“It can feel as if the composer is really writing for a clarinet and not a woman, a cello and not a man, and the singers are ready to collude with this as they can revert to the unquestioning habits of their training – showing off the smoothness across their “break” and their easy reach of the high and the low. But what is created has nothing to do with sense, or a depiction of human experience. This failure to communicate would not be tolerated in contemporary theatre.”

Italics mine.  I am all for “singers who refuse to use Italian vowels for English ones, who don’t avoid regional accents with their clutter of so-called ugly diphthongs, and who feel compelled to make sense of the words.”  But concert timbre embodies a technique, not an attitude; and an opera’s dramatic method partakes equally of the play and the concerto, which is why I would argue the melismatic and technically demanding vocalizing in “Sempre libera” comprises, rather than ornaments, its “depiction of human experience.”  More to argue with here.

I’d first met Caroline Worra and Cherry Duke through Little Women, who had both sung the opera for the first time the same season (2002-2003) but in different productions: Cherry had introduced her first Jo to Virginia before singing the rôle at the Cabrillo Festival with Marin the following year, and Caroline had sang Amy for Glimmerglass that summer and for New York City Opera that spring.  Though we’d never worked together, I’d known Amy Burton socially though City Opera and through John Musto: and I sat in on a coaching or two when Amy was first learning John’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan, the orchestral version of which she’s sung repeatedly around the country.

So I knew these women’s art, a little: and yet I didn’t.  That night at Symphony Space, Caroline sang, from Lysistrata, both the heroine’s second-act aria (which she knew, and recorded, six years ago) and the first-act cabaletta on which it’s based (which she’d never seen.)  Her voice, always full and bright, is even fuller and brighter now; but it was what she did with it that swept all before her in the aria.  One example: there’s a long middle D on the word “I” about three-quarters of the way through “I am not my own:” the soprano must sustain it over five slow bars while the orchestra proffers a fragment of a theme which, like the beloved it describes, can never return.  The immobility of the character is what’s important at this juncture: and so if you, the singer, simply sustain the pitch and observe the crescendo, you’ll have done enough to make the point.  Or you can do what Caroline did, which is to start the pitch with a flute-like shimmer, and not only build the volume but darken the color beat by beat until the pitch breaks off in baritonal anguish.

Comparably, Amy, in J’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” was wrestling with vocal lines of two distinctly different characters: one a treading, low-register imprecation that took its color, if not its form, from the passacaglia underpinning it, and the second a fugitive, improvisatory cantilena that seems to evanesce into a cloudbank of bells.  The pivot point between the two is on the phrase “The answer,” and Amy, working one of those miracles of vocal technique that everyone can hear but no one can describe without resorting to far-fetched metaphors (see below,) made her assertive lyric soprano a slim filament of itself.  Her voice lost neither aural presence nor verbal clarity, but its texture seemed to thin from satin to gauze: a perfect choice when singing, as the lyric demands, an answer that’s no answer at all.

Cherry Duke, of the three singers that night, had in many ways the trickiest assignment: singing a lyric (“Dodecaphonia, or They Call Her Twelve-Tone Rose”) written for the wry attitude and offhand delivery of an amplified theatre singer while simultaneously negotiating a twelve-tone jazz setting extending from low G to almost two octaves higher.  Cherry was in great, rich voice: but here, too, the success of the performance owed not just to her astutely judged decisions—when to let just the plain pitched word carry the meaning, when to let the voice bloom—but her technique in making them audible.  And that technique isn’t just timbral.  Nothing reminds you so much that comedy is timing—is rhythm—than than hearing Cherry land a musical joke by the mere adjustment of an eighth-rest, or turn a subito piano after a robust forte into the aural equivalent of a raised eyebrow.

I don’t mean to sentimentalize here.  Vocal artists in 2011 are supposed to have these timbral—these interpretive—resources.  But these performances underlined for me a point that I try to impress on the composers I work with: that however precise and unambiguous we think we make our scores, the opera doesn’t happen until its singers embody, not merely mime, those scores’ intentions.  You don’t want piannissimo, you want heartbreak, but you can only notate the former: and there’s no notation devised that can specify intelligence.  I remember vividly the first time I ever heard the term “create” applied to a singer participating in a world première, as in, “Annie Krull created the rôle of Elektra,” and bristling ever-so-slightly: surely Strauss and von Hoffmansthal were the creators, no?  And yet any of us who have ever suffered through (or inflicted on patient friends) a poor MIDI realization of a vocal score have to revise that hoariest of clichés about this art we practice.  Forget about when it’s over: the opera doesn’t begin until that lady sings.

B.: This is interesting.

W.: What?

B.: “Mr. Schwartz participated in a City Opera panel discussion this month, moderated by the company’s general manager, George Steel, on the topic of what defines opera and musical theater. The other participants were the composer John Kander, the composer and lyricist Adam Guettel, the songwriter and opera composer Rufus Wainwright, and the playwright David Henry Hwang—“

W.: (whining) They didn’t ask me.

B.: Every time they thought about it, their hearts sank.  (W. slumps. B. resumes.) One opinion that found consensus among the panelists was that music critics disrespect operas that are too accessible. I wanted to shout out: “’Not true! The issue is more complicated.’”

W.: Great!   An issue worth discussing.  How does he unpack it?

B: He doesn’t.  He says the opera tries too hard to be accessible—

W: That doesn’t say anything about accessibility as a value, or even define the term—

B.: Hush, I’m still reading.

(Reads. W. drains coffee, drums fingers, sighs pointedly.)

B.: Oh, this is funny.

W.: (all but shouting:) WHAT?

B.: (serenely) You could always get your own iPad.  (resuming) “I can think of harmonically gritty and aggressive episodes in Wicked that are more daring musically than anything in Séance.”

W.: Oh, please! Nothing else about accessibility?

B.: Well, he acknowledges the show’s narrative fluency; and ends with, “Every time Mr. Schwartz’s score had more complexity and nuance (asymmetrical riffs of five beats, sustained harmonies that create tension through astringent dissonance, piled-up voices in intricate ensembles), the opera would gain intensity and start to grab me. Maybe I did want Séance on a Wet Afternoon to be less accessible. Guilty as charged.”

W.: Then, since we all agree that the issues—I count two: Wicked’s “grit” and “grit” vs. “accessibility”— are “more complicated than that,” it is left to us to unpack them.  Let’s deal with Wicked first.  We’ve heard both these scores, yes?  Do we agree that Wicked is more dissonant than Séance?

B.: I’ll happily compare p/v’s.  But if we’re talking about pitch content, I think not.

W.: Why might Tommasini have thought so?

B.: Microphones.  Instrumentation.  Wicked is a brazenly amplified pop score: electric instruments in the pit, an r&b belter in one of the leads.  You play a C-minor triad on those guitars, through those speakers, and it’s inevitably going to sound more “aggressive” than even a twelve-note cluster in acoustic strings.

W.: Couldn’t you argue that achieving, unplugged, a comparable forcefulness is a fair challenge to an acoustic orchestrator?

B.: You could.  But in so doing, you’re conceding that second point, which I thought you wanted to argue: which is this notion of the superiority of “grit” over “accessibility.”

W.: What do these terms mean?  Are they even opposed? “Grit,” to my ear, denotes either a texture and/or an attitude.  Both connote abrasiveness.  But—while you could sand a sideboard with Wozzeck’s minor seconds—is that opera inaccessible?  Unclear?  Or merely dark?  And is grit, qua grit, a value in 2011?  Who will tell Philip Glass?  It’s been decades since non-triadic harmony was heard as the aesthetic equivalent of the Green Revolution: and if you expand the term to mean timbral roughness, you can get that everywhere from the Bang on a Can Marathon to—as Tommasini concedes!—the pit of a decades-long-running Broadway show.  Grit in 2011 is just a personal taste for aural friction; that latter is fine, as far as it goes, but is it really adequate as a critical criterion?  And what has that to do with accessibility, unless we’re sliding towards that tedious art/entertainment question?

B.: Someone—it may actually have been Stephen—asked John once how the whole art/entertainment question was discussed on the opera side of the music-theatre aisle, and John, missing not a beat, said, “That’s easy.  Art doesn’t work.  That’s how you know it’s art.” “What is it if it does work?” the guest asked.  And John said, “Then, obviously, it’s show business.”

Hostess (off:) Adorno, party of one?  Adorno, party of one?

B.: To be fair, Tommasini is very careful not to pick that fight in the opening ‘graph.  (reading): “Is Séance a musical theater work with operatic elements? An opera with populist leanings?  Of course there is only one question that matters: Is Séance on a Wet Afternoon good?”

W.: Define “good!”

B.: Define “work!”

W.: Touché.  “Work” can carry any number of meanings.  But mustn’t any meaning of “work” entail expressiveness: how close or far did the writers come in achieving their musical and dramatic goals as the critic perceives them?  If Tommasini’s review had led to any number of other conclusions—that, to his ear, the score wasn’t intensely enough written or orchestrated to be fully expressive of what he thought the composer was trying to do—I may or may not have agreed, but at least the judgment would be based on meaningful criteria.  But instead, we get this tired, tired notion that astringence and asymmetry are always and everywhere their own rewards—

B.: Even in lullabies—

W.: —and we bat around this needlessly politicized term “accessibility,” which seems to me to have the same relationship to “expressiveness” as “cult” does to “religion.”  If “cult” is the religion of people we don’t like, “accessibility” is expressiveness in language we don’t like.

B.: Not bad.  You should be on a panel sometime.

(W. glares: weeps; recovers.  B. sips coffee.)