And probably they hadn’t, those doing the shouting and whooping. They were a minority of those present, but they set the tone for “audience response,” not at all the same as that set by the paid claqueurs of old, who needed a degree of connoisseurship for proper execution of their chores. In a moment of darkest suspicion, it was possible to imagine that they were indeed a paid cohort, brought in off the street and given instruction at some sub-basement rallying point, so that company management could cite the fabricated enthusiasm as evidence of its sagacity in casting and audience-building. But, banishing such speculations, I supposed that this outburst (one of many such in the past few seasons) came from youngish folks who had learned how to pick up on a cue, but had no idea of what to reasonably expect of what they were hearing and seeing. They had no standard for that, and thus no discrimination.

Some readers may recall an earlier article (see The Lost One—Searching for a Standard for “La Traviata,” 10/8/22) in which I discussed the kinds of knowledge that are required for adoption of a standard, a set of expectations, for both performers and their audiences, and asked what it is, exactly, that we are trying to measure. Each of us has his or her individual, subjective response to performance events. But there is also a held-in-common response, based on shared knowledge and shared emotional engagement (or else on the absence of these). It involves questions of vocal calibre and quality, orchestral execution, interpretive eloquence and stylistic awareness, as well as an instinct for how dramatic action moves forward on the desires of certain sorts of characters in a certain sort of milieu, and how all these elements are meant to convey musicodramatic truth and beauty. In the case of the Lost One herself, Violetta, I gave some attention to Gemma Bellincioni, famous in that part, who as it happens began her career as a singer of the Bellini/Rossini/Donizetti roles (too early, though, to leave recorded tracings) and ended it in verismo mode (preserved on some acousticals), which influenced her interpretation of Violetta. With I Puritani, a historical search will take us back through recordings of many of the same singers and the shifts in vocality and style they represent. And since we are evaluating a live production, we must also ask how we visualize the characters, their behavior, and their onstage world.

The Met had very little history with I Puritani before the “bel canto revival” of the postwar decades, which can properly be said to have begun when Maria Callas stepped into the role of Elvira for an indisposed Margherita Carosio in Venice on January 19, 1949. And where Puritani is concerned, the Met didn’t catch up with it until 1976, when Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti, both already in mid-late career mode, headed the revival that gave it some repertory status here. There had been a single performance in the company’s first year (1883-84), with Marcella Sembrich as Elvira, and then a run in the season of 1917-18, with Maria Barrientos, Hipólito Lázaro, Giuseppe de Luca, and Jose Mardones as the quartet of principals. Meanwhile, though, the opera had been chosen as the premiere offering of Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera in 1906, with a cast of Regina Pinkert, Alessandro Bonci, Mario Ancona, and Vittorio Arimondi, under a conductor of high reputation, Cleofonte Campanini. These names, and those of a few others, will give us some re-tunings of the ear as we consider the current performance.