With apologies for the late posting, here is the article scheduled for yesterday, February 25.

The Metropolitan Opera has been on hiatus for the month of February, and while there has been some local operatic activity that may figure in an end-of-season appraisal, this has been a quiet time with respect to my current preoccupation, the condition of the canon at the international level of performance. So, as I indicated at the end of my last post, I’m using my space today to take some tracings from the genealogy of Met performances of one canonical masterpiece that has been in this season’s repertoire. And having given deservedly short shrift to the company’s current mock-up of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, I have chosen that work as the starting point for the journey. It’s arguable, I suppose, whether or not it represents a wider gap between what I know to be a particular opera’s demonstrated potential on the one hand, and what I recently saw and heard on the other than, say, the past fall’s Meistersinger (see “Ha, diese Meister!“, 11/22/2021). But none has made me more keenly aware of what’s been lost, or more interested in defining exactly what that is, and where it went missing along the way.

Nozze di Figaro also happens to be an opera with whose performing tradition at the Met, for all practical purposes, I have been familiar from the start, at least where singers are concerned. That is: from the time (1940) the Met took up the opera after a 22-year absence, and any strong connection to a tenuous earlier performing tradition had been broken, most of the singers regularly cast were ones I came to know over the air and in live performance. That was also the time when the Mozart/Da Ponte operas were coming in for revival more broadly—for though they were never as completely on the outs as the operas of Handel (except for Così fan tutte, which was exactly that), they had spent many decades flying well under the Romantic radar. The 1930s had seen long strides toward restoration, of which the longest were the performances at the festivals of Salzburg and Glyndebourne and the return (again after a more-than-two-decade void) of Don Giovanni to regular performance at the Metropolitan. The  Figaros and Giovannis of both Salzburg and the Met had Ezio Pinza in their title roles; for twenty or so years, he set the standard—vocally, musically, charismatically—for these extraordinary characters. The Glyndebourne productions of all three of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas received “complete” studio recordings (recitatives cut to the bone); for fifteen or so years, they had to be considered definitive in the absence of competition and, along with the Beecham recording of Die Zauberflöte, constituted a significant factor in earning for these works their proper standing in the modern opera repertory.

I would describe what’s gone missing as falling into two broad categories. In Category 1 are all the things that interpretations of Le Nozze di Figaro need to have in common, so that we are able to recognize the opera in performance as a work of understood artistically satisfying qualities, and expect that they will be present. These elements are derived from two sources, namely, the musical and verbal text itself, and the things that talented performers have revealed as necessary to its basic fulfillment, and have thus become parts of its performing tradition. Category 2 holds everything that individual performers of imagination, personality, and presence bring to the music and drama of the piece. Since the piece at hand is an opera, much that belongs to both categories is found in its vocal and musical expression; but since an opera takes theatrical form, much else must come from the theatre’s territory. Of course the contributions of extraordinary performers will at times ambush our in-common expectations in a way we receive as revelatory, so that the tradition is supplemented. But that’s not involved in the recent Figaro experience. We aren’t dealing with anything gained, but only with things lost, and going in search of them.