Well, it’s a Singspiel—a series of closed-form musical numbers interspersed with substantial sections of dialogue—and speech is different from song. Let’s not pretend that this isn’t a challenge in the Met, especially on a wide-open set. And it has always been true that some singers are more or less natural-sounding actors, and others not. These days, few performers have much in the way of elocutionary skills or, among women, sufficient strength in their natural speaking range (that is, the chest register) to deal effectively with dialogue in a large theatre. But there is nothing more “unnatural” than the sound of a voice murmuring at an intimate speech level, yet carrying easily in a cavernous space—can’t believe that for a second. And besides promoting this obvious contradiction, the miking tends to help everything settle into a lazy groove: now the singing need only match up with the low-energy talking. “There is so much more I can do with the dialogue with a mic,” said Ms. Morley. “I can face upstage, I can whisper something . . .” The performers themselves don’t understand when they’re being sold down the river.^(I)

It was that raised orchestra that occasioned the conductor/orchestra unpleasantness. It’s tempting to simply overlook it as a squalid little spat, except that it does tell us something about how things are going down at the Big House, and does raise a legitimate issue about the treatment of pre-Romantic operas there. In the same article from which I’ve extracted the Stutzmann and Morley remarks^(II) the conductor put in a word on behalf of enabling the musicians to watch the action they’re playing for, and on the longueurs of durance in the pit, this last something that anyone professionally connected in any way has often heard about—from the players. Michael Levine, the set designer, also pointed out that in the 18th Century, the musicians weren’t “hidden.” True enough, there wasn’t a pit. (I haven’t turned up anything specific on the orchestra/stage conformation at the Theater auf der Wieden, and can only assume that’s because it was the norm for the time.) There also wasn’t a director or a conductor in our sense of those terms, and I find myself increasingly willing to take my chances with that arrangement. Stutzmann’s remarks were generally, not personally, directed and, after all, sympathetic to opera-pit musicians. But representatives of the orchestra took umbrage with a huffy, self-congratulatory, resentful screed about their passion, dedication, and alertness to the dramatic situation, that last something their playing at times calls into question. The conductor was obliged to issue an apology. None of this made the mainstream media in real time, so it was gratifying to see Zachary Woolfe, in a well-judged seasonal retrospective piece, calling out the players and Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s embarrassing Instagram endorsement of their statement.^(III)