Settling in to do my listening for this week’s entry, I jotted down some impressions from the first scene of our “problem opera,” one of a number that’s now on the verge of being a problem no more (see last post). Of the Leonora, Zinka Milanov, I noted the presence of an easy, natural-sounding chest voice on even casual low phrases of the opening recitative (the D naturals at “decidermi non so” and “scendevanmi“), enabling these syllables to drop out into the auditorium, at once present yet conversational. I doubt I would have given this a thought in the seasons when I actually saw her in the role; I would have taken it for granted. Then, as the wonderful ensuing aria, “Me pellegrina ed orfana,” wound its way, I made sure to mark how the voice shaped the line on a cushioned messa di voce, from which her seemingly instinctive accenting emerged without fuss, and which led the arcs of phrases, and finally of the whole aria, to their destinations—”this,” I wrote, “in addition to the beautiful quality, here at peak.” Of her Alvaro, Mario del Monaco, I observed that the “darkling, bronzed timbre” (a brooding, rim-of-the-volcano quality especially apt for this role, as for Otello), was “at its freshest & best.” Then I also scribbled: “The faults of ea. we used to complain about.” I wasn’t writing about Milanov’s studio recording of Forza (RCA Victor, 1958), or Del Monaco’s either (Decca/London, 1955), or of a hot night at the Met or La Scala or a summer festival, but of a composite of two evenings in the March of 1953, in New Orleans (VAIA 1252-3, issued in 2005).

This Big Easy Forza is one of three live performances from the ’50s I decided to focus on as I try to memorialize this season’s Met production that wasn’t, and summon something of the impact the work once had with reasonable regularity. Another is the video (also released as audio-only) of a March, 1958 performance at the San Carlo in Naples. There, the Leonora was Renata Tebaldi and the Alvaro was Franco Corelli. The third (audio only) is from May, 1953 at the Maggio Musicale in Florence, and has Tebaldi and Del Monaco together, as they often were in those years.

When the San Carlo video was pulled from the RAI archives in 1994, Will Crutchfield wrote about it in the New York Times. It’s the sort of piece that, in its willingness to assume of its readers a thirst for, or at least a tolerance of, expert evaluation, has vanished from our mainstream press as surely as the level of performance it describes has vanished from our opera houses. ^(I) As I did with my “faults of ea.” notation, Will concedes early on the reservations one must have about the performance if one is applying the highest standard. They are not insignificant. But then he goes on: “If you’re over 50 [remember, this is 1994] and think you might be romanticizing your memories; if you’re young and think the old-timers are just trying to intimidate you with their stories . . . and, especially, if the beauty of the human voice means a lot to you—get the video.” And later: “[watching it] . . . is likely to blow away the optimism we all try to feel about Verdian singers doing pretty well after all these days . . . ” (The complete article is accessible at http://www.nytimes/1994 , and well worth a scan.)

A while back a tenor friend of mine, Richard Slade, handed me a CD album he’d picked up at a library sale or flea market. “This,” he announced, “is where everything started to go wrong. You want it? It doesn’t need to live in my house.” Since I’d never heard the particular performance, I said “Sure,” and stuck it on a shelf in my house. The performance was the 1976 RCA Victor studio recording of La Forza del destino. The cast: Mmes. L. Price and Cossotto; Messrs. Domingo, Milnes, Giaiotti, and Bacquier, all in good-to-excellent form. The conductor: James Levine, still young and noted for whipping up a batch of Verdi. “If that lineup was around today,” I hear you say, “I’d snatch up a ticket quick.” Well, me too.

Here in New York, we were supposed to get Forza this year. It was scheduled for the current Metropolitan season, to be directed by the controversial Calixto Bieito in his local debut, and conducted by the selfsame Levine, young no longer. But the Forza della borsa turned out to be stronger than that of destino, and the production was cancelled. ^(I)  I’ve been wondering if we shall ever again have Forza, and if so what on earth it will look and sound like. It’s my personal model for what we can’t do any more, though I could well have chosen any of the bigger Verdi pieces, or anything at all of Wagner. But Forza has been my test case since the early 1970s, when I began asking myself if, given my pick from the international pool of singers at or near their vocal primes, two casts could be assembled that would satisfy the work’s basic requirements according to standards that had prevailed fairly recently—in the 1950s, let us say—and had to answer “No.”

Among the basic requirements for La Forza del destino—by which I mean things that are just basic, absolutely required in order to jump the lowest hurdles—the first must be visceral impact. This doesn’t come of sheer loudness, of course. Tonal quality, musical shapeliness, interpretive nuance, and soulfulness must be present in some acceptable portion, onstage and in the pit. But all these will fall short without the straight-from-the-gut energies of heavy-calibre voices in high-functioning condition. Of Verdi’s operas that present the core narrative of 19th-Century opera, that of a protagonist couple seeking the social position of which they are deprived, several (Otello, Don Carlo, Aïda) should probably be rated as artistically superior to Forza. But among those that offer it in naked form (Ernani and Il Trovatore would be the others), it is at once the most artistically mature and the most savage. And its epic embrace, with its story of doomed love and implacable vengeance playing out over long stretches of time and distance and amid vividly set scenes of warfare’s desolations, the survival mechanisms of the common people, and the beneficence of religious refuge, is unique in Verdi’s output.

In my first “Before the First Lesson” post (Oct. 27) I discussed endocrine disruptors, one of several human intrusions on the natural environment that I think may be affecting the state of many young voices before they’ve even encountered formal instruction. Today I’d like to take a look at a couple of ways changes in everyday technology—the secondary environment that at an accelerating pace is displacing the primary one—are contributing to the early conditioning of voices. And below, I’ll offer corrections and extend the discussion with respect to my recent posts on Norma and Thaïs.

The presence of a secondary, technologically determined aural environment is now taken for granted, and while I’ll be speaking here about changes to it that have occurred within a single lifetime, I think we tend to forget how recent its very existence is. It has cohabited  with opera, for instance, for only about one quarter of the artform’s history, and creatively speaking that quarter coincides with the descent (at first gradual, then precipitous) from the summit opera had reached by the late 1800s. I’m not saying, quite, that technology has killed opera. But there’s an ugly synchronicity there. It happens that I entered the scene at a propitious time for the coupling of opera with this secondary environment. I am always conscious of belonging to one of only two or, at most, three generations who perceived the presence of this environment, largely through the electronic media—radio and recordings—as a great boon to opera and classical music. And so it certainly was, at least in the sense of extending their reach. For much of that time, including my childhood, this extended reach was by ear only, and a monaural ear at that. The exclusive ear-engagement is a highly particularized form of acquaintanceship and habituation, not known before, and not so generally since, that period.  It’s already “unnatural”—eliminating, as it does, the entire visual component of the operatic experience—though in my case countered from an early age by the reality-check experience of live performance.  It is also intense in its private manifestations, and pervasive enough in its public ones to have become an accepted feature of the social landscape.

In the December issue of Opera there is an article by Brian Kellow on the Institute for Young Dramatic Voices, a project established by Dolora Zajick and several colleagues to try to address the dearth of such instruments—a situation which, as my readers know by now, has my ongoing attention. Zajick speaks about her own early (1970s) listening experiences in the music library at the University of Nevada, where, she says, ” . . . they had stopped buying records by 1962.” As a result, ” . . . all they had was Barbieri, Stignani, Simionato, Arkhipova, Ferrier . . . I thought that’s what everyone sounded like.”  Then she moved out into the world of audition and competition judges, academically trained coaches, and other gatekeepers, and the pressure to squeeze her voice down to a “safe” level was on. I infer from her account that she had not been immersed in operatic singing as a child, and hadn’t much exposure to live performance. But she did have those recordings of real dramatic mezzos and contraltos (she also mentions Dame Clara Butt) as models, and no one to tell her, at that early stage, that she shouldn’t try to sing like they did.

In the end, I caved. I had fully intended to honor my oath, sworn and upheld last season, to waste no more time, energy, and money on the new operas the Met hauls into view once per annum. It was a fully informed pledge, taken after many years of obligatory open-mindedness, and it served me well, but all too briefly. “Man up,” I said to the mirror one day. “We really need new operas.” I did have an excuse. On my previous encounters with the operas of Thomas Adès—the EMI recording of Powder Her Face and the Met production of The Tempest—I had detected in the music’s gestures and structures something of a genuine theatrical sensibility, a feel for the scenic event. In the writing for the Duchess in Powder (a compelling performance by Jill Gomez) I even heard the gift of not merely sympathizing with a difficult character, but of getting inside her and writing from there. That gift, the supreme talent of a composer Adès has derided (Verdi!—no Brownie points there), is nowhere to be heard nowadays. So, although the world of Powder will not draw me back except in the line of duty and The Tempest fell well short of its daunting task, I forked over the bargain tariff of $87.50 for a front-row Dress Circle box seat for the Nov. 7 performance of The Exterminating Angel.

I have never seen the famous Buñuel film that is the opera’s source. Naturally, I’ve by this time boned up on the sources of all the operas that come around in canonical canon—plays, poems, mythical epics, etc., by Shakespeare, Schiller, Hugo, Pushkin, Sophocles, et al.—and have usually done the same when a historical rarity comes along. With new operas, though, if  I don’t already know the material, I like to pretend I’m Mr. Average Operagoer, and see if the work makes its case to him, just as a new play or movie or dance piece would need to do. In that respect, Exterminating Angel presented an immediate obstacle: it introduced many characters, major and minor, almost immediately, and except for those of a couple of the low-voiced men, scarcely a word from any of them was understandable. If a composer is writing a through-written, dialogue-based opera (there are in fact a few set pieces, but with a single exception they, too, are dependent on the word, not on vocalization), it does behoove him to give the singers a fighting chance at comprehensibility. Mr. and Ms. Average Operagoer probably use the subtitles. Perversely, I like to focus on the stage and listen for sung words, words that are simultaneously captured and released by the beauty and power of the singing voice. That way, the onstage events and emotions come directly and uninterruptedly to me, and the verbal content does not constantly assert itself over the music via the scanning eye. So I leave captions to foreign movies.

After a while, I found that with some guidance from the program’s synopsis, I could distinguish the female characters by the colors of their dresses, considerately selected for ID purposes. The men, in evening dress and, except for the basses, vocally indistinguishable pending more  extended inspection, revealed themselves grudgingly, in a couple of cases only after intermission and further consultation with the program. Still, the general progression of the action came into hazy focus as the evening went on, and the story’s intended cumulative force could be detected. Because of the film’s standing, the dramatic situation of this work is an item of cultural familiarity: at a late-night post-performance supper in an elegant home, the guests are prevented from leaving by a mysterious force. Then, after a lengthy detainment in the course of which they are reduced to the condition of starving savages, they are inexplicably released, to wander dazedly back into the outside world. The mood is Existential (upper- and lower-case “e”) and Absurdist (ditto with the “a”).

Cecilia Bartoli is a woman of parts. Having won a place with her vocal and musical gifts, and having sagaciously assessed herself and the world she finds herself in, she has fused those gifts with a sympathy for pre-Romantic and early Romantic styles, a passion for research worthy of an obsessed scholar, and the entrepreneurial  zeal of a brilliant startup engineer to produce a series of well-turned-out themed Projects, recorded and live. It’s been an ingeniously managed career, and has won her through to the artistic leadership of an important operatic enterprise, the Salzburg Whitsun Festival—a feat to be applauded on behalf of both women and singers.

It was at Salzburg Whitsun that the production of Norma so favorably recalled when contrasted with the Met’s by both Alex Ross and Anthony Tommasini (see the post of Nov. 10), and with Bartoli in the titular role, was inaugurated. I’ve read about this production, seen it described and evaluated—the latter, with minor reservations, quite favorably. Bartoli’s performance is universally praised for its intensity, and in the little snippets viewable online, she certainly looks involved. I can’t sensibly take issue with a production I didn’t see, but in search of what Ross and Tommasini find pertinent in it, I can enter a thought or two about such updatings in general. I can also give you some reactions to the recording of Norma by Bartoli and, with one principal exception, the same forces involved with her at Salzburg. To the recording first, since—as I’ve indicated—aesthetically wonderful, dramatically engaged singing and playing are what’s most likely to make any opera relevant for me. As with all of Bartoli’s projects, musicological restoration is seen as crucial. Keys, tempi, orchestration (including the use of period instruments), phrasings and articulations—all the musical elements—are subject to research in quest of definitive, true-to-period authenticity. Then, the resulting edition is tightly honored in performance.

I won’t attempt to account for all the consequent changes made in this case. Some are noted in the annotations that accompany the recording. They are significant, but it is still performance itself that is determinative. And if Rizzi and the Met orchestra had played with half the incisiveness of attack, sharpness of accent, gestural shape, and alertness to articulations that Giovanni Antonini secures from the Orchestra La Scintilla of Zürich, in any edition of the score, things would have been livelier on Oct. 3. Unfortunately, once the sinfonia is past, here come the singers. Almost all the positive effect of the recording rests with the orchestra, and with the exaggerated “presence” of modern studio technology. Bartoli has all the notes in good intonation, plenty of rhythmic energy, and keen inflectional instincts in her native language. Those are not small things. But from “Sediziose voci” through to the end, her voice jiggles and quivers like Jello in an earthquake under any pressure at all, especially in midrange. Her passagework is accurate, but never legato, the notes defined by the same quasi-marcato little throat actions Giulietta Simionato (with a far more potent instrument) used under similar musical circumstances. The interpretive intensity is so generalized that it adds up to a tiresome hypernervosity. “Casta diva” (in G, but in lowered tuning) is surmounted via odd vowel mutations and preparations (she sang it better on an earlier recording). Some of the quieter passages tell, and moments like “Qual cor tradisti” or “Deh! non volerli vittime” would have their intended emotional effect if underpinned by firmer tone and not surrounded by so much excitability. I find her hard listening. Of the Adalgisa and Pollione, let us stipulate that they are high-level professionals and musically on point. Sumi Jo owns a sweet lyric soprano, and can sing a placid line nicely. There is no  tension, good or bad, anywhere in her voice, and so no dramatic properties of the sort that even small, light instruments can have. Her emotional engagement is indicated by moments of breathy onset. John Osborn, whom we heard here last season in Guillaume Tell, is, as the boldly adventurous Roman proconsul of Gaul, a sort of excellent Nanki-Poo with acuti; he executes with some dash. Michele Pertusi, the Oroveso, wins the Basic Qualification medal simply by virtue of being a capable Italian bass.

Although the current Metropolitan Opera production of Bellini’s Norma is a new one and had been selected as the season’s opener, the performance I saw (on October 3) was unremarkable, and I had no plans to write about it until oddly parallel remarks in a couple of local reviews, bouncing back and forth like echoes off our urban canyon walls, stirred thoughts about whether the work is any longer of use, and if so on what terms. The reviews were in two of the journals I see with greatest regularity, the New York Times and the New Yorker. The latter publication, once an indispensable source for devotees of classical music, has for all practical purposes withdrawn from critical coverage of anything involving any of its forms—the orchestral, chamber, and recital varieties; opera—except for the widely spaced and idiosyncratic commentaries of its nominal music critic, Alex Ross. Ballet has suffered similar diminution. But this occasion, paired with the New York Philharmonic’s first full first concert under its new music director, Jaap van Sweden, drew Ross back to the big old halls and the mainstream beat.

Neither Ross nor the Times‘ reviewer, Anthony Tommasini, actually use the word “relevant” this time around. But relevancy, in a very particular meaning, is what they (and many others) are looking for in this (and many other) cases. And they are instructing us to look for it, too. According to my trusty Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, “relevant” means “relating to the matter in hand,” and by way of sampling usage Skeats cites a letter of Charles 1’s: “to make our probations and arguments relevant.” But then the natural question is, what is the “matter in hand”? And, following—whose hand? Because there’s no such thing as universal relevancy. People decide for themselves what’s relevant to them. In this instance, Ross avoids “relevant,” and substitutes “pertinent.” All right, “pertinent.” Skeats: “relating or belonging to.” To what? To whom?

In his lead paragraph, Tommasini finds Norma “rich in themes that resonate in today’s political and social climate.”  (My italics.) Later, he chides the production’s director, David McVicar, for “not having a more resonant concept to begin with,” and offers as comparison the Salzburg production of a few years back, updated to the France of WW11 and starring Cecilia Bartoli. Ross, after complaining that choosing Norma to open the Met’s season was implicitly “reactionary” and that the company persists in putting on “canonical pieces by white males” (alternate suggestions, please?) while “the nation contends with its racist and misogynist demons,” deplores the production’s “mildly sexed-up traditionalism” and its “mist of Gothic-Romantic cliché.” He, too (and this is where the parallels, otherwise fairly general and expectable, become specific), recalls the Salzburg/Bartoli Occupation scenario, as well as another set in an Amish community. The Salzburg Norma (staged in the Haus für Mozart  in 2013, during the Whitsun Festival), was very much a reformist one, musicologically speaking. That, and Bartoli’s performance, was what was widely celebrated about it, and one might think that those elements are what music critics would find relevant or pertinent. But it is the production itself, with the Druids transformed into Resistance fighters, that both use to chastise McVicar’s sociopolitical backwardness. I’ll give consideration to that below. First, some attention to the Met’s effort, and to the nature of the piece itself.

The questions I most frequently hear from people who, wisely or not, consider me a source of knowledge or informed opinion on matters operatic and vocal, are: “What’s happened? Why aren’t there any great new operas?”  and, “What’s happened? Where have all the great voices gone?” Unless the questioner and I have extended time and compatible surroundings (think of a late closing time at your favorite quiet restaurant, life inside a Beckett play, a nonstop to Ulan Bator), I generally mumble something like “It’s a long story” or “It’s really complicated.” Sometimes I’ll throw in something about microphones, or, if I really want to shut it all down, I’ll just say “I’ve no idea.”

But I do have ideas, many of them. The problem is summoning  them in intelligible form, vetting them, and prioritizing them. I do accept the premises of both questions. That is, I don’t attempt to argue that we have plenty of great new operas or great grand-opera voices. That would not get me much of a hearing. With respect to the first question, my principal theory⎯⎯which is that the presence of a socially urgent metanarrative (as in: they had one, we don’t) is a necessary precondition for the generation of a significant body of work in the artform⎯⎯is elaborated in Opera as Opera, and I won’t recycle it here. The second is also debated in my book, and at some length. There, it is discussed chiefly in relation to vocal technique and the influences of our education and training system on the development of young voices. Those are certainly central concerns. We are faced with the fact that with a huge pool of postulants and an unprecedentedly extensive training system in place, we aren’t getting a minimally sufficient supply of major operatic instruments. What’s taught, and in what context, is inescapably implicated. If we aren’t seriously seeking grand opera format in our work with young voices, or facing young singers with the demands of grand opera roles, we can’t expect a race of grand opera warriors to spring fully armed from the soil. But, if I may continue the metaphor, there is also the matter of what’s been scattered on the soil to begin with⎯⎯dragon’s teeth, or those little packets from Burpee’s?

So today, and from time to time in posts to come, I’ll be offering thoughts about the state-of-being of today’s beginning singer⎯⎯the teenager with a nice voice, some musicality, and some indicated interest or ambition⎯⎯as he or she starts professional study. That person may be very talented and vocally mature for his or her age, but I can safely promise you that he or she will present a radically different set of strengths and weaknesses, vocal and personal, than those of the 19-year-old Fyodor Chaliapin, the 18-year-old Rosa Ponselle, or, as I suggested in my post of Sept. 30, the 16- or 17-year-old Lotte Lehmann. I’m not going to rank these considerations yet. I’m quite sure that “microphones” escapes my lips first-off because it assuredly belongs at or near the top of any such ranking, along with several broad sociocultural influences that can be, at one and the same time, socially progressive yet  sources of collateral damage when it comes to great singing. At some point, I’ll try to pull all these together, arrange them in a hierarchy of importance, and separate those that seem beyond our control from those we can do something about. For now, I’ll simply enter them here, trying to provide solid evidence where it exists and fair warning when I’m thinking in more speculative mode.

The exemplary balancing of the sound families (“registers”) in Lotte Lehmann’s voice at the fulcrum in the lower-middle range, about which I wrote in my last post, is subject to only the slightest shifts on all her recordings, early and late, opera and song, live and in-studio. It can be mapped with an almost eerie exactitude on the wonderful Suor Angelica excerpts (1920) that Michael Aspinall, in his Marston notes,  rightly singles out among several fine Puccini interpretations.The centering of the transition on E-natural, with a half-to-full-step tolerance depending on vowel, loudness, and direction of movement, will be clear to anyone following these performances with the music at hand, as will the equality of strength on either side of the center, and the absence of vowel modifications while passing through. And anyone who, like me, has heard many a pretty voice descend to nothing much on Susanna’s low A, or even just her C, in “Deh, vieni non tardar”  (here, “O säume länger nicht”), or to a hollow scratch on Ariadne’s A-flat at “Totenreich”  can hear what’s supposed to happen in Lehmann’s 1917 inscription of the former and her 1928  traversal of the latter. (This last is beyond the scope of this Marston collection of acousticals. But if response is encouraging, Marston hopes to go on to  at least the Odeon electricals).

As we move from the 1918 account of the Act 11 Freischütz scene (see last post) to the 1925 version, some changes can be heard that are not attributable to improvement in recording technique. (In fact, I rather prefer the sound of the earlier recording, though better instrumental playing and leadership may be largely responsible.) The general direction of these changes is apparent in the same opening phrases of which I wrote two weeks ago, and though they are subtle, if you A-B them on these excellent transfers, you’ll hear them. On the very first interval, we are aware of two things: first, the voice’s tonal format has matured ever so slightly; and second, that opening portamentoed downward fifth to F#  with its open “ah” now stays more definitively on the “head” side of the registral DMZ—the touch of open light chest mix is gone.  In the next bar, the swell-and-diminish on the B-natural  of “bevor ich i-ihm” is more filled out, and even more bewitching. A few bars along, the beautiful “Welch schöne Nacht!”  is still perfect, but a different shade of perfect. The “ö” of “schöne” is a touch darker, with a little more of the “o,” or even “u,” and less of the “eh,” in the umlauted vowel. This gives the sustained upper F# a more gathered and marginally heftier texture, then carries the voice down the scale to a low B on “Nacht” that has a detectably deeper tint and an even more settled feel. This is not because  more “chest”  has been added, but, on the contrary, because just a bit more “head” (let’s say 10%) has overlain the entire descent. (Note that in 1918, she sings “Wie schö-ö-n die Nacht ,”  with a breath comma after the middle C# on “schōn,” then a new attack on the F# for “die,” and finally a clearly defined “chest” for the B on “Nacht,” whereas in 1925 she sings (as in the score) “Welch schöne Nacht,” without the break for renewal of breath, and with a more blended chest on the low B. It all goes together.)

One of the advantages of writing a blog is that, while one remains alert to events in the here and now that seem to demand attention, one is not obligated to them, and can instead choose as subject something of more fundamental and lasting interest. Today’s post, the first of two on this subject, does in fact respond to a recent event, but not one that would gain much traction as a “hook” in the journalistic world at large. That would be the release of a four-CD set of the acoustic recordings of Lotte Lehmann from the Marston label, done with the exemplary technical restoration and documentation we’ve come to expect from that source.

There are a hundred compelling reasons to listen to Lehmann, foremost among them the sheer enjoyment and emotional reward of hearing interpretations that, besides being for the most part wonderfully sung, are among the most personal and dramatically urgent ever recorded. So upon reconsidering her, it’s very tempting to write about her as an interpreter, especially with respect to the roles for which she became internationally famous (the Marschallin, Sieglinde, Fidelio) and the Lieder she sang so inimitably. That’s how she’s usually written about. Here, though, I’d like to focus on a question of functional technique, the actual structuring of her voice, without which Lehmann’s most precious qualities—her directness of expression, her sense of a spontaneous release of emotion and intent like that of a great actress standing on the cusp between the old elocutionary style and the modern acting sensibility—would have been compromised. (Or, as the megastar teacher Mathilde Marchesi said—and more on her below—”Every art consists of a technical/mechanical part and an aesthetical part. The singer who cannot overcome the difficulties of the first part can never attain perfection in the second, not even a genius.”) Marston’s superb compilation, which starts with her earliest and rarest recordings (two Lohengrin excerpts from 1914) and ends with a few electrical Odeons that extend to 1932) afford us the chance to hear those qualities and examine that structuring, that “technical/mechanical part,” in the early stages of her long career.

In my own thought and work, I’ve been trying to rid myself of the word “register”—hence the quotation marks. That isn’t because I’m a denier. It’s for two reasons. First, a “register” doesn’t sound like an activity of the elastic, fluid human body. It sounds like either something fixed and mechanical (the term was apparently drawn from keyboard parlance, where⏤thinking of the organ and pre-pianoforte keyboard instruments, it makes some sense, and does refer to “mechanisms,” a word Garcia used), or something visual, as in pre-digital printing processes (“Those plates are out of register”). The human body doesn’t have mechanisms. It has processes, co-ordinations. Second, “register” has too many associations with old debates about sources of timbral groupings, particularly “chest” and “head,” and sometimes (see below) “middle.” The early Italian pedagogues spoke of “voices,” as in “voce di petto,” “voce di testa,” and in some later elocutionary tracts (what would come between your chest and your head?) “voce di gola.” But “having”  two or three voices sounds like growing two or three heads that now have to be somehow combined, and anyway a voice is more something we do than something we “have.”

I concluded my last post with thoughts about a way forward for the New York City Opera. They were cautiously hopeful but hedged with a question: how, with a Board of Directors that numbers eight and–so far as I can determine–no endowment, is this company to survive, even if it were to go from triumph to triumph artistically?

It’s the sort of question never welcomed by artists or devotees or, perhaps, most of my readers. Or by critics, e.g., Anthony Tommasini, chief music critic of The New York Times. A couple of years back, he had the rare privilege of being alternately cited as authority and attacked as willful ignoramus (depending on the author’s convenience) by Reynold Levy in They Told Me Not to Take That Job (Public Affairs, N.Y., 2015), the memoir of Levy’s twelve years at the helm of Lincoln Center. Levy’s complaint had to do with what he termed Tommasini’s “magical thinking”–in part his support for the (then) NYCO’s notion of splitting off from Lincoln Center (and going where?), and in part his persistent campaigning for more new operas and more revisionist productions of old ones, “whatever the costs, whatever the risks,” in a time of desperation.

Tommasini rose to the bait, arguing (see NYT, June 21, 2015) that a critic’s concern is exclusively artistic, with matters of finance and governance best left to “arts reporters.” He also defended his standing recommendations on artistic policy, which to me have usually sounded like the expressions of a rather rarefied modern/postmodern connoisseur taste that was somehow going to become universal if only given the chance. There’s the rub, I think. De gustibus, etc., but Levy was upbraiding Tommasini not so much for his tastes as for advancing them as artistic policy–as if they were the solution to the problem of survival, or, in other words, of solvency.

So, despite Tommasini’s protestations, here he was in the realm of money, where many a magical thought gets thunk. “I’m convinced that there’s a new audience out there for new music,” he said, and while this is something of a faith-based declaration, it’s general enough to be true: sure enough, there are many new musics with followings of some size and devotion, and when new music is performed, new operas produced, some people usually do show up. For major repertory institutions, however, that is not the issue. They need sustainable, repeatable works of broader appeal. And in the case of opera, it’s not just a matter of the music. It’s also a matter of drama, the subject matter, the story being told. Thus, though I have an inbred sympathy for Tommasini’s vision of critical purity, it’s of an “if only” kind. Art and money are inextricable, and no one concerned with the former can afford to ignore the latter.This post, therefore, is about the economics of the high-culture performing arts, of which opera is of its nature the most profligate. So man up, fellow cantophones, if you care at all about the fate of our art. Next time, I promise, we’re back to Die heilige Kunst.