Opera’s future may well depend on initiatives of relatively modest size and relatively narrow focus, dedicated to well-defined artistic goals and the building of an audience that responds to them. But a way must be found to maintain a venue for the production of the large-scale works of genius that have proved their worth to many generations of people across boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, and cultural set. To see the resources of the Metropolitan Opera—its artistic personnel, its technical capacities, its physical plant—placed in the service of a spectacle like last year’s Carmen is to feel a soul-sickness. Almost as discouraging is the convoy of  contemporary pieces that “smack of accessibility” but offer so little nourishment, especially alongside the masterworks of our artform. The company is floundering, artistically and financially. Many of the reasons for that are common to the opera world at large. Others are peculiar to the opera world of the United States, with its unique mechanisms of support, faltering now amid cultural erosion, shifting demographics, and unfriendly politics—a development a half-century in the making. But others are the responsibility of the Gelb/Nézet-Séguin administration, which, bereft of any strong artistic vision, has been content to entertain the trends launched by others with stronger convictions, make artistically enfeebling social gestures, and pursue a divide-and-conquer audience-development scheme. The pandemic helped no one and its tail is still visible, but its explanatory force is fading fast. It’s past time for a change. But that is in the hands of the company’s Board of Directors, as it has been all along, with no outward signs of restlessness.

Flash: as we go to press (so to speak), breaking news is that Daniele Rustioni has been named Principal Guest Conductor at the Met, and will be leading at least two standard-rep productions per season for the duration of his contract (initially, three years). That’s an interesting move. A stirring of awareness?

Where might we look for a cheerier picture? Ah yes, Vienna!

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Vienna/Heather/Asmik. Heather Mac Donald, whose trenchant views on the artistic impact of some of our liberal pieties I have had occasion to cite previously (see Where Are We?, 6/10/22), recently posted a thoughtful, musically informed article here on a visit to Prague and Vienna  whose effect, she says, “is to raise one’s optimism about the future of classical music.” In one of the beautiful old halls that host Prague’s many smaller-scaled musical events, she attended a recital of the “Evening Song” cycles of Smetana and Dvořák—music we don’t hear in the U. S., and in her estimation very well performed. She took note of the Czech training system, so solidly grounded in the national and local culture, with nearly all of its graduates going on to careers pursued largely in the Czech Republic. She spoke with an American musician, Mahan Esfahani, long resident in Prague. “It still astounds me,” Esfahani said in remarking on the plethora of sold-out concerts and recitals in a city of a half-million, “how an entire culture takes interest in its orchestras . . . a matter of civic culture and social cohesion.” Over in Vienna, a more cosmopolitan city and one more plugged into the international ecosystem of presumably Weltklasse performance, she nevertheless still found a strong local culture of training and music-making, fed by remnants of the old guild system of accreditation and advancement. In the makeup of the great orchestras of both cities (the Czech Philharmonic, the VPO), she was struck by the lower proportion of females as compared with the big American orchestras, and by the total absence of Asians, who as players aren’t needed by the orchestras or as students by the conservatories, who therefore do not offer them the substantial scholarships advanced by our own institutions.^(I)