Though the thought seems too obvious to rank as an insight, we who spend so much time in an audop, vidop realm need to remind ourselves that throughout the pre-electronic era, which is to say the era in which our operatic canon was created, operawrights conceived, imagined, and wrote exclusively for the natural state. Every sung and played note, every stage action and arrangement, every musical and scenetic structure, every coming-together of these elements in the integral form of opera, was preconceived in the mind’s-ears and mind’s-eyes of the creators for that state, as was the desired effect on receptors, who had the whole continuously before them. Had any other circumstances obtained, the operawrights would have written differently, even in tellings of the same stories. Indeed, in the presence of a microphone, there is no necessity for the classically developed singing voice, and in the presence of a camera, none for the energetics of the viscerally generated, “projected” sung action, to say nothing of the staging demands of large ensemble scenes, which the camera cannot contain. In the presence of both, in other words, the essentials of live operatic performance are much more by way of inconvenience than of opportunity.

Audop and vidop engagements can be very intense. After all, they’re private. The behavioral constraints of the natural state are removed, and our emotional responses can come out of the closet. We don’t have to share them, either—to the in-common portions we can freely add our personal ones, including any that might seem weird or unacceptable to others. We can set up our own internal interactive loops with the in-part engagement, and zero in on the things that trigger our most powerful reactions. Or we can use the engagement for study, for inspection and analysis, in a way that opera in whole makes difficult, since it does not present itself for examination of its constituent parts. We are also in charge. We choose the where and when, make no commitment of travel, dress, or even unbroken attention, and can disengage at any moment, usually with little or no penalty. With records, CDs, and DVDs, there are physical objects, collectibles, of which we can take possession, and thus have the feeling of owning, “having,” a performance, many performances (“How many Don Giovannis do you have?”) These tactile objects have their own little rituals and habits connected to them. They can be the filling ingredients of one’s solitude, and cherished for that. So it isn’t a question of opera in part being of no value, not being an enrichment. As with so many aspects of our lives now, it’s a question of whether or not reality can survive virtuality, and how we feel about that.

One of my favorite recent correspondents is a reader named Ellen. She first wrote me about my posts on some of the idea-content of the François Girard production of Der fliegende Holländer at the Met (see The Naïve, Hyperreality, and Filthy Lucre, Parts 1 and 2 and follow-ups, 4/6/20, 4/11/20 and 4/24/20), in which she was especially taken with my notes on the monster aspect of the Dutchman’s identity, and she has written me a number of times since, often at some length. Her insights are always intriguing and her questions perceptive. Her operatic interest has evidently been reviving lately after a period of dormancy, but she’s had considerable involvement with opera and other classical music in the past. Ellen’s screen orientation is far more extensive than mine, and her aesthetic tolerances broader. Her references just with regard to Holländer include the Lord of the Rings movies, Game of Thrones, all Bram Stoker film versions, the Hammer films, Buffy (The Vampire Slayer, I presume), and Let Me In, which she lauds for its “fine use of diegetic and non-diegetic heavy metal.” Except for a couple of those Bram Stoker oldies, I’m a complete stranger to all those except by name, and contact with them would be accidental, the result of some odd social or professional occurrence.