Long ago and far away, which is to say in the ’60s and over on the Upper East Side, there was a benevolent organization called the SPCCG—Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Charles Gounod. It was founded by Patrick J. Smith (author of The Tenth Muse, editor and publisher of The Musical Newsletter, editor of Opera News, etc.) and a few of his friends. The Society established an award for good services rendered to the eponymous cause, and if memory serves did actually bestow this award on one or two occasions. I was a little miffed at never being designated a recipient, having on several occasions come to the defense of Faust‘s already-beleaguered reputation, and having said nice things about Mireille as well. But such are the slights we must learn to ignore.

The SPCCG was essentially a waggish, donnish enterprise of a sort whose cultural moment has no doubt passed. But beneath this tone was the entirely valid perception that the long-venerated works of this master were being critically condescended to because of a failure to distinguish between the deficiencies of performance and those of the works themselves. And things have not improved for C.G. over the intervening decades. Indeed, a correspondent recently wrote me about a conversation with the artistic director of an important American opera company who stated flatly that Faust should not be done anymore, because we no longer believe in that sort of salvation, the Devil, and all the rest that goes with that. In its last two productions at the Met, the opera could not be located amid the depredations of its directors (Andrei Serban and Des McAnuff)—D.O.A. before even approaching the matters of conducting and singing.

When we’ll see Faust again, and how, is a matter of pure, dark speculation. Meanwhile, though, Gounod’s other big hit, Roméo et Juliette, is returning to the Met repertory. It’s not on my list of must-sees this year, but I’ve been making some notes, rather in the SPCCG spirit, about both the piece and its presentation, as revealed in the present Met production and the one that preceded it. Looking back over these sets of notes, I’m struck by how similar their observations are, despite changes up and down the line in physical production, musical direction, and casting. And for some time I’ve been intrigued by the fact that regardless of textual decisions, some means are always found to throw Act I under the bus. One reason for the oft-heard complaint that Roméo is nothing but a series of lyrical love duets, and thus comes off as a pressed flower of an opera, is that everything else in the work, of which there is quite a lot, is curtailed either by redaction or in the execution. So, especially in a time when we are unlikely to experience Romantic transcendence in those duets, we might ask what it is that Act I is meant to accomplish, and what light that might throw on the rest of the opera.

First, for anyone who might be confused by recent experience: Roméo, as laid out in its score, is a five-act grand opera. The acts are closed forms; each ends with a decisive “button,” thus implying an intermission to follow. With the cuts in Act IV that were formerly standard (Juliette’s Potion aria and the Epithalamium, in addition to the permanently exiled ballet), it was easy to run Acts IV and V together, leaving only three intermissions. Now, with those numbers restored in whole or in part, the entire show is granted but a single intermission, which chops the score in two in the middle of Act III. So when I speak of “Act I,” I refer to what is now the first of three scenes in the very lengthy stretch before the intermission. This is the scene at Capulet’s ball, and it’s not short, preceded as it is by the overture and choral Prologue. It contains five numbers, but that’s somewhat deceptive, since the first takes in everything before Mercutio’s Queen Mab ballad. In terms of audience experience, the act comprises four important solos (Juliette’s brief but showy introduction, Capulet’s song in praise of youth and dance, Queen Mab, and Juliette’s Waltz Song) and one duet (the madrigal “Ange adorable” at the lovers’ first meeting). These episodes are bracketed by choral and dance music and joined by very concise sections of recitative, originally conceived as spoken dialogue but never so presented, even in the premiere production (1867) at the Théâtre Lyrique. The atmosphere is festive. Tempo indications are prevailingly on the quick side, and triple meters predominate.

Owing to the crunch-time pressure of work on the proofs of Opera as Opera/The State of the Art, I must delay my next post for one week, till Friday, April 13. I’ll be paying some close attention then to Act 1 (the actual Act 1, as indicated by the score) of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette—how the now-customary cuts undermine its function, and how the performed remainder is being staged, sung, and conducted. As with my earlier remarks on Massenet’s Thaïs, there will be reference to what sorts of voices were heard in the opera’s heyday, and how radically that affects the way we receive this work. Also to come over the next few weeks: two Verdi revivals (Trovatore and Luisa Miller); Montemezzi’s (potentially) gripping L’Amore dei tre re; and recent local exploits of Jonas Kaufmann and Anna Netrebko—always dependent, of course, on the real-life materialization of same.

Meanwhile, we are nearing the time when a firm publication date and specifics about ordering can be announced for the above-mentioned book, which is to the best of my knowledge the one-and-only effort to date to attempt a comprehensive evaluation of all aspects of operatic performance over the past couple of decades, and thus of where our artform stands in today’s society. All the considerations dealt with here in bi-weekly chunks, and more, are taken up at greater length, and in the context of some unifying themes, in this book. More detailed description will be forthcoming shortly.

# # #

In my first “Before the First Lesson” post (Oct. 27, 2017), I set as the context for this series the fact that despite an unprecedentedly crowded field of unprecedentedly large-bodied candidates entering an unprecedentedly extensive system of formal higher education in music and opera, we have little to show for it by way of voices capable of satisfying the demands of the greatest roles in the greatest works. I further stipulated that these entries would consider some of the environmental, sociocultural, and technological factors that influence vocal development (or lack thereof) in advance of training. And I followed the lead of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in presenting the first of these factors, the heavy and pernicious presence of the chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, with their scary and vocally intriguing effects on sexual maturation and obesity. ^(I)

In the second of the series (Dec. 22, 2017), I wrote about some of the ways our “technologically determined secondary aural environment” governs the largely unconscious modeling of the ear-voice loop that now conditions the vocal upbringing of everyone save for rare off-the-grid souls, who are unlikely to include many budding Tristans or Aïdas. In that discussion, I touched on two aspects of what I’ve decided to call the Digital Covenant (see below): the fragmentation of attention and the tyranny of the Now, with their concomitant losses of orientation and context. These are perhaps the components of the digital culture most commonly cited as problematic by educators and cultural commentators concerned with how minds are being structured and personalities formed. Today I’d like to enter some preliminary thoughts on a subject I see discussed less often, and that is the effects of our digitized life on emotional development. In a way, these thoughts follow a thread I’ve been tugging at since my first posts, concerning the unique intensity and, at times, the apparent waywardness of the emotional bond we form with musical and dramatic happenings. (See, especially, my article of Feb. 2, “How Are We Moved, and Why Do We Like it?” But, as I say, it’s a thread.) Until now, I’ve spoken about the receiving end of the bond—the taking in of emotionally directed events, our response to them, and our incorporation of reception and response into our storehouse of memory and expectation. What about the conditions on the sending end, with the artists themselves, who after all begin as receptors, too? Might the recent shifts in the ways we all mediate the world (especially with regard to relationships) also be mediating (I was going to write “stunting”) the ability to mobilize emotional, visceral energies—or even the recognition of the necessity to do so?—among potential creators and interpreters of the most emotional and visceral of the arts? Obviously, if I didn’t have a suspicion that the answer could be “yes,” I wouldn’t be addressing the question.

Richard Wagner said what could well have been his last word, as Verdi was soon to do, with a comedy that brought the story of the outsider protagonist couple (the underlying narrative of Romantic opera, and thus of most of our active canon) to an unaccustomed happy end, and incorporated it into the world of the bourgeois quotidian. Instead, after Die Meistersinger, he not only turned back to his native habitat of myth and legend, but to a species of musicodramatic realization that really has only one other specimen—his own Tristan und Isolde. In my post of Feb. 9, I mentioned that in his study of ten great dramas, The Idea of a Theatre, Francis Fergusson named Tristan a “drama of passion,” distinct from all other kinds. To be sure, “passion” is the emotional condition that besets most premodern dramatic characters, and with which we are meant to empathize, even to celebrate and declare a “right.” But passion as a ruling, immersive force, to which we are asked to give ourselves over unreservedly and beyond reasoning as the very purpose of the artistic experience, and which only music has the power to impose upon us, is unique to Tristan and Parsifal. Or, perhaps I should say, those are the only two works that truly achieve that aim, for anyone willing or eager to undergo it. Parsifal returned to the Metropolitan Opera’s repertory this season in the production directed by François Girard, first seen in 2013. Then, it was conducted by Daniele Gatti; now, it is led by the company’s Music Director Designate, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

As always, we can talk about performance or about production, or the relationship between the two. And we can talk either about what’s there, or what’s missing. When we talk about what’s missing (which all criticism must come to), we inevitably speak of our own expectations, and those depend in great part upon the route we have taken into the work, and what we’ve found there in the past. I’ll be speaking about all these things here. But since I know many readers will be interested first in performance and in what was there (how was it?), as with any other opera that pops up of a Tuesday evening, I’ll begin with that.

This was the lightest Parsifal cast I’ve ever seen or heard, nosing out the 2013 contingent. The only exception was the Kundry, Evelyn Herlitzius. She commands an upper range of cold, focused power. This, allied with an often gripping intensity of vocal and physical action, allowed the latter part of Act 2, climaxing with the great cries of “Irre! Irre!” to build with a fair measure of its desperation, and put her in second place in the lightness derby to Katerina Dalayman of the 2013 cast. Lower down, though, Herlitzius’ voice lacks the presence and color, the complexity, and often simply the supported steadiness needed earlier in the act, from the first call of Parsifal’s name through “Ich sah das Kind‘ to the “ersten Kuss.” She’s an interesting artist, and I’d like to say I would welcome seeing her in other roles, but it’s hard to know which.

Verdi and Wagner are the two great opera composers that suffer especially grievously in our current performance climate. All opera labors, but the mightiest the most. The insidious combination of spavined vocalities, openly or underhandedly adversarial production practices, and musical renderings that with rare exceptions emerge as “lightened,” “clarified,” and/or mechanical, serve to reduce these two most regularly to the status of pitiful giants. In my Traviata and Forza del destino posts I have had some occasion to deal with Verdi. Trovatore and Luisa Miller will receive attention soon. Wagner, though, has simply not presented himself in our New York season to date. Even now, he’s just edging in, with a Met revival of Parsifal and single acts (the most surefire ones, and the cheapest to present) of Die Walküre and, in April, Tristan und Isolde, in concert format.

In a faint echo of the commercial symbiosis that once took place between record releases and live events, the conductor and Sieglinde of the Walküre Act I (Jaap van Zweden and Heidi Melton) are also those of the complete Ring underway from Naxos (the Siegfried has just been issued), while the Siegfried of that cycle is our Siegmund. Further, the Wotan of the Naxos Ring, Matthias Goerne, has just appeared at Carnegie Hall in the role that has earned him his greatest prominence—that of champion of the profundities of the German art song— and has been announced as the New York Philharmonic’s artist-in-residence for next season, when Mr. Van Zweden takes over the orchestra. Goerne being first to stand in the docket, I’ll begin with him and elements of the Naxos recording.

My earlier experience of Goerne was limited to a single Papageno, back in 1998. It wasn’t quite at the level of the best I’ve seen (Hermann Prey or, in an Americanized context, Theodor Uppman) or heard (Prey again, Fischer-Dieskau, Gerhard Hüsch), but it was nice (and no, Papageno is not a slam-dunk). I did mark a peculiarity in his rendering of the spoken dialogue. For that, he adopted a high-set adjustment—higher in pitch, in fact, than most of his sung notes—shallow and mouthy in timbre. It reminded me somewhat of Peter Lorre’s default speech mode, or more specifically of a tone taken by the eminent actor and director Gustaf Gründgens in some of his snakily seductive speeches as Goethe’s Mephistopheles, and so produced an effect oddly creepy for the character. I wondered if there were some culture-code signal in this usage that I was missing, or if Goerne simply thought that this unnaturally high placement would carry well in the big house. In any case, it did lodge in the memory. I’ve had no further occasion to see Goerne in opera, noting only at a distance and with some surprise the roles he has more recently undertaken, and have been remiss in catching up with him in recital till the evening of February 6.

I have heard and seen grumblings about an over-seriousness in Goerne’s recital programming and presentation. These get no support from me. One reason I find myself at the recital hall with reduced frequency is that the programming (when one can find out about it in advance in any detail) seems designed to avoid a dreaded “heaviness,” and the presentational mode is one of casual friending, often of a patent insincerity. The world of the Lied is richer and deeper than that, and if you’re not going to go there, neither am I. On this occasion, Goerne was offering the four songs of Berg’s Opus 2, the complete Schumann Dichterliebe, Wolf’s three Michelangelo settings and three of Shostakovich’s as well, and finally the Vier ernste Gesänge of Brahms. From beginning to end, substantial nourishment for heart and mind. What less could you want? And let me stipulate: Goerne has a sturdy, reliable voice. He’s entirely in command of his material. His intonation is excellent, and at least in this material, the tone is never spread or tremulous. He’s clearly dedicated and sincere. His collaborator on this occasion was the acclaimed young Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, this recital being one of the events he is “curating” as Carnegie Hall’s artist-in-residence. All these good things notwithstanding, I found Goerne a strange performer, and this a strange evening. In such cases, I think it can be informative to search for technical causes. It’s part of my ongoing attempt to pin down what’s gone on with classical singing over the past half-century, a search that’s best conducted among the most gifted and successful, since their talent always consists in part of compensating for whatever weaknesses may be present. But before that, a note on self-presentation, which actually creates the first impression.

In my very first working post (“Traviata 1,” Aug. 4, 2017), I confessed that despite my dislike—on grounds not only of taste, but of artistic principle—of  Willy Decker’s production, there were moments in the Act 2 finale and the final scene when I found myself moved. I also had to admit that while I am often moved by these same passages, even in poorish performances, and attribute this mostly to the power of Verdi’s music to override the failings of his interpreters (and, on this occasion, the generally sour, resistant mood the production had put me in), I couldn’t indulge myself in denial: there had to be something in the production and performance that at least contributed to my emotional response. I was also aware that whenever I attend or listen to a performance of La Traviata, I am hoping for something like this response at these junctures; that although the emotion is of deep sadness, evoked by representations of cruelty, shattered love, and mortality itself, I enjoy having it and am disappointed when I don’t; and finally that this enjoyment or disappointment is a starting-point (though that only) for critical evaluation. I intended to pursue this subject in “Traviata 2,” but did not. Now’s a good time.

I was talking recently with a friend about François Girard’s production of Parsifal, which is returning to the Met this season. It’s another representation I object to on principle, whether I’m moved or not. And I’m always moved by Parsifal, because at certain places the music invariably overtakes all other considerations. In that sense, being moved has nothing to do with my opinion, so I concede the former and hold to the latter. But my friend was moved, specifically, by certain production choices. One was that in Girard’s auteurial universe, Kundry gets to be the officiant at the end. Wagner says she doesn’t, but Girard says she does, and since it’s Girard’s show, he holds the high cards. My friend felt that this choice contradicted only the letter, not the spirit, of Wagner’s apparently nullified law, and was moved to see Kundry dispensing the nourishing radiance. “She has to be redeemed!”, he said.

There’s a thread here, about women in the realm of the Grail, which I may take up after I’ve been to this year’s Parsifal revival. And one can’t very well be in the business of invalidating someone else’s emotional responses. For my money, Kundry should stay on the floor,  because her redemption inheres simply in being released from the centuries, eons, of agony to which she has been condemned for a blasphemy, and the only release is through death. There is plenty to explore in this notion; we don’t have to agree with it or like it. But it belonged to RW, and like another W, he’s the Decider in this pretty basic matter, according to my code of artistic ethics. (Which of the principal characters completes the work’s central action is well beyond the “Joe averts her gaze and frowns” level of stage direction, I would think.) Nonetheless, this little disagreement serves to remind me that I, too, was moved, as always, at the end of this Parsifal, this despite the fact that Kundry was having her mini-Resurrection. Further: this “being moved” was similar to, but not the same as, the “being moved” of La Traviata. Deeper? Not really, but different. Less personal, more “universal.” And while La Traviata is a tragedy of a peculiarly operatic sort, Parsifal, though marinated in tragic juices, isn’t. It’s a drama of redemption that shares the Christian dream of redeeming the world. That makes it one of a handful of outliers on the edge of the Romantic metanarrative.

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”).