First, a small correction. In describing some of the highlights of the 1956-57 Metropolitan Opera season (see Callas, Part One, 3/2/24) and relying on memory, I mistakenly named the bass Gottlob Frick among the prominent German artists imported for that season’s Ring cycles. But he did not arrive until the cycles of 1961-62. Kurt Böhme was the principal bass of the ’56-’57 Ring.

And a reminder for anyone who may have missed my announcement of 3/21/24: Marston’s long-delayed 10-CD set of studio and broadcast recordings of Lawrence Tibbett, to which I contributed the booklet essay, is at last available. See the Marston website for ordering details.

In 2018, I placed La Forza del destino, one of Giuseppe Verdi’s late-middle-period masterpieces, in my series of MIA (“Missing in Action”) operas. After a longish absence, it had been scheduled for a new Metropolitan production that year. But it’s a big show, and owing to a shortage of dollars, it was canceled. So I wrote about audio and video productions of the 1950s, when both cash and singers of the kind Forza requires were in better supply. (See the posts of 1/12/18 and 1/27/18.) Now, despite further depletion of the former and no significant change in the quality of the latter over the ensuing six years, Forza has returned, after a fashion, in a new production directed by Mariusz Trelinski and conducted by Yannick Nézet- Séguin.

I wish there were a way to write out the simultaneity of operatic experience; that is, to convey the reception of the sights and sounds coming from without, jumbled with the communiques from within, the flashes of prior experience that glimmer constantly in the background of the new sights and sounds, and which, like flares, fitfully illumine their contours and qualities. There isn’t, though. One is forced to lay out these elements of experience for display, and then try to explain how their interrelationships do or don’t satisfy one’s longing for a wholeness. And much depends on the state of that prior knowledge, and on an awareness of how it has led to whatever beliefs and standards one brings to the new encounter. One of my frequent, highly informed correspondents recently wrote to me about a live regional performance she’d attended, of another 19th-Century masterwork. Well aware of the physical and financial limitations on her home company, she was more than willing to cut some slack in the matter of production choices, and was grateful that this one wasn’t of an extreme conceptual type. Still, it was displaced to the here-and-now, so though she enjoyed many aspects of it, she ” . . . remained annoyed at the timewarp, which just plays as stupid if one knows the libretto!” Yes. Also if one knows the music, the atmosphere, the set of cultural values, etc., that are of the work’s essence, none of which fit the time and place of the production or the society shown in it. Yet, though the directors of nearly all contemporary opera productions countenance exactly this stupidity—embrace it, in fact—they are not themselves stupid. They are adversarial, dedicated opponents of the very material they are interpreting, and they count on some combination of three states of mind in enough of their audience to forestall violent rioting: ignorance—lazy, willful, or native; intimidation in the face of the stupidity, tolerance of which is presumed to arise from insights elevated above anything that smacks of the literal or commonsensical; or (in a small but influential minority) actual agreement with the cultural replacement project underway.