“Keep trying, Conrad.” The words came to me across a few empty folding chairs as we exited the St. Regis Hotel ballroom on a November day in 1978. I had just chaired a panel on the training of opera singers at a Central Opera Service conference. The panel was a prestigious one, and two of its members, the soprano Patricia Brooks (” . . . our Schröder-Devrient,” as the director David Alden named her for her wonderful work with the NYCO in the ’60s) and the director and teacher Robert (“Bobby”) Lewis (the only alumnus of the famed Group Theatre to have much involved himself with opera and musical theatre), were personal choices of mine, with the intent of injecting a robust plug for the incorporation of serious acting technique into the operatic training curriculum. The discussion had been lively, questions and comments from the floor well taken, and the vibe in the room positive. Surely a successful little event. Yet the words “Keep trying.” They came from John Ludwig, whom I knew well, first as the General Manager of the Center Opera in Minneapolis, and later as the Executive Director of the National Opera Institute. We’d conversed many times. He’d read some of my articles, heard some of my speeches, and listened as I advocated for a better understanding among operafolk of what the study of modern acting principles could contribute to opera. In his wryly supportive tone was an understanding he was sure I shared: yes, people like the idea, it sounds good to them—but nothing much will come of it, because with the exceptions of a minority of the professionals present, they don’t really understand what I’m talking about, or what it would entail. They’re opera people; the music says it all; you’ll never get through. Still—keep trying.

And so I do. Just as I believe that the primary generating force behind the great E-19 maturation of our artform was its in-common dramatic narrative, rather than any of its significant musical developments (that is, the former drove the latter, more than the other way around), so I believe that the key to vitality in performance lies in contacting its dramatic sources. Opera exists when, and only when, performers commit sung theatrical actions. The action and the singing must arise from a common source, neither complete without the other. I have left “acting” in quotation marks to try to discourage thinking of it as a separate element. 

I know that for many opera devotees this is not familiar ground. There will be concepts and names for which I will try to provide context, but which some readers may consider inapplicable or even unwelcome to the operatic situation. I urge them to hear me out.    

I often hear people say that although operatic singing has admittedly been in decline for several decades, operatic acting, at least, has improved. And my first lazy response is a tentative, limited agreement. But then: How can that be? Since operatic acting is first of all a matter of dramatic expression by vocal and musical means, how can it have strengthened even as its primary component, singing, has weakened? Isn’t the most important thing we mean when we say that operatic singing has declined is, precisely, that it has lost much of its dramatic potency, in terms of force, nuance, and above all, passion? I think it is. So any perceived “improvement” must fall in the area of physical behavior. Or, to put it another way, of acting for the eye. Which in turn suggests that in the always-fluctuating sensory blend of the operatic experience, attention has been drawn away from the ear and toward the eye, and that a high aspiration, a key element of what I call the “modern acting sensibility” ^(I)as brought to bear on opera, has been abandoned. That aspiration is, or was: to create an indissoluble bond between body and voice, so that their actions arise from the same mental/visceral source, and are received by the audience as a single sensory experience. It is only if we separate the two, and then concentrate on the bodily one, that we can detect any “improvement” in operatic acting. When people speak of such an improvement, what they really mean is that it more closely resembles all the other acting they’re seeing, which for most people most of the time now means acting for the screen.