This is only one moment, but it stands for many. Throughout much of this performance, the physical behavior, though never startlingly “right” or gripping, was plausible enough in the setting of the scenario’s generalized, anonymized here-and-now world. And there were spots of vocal satisfaction from the principals, phrases where the timbres and guidance of their voices registered the music’s shapes and intensities within the calibrations available to them, and so allowed a portion of this great score’s worth to seep through the dense filter the production had set in place. But there were two things missing from the singing—all the singing. One was any impression of expansiveness, of being able to play with a range of colors and dynamics, or of depth (something dramatically pregnant embedded in the tone itself), either or both of which are necessary to get beyond merely rendering notes and phrases with energy, and actually interpreting them. The other was so much as a single moment of what we’d call insight, of illumination, something that would catch the breath for a second, or, failing that, make us think. So the most treasurable things on the singing side of the voice/body bond, the things that “technique” is above all meant to enable, were absent except in a de minimis way. In this production as in so many now, an unassuming form of the modern acting sensibility, a form that requires only that the performers appear “natural” in a way that conforms to current social models, and then try to carry out a director’s instructions, is enlisted in the service of a kind of theatre that intentionally flouts the ideal of an integrated production.

But some of our auteurial directors will say that they are working assiduously on exactly this thing called “integrated production.” By that they mean: integrated to their own fantasies, to the things they want to say, with the great operatic scores of the past as accompaniment. That, they believe, makes them creators. And what do I mean by it? Where, for that matter, does the very idea, which in one form or another we have long taken for granted even in opera, come from?

˜ ˜ ˜

I feel something of an old thrill whenever I encounter a retelling of the adventures of the young Konstantin Sergeievich Alekseiev, known to us as Stanislavski, in his search for a new kind of theatre, based on a new kind of acting. It’s the story of his early amateur efforts,^(I) in the Moscow of the 1880s and ’90s, first with his Alekseiev Circle and then his Society of Art and Literature, and then of his famous (at least among theatrefolk) lunch-into-late-night meeting at the Slavyansky Bazaar in 1897 with the distinguished playwright, scholar, and teacher Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, which led directly to the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre. The story goes on to chronicle the extraordinary success of that ensemble and its ever-evolving way of working; its acclaimed tours in Europe and then the United States; and the widespread adaptation, especially in this country, of the techniques developed and taught by Stanislavski. The story has been written dozens of times,^(II) beginning with the autobiographical accounts of the founders themselves, but has received its most recent re-telling—clear, concise without being squeezed, and written from a more professionally objective p.o.v. than most—in the early chapters of Isaac Butler’s The Method. (The later chapters are good, too, but the farther away we get from KS and the MAT and into the Americanizations of their work, culminating in naturalistic techniques most useful in film acting, the more remote we are from anything of value to the problems of acting in opera, or, for that matter, the classical spoken theatre.)