Go to That Opera Again; Singers Are Only Human

By ANNE MIDGETTE
Published: December 30, 2006, New York Times

The lesson was not about endurance. Opera lovers are generally glad to sit through as many performances of a favorite opera with a strong cast as they can get tickets to. Two measly performances of even a four-hour opera like “Don Carlo” is nothing compared with, say, four hearings of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” to which I happily subjected myself in my college years.

Rather, the lesson concerned performance. I had heard the mezzo-soprano Bruna Baglioni, who sang the role of Eboli in 1992 at the Prinzregententheater in Munich. She was, on the first night, little short of ghastly. I seem to remember a wobble, vocal unevenness, missed pitches and the kind of war-whoop effect peculiar to a certain type of putatively dramatic singer seeking to convey excitement without the technique to support it.

I thought she was awful. So when I returned two days later, I was rather dreading Eboli’s scenes.

But Ms. Baglioni was absolutely terrific. She marshaled her forces and gave a fantastic, powerful, exciting portrayal.

It is a truism in opera that you’re only as good as your last performance. Human variability is supposed to be one of the exciting things about live music, making it like a high-wire act. Will the tenor successfully negotiate the course? Or will he fall spectacularly, in plain sight of everyone, cracking on a high note (or, as Roberto Alagna infamously did nearly three weeks ago, storming off the stage)?

This mutability has given even superstar singers screaming cases of stage fright. (The soprano Rosa Ponselle used to walk to the Metropolitan Opera as slowly as possible, hoping she might be hit by a bus before she arrived at the theater and had to go onstage and live up to her reputation). And it’s what draws opera fans to attend multiple performances of the same production, to hear what variations may emerge from one night to another.

And still people are prone to snap judgments in a society rife with cultural experiences, where they are chronically challenged in finding time to process them. Another favorite saying in critical circles is that you don’t have to eat the whole egg to know it’s rotten. Yet this saying reveals a tacit, and incorrect, assumption: that live performance can be equated with a book or a film, and that a constantly changing art is comparable to something that is fixed and will be encountered in the same form by everyone who apprehends it.

After I began writing this article, a passionate debate on the same subject erupted in an online discussion forum: how can you presume to judge a singer after a single hearing? It’s a thorny question, particularly for those of us whose job it is to do just that. Had I been reviewing Ms. Baglioni, I would have written a blistering assessment of that first performance and never gone back to learn how wonderful she could be at her best.

Yet anyone who listens to music can cite performers who have varied wildly from one evening to another. I recently reviewed a gifted cellist who on the night I heard him happened to have trouble with his intonation. I’ve been assured that he has been brilliant on other nights.

Or take the tenor Salvatore Licitra, who has by now sung quite a few performances in New York, ranging from brilliant to so-so. Audiences here have had a chance to form their own opinions. Yet when he sang Canio in the Metropolitan Opera’s “Pagliacci” this fall, some of the problem spots in his voice seemed to have improved strikingly: the upper middle, once strained, was strong. He had been working on his approach. Is it still possible for him to change fans’ minds?

Here I might invoke another cliché: performers are only human. And I believe the most appropriate response to the recognition of artists’ human failings is not necessarily to hedge your bets by making allowances, speculating on outside factors that led to their being bad on a given night, or hypothesizing that they might improve with more practice. (It would be equally true, or equally fallacious, to qualify a description of an excellent performance with the observation that the artist could well buckle at the next show.)

Art matters. And if it doesn’t matter enough to provoke strong opinions in the people who passionately love it, it can hardly be expected to awaken responses in anybody else. Indeed, it is vital to the future of the field that music lovers of all kinds remain judgmental and passionately involved; that fans care enough to be upset when someone turns in a dog of a performance, or to defend a favorite performer against charges of inadequacy.

But the corollary is to remember that listeners too are human, and that we too can be wrong. The best acknowledgment of an artist’s human weaknesses, and the mutability of live performance, is to keep your ears open and your judgment suspended. For the lesson I learned from Ms. Baglioni is that if you love music, there is great joy in being proved wrong by an old pro who, versed in Italian style to her fingertips, may not always have it in her to be good but who, when the chips are down, can pull it all together and deliver a fantastic performance.