But what about opera? In Prague, Mac Donald found a Barbiere di Siviglia at the National Theatre musically pleasing (though the production seems to have been a forced-jokey update), then encountered a Zauberflöte to whose conductor and all-Czech cast she gave good marks but whose production, though visually elegant, was full of “incomprehensible cuts and interpretive choices” and shadowed by a “haggard, hollow-eyed Mozart” scribbling away on the sidelines, the whole managing to “strip The Magic Flute of all its whimsy.” In Vienna, she took in a Tosca at the Staatsoper that she doesn’t tell us much about, and then, at the lightfooted de Beer’s Volksoper, a “feminist bastardization” of Puccini’s La Rondine. So it would seem from Mac Donald’s small sampling that depth of culture notwithstanding, when it comes to opera things are pretty much the same in these two seats of Middle European civilization as they are elsewhere. Here in the U. S., we do not have the civic monoculture or, Lord knows, the social cohesion that Mahan Esfahani tells us of in Prague, or even faint traces of a stepwise, trades-oriented path to professional standing harking back to the Middle Ages. Neither do we have a longstanding presumption of significant support from the state, based on recognition of the arts as public goods and sources of national cultural pride, and enabling ticket prices that encourage broad participation. We have been inventive in creating substitutes for all these, but their roots show signs of slipping and rotting in times of crisis.

Further: opera in Vienna is by no means without its own problems. Roščic, emerging from the same recording industry background as Gelb had before him (most recently the same company, in fact—Sony) almost immediately ran into the pandemic. Then, as Barone reports, there was a falling-out with his Music Director, Philippe Jordan, who after a nettled interview in the Kurier is departing the scene with some rearguard potshots at the usurpations of Regietheater, which, he feels, is careening toward certain ruin for the house. This historically great opera company will now operate without a Music Director, relying on regular visits from a few of Roščic’s favorites. The auteuristic régisseurs will, it seems, have even freer hands. For an idea of their contributions over the span of his regime to date, I recommend a quick run through the descriptions provided by the reviews in Opera, and the vivid reports and critiques, with full-color photos that do not lie, posted by Thomas Prochazka at http://www.dermerker.com/.  And of course, there’s plenty of Viennese audio and video out there, for your edification. Meanwhile, via another interview in the Kurier (9/26/24), we’ve had a performer speaking up!—soprano Asmik Grigorian, no less, a star of the Salzburg/Vienna Opernwelt who was our Cio-cio-san at last season’s end. She self-identifies as “a product of Regietheater.” And what choice would she have had as she built a career over the past twenty years? But we gather she’s fine with that, and that she endorses the efforts to contemporize production, “to win the young public.” I observed about her Butterfly that its most interesting aspect was the way that, in a production already set, she stuck to her guns in playing the woman as she felt her, even at the cost of some desirable moments that went unfulfilled. And for certain inventive artists, there’s a stimulus to creativity, a sort of charging-the-waving-red-flag challenge, to see what they can make of a stage world that upends their previous conceptions.