I opened my mouth in astonishment. Had I read that right? No, it couldn't be!
I looked again. I re-read the headline... Hmm.... Uh-huh... Yes, unfortunately, I had read it right.
The New York Times published a piece the other day, in their online edition, about the Metropolitan Opera's curtailing of their decades old publication, Opera News. One I had been reading and admiring and subscribing to for years on end, if not decades. A musical balm for this operatically minded soul, a literary crutch I had been leaning on for as long as I could remember.
They say all good things come to an end. And surely this piece of dreadful news had come at a perilous period for the economically strapped Metropolitan Opera House and the Met Opera Guild in charge of disseminating the monthly magazine.
Why, I had practically grown up with the periodical, back in the days when it was a weekly distribution. I would read it from cover to cover, as any young acolyte would, during a time when one's interest in the operatic art had burgeoned and flowered to unheard-of heights.
But those were different, more innocent times. And it was quite a different publication back then - with one hand in the present, one hand in the future, and both feet planted firmly in opera's past.
I am sad to say that that past has now become the present. And the future looks dire indeed for the institution itself.
Yet, there is a somewhat bright side to the story. The Guild has gone out of its way to state that their magazine (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) will be folded into the pages of the British journal Opera, one I used to devour at will on the occasion of my visits to the New York Public Library on 42 nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Or to the famed Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts.
To say that I learned my opera at the altar of Opera News is a mild understatement. Certainly, the magazine helped to supplement the weekly Met Opera transmissions of live opera, as it was designed to do. As a teenager eager to absorb the drama, the singing, the music, the text, the action, and the star-studded variety of works and artists via successive Saturday afternoon transmissions, Opera News was, to me, a veritable lifeline. Bringing the art to my ears and heart was worth the price of admission (a most reasonable one, at that!).
In the heyday of its glorious past, the Met Opera broadcasts introduced this novice to the then-contemporary names of Price, Sutherland, Caballé, Tebaldi, Freni, Scotto, Sills, Bumbry, Verrett, Ludwig, Cossotto, Tucker, Corelli, Bergonzi, Vickers, McCracken, Domingo, Carreras, Pavarotti, Merrill, Milnes, Gobbi, MacNeil, Stewart, Siepi, Tozzi, Morris, Ramey... Need I go on? If I have left out any of your favorites (Callas, for instance), it's because I never heard them in the flesh. Records would supplement that shortfall.
But a magazine is a magazine. And as troubling as its curtailment might seem to readers, rest assured that opera will go on as before.
Nothing can compare to the fact that the publication itself has become, through the COVID pandemic and beyond, a mere shadow of what it once had been. I wrote about some of the changes to opera a while back, almost twenty years ago in fact, where it concerned problems associated with the operatic art in Brazil. Lately, however (and by that, I mean within the last four to five years), Opera News has transitioned to a kind of Cosmopolitan format, something more in line with Women's Wear Daily than a serious musical tome.
Photo sessions of rising stars in various modes of dress, decked out in all their finery, surrounded by what appears to be the lap of luxury, positioned to take advantage of the flattering light - I'm sorry, but I have to ask: "What does all this have to do with opera?"
Am I the only one to have noticed this radical change in format? Famous singers, some of whom I know for a fact are well along in years, with their faces airbrushed to death, the very life drained away from their familiar features, the wrinkles of time evaporated before our eyes... Frankly, I don't get it.
It's disturbing. No, it's more than that: It's insulting. To whom, you might ask? To the artists themselves, of course. Why turn a supposedly serious art into another frivolous Facebook page for gawkers? Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but the proof is in the substance. Look at the magazine's cover sheet. Flip to the Contents section. Next, go to Noteworthy & Now. Then, to Sound Bites, Spotlight, and finally the Main Feature.
What do you see? Pages upon pages of polished picture spreads. People, places, fashion statements, lavish layouts, stylish coiffures, hairstyles galore, clothes designed by renowned artisans, crafts folk of the highest order... Where does it end? And, again, we need to ask: "What do these have to do with opera?"
Personally, these only contribute to the argument that opera is for the wealthy among us; the elite of society, the well-to-do, the so-called privileged classes.
Well, there's some truth to that observation, in that opera was, indeed, in its earliest stages and at times an art for the upper strata. Only later on, at the smaller regional and local theaters in, say, Italy, France and Germany, did opera attract the attention of the working class. Eventually, interest in the form reached North America by way of European immigration to her shores.
This appeal to the upwardly mobile, the "well off" of society, in our estimation, is a misguided venture. What it will serve to do is isolate an already isolated art form even more. Exactly at a time when funding for the arts - for music, for literature, for theater, for film, and the like - are most needed.
For it is through the arts that we may see ourselves as we truly are: a population in dire need of music in our lives; of art, of singing, of theater, of drama and cinema - and of representation through the pages of publications that cater to our needs and wants.
"Art for the masses." That's what they used to say. And it bears repeating.
Copyright © 2023 by Josmar F. Lopes
