Ellen’s complaint about space and distance exemplifies what I mean by “hard-wired sensory hook-up.” Based on everything she’s written about her own experience, it seems safe to categorize her as more an eye person than an ear person, at least when she engages with opera. And her eye is screen-oriented, which means that her ear is mike-oriented. That’s just how her sensorium is activated, and that must be true of a great majority of us in our heavily virtualized environment. Of course we all adjust in some degree to our shifts between real and virtual, but there are limits to how easily our sensory conditioning will let us do that. What vidop eliminates is not so much distance per se as the conquest of distance by sound, and thus the experience of the objects (mostly people) in our visual field being at a remove, yet the sounds (mostly of those same people) close to us, breathing, vibrating, and shaping all the dynamics of the engagement, in real time and space. Both light and sound are beamed at us in natural-state opera, but in a unique balance. That’s what’s “integral” to opera live.

The decline of greatvoiced singing, and of the sense of bodily theatrical presence that in some cases went with it, has sharply reduced the appeal of opera in whole. Ellen comments that when she goes to live performances, she lowers her expectations so as not to be too disappointed. So do I. The difference, I suppose, is that in addition to all my early audop listening (and I had a lot of that, on records and broadcasts, before any great amount of live-performance attendance), I had roughly a quarter-century of multiple live-opera encounters at a time when space-conquering voices were still fairly plentiful, and everything else in the sound environment was calibrated to that central presence. So what I heard and saw in audop and vidop transmissions, and how I felt and evaluated them, how my sensorium was activated by them, was in relation to that—always to the real, the whole, and the ever-changing.

Back near what now seems the midmorning of the electronic media, Marshall McLuhan called them “the extensions of Man,” declared that “the medium is the message,” and defined television as “cool.” Fifteen years later, George W. S. Trow placed television “Within the context of no context,” lowered its temperature from “cool” to “cold,” and wrote of “The decline of adulthood.” Since, we have had the ever-unspooling commentary of the semioticians and other postmodern thinkers, seeing the world as a phantasmagoria of simulacra and maps before territories and of “liquid modernity” (Zigmunt Bauman’s term), ever more alienated from its real self, and the contributions of social- and political-science writers who have chronicled the tribalizing, simultaneously isolating but herd-thinking effects of the internet and social media and their erasure of any context save that of the moment, right down to Shoshanna Zuboff’s panorama of corporate surveillance and behavior modification, far beyond Foucault’s panopticon metaphor. I have many disagreements and reservations about much of this observation and analysis, but find no way to refute it as broad-brush description. It is into this environment that opera, having been kneecapped in its natural state by conceptualist, auteurist production and the Trojan Horse of critique-from-within, is in danger of being swallowed by the virtual maw.