Acts of cultural revisionism in performance, like the Don Carlos Mohawk or the Meistersinger Black Dancin’, function as gestures not merely of personal defiance, but of contempt for the culture in which they are embedded. Whether or not they are intended in precisely that way by the responsible parties is immaterial; they are considered and self-aware. In the immortal formulation of Netflix upon the exile of the actor Frank Langella for Intimacy Coach violations: we don’t care about intent. We care about impact.

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PART TWO: MY SPRING SEMESTER BOOK REPORT.

In my personal library there’s a shelf for books related to the question in this essay’s title. The books constitute only a small portion of my collection, but take up mental space beyond their numbers. There’s no academic logic to their selection; they’re just books I’ve read or heard about, or whose authors I’ve seen interviewed, and which have seemed of topical importance to me. With anything I read, regardless of subject matter, its potential connection to opera and to the classical arts in general is invariably in my awareness, if not always in the foreground. This shelf runs chronologically from right to left, and begins with books dealing with the socio-politico-cultural impact of the internet and Big Tech, such as Robert Levine’s Free Ride, Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine and Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur; three books by Jaron Lanier and two by Tim Wu; Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform, Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Destruction, David Sax’s Revenge of the Analog, and, as grand finale, Shoshanna Luboff’s thoroughly scary Surveillance Capitalism.

Getting out toward the left end of the shelf, there’s a change in tone. It begins somewhere around The Death of Expertise/The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, by Tom Nichols, a foreign policy analyst by trade whom I’d seen interviewed by Christiane Amanpour. She was not pleased by some of his answers, particularly as they related to the post-George Floyd protests, but I was intrigued enough to buy his book. A few chapter titles: Higher Education (subsections, e. g.: Rate Me Gently (student evaluations of professors); College Is Not a Safe Space (do I need to elaborate?); The “New” New Journalism (trusted news sources, “personality journalism,” etc.). The book is well-sourced and entertainingly but soberly argued, and for me its defense of established knowledge and expertise (of the very notion that there are such things, in fact) extends by implication to a defense of the established worth of classical culture.

Then there’s Louis Menand’s The Free World/Art and Culture in the Cold War. I’m always interested in any book that will help me get my arms around what on earth has happened to intellectual and cultural life in my own lifetime, and this is a major effort in that direction. I’ve always found Menand stimulating when he writes for magazines I regularly see (Harper’s, New York Review of Books, et al.) and have held him in esteem, though that slipped a notch when, given the chance by Walter Isaacson (Amanpour’s show again) to say something useful about current campus warfare, he weaseled away with something like “The campus has always been the setting for political controversy, and should be, blah-blah . . .” His book is far-ranging and fine. It covers only the period from the end of WW2 to the onset of Viet Nam, and I have an 18-year head start on him in terms of experience of those years. Nevertheless, in addition to being reminded of much, I learned much from it. Of course, these were not my 1950s and ’60s, except in the sense that they constituted an unavoidable milieu. Once Menand departs the spheres of high diplomacy (George Kennan & Co.) and wartime outremer thought (Orwell, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Arendt) for that of American popular and avant-garde art and literature, the intellectual and aesthetic level of what he’s writing about plummets, and he is guardedly nonjudgmental about it all—except insofar as his selection of material imputes an equal importance to all. The lone index entry under “opera” is for Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique, and there is really nothing on classical or even mainstream contemporaneous music or theatre, or on the burgeoning of the regional theatre and opera systems that marked that time. Nonetheless, I found Menand’s book worthwhile for its reach and literateness, not so much “on background” (for which it may serve for anyone much younger than I) as “on surround.” Back then and—with exponentially greater urgency, now—that surround, comprising an increasingly degraded popular culture and an avant-garde that signaled, like off-key Fidelio trumpets, what we now think of as The Postmodern, is what opera, and all the classical arts and humanities, must stubbornly resist.