Which returns us to the receptor’s state of knowledge and belief. It needs to be accounted for at even the higher levels of discussion. For instance, take the operatic commentary of Geoffrey O’Brien. He is the author of several novels and volumes of poetry and of many articles on subjects of cultural interest, and was for nearly two decades the Editor in Chief of the Library of America. His interests have leaned heavily toward film and the popular culture, including pop music. But on the occasion of new productions at the Metropolitan, the New York Review of Books often sends him forth to comment. Since he’s a stylish writer of general cultural awareness and I’m grateful, on principle, that the NYRB reserves some space for classical music and opera, I always read these articles.

Usually, O’Brien’s opera pieces are at once reminders of the nearly extinct tradition of the gentleman writer of taste who comments from somewhere in orbit around any cultural object that drifts his way, and of the more recent practice of postcriticism, in which the author makes observations and hints at attitudes, but declines to take any evaluative stand and simply writes around the areas he knows little or nothing about, even when they are crucial to the subject at hand. In Opera as Opera I referred in passing to one lacuna in O’Brien’s knowledge of Borodin’s Prince Igor, a cornerstone work of the Russian repertory whose demolishment on political grounds by Yuri Tcherniakov he enthusiastically endorsed. In that case, he simply rode the stampede of the Russophobe herd (and this was long pre-Ukraine), which trampled any incipient concerns over artistic integrity or quality. With Trelinski’s Forza, he is more equivocal. He notes, for example, that the action’s pace “seems almost doubled by the continual movement of a revolving stage and a dense clustering of visual clues and flourishes;” that “Trelinski is telling Verdi’s story but a story of his own as well . . . inserting himself as full collaborator;” that, having started as a filmmaker, “as an opera director he continues to be one;” that “the countless revolutions” of the roundtable pantomime staged during the overture “resemble camera movements permitting scene changes,” coming close to turning that spectacular stretch of music into “mere soundtrack for this three-dimensional silent movie;” that the inserted videoclips do not so much clarify the narrative as lift it more decisively into the contemporary world; that the concept turns the opera into a “whirligig of time and circumstance—with no situation stable for long;” and that—to conclude this incomplete list—”The considerations of honor and lineage that inform the libretto are no longer operative in Trelinski’s version of the modern world.” He does seem uneasy with aspects of this. Some of it “jars,” and “the disparities take some getting used to.” Alvaro, he complains, “might at least make his entrance with a trace of heroic self-assurance.” But finally, it’s all just “a matter of adjusting to a reconceived libretto.”

But the libretto is not reconceived. It is retained, word for word except for the cuts, contradicting what we see from one moment to the next. It is a new scenario that the “full collaborator” (i. e., auteur) has dumped over the libretto and the music, with the now-customary insolence, the now-customary “stupidity” as the prevailing condition of the performance. It is not “bold,” or “abundantly inventive.” It’s just more hacking at the played -out vein of postoperqtic apocalyptic cliché. But O’Brien thinks all will be well if, after making our “adjustment,” we learn to read the production as a palimpsest, one scenario atop another, and leave the music in its role as “mere soundtrack.” Apart from seriously mischaracterizing some of the performances, and those primarily in visual terms—Lise Davidsen’s is the only voice to get fragmentary attention, and the conducting and playing don’t get even that—he scarcely engages with the music beyond noting that its recurring motifs are “like the continual excavation of ever deeper recesses of suffering.” It can be argued that O’Brien isn’t, after all, writing for an audience of opera nuts. True. NYRB has always been a politico-literary journal that extends itself selectively into the humanities and arts—especially the fine arts, where some advertising return is forthcoming—but the performing arts as well. It is also a legacy publication for the intelligentsia, whose readership is surely aware of opera’s continuing existence and will connect to the trending elements in O’Brien’s reports by analogy with developments in their own fields of primary interest. If the content of those reports amounts to little more than an intelligently written waving-through of the idées reçus of postmodern orthodoxies, I am hard put to find the use in it.