A standard is something to measure by. But what are we measuring? It’s a question we implicitly ask any time we try to describe and evaluate. When it comes to operatic interpretation, I think we must confess that what we’re measuring is its effect on our expectant selves—a discouragingly personal fragment of experience without much claim on an objective reality, especially inasmuch as our selves are forever changing and thereby shifting the height, distance, and angle of the goalposts. “Expectancy,” in particular, depends on the accumulated involvement of each unique self, and its elusive nature was  on my mind as I listened and thought back through my own engagement with this opera and its characters. Still, there’s much that most of us hold in common, at least to a degree, in our personal experience of performance, and there are elements of interpretation that can be, as it were, quantified and categorized, which we can use to go in search of the causes of the effects we experience, and to sort out the interrelationship of performance and its reception in at least one self.

Unless a new performance is so persuasive as to set a new paradigm (and when can we say that last happened with any aspect of La Traviata?—that’s part of our quest), any search for a standard will take us into the past. That means via recordings; the memory of the given unique self; and scraps of written documentation. All are unreliable, but they are what we have. Inasmuch as I keep insisting that opera is opera only in the theatre, I am biased in favor of recordings that coincide with events in memory (mine), as far back as that can take us. So my principal exhibits will be three live recordings that extend to the edge of my own recollection. But if we are in earnest in seeking a standard, we also need to traverse the time machine to earlier entries, where two of the standard’s more “objective” elements can be glimpsed. The first lies in the types of voice considered appropriate for the roles in question at a time now distant from ours, but much closer to that of the roles’ creation. Their vocality had passed through fewer generational filters and (as with everything in modern life, I think we can assume) at a slower pace, than our own; thus, despite the important overall changes in vocality that occurred during the second half of the 19th Century, we can draw the reasonable inference of a closer match to the vocal sounds and behaviors Verdi was writing to. The second “objective” criterion would often be defined as a matter of “style,” that is, what the musical and vocal manners of the singing can tell us about how the characters and their actions were conceived at the time.  And beyond these quasi-verifiable matters of voice, technique, and style there lies the one they are meant to serve—dramatic truth, the perception of which is as changeable as our selves over time. I do not think of all these differences purely as objects of historical curiosity, but as rich resources for our own thinking about performance.