It’s with much sadness that I note the death of Patrick J. Smith. I first met Patrick when he came aboard High Fidelity‘s reviewing staff in 1964, and saw him often professionally and socially over the next fifteen years, especially at warm and entertaining gatherings hosted by Patrick and his wife Elisabeth, a gifted illustrator, at their elegant Park Avenue apartment. In 1970, Patrick published The Tenth Muse, a historical study of the libretto, which despite more recent scholarship remains a basic reference in that field of inquiry. In that same year, he founded a quarterly, The Musical Newsletter, for which I became a contributing editor, along with David Hamilton and Robert Morgan. Our quarterly editorial meetings at the magazine’s cozy headquarters, always over a lunch of roast beef sandwiches and Ballantine IPA, were stimulating and convivial. MN lasted for seven years, and to the best of my knowledge its circulation peaked at just short of four figures. But it contained a wealth of  fine writing by some distinguished writers, who, by the way, were paid competitive rates for their work. Later, Patrick became the Editor of Opera News for a ten-year run, wrote for a number of other publications, and served in other critical and administrative capacities. I last saw him at the launch party for my book, Opera as Opera, in the summer of 2018, when he was very much his customary witty, genial self. He leaves an importance legacy for our artform, and fond memories for me. 

Today’s post is unusual, in that it has something of a macro/micro aspect (and sometimes we do see developments more vividly at a localized level than from a more elevated p.o.v.) and has led me unexpectedly to thoughts on a 61-year-old essay by a writer whose influence on the arts flowed very much in the direction of our central topic, a”re-imagining” of an initially triumphant opera that has fallen into disuse, in the context of the latest of several efforts to revive a venerable theatre festival.       

Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, with a libretto by Gian-Carlo Menotti, was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in the season of 1957-58, to a feverish audience response and a more reserved, but generally supportive, critical one. I well recall the atmosphere around its arrival. All of us who cared about the emergence of an American operatic repertoire had felt an optimism in the postwar years, based mostly on the successes of operas by Floyd, Ward, Moore, Weill, Blitzstein, Dello Joio, and Menotti himself, and by a general sense that with the war over, and very much on our terms, we could pick up on the efforts of the interwar years and move onward and upward. Yet these operas had emerged under the auspices of the New York City Opera, regional companies, university opera departments, the NBC-TV opera telecasts, or—inconceivable as it seems now—the Broadway theatre business. None had cracked the “world-class” ceiling at the Met, and only two or three seemed even borderline candidates for such elevation. No American opera had been mounted by the Met since Rudolf Bing’s arrival as General Manager in1950. Now, though, he had on offer an opera by a composer whose standing with the music-loving public, prominent conductors and performers and critics, was equalled or surpassed only by Aaron Copland’s, and whose libretto was by that same Menotti who had reached the public with The Medium, Amahl and the Night Visitors, and The Consul. Barber, with his comfortably in-between harmonic idiom, his easy command of the traditional orchestra, and the melodic gift shown in his songs, would surely write to Metropolitan size and artistic expectations. And so he did, at least sufficiently to stir the excitements of the premiere and ensure that RCA Victor would quickly record the work with all forces intact. I was among the excited, not because I supposed the opera would really hold in the Met’s repertoire of canonical masterworks, but because it had at least aspired to that level and at times approached it, and had been performed as if it had achieved it. As a young devotee, I was a part of the expectations, the aspirations of that time, which can be described, but not re-created, now.