Recently, I’ve been hearing and seeing a lot about a “flourishing American repertory,” or even an “American canon.” Some of it comes from sources dedicated to advocacy, and thus predisposed to an enthusiast leaning (notably, Opera America—see below), and some from reviewers influenced by local civic pride, a genuine wish to be supportive of an imperiled art, or a relationship to it that is essentially a fan’s. They are naturally reluctant to apply a meaningful critical standard, to whatever extent they are capable of doing so. But some of the clamor also comes from knowledgeable, engaged professionals and established critics. I tend to discount these claims, partly because they are to one side of my own preoccupation with the salvation of the operatic canon, but mostly because of a skepticism born of long, ever-hopeful experience with just this subject. (For a rundown of that experience, see “Florencia” and ‘The New Opera Problem’ Redux,” 12/15/23.)  Still, it’s true that there is a creative churning in the field, and my curiosity remains active. Might the churning be turning up something we could call a repertory?

A work doesn’t join “the repertory” just by virtue of having been done, or even of having made the rounds once. For it to attain that status, it must be repeatable and renewable. Both artists and their audiences must find it interesting enough to invest in on multiple occasions, over time. True, it’s not necessary to think of operas in repertory terms at all. We can simply take them as we do many other transitory events we enjoy to a greater or lesser degree and then release into our ever-receding rotation of momentarily relevant occurrences. That’s especially so—indeed, welcome—for all who believe we must live only in the present. But it is not so for anyone who looks forward to a future. That person is located on a timeline, and a timeline necessarily includes a past. The signal virtue of a repertory, especially when its repetitions and renewals bring forth a canon, is that it binds people together along the timeline, bringing the understandings and values of its origins with it. That enables us to separate what continues to nourish us from what doesn’t, and lends our own efforts a perspective that is not accessible to us in the present dimension, no matter how far we reach out into it. It also suggests that this process will continue into the future, taking our own understandings with it. So a repertory and the institutions that maintain it become forces for social continuity, identity, and stability, all of which I believe we sorely need. I decided to challenge my skepticism with a sampling of well-received 21st-Century American operas via recordings, asking myself as I went along: having heard the music, am I eager to hear it again? Do I want to see the opera? Can I imagine wanting to see or hear it repeatedly, in different productions with different casts? Is it, in other words, a serious candidate for a repertory, or better yet, a canon?

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio, with its unique amalgam of Singspieler-ish domesticity, last-minute rescue-opera melodrama, married love exaltation, just-deserts redemption, and spiritual uplift, returned to the Met’s repertory on March 4 for a brief run, in the production first directed in 2000 by Jürgen Flimm. It was conducted by Susanna Mälkki, and the revival stage director was Gina Lapinski.

Lise Davidsen is the raison d’être of this revival, so first attention to her. I have already written often about this soprano^(I), very much the Met’s leading lady of the decade. So the question here is how comfortably the artistic proclivities already characterized consort with the hyperextended vocal, musical, and dramatic requirements and opportunities (plenty of both) in the role of Leonore. Let me run a quick inventory, with the understanding that the three aspects can be teased apart only for discussion purposes. Vocal: on the positive side, there is the upper octave, and in particular, the upper fifth (E to B) of her instrument, whose amplitude, freedom, and clearwater timbre enable a satisfying, often exciting, fulfillment of the part’s crucial climactic phrases and proclamations—worth the price of admission in itself for all of us who look for these crowning moments. Also, clean intonation, by no means to be taken for granted. One reason, however, that those upper notes register their sometimes startling impact is that we are not prepared for them by the sound of her lower octave, which, though not jumbled and unpredictable like, for instance, Leonie Rysanek’s (another sensational-at-the-top Leonore), is a slender, modest presence; it can trace a line, but not fill it in. Her available span of color (the chiaroscuro) is controlled, but narrow. This means that not only does the great interplay of registers, resonances, and dynamics set up by Beethoven across wide stretches of compass in the “Abscheulicher!” become little games of now-she’s-here, now-she’s-gone, but that the many moments of lower-midrange settlement, some of extraordinary beauty, are not more than indicated. The overall vocal impression is of a “best highlights” Leonore, with much of the rest more or less in neutral.^(II)

As I announced at the end of my last post (The Met’s New “Aida,“ 1/18/25), my next report will be on the company’s revival of Fidelio, which will star Lise Davidsen and be conducted by Susanna Mälkki. That will appear on Friday, March 21. Meanwhile, I’ll be completing my selective investigation of a few of the works that are advanced as belonging to a new American repertory, or even a “canon.”  That will comprise evaluations of the works themselves as heard on recordings, and—by way of context—of two informative publications from our country’s trade and advocacy organization, Opera America: its annual Field Report and a new special report on newcomers to the operatic audience. That is scheduled for Friday, April 4. Till then,

CLO

I must open on a sad note by recording the death of a longtime colleague and friend, Richard Dyer, who for thirty years was the highly respected chief music critic for The Boston Globe. Though we wrote for several of the same magazines (notably High Fidelity) from the 1960s onward, and Richard even reviewed me twice (once as novelist, once as actor) we did not actually cross paths except in passing until the last decade or so, when we finally had a couple of luncheon meetings up in the Berkshires (Tanglewood having been on his beat for all those years) and began a regular correspondence. Richard’s letters were full of keen observations and reminiscences, both professional and personal, and of a love of music and an optimism he somehow maintained to the end despite full awareness of the worsening trends. He was as knowledgeable about theatre as about music, and eagerly shared obscure materials in both areas. I’ll miss Richard, as will all who knew him, and the world of classical music at large.

Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, the most finished of all his works showing the tragic fates of lovers caught in deadly political and religious conflicts, and thereby the most powerful, concise statement of grand opera as a form, has returned to the Metropolitan Opera’s repertory in a new production. Directed by Michael Mayer and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, it had its premiere on New Year’s eve. I saw the performance of January 7th. I also have to hand two previously unheard recordings—not exactly hot off the presses, but new to me—to give us some triangulation on the production and performance.

The work’s demands are such that one seldom sees or hears anything approaching their complete fulfillment—that’s neither expected nor required for the work to convey a satisfying experience—but I can’t recall an Aida as flat and empty as this one, despite some willing performers. To sketch the framework first: it is Mayer’s conceit that we are seeing the opera’s action through the eyes of modern Egyptological explorers who first inspect, then plunder the artifacts of the Pharaonic civilization. They troupe in and out, most prominently in the Prelude and Triumphal Scene but elsewhere as well, and hover above the final entombment. Thus are the specters of Orientalism, Colonialist Exoticism, and Cultural Appropriation conjured; thus are we put at arm’s length from the story and its emotional impact, and invited to pass moral judgment—a loathsome tactic. With all exoticisms and ethnic distinctions either erased or turned upside down (Aida’s black, her Daddy’s white; Egyptians and Ethiopians are undifferentiated; Moorish slaves, Amneris’ attendants, Temple dancers, prisoners of war, et al., are all laundry-day white with the occasional black face and body spotted in), there are no identities, no positions or attitudes related to those distinctions left to play.^(I) The dances, so deliciously and precisely written to delineate those identities and positions, are especially penalized, and irrespective of the choreographic choices (by Oleg Glushov, who has my sympathies), they become little more than anonymous jigglings.

Today’s post concludes the article begun last week (published Nov. 29). If you missed Part One, I urge you to read it before proceeding to Part Two, below. The two constitute a continuous argument, but I felt that this consideration of the thought of the radical and influential operauteur Yuval Sharon, who challenges the fundamental assumptions of our artform but is working on some of its cornerstone works within its longstanding institutional structures, merited a stand-alone status.

Yuval/Time/Ambiguity, etc. Every so often, another one comes along—an inventive, ambitious, personally persuasive director of reformist bent whose work and ideas are far enough to one side of the operatic mainstream to earn him the status of enfant terrible, creative disruptor, or, in time, innovative thinker. These directors are talented and intelligent. Their critiques of whatever constitute the “traditional” ways of creating and presenting opera in the times of their flourishing are often entirely justified and keenly put. They frequently assert a sociopolitical motivation for their work, and as they progress beyond their artistic enfance, seek a spiritual connection to it as well, generally found in non-Western religious or mythic sources. But each has before him the problem that terribilité must be redefined in evermore radical terms, until his disruptions and innovations bring him to the boundary beyond which he isn’t really speaking of opera anymore. And such has been the absorption of successive versions of the terrible into the mainstream that we have reached that boundary, and the pretense of reforming within the artform as it has evolved must be dropped altogether.

That, at least, is the conclusion we must draw from A New Philosophy of Opera, by Yuval Sharon. He’s the latest director in a twisting line of descent that includes Peter Brook, Peter Sellars, and Robert Wilson, before we lose the trace amid the troops of auteurs that now occupy most of opera’s territory. And you have surely heard of him. He’s the fellow who directed La Bohème for the Detroit Opera with its acts played in reverse order and with an added character called The Wanderer, played by George Shirley, interrupting the music to call attention to choices Puccini made in his musical narrative, and who (take a deep breath now) with his own company, The Industry, created such events as Hopscotch, in which limos holding four ticket-buying passengers each plus musicians in residence (to each limo, that is), plus a puppet, tooled about Los Angeles following three separate routes (you had to buy into all three to take in the whole shebang), the performers playing and singing the while, with the music and words of several local composers and librettists, loosely related to the adventures of two characters from Julio Cortázar’s “anti-novel” Rayuela, before returning to a Central Hub where a secondary audience could follow the proceedings via onscreen streaming—a neat experience, I can imagine, for the handful of participants and audience-passengers, and to some degree for the Central Hub viewers, for whose sakes Sharon wangled the co-operation of L.A. authorities and the commitment of publicly accountable funds, and somehow managed to declare Hopscotch an anti-elitist event, at least in his own mind.

At least for some readers, this morning’s article did not post correctly, the text continuing unpaginated in email instead of going to the blog. We’re working to track this down. Meanwhile, here is a link directly to the blog post, properly paginated and footnoted. 

Apologies,

CLO 

Following his NPR program devoted to Marston’s 10-CD Lawrence Tibbett release, for which I wrote the booklet essay, Joseph Horowitz has posted an article, The Baritone as Democrat, in The American Scholar, here. In addition to a concise narrative of the great baritone’s life and career, with its unequalled “crossover” triumphs (a “Star of Stage, Screen, and Radio,” as the réclame went), Horowitz speculates intriguingly on how differently the course of opera in America might have run had the dream for which he fought (of an American repertory, and opera in translation) had been realized, and even if—as was once held plausible—he had succeeded to the artistic directorship of the Metrpolitan Opera. Recommended.

I have decided to split this article into two posts, because I feel the second part, which deals with the radical director Yuval Sharon’s ideas and work about the nature of opera and its production (he will be staging Tristan und Isolde and the Ring for the Met beginning next season), as contained in his new book and in his Bayreuth production of Lohengrin, are best considered in a stand-alone context. Below, Part One.

The Met/Gelb/NYT. As with the 2023-24 season here at our local opera house, the present one is backloaded—most of what seems to invite critical attention falls late, and I have already offered my thoughts on Les contes d’Hoffmann. But there has been plenty to chew over since ’23-’24 staggered to a close with a revival of Madama Butterfly and a death-of-art production of Carmen (see Butterfly Revived. Carmen, Not, 5/24/24). The chewing began in mid-June, with a three-day volley of opera-related small-arms fire in the New York Times. On the 15th, Zachary Woolfe, the paper’s chief music critic, conducted a post-season survey (a half-page plus a column) that alternated artistic evaluation with box-office returns, special attention being given to the Met’s “swerve” toward contemporary opera in an effort to boost cratering attendance and lure younger and first-time ticket buyers. The article avoided anything definitive-sounding or alarmist, but the tone was of distinctly modified rapture on the artistic front and of sobering reportage on the audience-hunting one—no big game had been brought to ground.

The very next day, Joshua Barone contributed a bottom half-page (above-the-fold space being devoted to promo photos of the Intendants of the Staatsoper (Bogdan Roščic) and the Volksoper (Lotte de Beer), the latter posing dancily on the seatbacks of her auditorium) to how wonderful things are in Vienna, as indeed they are from the audience support p.o.v.—according to the article, typically 99.5-100% attendance at the Staatsoper, for many more productions and performances than the Met is currently managing.^(I) Artistically, Barone reports, Roščic’s kind of innovation involves a renewal of the core repertory, while de Beer’s is feminist and new-work-oriented. He does not paper over the Staatsoper’s administrative problems (see below), but the overall feel of his piece is positive. And the day after that, the NYT published a “Critic’s Notebook” article by Barone, an evaluation of Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s artistic leadership of the Met, with the emphasis on his work with the orchestra (a “mixed tenure . . . evident at recent shows,” ran the subhead) and on the limited portion of N-S’s élan vital that is available to the company amid his other commitments (he conducted only four of the company’s eighteen productions in ’23-’24). 

No presentation of Jacques Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann (at least none that I have seen or heard tell of) has escaped the complications attendant on the opera’s gestation and birth. Those originate in the mass of materials the composer left for his unfinished work, continue with the choices made among them by scholars, directors, and conductors, and end with casting decisions. The long-standard performing edition came close to one sort of solution, largely through eliminating or simply passing over the most obvious contradictions, and made for a relatively tight, playable show that was satisfying if decently performed. The version revived by the Met this season goes far in the other direction, inviting back many of the complications and adding a few of its own. It makes for a baggy, musically uneven evening that would in best-scenario imaginings require a more consistently fulfilling level of performance to stay out of the doldrums.^(I)

The composer began serious work on the opera only in the late 1870s, trying to prepare it for projected productions that did not materialize. But he had been intrigued by the subject for nearly thirty years. Whether or not he’d known E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories, either in his native German or his naturalized French, I don’t know—given their presence in the culture he grew up in, it’s hard to believe he had not. In any case, he had seen the play by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, based on several of the tales and entitled Les contes fantastiques d’Hoffmann, in 1851, and had dreamed of an operatic adaptation ever since. For all those years, there’d been neither time nor reason to work on a realization of the dream. A German Jewish emigré to Paris in the riotous aftermath of the July Revolution of 1831, soon followed by a cholera epidemic, he’d first made his way with his cello, playing in the pit of the Opéra-Comique and then, with a combination of virtuosity, wit, and charm, delighting the patrons of the salons that were the route to social acceptance. Finding some success as a composer of incidental pieces and songs, he had won the license to open his original, tiny Bouffes Parisiens, where he had purveyed a mishmash of proto-operetta-ish skits and duets, pantomimes, and mélodrames—all restricted not only by the space but by licensing requirements to three or four characters—that eventually developed into dozens of whimsical one-act operettas, items of pure distraction for the theatres and habitués of the boulevards and visitors to the great international exhibitions. It wasn’t until 1858 that his breakthrough hit of Orphée aux Enfers began the string of full-length operettas, with their satirical brashness and greater musical and dramatic development, that both defined that genre and made his lasting reputation as its master.

Fellow devotees,

My article on this season’s Met revival of Les contes d’Hoffmann, originally scheduled for today, will be published on Monday, Oct. 28. I’ll be discussing the life and career of Jacques Offenbach; the music and dramaturgy of the opera itself; the choices to be made amongst the materials left at the time of the composer’s death, as sorted through by latterday scholarship; and all these in reference to the production and performances as seen and heard on Oct. 1.

CLO

“Keep trying, Conrad.” The words came to me across a few empty folding chairs as we exited the St. Regis Hotel ballroom on a November day in 1978. I had just chaired a panel on the training of opera singers at a Central Opera Service conference. The panel was a prestigious one, and two of its members, the soprano Patricia Brooks (” . . . our Schröder-Devrient,” as the director David Alden named her for her wonderful work with the NYCO in the ’60s) and the director and teacher Robert (“Bobby”) Lewis (the only alumnus of the famed Group Theatre to have much involved himself with opera and musical theatre), were personal choices of mine, with the intent of injecting a robust plug for the incorporation of serious acting technique into the operatic training curriculum. The discussion had been lively, questions and comments from the floor well taken, and the vibe in the room positive. Surely a successful little event. Yet the words “Keep trying.” They came from John Ludwig, whom I knew well, first as the General Manager of the Center Opera in Minneapolis, and later as the Executive Director of the National Opera Institute. We’d conversed many times. He’d read some of my articles, heard some of my speeches, and listened as I advocated for a better understanding among operafolk of what the study of modern acting principles could contribute to opera. In his wryly supportive tone was an understanding he was sure I shared: yes, people like the idea, it sounds good to them—but nothing much will come of it, because with the exceptions of a minority of the professionals present, they don’t really understand what I’m talking about, or what it would entail. They’re opera people; the music says it all; you’ll never get through. Still—keep trying.

And so I do. Just as I believe that the primary generating force behind the great E-19 maturation of our artform was its in-common dramatic narrative, rather than any of its significant musical developments (that is, the former drove the latter, more than the other way around), so I believe that the key to vitality in performance lies in contacting its dramatic sources. Opera exists when, and only when, performers commit sung theatrical actions. The action and the singing must arise from a common source, neither complete without the other. I have left “acting” in quotation marks to try to discourage thinking of it as a separate element. 

I know that for many opera devotees this is not familiar ground. There will be concepts and names for which I will try to provide context, but which some readers may consider inapplicable or even unwelcome to the operatic situation. I urge them to hear me out.    

I often hear people say that although operatic singing has admittedly been in decline for several decades, operatic acting, at least, has improved. And my first lazy response is a tentative, limited agreement. But then: How can that be? Since operatic acting is first of all a matter of dramatic expression by vocal and musical means, how can it have strengthened even as its primary component, singing, has weakened? Isn’t the most important thing we mean when we say that operatic singing has declined is, precisely, that it has lost much of its dramatic potency, in terms of force, nuance, and above all, passion? I think it is. So any perceived “improvement” must fall in the area of physical behavior. Or, to put it another way, of acting for the eye. Which in turn suggests that in the always-fluctuating sensory blend of the operatic experience, attention has been drawn away from the ear and toward the eye, and that a high aspiration, a key element of what I call the “modern acting sensibility” ^(I)as brought to bear on opera, has been abandoned. That aspiration is, or was: to create an indissoluble bond between body and voice, so that their actions arise from the same mental/visceral source, and are received by the audience as a single sensory experience. It is only if we separate the two, and then concentrate on the bodily one, that we can detect any “improvement” in operatic acting. When people speak of such an improvement, what they really mean is that it more closely resembles all the other acting they’re seeing, which for most people most of the time now means acting for the screen.