5. And one more: let’s call it the hand of history, which lies more heavily on the singing than on the speaking actor. This is true in a couple of ways. One is in opera’s oral traditions, according to which certain ways of doing things, for both ear and eye, that either are attributed to the originating impulses of a work’s style or that have simply been found effective in the course of myriad repetitions, are transmitted to young performers as if embedded in the score. They lay down tracks in the performer’s system just as the absolutes do. This sense of fealty to an oral tradition of performance, and the tensions inherent in taking from it what is useful as against the claims of our other sources of interpretive choice (the text itself; the free run of the performer’s imagination; and the discoveries of rehearsal) is a far more active issue for the singer than for the actor. This is all the more true because the singer lives in a world dominated by a repertory of classics (the canonization Levik’s progressives were complaining of), and all these classics—even those which in that pre-WW1 time would have been contemporary—are period pieces, involving immersion in the manners and values of earlier eras, and performed, I hope I needn’t point out, in several different languages. Since the values represented by the operatic canons have always been some mix of Late Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic ones, they have always represented some form of idealism, of a stage world in which people observe principles of behavior, codes of honor, the quality we call “nobility,” that are meant to serve as aspirational models for us.  One aspect of that is that these classics frequently lead their interpreters into encounters with “heavy” or “elevated” characters, personages meant to carry more than their individual, personal levels of import. This extends to the embrace of characters of mythological, legendary, or symbolic derivation that cannot be successfully played through resort to “naturalness,” and goes beyond the general heightening of impassionization inherent in their musical settings.

It is true that several of these requirements and conditions apply in some degree to the speaking actor’s work, especially in poetic and/or period drama whenever those are allowed to be themselves, or under a director given to seeking out the musicality of a given script, to “scoring” it, or to emphasizing a suprapersonal subtext in the work being prepared. Even then, though, crucial differences—physical, aesthetic, psychological—remain. With all these differences in place (and I may have missed a few), what validity remains for the modern acting sensibility, with its de-emphasis on rhetorics of voice and body, in the preparation and performance of opera? What “improvement” can it be said to have made?

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I assert that the basic insights of Stanislavski and his fellow modernists, outlined earlier, constituted true progress. They were important parts of the maturation of our thinking about theatrical truth, or at least (what amounts to the same thing) theatrical believability, and remain as valid here and now as they were there and then. And no less than speaking actors, singing actors pursue the illusions of theatrical believability and emotional authenticity through character action. Theatrical reform has always, until quite recently, been in search of an intensification of “seeming real.” “Real-seeming” ought not to be confused with Realism or Naturalism as styles, or simply with what a given generation recognizes as familiar, or with the life styles of a particular social class. Stanislavski & Co. intended none of those things. They sought, rather, to bring a greater sense of reality to a theatre that embraced the cultural values of all works undertaken, wherever those might fall along the line of social and theatrical history. Their revolution in acting and directing was not a rejection of the past, but of the conventional histrionics associated with it, and the unsuitability of those histrionics to the plays of contemporaneous authors. Let’s look briefly at how Stanislavskian principles, if applied with any consistency to opera, would stack up against the five sung-vs.-spoken divergences I’ve outlined. It should be noted that Stanislavski loved opera and singing. He had youthful singing ambitions, reluctantly relinquished. His own reminiscences of the European singers he heard in his youth (essentially, of the generation before those Levik tells us of—KS saw Patti, Cotogni, Tamagno, and many of their contemporaries) show a keen understanding of vocal art. Chaliapin stood alongside Salvini, Duse, and Yermolova as one of the acting geniuses who inspired his quest—though set to one side (perhaps even slightly above?) for his special status as singing-actor. After the Revolution (the political one), in collaboration with the Bolshoi, KS established his Opera Studio, where he applied his techniques to both operatic and art song material (see the Rumyantsev entry in the bibliography). Moscow’s Stanislavski/Nemirovich-Danchenko Opera Company, born of a merger of the Opera Studio with Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Musical Studio, is descended—however remotely now—from that effort.