Personally I wish Adams had not laid down the requirement for amplified sound. I understand why: he included in the orchestra keyboard instruments that are inherently electronic (i.e. without loudspeakers they make no sound), and mixing electronic with acoustic elements never sounds good in practice unless they are fed together into an electronic sound system. But in my opinion those instruments contribute less value to his score than the vocal parts, whose future depends on the continuing health of a system that excludes artificial sound.

In the skill of writing effectively for voices, Adams is not an outlier. Barber had it, and was himself a good singer. So did or do Floyd, Menotti, Rota, Argento, Heggie, Adamo, Catán, and any number of “conservative” opera composers in the postwar period. As that list shows, singability is not by itself a sufficient condition for creating a repeatable opera; the music has to achieve other things too. But that it is a necessary condition can be illustrated by The Exterminating Angel, where the opposite is on display: tenors squawking high B and C on random short syllables, basses growling in Osmin territory without the setup or rhythmic space required for such sounds to tell, jumps of a 12th or more scattered routinely through conversation, a soprano part reaching the A four lines and a space above the treble staff and spending a good deal of time in the octave leading up to it. The immediate effect is to stamp the operatic voice itself as a vehicle for grotesquerie. Berg did something of the kind at curtain-up in Wozzeck, and a little goes a long way; I wouldn’t have wanted to hear an opera that sounds like Wozzeck’s Captain all night long. But now I have. Adès told the New York Times “when I hear the conventional high C of a soprano, I want to say, ‘Show us what else you’ve got.’” To each his own, I guess. When I hear the bat-chirps emitted by Audrey Luna in Angel, I want to say “don’t tell everything you know.”

I can’t help hearing something juvenile in this approach. It sounds to me like a teenage composer who hears some exotic instruments and decides to write for an entire orchestra of theremins, kazoos, and ondes martenot. Wow, those opera singers can hit some crazy outta-sight high notes, how cool is that? It sounds like he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Is that unduly harsh? On my desk as I write is the engraved but not-yet-published piano score from which the Exterminating Angel cast worked. It contains far, far more crazy-high bits than Ms. Luna actually delivered in performance, including many notes and several entire phrases that she wound up singing a full octave lower. In other words, Adès actually composed a freak show that even his freak-show specialist couldn’t come close to executing. Since the treatment of human voices matters in our business, I repeat the criticism with all due meditation: he doesn’t know what he’s doing.