Unique to TN’s performance preparation is its seven-week training program, a period of intensive work with the chosen singers on all aspects of interpretation for the ear (vocal technique, linguistic fluency, stylistic conventions, musical interpretation) that leads up to the actual rehearsal period. All onstage performers, chorus to principals, participate, and many return for more than one summer, so that with time a cadre of singers thoroughly immersed in the métier begins to emerge. The result is the sense of everyone being on the same page, of an ease of response that comes of knowing what to expect of one another, that I’ve detected on and off in earlier TN productions but with a more satisfying consistency in this one. And I believe it suggests one back-to-the-future pathway for opera, by reversing the homogenizing and generalizing tendencies of the artform’s internationalization, which has taken place with increasing velocity over the last century and into the present one. The fact that great works of art speak powerfully to people of many places and times does not negate their cultural specificity. The plays of Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, and Chekhov, the operas of Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner (I cite only a few of the hardest-hitting heavyweights—it’s no less true of the dance-on-your-toes bantamweights or outright street brawlers) are not the products of globalized, multicultural mentalities and broad perspectives, but of minds deeply rooted in the national, spiritual, social, and linguistic givens of their lives. Their “universality” is more apt to be unconcealed by digging at those roots than by shaking the spreading branches for fallen withering leaves. And if as much can be done with a 173-year-old Italian comic opera as TN showed us in its Crispino, why could not something similar be achieved with, say, the later 19th-century opéra comique, the earlier Singspiel, the later Italian and French works of veristic intent—or the true masterpieces of our once-standard repertory? That would create a different, more artistically rewarding diversity than the sort so strenuously sought today, a diversity of cultures rendered more truly themselves, and thus able to inform us more completely of their truths. Of course, this requires big-time, if not predatory, cultural appropriation, of the kind imaginative artists have always practiced and must continue to practice—a two-way appropriation in which the artist claims his right to the culture by assimilating to it, being absorbed into it.

If only by setting this example, TN has already accomplished a great deal. Yet it’s only made a beginning: its summer season consisted of two performances each of two operas. More crucially, its work is theatrically, therefore operatically, incomplete. Crispino managed to edge beyond the “semi-staged” scam that has been a bane of my life for over sixty years now. That is, the performers were given a few items of furniture to work with and some sensible blocking, and so were able to behave with one another somewhat in the manner of singing actors. But they were doing so in business suits and contemporary dresses, on an essentially bare stage, with no set and only minimal help from lighting. The Rose’s stage and auditorium is a large improvement over the depressing space that TN worked in up at SUNY Purchase—sort of an open-pit mine effect—but we are still left with the realization that while all the musical elements of operatic production have been brought nigh to our integrated, bonded ideal, the theatrical (and hence dramatic) ones have been only indicated. Direction and design, with an acting component in the training program, would be required to give us a whole opera. And that returns us to the question of money, the answers to which recede ever farther in the rear-view mirror.