I hold out hope for some improvement in the Times’ opera criticism. Woolfe writes more pungently than did Tommasini, and buried amid the hedges and thickets of “leading with the positives” that appear to be editorial Diktat for NYT critics, there have always been shy little growths that suggest he knows more than he’s letting on. Perhaps, now that he’s chief critic, these specimens will come out of the shadows—his review of the Stoned Lucia hints at as much. But he will not, I predict, slip the bonds of the paper’s self-imposed “major issues” mandate, which is to view all artistic effort in the light of Diversity.

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It is this same mandate that, in a sort of Declaration of Dependence, has been proclaimed by the Met. It certainly governed the selection of Fire (which features the intersection of race and the “G” of LGBTetc.) for insertion in the repertory to begin with, and its subsequent promotion to opening night status. It is clearly influencing the company’s thinking as it moves onward. Both Gelb and Nézet-Séguin have chimed in by voice vote, N-S most transparently in an article by Woolfe (see He’s New York’s Conductor Now, NYT, 11/21/21). There, Woolfe reports that Fire‘s success (in reviews, sales, and—Eureka! African-American attendance!) has convinced N-S that works representing marginalized groups (Latinos and LGBT people are mentioned) “should be  fixtures” going forward. “I don’t want this to be the exception,” says N-S, “to do Eurydice and Fire. For me, this should be the norm.” How much headroom N-S feels he has for yet further progress toward this normalization of the contemporary and the “major issues” I’m not sure, but presumably we are about to find out.

And in that regard, I am constrained to again point out that, with the exception of the field open to creators, which is infinite, everything in our little operatic cosmos truly is in place of something else. The repertory of a season—of a decade’s, a lifetime’s worth of seasons—is finite. So there is limited standing room for a work, a role, a job. Each is in place of another, or a number of others.^(I) With respect to works, which others of worth might be excluded in favor of this new norm? We can all think of many, but as examples of now-seldom-done pieces that had occurred to N-S but which must now be set aside, Woolfe’s article cites Gluck (and when, by the way, might we get Armide? Alceste? or an Orfeo that is not a travesty?), Der Freischütz, Die Tote Stadt, and La Gioconda. Gosh, I’d be happier with any of those than with any new opera I’ve heard at the Met going back to Peter Grimes, unless we count Prokoviev’s War and Peace (1940) as “new” by the time the Met finally did it (2002, and then owing to the company’s collaboration with Valery Gergiev’s Maryinsky). And now, the infrequently mounted operas awakened from slumber for the 2022-2023 season are: Cherubini’s Medea, Mozart‘s Idomeneo, and Giordano’s Fedora! In place of Gluck, Weber, Korngold, and Ponchielli? May we take a plebiscite?