We did have something approaching that, though, with Opera Quarterly. For most of its 27-year existence, it was edited on the assumption that performance and performers were proper objects of considered, detailed critical consideration and historical exploration, while giving some attention to scholarly matters in essays and book reviews. After a switch in university press publishers (from Duke to Oxford, 1999) and a sharp turn in editorial policy toward the academic (2005), it expired in 2010. Though the first version contained much of value for the opera devotee, it paid scant attention to live performance, and so had no way of coming to grips with the contemporary scene and its problems. And its writers were not paid. To escape the academic quarterly niche (and pay its writers) a magazine must find either massive subvention, most likely on a non-profit basis, or a dependable advertising base. For classical music and opera, the latter disappeared with the melting away of the commercial recordings and recording equipment industry. For the former, the floor is open for nominations.

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My summertime exchanges with colleagues and other interested parties can be summed up in two syllables: “Regie” (as in “Regietheater“) and “DEI.” I try to avoid the term Regietheater. Like “woke,” it’s become useless as a descriptive, detached from its original meaning and batted about as a catchall pejorative meant to shut down thoughtful discussion. Of course I write about Regie—that is, about the work of directors and designers—nearly every time out, and seldom in a merry mood. But that isn’t because I’m against direction and design. As long as I have written, I have tried to champion the concept of integrated production, of the mutual reinforcement of all visual elements—of set, costume, and lighting with the physical actions of performers; of the bonding of those with the dramatic action, psychological atmosphere, and structural demands of the music; and the reconcilement of all these with the text. That’s my version of Regie, and who would oppose that?

Well, some people—people who have become highly influential in opera production. There are first of all the people who wish to radically displace the very notion of an integrated (“univocal”) statement. Not just particular stories, but narrative itself; not just certain kinds of characters, but psychology itself; not just a specific view of the ordering of elements, but ordering itself; not just a given aesthetic, but any aesthetic at all—all these have been rejected by the more extreme practitioners of our postdramatic theatre, and their repudiations gathered up into sophisticated philosophical apologias—that is, into theory, which in turn finds analogues in other artistic realms. Then there are the auteurs and their co-believers in the notion, born of cinematic practice, of the director/designer as co-creator and “writer anew” of The Work each time out, co-equal with the true creators. Many of these self-proclaimed auteurs have been sufficiently delighted with the handy appearance of postdramatic perceptions to consider themselves “free” of one or more of the inconvenient demands of the integrated ideal, and of the stodgy requirement of working within the boundaries drawn (sharply here, more faintly there) by the composer and librettist, and are at the same time entranced by the vision of the stage shedding its own skin to don that of the screen. It is their kind of Regie (pervasive now) that I consider myself duty-bound to oppose. It’s still the case, though, that our major American venues have for the most part fought shy of the most egregious auteurial divertissements. So, in lieu of my going on about them, I’ll send you to a tasting menu of them, here, with the observation that the distinction between European and American opera playpen preferences is now a wire service story. Cultural penetration, at last.