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.

La campana sommersa has for me always been an opera known by name only, one of several by a composer whose orchestral extravaganzas and arrangements of ancient songs and dances I enjoy, and taken from an exotic-sounding play by Gerhart Hauptmann, a writer generally considered as a Father of Theatrical Naturalism.  (Hauptmann’s “The Weavers” and Maxim Gorki’s “The Lower Depths,” I was taught, were founding documents of that style, and I guess that’s more or less true, though far from the complete story of either of these writers. Hauptmann was almost from the beginning drawn toward poetic, symbolic elements, witness “The Sunken Bell,” from1896.) So in early April I was happy for an opportunity to see Campana in a co-production between an Italian company (the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari) and the New York City Opera redux. It was a heartening evening for me, both for discovery of the piece and for implied possibilities for the viability of our long-besieged Second Company.

I went to Campana the way I went to many performances when very young, prepped only by a reading of the plot synopsis, and with little idea of what to expect from the performance. I entertained a mixture of hopeful curiosity and trepidation about the current condition of the announced leading tenor, Fabio Armiliato, whom I’d last heard live in a Don Carlo some fifteen years ago,^(I) and of the company itself, most recently encountered in 2014 under its previous management, tackling Rossini’s Mosé in Egitto at the City Center.  After my sour experience with Met program notes (see the post of Aug. 4), it was little short of exhilarating to read the informative essay by Lucy Tucker Yates, who seems to know the literary and mythical background of the work and to understand its theatrical and musical idiom, and whose writing is literate and witty. As the Rose Hall houselights lowered, we were informed that Armiliato was sick, and the demanding role of Enrico would be taken by his alternate—a disappointment, but a provisional one, since one didn’t really know what one was losing or gaining.

Respighi’s score is of a kind I find congenial. His mastery of orchestral description—a melding of thematic invention, instrumention of great brilliance and sombre depths, and often magnetic harmonic progressions—was anticipated, and indeed there are stunning extended passages that envelop the listener in the melancholy mystery and fateful seductiveness of the subject and setting. But the music seldom wanders into the purely evocative; it is alert to dramatic event and character. By combining the NYCO’s own players with the Cagliari ensemble (which had already played the run over there), a full, skilled orchestral complement was assembled, and they sounded superb. Without more knowledge of the score, I can’t responsibly evaluate the conducting of Ira Levin as interpretation, but he was clearly in command, and managed pit/stage balances without cheating the glories of the scoring. Respighi’s vocal writing, predominantly in through-composed arioso form, is challenging, but rewardingly set for the appropriate voices. More on that, and on the production, below. What particularly fascinated me about Campana  was the composer’s response to the play’s thematic materials (the librettistic adaptation is by Claudio Guastalla).

At the end of our last episode, we left Michael Fabiano on the brink of attempted Reconstruction, his singing of Alfredo’s aria having whizzed by in a blur of theatre-games foreplay. How had he actually sung the piece? We can jigsaw together audiovideo renditions, but these fall well short of giving us the voice’s presence and quality, and the performer’s three-dimensional in-person self, in opera-house space. That’s why we must seek out the live experience whenever possible. (And a quick alert: here comes the first of these posts to get into some musical and vocal thickets in search of crucial but often subliminal performance micro-events. If you’re not used to that, please consult the Preamble of Aug. 4, and try to hang in.)

By the beginning of Act II, I’d had time to form a general impression, and that was certainly positive: a strong, well-balanced lyric tenor of pleasing timbre that carried into a clear ring at the top; well-centered intonation; decent legato and sense of phrase; some control of dynamics–in sum, one of the best of his type now active. He’d sung the little turns of the Brindisi with fair elegance, and given “Un dì, felice” a well-drawn arc. The structure of the instrument is of a sort that has become the norm for such voices post-WWII. It always makes me slightly nervous. It’s generally darker than would once have been considered desirable, and this is most evident in the lower range and in the way the singer approaches the mezza voce (see below). Technically, this is a result of greater pharyngeal dominance in vowel formation, and in at least some cases from an emphasis on very low laryngeal position, creating a longer tubular space between the tone’s vibrational source and its point of emission. Recent examples of this structure, with many individual balances of strengths and weaknesses, would be Neil Shicoff, Marcello Giordani, and Jonas Kaufmann. The worrisome aspect is that in the lower range and /or at lower dynamics, the clearer, more tensile center of the tone may drop aside, leaving insufficient underpinning for greater stresses or a clear, refined half-voice. But Fabiano’s voice is at this point a well-modulated specimen of this set-up, and young.

In my Reconstructive noodlings, I’ve found two audiovideo versions of the Fabiano “De’ miei bollenti spiriti,” complete with Annina and cabaletta. There was, briefly, a third, sneaked out from this 2017 Met run (O, these traitorous leaks!). I watched it once, intending to return, since to grasp the sung interpretation on a video it is necessary to listen at least twice with eyes averted, then look again to see where vocal moments do or don’t seem to coincide with the staging. But it vanished before I could get back to it. So I’ll proceed with the other two, with the caveat that neither represents exactly what I heard on March1, 2017, to the extent that I heard it. Then I’ll offer some comparisons, by way of clarifying points I’m trying to make about interpretation for the eye vs. that for the ear.

As its title indicates, these initial posts were intended to assess aspects of two performances of La Traviata, one here in New York and one in Naples, that fell conveniently close together. But based on my recent Italian experiences, the state of the operatic art in its Motherland is especially dispiriting, and closely related to peculiarly Italian economic and political realities that serve to amplify the already serious problems faced elsewhere, and whose artistic weight is hard to judge from outside. The San Carlo Traviata was, especially in consideration of its venue, all too representative of the situation, and I haven’t the heart to give it any rigorous scrutiny. Bits and pieces of it, and of the Andrea Chénier seen in Rome on the same visit, will likely surface in the context of future discussion.

At the Met, it was The One With the Clock—Willy Decker’s auteurial fantasy that was first given at the Salzburg Festival in 2005, came to New York five years later, and is now reportedly in retirement. I hadn’t seen it before, having had a potent antidote in the form of a sampler DVD thrust upon me while innocently on my way into the opera house one evening. It showed me the clock and enough else about the production to curb any incipient enthusiasm, plus the discouraging sight of Rolando Villazón, whose earlier Alfredo had been among the happiest Met debuts in a couple of decades, in what looked to me like extreme discomfort with his surroundings. So, untempted by the annnounced cast, I’d passed and had never caught up, though I did acquire the Salzburg CDs, mainly to hear Anna Netrebko’s Violetta. This year, I decided to transcend in order to hear two trending singers, the soprano Sonya Yoncheva and tenor Michael Fabiano.

The production has been described often enough, and now survives in video halflife. I’ll engage with only a few of its particulars. While it avoids some of the most destructive extremes of contemporary Regie, it is otherwise a walking, singing catalogue of everything I think is wrong with “advanced” operatic theatrethink. So my eye spent most of the evening in a state of aggravation. Still, I can’t deny that from the middle of Act II, Scene 2 (in original sequence) through to the end, I was intermittently moved. I’ll have some thoughts about that below. First, to the eye-aggravation. That would have begun even before the staged Prelude (Violetta in pantomime with Death Himself who, as we suspect all along, is none other than Dr. Grenvil, or vice-versa) had I read the program annotations in advance. Let’s pretend I did.

First, under the heading “Synopsis,” comes an anonymous, flatly written recounting not of the Piave/Verdi work, but of Decker’s auteurial fantasy. In the absence of any effort to distinguish between the two, this is misreprentation and miseducation and is, simply, unethical. Next, under “Program Notes,” Cori Ellison gives us some solid historical background and a dose of Budden-inspired speculation on the work’s story as timeless and mythical, in the course of which she puzzlingly states that Traviata was first sung in time-of-creation costume by Gemma Bellincioni in 1866, at which time la bella Gemma (a/k/a Mrs. Stagno) would have been two years old. ^(I)  Finally, we have Decker’s “Director’s Note.” It’s perfectly kosher for a director to explain him/herself and to argue for any departures from the creators’ specifications (though once again, these last are not honored with representation). Like most directors working at this high a level, Decker is obviously intelligent, inventive, and highly skilled. His mind, however, again like those of so many of his brethren, rattles about in a postmodern, neoMarxian cage. We’ll meet some of his thinking as we encounter it in action.

The rumored surge in popular demand for yet another opera blog having failed to materialize, a few words about what can be expected here may be in order.

That word “critical,” I’d say, is the key. In my dictionary, the first definition of “criticism”  reads, “The act of making judgments; analysis of qualities and evaluations of comparative worth.” That’s good. The adjectival form,“critical,” is also used in reference to a crisis or decisive moment, as in “This is the critical time for . . .” But I recently came across another way of putting it that succinctly describes what I’ll be trying to do. It popped up in The Times Union of Albany, N.Y., in an article by Melody Davis. She’s a professor of humanities, the discipline that teaches “critical thinking” to anyone who’ll listen. It’s very simple: “The application of prior knowledge to a problem.”

Anyone not historically informed and not yet at least into his or her forties can be forgiven for not having much awareness of how these processes might be brought to bear on operatic performance. We have textual criticism, some of it very fine. We have plenty of opinions, many of them entertaining and some well argued. But the standards that would render “acts of judgment” and “evaluations of comparative worth” worthy of note; the insight that would make any “analysis of qualities” valuable;  and the “prior knowledge” relevant to the problems of opera when it actually is opera (that is, when it is performed) are seldom in evidence in what little is left of journalistic criticism. Of criticism at a critical time, we have very little.

And for opera, this is a critical time. Refusal to acknowledge that, a sort of denial by default, is criticism’s greatest failure now. Critics do greater harm through misplaced praise or through indifference, an indolent passing along, than with any considered censure. Opera’s present crisis has two principal components, artistically speaking. (There is also an economic crisis, a crisis of public acceptance. I’ll come to that down the road. For now, let’s stipulate only that these two crises cannot be unrelated.) The first component is creative: not enough new works are proving capable of standing with the masterworks of the classical repertory. This has been the case for a long time. The second is interpretive: the aforesaid masterworks are being inadequately presented, often to the point of being unrecognizable, and so cannot exert their magnetic hold on audiences.

Both components will receive attention here, but more will be paid to the second than to the first. There’s no shortfall of energy when it comes to the creation of new work, and in the media there is a kind of boosterish froth around it, a wishing into existence of a world in which contemporary culture and opera have found the grounds for an exciting new relationship. If there’s some truth in that, it’s happening mostly on the margins. The two most interesting new operas I’ve seen in recent seasons are Written on Skin (George Benjamin/Martin Crimp) and Dog Days (David T. Little/Royce Vavrek). They were both more compelling than any of those on offer from the Metropolitan or the New York City Opera in recent seasons (I’ve kept up pretty well). Neither seems a candidate for the status of repertory opera.