My determination to have an uninterrupted summer hiatus from writing about opera’s weal and woe has held fast this year. But the time has come to greet a new season, and so to welcome fellow devotees back to some of my thoughts on what’s happening with and to our artform. Over the summer, the thoughts—and exchanges about them with friends and colleagues—have been of troubling varieties, mostly concerned with the ways in which the decline of opera’s standing has manifested itself, and at an accelerating pace. I did attend one event, though, that was enjoyable in itself and that offered a suggestion of one promising way forward, though not without trailing behind it a reminder of one of the trouble spots. I’ll get to that presently.

I’ve devoted a fair amount of my hiatus time to the gathering of materials (“my papers,” to give them their properly dignified name) for archiving purposes—a large task, and part of the yet larger one we call “putting our affairs in order.” I’d started this a while back by assembling all the unpublished writing I had done in the period (1968-1980) when my work was centered on the development and expansion of opera in our country. This had included the many field evaluations of opera companies I’d submitted for foundation and federal funding sources, speeches made at conferences and opera-celebrative occasions, and articles I’d written in the house organs of the service organizations (Affiliate Artists and The National Opera Institute) on whose boards I had served. This summer, I collated the 90-some columns I wrote for London’s Financial Times between 1962 and 1969, when I was that newspaper’s New York music (but mostly opera) critic. It was a wonderful time to have that job—the time, in fact, of opera’s greatest flourishing in New York. The lengths of seasons, number of performances, and rates of attendance reached levels they had never attained before, and which would be sustained for only a few years thereafter before the long erosion set in. Those seven years saw the successive openings of the major halls at Lincoln Center, which in operatic terms meant the Metropolitan’s final seasons in the old house and its removal to the new one, and the corresponding migration of the New York City Opera from the City Center to the (then) New York State Theater, as well as the first summer visits of major foreign companies (the Hamburg State Opera, the Rome Opera) to the new opera house, and the New York stands of the short-lived touring Metropolitan Opera National Company. Not coincidentally, this flourishing extended to the classical division of the commercial recording industry, whose symbiosis with the live performance institutions, though not without its negative aspects, was for thirty or so years a promotional party time.

And artistically, those years corresponded almost exactly with the final wave of greatvoiced singers, the last years when it was possible for the major international companies, among which the Metropolitan had for three-quarters of a century maintained a position of prima inter pares when it came to singing, to assemble satisfying casts for the masterworks of the 19th and early 20th centuries. At times, these singers were guided by master conductors of a breed that has gone extinct, though in a house of full-season true “rolling rep” (rotating operas and casts six nights a week, two shows on Saturday), a knowledgeable routine on the parts of conductors and players was the night-to-night aspiration, by no means always met. Finally, it was a time when we in the U. S. could still expect that, whatever the failings or stylistic peculiarities (or the tradition-bound slovenliness, the lazy “received wisdom”) of a particular production or performance might be, the point of stage direction and design was to transmit the manifest content of the given work—that is, its story and characters, in their time and place. Thus, all discussion and argumentation, including that of professional criticism, could proceed on the basis of how well that transmission was perceived to have gone, its vocal and orchestral achievements, visual style, narrative emphasis, and presentation of character action being the foci of attention. Intellectual interpretation—the analysis of meaning, of the work’s relation to social, historical, or cultural issues—and/or ideologies of same—could be left to the disciplines of academic criticism, where, however, they were not much taken up in relation to their only means of transference, performance. The notion that the revisionist or adversarial varieties of such critique might be incorporated into performance itself would have been considered daft.