tactics for being first to the bar, to the restroom, etc.). There are the circumstances of arrival and departure under the particular influences of weather, of traffic, and so on, and of companionship, or not, and the personal dynamics associated with that. Finally, there is the economic stratification marked by one’s location in the shared room, and the price thereof, and amenities accessible therefrom, and the privilege and agency attached thereto, and all the implications for one’s standing in both this initiatory gathering and the world at large.

On a natural-state occasion, everything I’ve mentioned is in the air, in the murmur of verbalizations and the significations of actions and attitudes, the degrees of attentiveness to the arc of the performed event, and the tensions between expression and constraint dictated by the circumstances. Taken together, these phenomena constitute the immediate context of the event, and beyond the takeaway from the artistic happening itself, a significant share of the event’s ultimate meaning in the lives of its attendees. Each of them now undertakes the integration of the engagement into his or her personal history of such events, and of locating the history in the background (or, for the true devotee, the foreground) of his or her life. That’s the deep context, in the vertical dimension.

For the longer part of its history, opera existed only in its natural state. Except for the presentation of excerpts in concert or recital settings, it could not be experienced in part, nor re-experienced unchanged. We could come to know it only through repeated attendance, therefore always in whole and always changing, supplemented by study of whatever materials were accessible to us. Separating the musical  parts from the theatrical ones, the vocal from the orchestral, the acting from the setting in which it takes place, was unimaginable. The only alternative to the natural state was to perform as much of the whole as we could ourselves, in our homes, as part of the domestic music-making that was once widely cultivated. That, too, involved gathering in a shared space and exchanging live, unmediated human energies, and its participatory nature, however humble the level of execution, afforded an intimacy of understanding, as well as leaving no doubt about what was missing.