We can speculate over the differences among the arts of the act that might influence differences in their critical treatment, and at least partly account for differences in the treatment of the critics themselves, i. e., house arrest for Green, Pareles, and Lyons, but Siberia, on the deadbeat, for Woolfe. The theatre “beat,” for instance, involves coverage of individual productions requiring individual attention, not repertory companies susceptible to “roundups,” and its tone is colored by its commercial sector. Much the same is true of pop music, along with its demands for attention to aural and video recordings. Ballet here in New York is dominated by two repertory companies with extended annual residencies (the New York City Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre), and in those respects, along with the involvement of classical music, it more closely resembles opera. But the ballet companies are artistically more stable than the Metropolitan Opera. Their star performers tend to stay longer—and exclusively—with their companies. Audiences and critics track their rise, follow their assumption of canonical roles, and take pleasure in comparisons in a way that no longer makes sense in opera, partly because ballet preserves traditional approaches to production and interpretation (choreography, after all) in the classical repertory, so that the comparisons are of like to like rather than between one transgressive auteur’s thoughts versus another’s about a character in a “re-imagined” stage world. The form is more adaptable to round-up treatment, to stories of one ballerina’s knock on a glass ceiling or another’s retirement after long service, than is opera.

But, setting aside the possibility that Sia Michel simply has a deep personal contempt for classical music and opera and is given rein to express it by her handlers at the Times, all these contributions to the understanding of Zachary Woolfe’s exile pale alongside the history of the Metropolitan Opera and the NYT and of Met General Manager Peter Gelb’s wish to suppress all criticism, plus a thinly disguised personal animus toward Woolfe. All that is recounted in some detail in Met/Gelb/NYT etc., Part One, 11/29/24, and I urge anyone with an interest in this matter to give that a read. Meanwhile, we’re left to wonder if coverage of the arts “beats” at our most influential source of such will contain any critical content at all.

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Among a number of interesting responses to my article on the Met’s new Salome, there were three that offered helpful information on questions touched on therein:

1) From the always well-informed Jay Kaufmann comes clarification on the availability of all or parts of the Elektra performance(s) that emanated from London in 1947, with Ljuba Welitsch as Chrysothemis. It appears that the entire opera was broadcast twice on the BBC, on 10/24 and 10/26, 1947. Jay supposes that these broadcasts were from prerecorded transcription discs, and that sounds more likely than the alternative, that the BBC assembled the entire cast and orchestra for two live performances two days apart. Then, those forces went into the studio to record the second half of the opera (from Aegisth’s entrance to the end), and this studio performance was issued on 78 rpm discs, then later on LP. Jay’s information is seconded at least in part by the booklet notes of Michael Tanner on the Arkadia LP release of the full opera, taken from the second of the BBC performances, where the use of transcription discs is acknowledged. Jay reports that the sound of the 78s from the studio recording of the final scene carried considerably more impact than any subsequent LP or CD reissue, and I find that easy to believe.