Opera/South was founded in 1970 in the heart of the Deep South to showcase black talent and, in the words of its then-managing director, to welcome predominantly black audiences to “the magic circle of opera.” Its initial programming had been extremely ambitious (Aïda and Turandot, two large-scale, standard-repertory works with non-European characters), but in its third season it attracted outside funding for a double bill of operas by two established black composers, Ulysses Kay and William Grant Still. The artistic merits of these pieces are modest, but certainly not inferior to those of many by contemporaneous white composers, and were adequately met by the performances. At the dress rehearsal of the double bill, the invited audience included several large groups of attentive black schoolchildren, from Jackson’s rural surroundings as well as the city itself—exactly the sort of outreach considered a prize aspect of development efforts. So far as I am aware, Opera/South represented the only instance in those years of expansion in which an ethnic component was an important factor in the funding decisions.^(I)

I don’t have a count of the then-new American operas I’ve seen in many venues large and small (including, particularly in the past quarter-century, the Met) over the past seventy or so years. But it has surely reached the vicinity of 100, augmented by over half that many post-WW2 operas by foreign composers. And of course there have been recordings and videos of many more, though I have not given them the same attention I accord to the living thing, to opera as opera. I have enjoyed, or found stimulating, a number of these encounters. In my youth I was excited by the efforts of the NYCO, along with the anticipation that the American musical, starting back with Showboat and Porgy and Bess and continuing with the most “legit” of the postwar shows, might be maturing into a native artform. I entertained hope that the Center Opera’s example would give rise to other visionary explorations that, while not revivifying opera exactly as we had known it, could lead to a here-and-now mutation of worth that might stand on its own while in return bringing a new piquancy to presentation of the traditional masterworks—something along those lines, it seemed to me, had happened in the relation of modern dance to classical ballet. And for several decades, I felt duty-bound to show up for any American or other contemporary opera that actually made it onto the stage of the Met, where most of them would need to grow in size, in aesthetic quality, in intellectual and emotional urgency, to avoid an impression of feeble pretense in the company of works that had held the heights for so long.

Among all these operas, there have been about a half-dozen that I would welcome seeing again (though only one or two of them at the Met); an equal number I would willingly grant a second viewing under promising auspices, on the chance that performance might have undercut them so severely as to blind and deafen me to qualities I have reason to suspect are there; and a couple I feel I should re-evaluate by way of examining my own biases. In short, while one never gives up all hope (I once won a lucrative trifecta at jai-alai, about which I know nothing), the odds have lengthened to sucker-bait proportions in any given instance. Besides, at least in the repertory of a major opera house, something of importance is being displaced with each of these new arrivals—a proven work of the standard repertory, or a revival of a too-long-absent opera from that same plenteous horde. It is that realization, nagging at mind and spirit on each of these “premiere” evenings, that puts me in essential agreement with Will Crutchfield’s “The new-opera problem” (guest column, 12/17/21), which I urge you to read (or re-read) in conjunction with this article. I don’t know that his analysis of our predicament, or mine, is exactly, comprehensively correct. And I continue to think that if we cannot bring ourselves to approach the past with integrity and allow it to speak for itself in production, and cannot find the means to strengthen the standards of classical singing, this will all be moot before too very long. One thing of which I feel quite sure is that on any of the evenings I have devoted to a contemporary premiere at the Met since I began writing this series, I would have found a middling performance of any standard-repertory opera, or a better-than-middling one of many of the “Plan B” operas Will is referring to, more stimulating, pleasing, and moving. And there are many such operas that have been MIA for quite some time now.