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The Dearth of Great Voices. The Met complains that it cannot properly ast Aida any more, and has not staged a satisfactory Ring in years. But longing for a vanished golden age obscures the fact that there are singers today who can compete with their heroic forebears: the Met gala boasts more than a dozen, singing alongside such potential future stars as Kathleen Battle and Leona Mitchell. Further, the days when the Met had unquestioned call on the major voices are gone. The competition from the great European houses and the other American companies is too great. As a result, the ideal of ensemble opera is once again fashionable, prizing drama as well as vocal display.
Radio, Television—and Now Subtitles. For 43 years, the Saturday-afternoon Met performances have been broadcast nationwide, bringing opera to millions. But TV is an even more potent medium, transmitting the spectacle along with the music to an even wider audience. Television has also proved a boon to intelligibility with its running subtitles. Now titles have crept into the opera house, projected on a screen, where they promise to settle the argument between those who favor hearing works in the original and those who want to hear them in the vernacular. The removal of the language barrier will likely increase attendance as audiences discover that opera is not as forbidding to the neophyte as once supposed.
All these developments are having an impact on the Met. Television is already a major factor, and only snobbism will delay the subtitling innovation. Like conductors everywhere, Music Director James Levine would prefer to cast star voices at each performance but knows he cannot always get them. Accordingly, Levine has, largely successfully, adopted the ensemble concept, taking advantage of the fact that singers generally look and act better than they used to.
As perhaps the world's most conservative major opera house, the Met has resisted the kind of directorial innovation (or excess, depending on one's view) that marks its European colleagues, to its loss. Ponnelle's willful, brilliant Dutchman was resoundingly booed when it was imported in 1979 and has not been seen since. But the Met does employ stage directors with strong, if more conventional, ideas: Otto Schenk, for example, who was responsible for last year's sparkling The Tales of Hoffmann. And, slowly, the company is recognizing that there is opera after Puccini: besides Peter Grimes this year, the repertory includes Poulenc, Weill, Stravinsky and Riccardo Zandonai's verismo potboiler, Francesco da Rimini. In addition, the Met has commissioned new works from Composers John Corigliano and Jacob Druckman.
As for the often remarked upon lack of great voices, that may be more a function of nostalgia than fact. There were great singers in the Met's past, there are still today, and there will be tomorrow. But they will no longer be the whole show. Verdi, who always prized drama above mere warbling, and Wagner, who attempted a synthesis of the arts, would be pleased. So should opera fans, who ought to realize that they may be sitting on the threshold of a new golden age.