There must be many differences between us, of both “nature” and “nurture,” that help account for our first-time reactions. I suspect the single most important one is age: mine is double his. That means that we not only grew up in very different times with respect to the atmosphere of world events and of social attitudes and expectations, but with respect to sensory cultivation as well. A childhood spent taking in everything at home by ear (not just music, but the news, ballgames, adventure serials, etc.—everything we could call drama), with the mind’s eye following, is not the same as one spent with television, where the outer eye is dominant from the outset, and if the persons of the drama are not providing much movement, the ever-nervous camera will create some for you. Different expectations are created, and to get back to opera’s “natural” sensory balance, we’d have to subtract from Sharon’s experience not only the aural virtualities present in mine (those of the radio and the phonograph), but the visual ones present in his. That’s a biological change, and for me it meant coming to live opera hooked on classical singing, and thus already presold in great part. I didn’t know Italian or the other operatic languages, either, but I loved their sounds as heard in singing, and on a crucial level understood their dramatic import before knowing anything more than an outline of story or character. (Supertitles didn’t emerge till thirty-some years of operagoing had passed for me.) So far from feeling excluded by my fellow attendees in the Second Balcony of the New York City Center, or the Family Circle of the (first) Metropolitan Opera, or the orchestra of the long-gone Center Theatre at Rockefeller Center, where Fortune Gallo’s touring San Carlo Opera played that first Traviata, I felt I belonged right away. I felt at home—my home, brought out into the great world.

Whatever else may have gone into shaping these early experiences, Sharon’s left him seeing opera as a “barely deciferable ceremony” whose re-enactments constituted deadening habit; for whose opaqueness he was himself to blame; and the key to which was in the sole possession of a class of elite snobs. And just as I have erected and tinkered with an intellectual superstructure to define, for myself and others, the nature of my passionate predilection, so has Sharon for his more conflicted stance. Hence, his book. I do not believe that even the most impressive colossus of rationality adequately accounts for that first emotional response. One is either inclined or not. And I believe that anything we’d call a subsequent change of heart is more likely a change of mind, beneath which the heart still beats in its original rhythm. However, only the rational arguments can be rationally debated. So I will select a few of Sharon’s—only a few, since he flings out gobbets of spaghetti, and I am the wall that must decide what sticks. I’ll try to hit representative ones.

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Time. Sharon wants us to see time as curved, to escape the “the tyranny of the ‘arrow of time.'” He’s not trying to resolve the scientific or philosophical nature of time; he simply wants us to experience time that way. But I don’t think we can decide how to experience it, and while I’m sure we experience it in different ways at different times, I believe the arcing flight of the arrow is as accurate a metaphor as we have for most of us most of the time, because it mimics the course of our own lives and what we see in the lives of others. That’s why it’s the default metaphor, which Sharon interprets as a “tyranny.” There’s another time-metaphor that is a part of my worldview. It sees the present as spatial, horizontal—as a “lateral cut,” to use Arthur Danto’s phrase—and the passage of time as vertical. This can mean that the past lies beneath us, that we “burrow into it” to retrieve its fragments. In a real-life, archeological sense, that’s often true. In the life-arc metaphor, it would require the archer to turn round and launch a counter-flight for us to recapture some fleeting moment, some momentary illumination of a part of the past. But I usually sense the past above us, that we are “descended” from it, that its knowledge, beliefs and values are “passed down to us,” and that we must therefore ascend to rediscover and explore it. No doubt this feeling is derived in part from the religious one that our forebears, with all they did, thought, and believed, are somewhere high above (at least we hope so). That is another powerful and longstanding metaphor that for me is an inspiration, not a tyranny—although our artists are, clearly, often squirming under an “anxiety of influence” that emanates from our recent past.