My FT articles were filed on newspaper deadlines, in best ink-stained-wretch fashion—they’re reviews, not thought pieces. I hadn’t looked them over for many years, so lining them up for inspection has involved many small rediscoveries and one large one: a presumptive cultural optimism that made it plausible, or at least not delusional, to envision an expanding sphere for opera in American society. Criticism could rely on an assurance of institutional solidity and continuity; mere survival in some recognizable form was not at issue. And of course we had a larger, more broadly distributed critical community, writing for a more culturally aware readership—as Andrew Porter, who’d recommended me for the FT position, said by way of orientation, “I write for an imaginary audience of connoisseurs, and it seems to work out.” Though newspapers were already foundering (the death of New York’s single alternative to the NYT as a high-quality broadsheet, the Herald-Tribune, in 1964 was but one prominent example), and the longstanding national music magazines were either already gone (Etude, with its educational and participatory tone and contents) or on the way out (Musical America, Musical Courier). New ones gave classical music and opera a greater-than-ever public visibility, but (and this was an important shift), this exposure was now founded almost exclusively on music and opera in their recorded forms, which, with their undeniable splendors, soon became the normative experience and standard of judgment for these artforms. Of these, American Record Guide (the oldest) and Fanfare continue to pluckily address the much-diminished audience for classical recordings. But they have nothing like the commercially driven distribution—and consequent social impact, the impression that classical music and opera are out there mixing it up with the popular culture and other forms of capitalist enterprise—attained by High Fidelity and Stereo Review in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.

It’s some of that simple presence on the agora, however modest, that is to be mourned with the summertime passing of Opera News. It was founded in 1935 (the same year as ARG‘s debut) as the publication of the Metropolitan Opera Guild (itself a Summer of ’23 casualty, except for a few vestigial functions), which had been established as part of the public campaign to keep the Met afloat in the depths of the Great Depression. ON won’t be much missed as a serious forum for discussion (as a retired colleague of mine put it, it had become “. . . basically a fashion magazine with provocative photos of young singers and an emphasis on luxury and acquisition, and almost nothing of interest about opera”). But it was still there, a sporadically visible reminder of “Oh yeah, opera,” and there was always the hope that a change might take it in a more useful direction. It remained a potential outlet for writers—who were paid, incidentally, at levels that at least lifted their work above the eleemosynary level—and the source of some jobs. It was, in other words, something rather than nothing. Elements of ON are apparently going to be incorporated into Opera, perhaps rather in the manner that High Fidelity (and later ARG) absorbed elements of Musical America in the ’60s. I’d like to think that its absence as an independent entity could make room for a more critically informed American journal about opera in both its scholarly and performative selves, but in the current environment that’s probably Dream-On wishfulness.