I must not leave the impression that Stanislavski was somehow single-handedly responsible for either the modern acting sensibility or the model of the integrated production. He was, rather, a prominent figure in an aesthetic shift underway throughout Western theatrical culture. In fact, if we were to search for early exemplars of the directorially guided “total theatre” production and forerunners of today’s Regietheater grandees, we would first cite Max Reinhardt, and then perhaps Vsevolod Meierhold, though the latter as a distant second because of his lack of impact outside Russia. In terms of acting, however, Stanislavski is surely the single greatest influence. Neither Reinhardt nor Meierhold worked “from the acting to the production,” and neither they nor anyone else, including Nemirovich-Danchenko, left behind anything comparable to The System.

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” . . . to a man, they all fell into the same error. Without understanding the basic difference between a musical and a non-musical piece for the theatre and without considering this basic question, they fought for the application of the same approach to opera as already existed in the straight theatre, to achieve ‘the greatest closeness to life’ by detail and overloading the work with naturalistic details . . . They were most upset by the canonisation of the operatic form, the limited choice of operatic subjects and the hackneyed routine of musical and stage architectonics.”

The words are not those of one of our contemporary critics, bemoaning the umpteenth revival of an old production by Zeffirelli or the Schenk/Schneider-Siemsen team, but of the Russian baritone and memoirist Sergei Levik, writing in the 1950s but recollecting the arguments of the operatic progressives of pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg. Levik’s compendious An Opera Singer’s Notes is treasured first of all for its keen professional evaluations of so many of the prominent singers, both Russian and Western European, of those early 20th-Century years. He heard nearly all commonly deemed “great,” first in his native Kiev, then at the Mariinsky, in Warsaw, or on tours in the Russian provinces, and observed closely by ear and eye. But here he was speaking as a charter artist of the Theatre of Musical Drama (1912-1919), a company organized by Joseph Lapitzky specifically as an operatic reform project dedicated to Moscow Art Theatre principles. So when he objects to a failure to recognize the differences between straight and musical theatre, it is hardly as an upholder of outworn conventions, or opponent of the incorporation of then-new acting and directing practices into operatic preparation and performance. And the questions he raises are fair and important. In passing, we note that, then as now, the progressives’ complaints were directed mainly at matters of production style. They passed over, at least according to Levik’s recounting, the more basic question of what is “true-to-life” in acting, and how that might apply to opera. So we are left to ask: what are the differences between acting for the spoken and sung stages? And of the techniques developed for the fulfillment of the modern acting sensibility, which are of real help to the operatic actor, and which merely beside the point, or even of negative impact? The differences are obvious if we stop to think about them. But we seldom do. I identify five major ones, each with important implications for working method.