Even if the assimilative prospect had been more wholeheartedly pursued (Ravel and Poulenc certainly tried; so did Weill and Gershwin from their side), it might have been doomed anyway in the longer term for another reason. Assimilation would eventually have involved giving up something people loved, as a shrinking few still do: the sound of the naturally developed human voice. Pop music, prizing the authenticity of the untutored impulse, was never going to resist the microphone. The world’s new vocal “stars” by 1950 or so were people who could not have sung opera even if they had wanted to try. By around 1970 they were producing sounds that barely resembled the tonal properties of an opera voice, even one used at low intensity. The sound of a non-mechanized voice had become alien for most; for all of previous human history it had been the only vocal sound anyone could hear in public. Who would expect that the renewable crop of successful operas could keep growing in such altered soil?

There we come to the real reason why Hamilton does not make opera folk optimistic or confident. Yes, it could be called an opera – yes, it fulfills the purposes of opera – but those people can’t perform our stuff and we can’t perform theirs. For me, sitting in good seats for Hamilton, convinced and excited from beginning to end, finding the lyrics stunning and the music at least pleasant, one impression kept intruding: “everybody up there can dance, and nobody can sing.” That’s not the reaction of the audience at large, it’s the reaction of an opera guy.

Maybe we need to find our optimism somewhere else.

***

Here is a thesis I’d defend more seriously than the definition-game offered at the outset: The one non-negotiable ingredient for durable operatic success is music that people come to love. Not admire, not “find interesting,” not “recognize as dramatically apt,” but love.

It doesn’t have to be love at first sight (most of us who love the chronological near-neighbors Carmen and Parsifal got one of them quickly and the other slowly). There has to be something in the early encounters, though, to draw us back for more, a flicker of desire that neither duty nor wishful thinking can produce. Something about the notes and the way they relate to expression has to bypass the analytical faculty and awaken a sense of wonder. It may be just a hint amidst other impressions not readily understood or not immediately appealing, or it may be a sudden mind-blowing revelation. It may come from reading a score or it may come from witnessing a performance. It has absolutely nothing to do with prior expectation. But one way or another it has to suggest the possibility of love.

This feeling isn’t reserved just for what we might call “masterpieces.” Do you think The Makropulos Case is one? Or Don Pasquale? I don’t. But I love the weirdly soaring lines and the grand-guignol musical atmospherics of the former, and the beautiful tunes and silly humanity of the latter. I want to hear them again sometime. I care about them and how they’re done.