I also prefer A Little Night Music to any new comic “opera” I’ve seen. But here we are back with the Hamilton-as-opera problem. Besides music and theater, I also love the natural human voice as a medium of expression. I recognize that as a conditioned taste: I grew up with it, got hooked at an early age, became permanently hungry for it. Satisfaction of that hunger is not a prerequisite for valid music theater; it is a particular preference. But a lot of the opera constituency shares it, and setting it aside isn’t easy. In microphone singing as it has evolved, pretty much anything will do as long as the performer has some charisma and is mostly on pitch. But that “anything” doesn’t include the very things we love, the colors and sonorities and expressive capacities that come only with natural development of the voice’s physical self.

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Hamilton doesn’t provide that satisfaction. But it does accomplish something else that opera used to do routinely: it takes material from the past, from history, and channels it into music and action that speak to the present in present terms. It is serious and entertaining at once. It’s the opposite of what we sometimes call “CNN opera” or “docu-opera,” which starts from a topic already on people’s minds and hopes that prefabricated interest will help it limp across the finish line. Hamilton starts instead from enthusiasm for the subject-matter on the part of a creator capable of absorbing it in a sophisticated way, and capable next of crafting it into a theater-piece that calls the audience to share the author’s interest.

It’s not the first Broadway musical to attempt such a thing, but the number of attempts – and their level of seriousness, for the customer who wants to dig into the material – has been disappointing compared to the track record of old-style opera. Especially disappointing if you also want to dig into the music and find something beyond the obvious – and here Hamilton itself is on shaky ground. But for this I blame mostly the self-banished “classical” side of the sundered profession. For well over half a century, from their tenured university refuge, the most educated and technically-equipped composers gave popular theater the back of their hand. Worse still, they ostracized aspirants who seemed otherwise disposed. (The hostility directed towards Leonard Bernstein around the time of West Side Story makes shocking reading today – and it had real impact.) They starved Broadway of what might have been its more musically ambitious participants, and aggressively directed an important segment of the audience elsewhere.

That, plus imponderables like Gershwin’s early death, stunted a progression that might plausibly have given the world a mid-century repertory based on acoustical singing that was both popular and wider-ranging. Just four or five more Gerswhin titles at the Porgy level, with four or five more from Bernstein at the level of WSS, would have put us incalculably farther along. And who knows what else might have flourished alongside those, if they had been written? A more developmental and less kitschy path for Richard Rodgers’ gifts? A Sam Barber willing to get his hands dirty? Wishing is easy. The successful Broadway innovators who have arrived since have been content to write for increasingly incompatible vocal expectations, and the musical component of the “musical” has not exactly deepened.