We cannot generalize from this tiny, quite random, grouping. For me, these are just 4 1/2 more works to toss in amongst the 100-plus I’ve seen or heard (see that Florencia article for a rough accounting) that at times have seemed to promise the emergence of a lasting American repertory but have never quite gotten there, and the many more that, whatever their ambitions, offered no such promise. If we search the 4 1/2 for elements in common, we see that they are all period pieces and that three of the four “real operas” are much concerned with the land. We could even say that of the fourth, in that WW1 was all about territory, usually in small, costly increments; Silent Night is also the only opera in the group to not have an American setting and character distribution. And if we ask what element might be missing, we alight first of all on the one that composers of opera’s prime centuries found most emotionally compelling and singable—romantic love. There’s not a sniff of it in Mazzoli’s work, and only sad hints of it elsewhere—indicated, but with no musical support for it, in Gordon’s and Puts’, and present in so darkly twisted a form in Thomas’ that we can’t call it by its name, though at least passion is invoked.

But these findings may be merely coincidental to my too-small-for-statistical-significance sample. Let’s go to where some stats reside.

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Opera America, our artform’s trade organization in this country, is assiduous about keeping up with developments in the business. In addition to its many other activities, it issues annual Field Reports and, quite frequently, special reports that track areas it identifies as being of particular concern. A great deal of work goes into these reports, and they contain much useful information we wouldn’t otherwise have, though they are also marked by a wishfulness I think we cannot afford. OA’s latest Field Report covers the calendar year 2023, and its most recent special report is an inspection of newcomers to opera—the presumably younger audience that could be expected to support the efforts of contemporary composers and librettists. Accompanying it is an article from OA’s magazine by the critic David Patrick Stearns, “The New American Canon: what are the traits of our flourishing American repertoire?” which seeks, one more time, to make a case for American operas of sufficient quantity and quality to stand as a repertory.

This alleged emerging repertory is predicated, says Stearns in his article, “more on the kinds of stories composers and librettists are telling than [on] any sort of throughline of compositional style”—an observation also touched on by Patrick J. Smith in a brief critique included in the Desire Under the Elms booklet: “. . . a large musical range, encompassing a variety of popular genres, and an expanded conception of how the story can and should be told.” But the “throughline” of compositional styles discernible in the truly canonical repertory, from Gluck and Mozart through Wagner and Strauss and Verdi and Puccini, is a developmental progression—an evolution, not a revolution except in little spurts—over the span of a century and a half, building on an already deep foundation, and its range of expression is not only much wider and richer than that of American opera to date, but shows far less straining after effect, after some invented newness, because it embodies a naturally changing expression of the ripened civilization that produced it. So I am not really on board with the claim of a greater musical variety, at least of a productive, nourishing sort. I am also puzzled by just why it is that many informed people take its presumed truth as a culturally positive thing, when it sounds to me more like a bemused rummaging for something to sing about, and some way of singing it. Had the rummaging produced even a few works of the depth, power, and broad appeal of the E-19 European canon, there’d be no just cause for disappointment. But it has not.