The Opera House is Half Full

In today’s New York Times, veteran critic Anthony Tommasini wonders, “Where have all the voices gone?” in an op-ed he actually calls a “lamentation.”

Along with the myth that opera audiences are shrinking, one of the favorite complaints of self-styled opera aficionadi everywhere is that there are no longer any great voices. I bet that if you could travel back in time fifty years, and wander around the standing room at the back of the Old Met during a Tebaldi-Corelli Bohème, you’d find someone whining that audiences are getting older and that there aren’t any singers anymore, like there used to be in the days of Ponselle and Martinelli.

The inspiration for Tommasini’s premature eulogy is the new Metropolitan Opera production of Madama Butterfly, directed by Anthony Minghella.

You know, the one that garnered rave reviews and is sold out for the rest of the season.

The cast is headed by Chilean soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domas, whose singing of the title role, according to Tommasini, was “courageous,” but “patchy, pale and shaky” on high notes, even though “she made up in intensity and vulnerability what she lacked in vocal allure.” Who among today’s sopranos should have been cast instead? “No one I can think of,” confesses Tommasini.

He then compares her to some of the legendary sopranos of the past, namely Geraldine Farrar and Renata Tebaldi. Tebaldi, who had a uniquely warm voice and an instantly recognizable timbre with an impossibly seamless legato, was not exactly renowned as an actress. And while her top may not have been “patchy, pale and shaky,” it certainly could be steely and flat. Check out her paint-peeling high C at the end of Act I of La Bohème in the famous Serafin recording with Bergonzi – and that was in her prime.

Farrar, who was renowned as an actress (and a glamorous social figure, too – the famous “flapper” look of the 1920s is an abbreviation of “gerryflapper,” for Geraldine) had a singing style that is no longer in vogue: someone singing Butterfly today the way she sang it would probably get booed off the stage, assuming she could get hired.

But let’s take Tommasini’s point seriously. Where are the Tebaldis today?

Remember from my previous post that the number of professional opera companies in America has grown 5700% in fifty years. In those days, Tebaldi, along with Franco Corelli, Mario del Monaco, Zinka Milanov, Jussi Bjoerling, Leonard Warren and a host of other operatic legends, basically shuttled back and forth between the Met and San Francisco. Alas, it is true that voices like these are not common; but now they are spread among 114 professional companies in the US, not to mention those in Europe and elsewhere. The supply/demand ratio has altered tremendously, but that doesn’t mean that the voices aren’t out there.

Two other phenomena are also at work, however.

One is the recording industry. Fifty years ago, great recording stars like Maria Callas, Robert Merrill, Anna Moffo and Fedora Barbieri had well-established stage careers before they began making studio recordings. It was their excellence on stage that led to recording contracts. That trend is basically reversed today.

In the early 1990s, a young Italian mezzo soprano by the name of Cecilia Bartoli overturned conventional wisdom by showing up for “weeks on end” on Billboard’s best sellers not with crossover work, or even with operatic chestnuts, but with her 1993 album “Se tu m’ami,” which featured 17th and 18th century Italian songs with piano accompaniment. Bartoli is an extraordinary artist, but with her large, dark eyes, lustrous brown hair and classic Roman features, she is beautiful and photogenic, too.

She was a recording superstar long before her much-anticipated Met debut. So was tenor Roberto Alagna. Soprano Anna Netrebko. Baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. What do these singers have in common? They’re all beautiful people. Not a dowdy, fat “opera singer” in the bunch.

Now, that’s good. Nothing wrong with a beautiful person with talent, too. But in our search to find ways to attract new audiences to opera, we have become too focused on physical appearance.

This is nothing new: the audience at the premiere of Verdi’s La Traviata had trouble accepting the voluptuous Fanny Salvini-Donatelli as the consumptive heroine. But the mindset found, perhaps, its apex in 2004, when soprano Deborah Voigt was famously canned from the Royal Opera at Covent Garden’s production of Ariadne auf Naxos – she remains the world’s pre-eminent interpreter of the title role – because she couldn’t fit into the little black cocktail dress that was, apparently, at the heart of the director’s vision of the opera. If she hadn’t already been an international superstar by virtue of her stupendous talent, it never would have made headlines.

Here we must concede something important to the future of opera: God does not always apportion gifts evenly. Opera is not Hollywood. Opera is a highly artificial form of entertainment. That doesn’t mean “fake”: look at the root of the word. ART. The roles were written for voices, not for bodies.

While it does appear that Aida is often a very well-fed slave, we have to admit that if our focus is on the physical attractiveness of the singer, rather than their vocal gifts, sometimes we’re going to have to make a tradeoff. And furthermore, we should examine our own bias in the process. There is deep, ugly prejudice in the suggestion that if Isolde is not thin and young, she’s not a worthy object of the eternal, transcendant love offered by Tristan. Unglamorous, unshapely people have lives, feelings, triumphs and tragedies, too. If people are serious about making opera more “realistic,” and therefore, more “accessible,” they’d recognize that human beings come in all shapes and sizes.

And they might find some voices, while they're at it.