Before getting to today’s topic (the Met’s revival of Die Meistersinger and two recent recordings featuring some of its principals), one announcement and one recommendation. The announcement: with the third printing of Opera as Opera, I have entered into a broader distribution agreement, a business move delayed by the bankruptcy of our original printer and distributor, and then by revenue uncertainties attendant upon the pandemic. This will make the book available to the libraries and retail outlets who are contractually bound to order only through designated suppliers, and will release it to online sales through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, et al. It will also improve accessibility for overseas customers by reducing the exorbitant shipping costs for them. Individuals can of course continue to order directly from this site, but will now have other options as well.
And the recommendation, for all readers ready to reach a bit beyond our mainstream opera concerns into closely related musical and cultural realms: My longtime colleague Joseph Horowitz has just published a fascinating exploration of what he perceives as the swerve in American cultural history that has separated us from the roots—including African-American and Indigenous musics—that might have nourished a more vital American musical language, and has led to the divorce of our “popular” and “classical” genres. Of course the thesis will arouse debate, but I believe Horowitz, building on his several previous books on American musical history, has made a persuasive case, grounded in literature and the fine arts as well as music. The book’s called Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, and it’s published by W. W. Norton & Co.
With the special circumstances of what we hopefully designate as our first post-pandemic opening behind us, we have a season of repertory opera underway at the Met. Aside from that first production, which I wrote about last time, I’ve been to two performances of well-aged revivals—a Turandot (about which I’ll offer some thoughts in a future post) and a Die Meistersinger, which I’ll write about here. This is a time of stringent testing for the EuroAngloAmerican canon, and for the presentation of its works in a repertory system. Such a system relies on a body of repeatable, renewable works, and in the case of these productions, “renewable” means “capable of revivification by the performers,” not by auteuristic conceptualization or revisionist counterargument, and unaided by the spurts of attention that accompany a new production or a work’s premiere. The season-to-season churn of core repertory works, fed by the attractions of repeat appearances by favored performers along with anticipated arrivals of new ones, is what finally determines the viability of an institution like the Met.
And we are at a juncture where both demand (from audiences) and supply (of high-functioning performers) are in serious question. On the demand side, we wonder whether the already tenuous hold our artform has had of late on the habit of attendance (or the inculcation of that habit in new prospects) may have suffered an economically fatal rupture from the pandemic and the complex of social, political, and environmental crises it has set into such bold relief. While I feel reasonably certain that the blocs of empty seats observed in the upper regions of the house at these performances (and reported on at others) are primarily due to the caution we all feel about returning to public events and the steep drop-off in tourism, the longterm effects of these disruptions will take time to assess. And over on the supply side, we suffer not so much from the factory-to-warehouse-to-consumer blockages that afflict so many sectors of the economy as from a simple lack of supply at the source. At the opera-singer warehouse, there’s not enough of quality and durability, ready for shipment, to keep us in stock.