"Opera criticism today: little to do with singing, not much to do with music," proclaims a headline in the latest issue of The Gramophone, the house magazine of CD (and often seedy) anoraks everywhere.
It introduces an article by the critic John Steane, in which he presents the results of an analysis of recent opera reviews in the national press and the amount of space they devoted to the various aspects of each production. He details two of his investigations, on the Covent Garden Don Giovanni and the Opera North Albert Herring, carefully tabulating paper by paper the length of each review, and the number of words referring to the drama, to the singers, and to singing.
Apart from the gob-smacking banality of the whole exercise (the thought of reading so many reviews is one thing, but actually sitting down and counting every word?) the inferences Steane draws seem to me utterly misplaced. His main conclusion is that "just as the singing is apparently of less interest [to critics] than the acting, so the scenario and libretto now matter less than the music".
Behind all of this seems to be a conspiracy theory - that directors' opera is all that matters now, and that such a hegemony is being supported by apparatchik critics, who concentrate on the visual and dramatic aspects of a production at the expense of the poor, put-upon and ignored singers.
I think I might put my hands up to that one, plead guilty, but point out not only that opera production is a far more sophisticated and downright interesting aspect of the business now than it has ever been before, but also that an opera reviewer in the national press today surely has a different function from what he or she had even half a century ago.
In those days the amount of opera available on disc was relatively limited; there were complete recordings of most (if not quite all) of the standard repertory works, but nothing like the multiplicity of choice that is offered to devotees today. Avid opera-lovers now can hear a dozen different complete Don Giovannis without leaving their sitting rooms, and if they go to live opera, it must offer something more than just the unpredictability of the human voice in performance, thrilling though that can sometimes be.
That is surely a significant part of the reason that production values in opera have risen so sharply in the past 20 or 30 years. Opera singers need to be able to act now as well as sing, and the whole presentation must be credible as drama as well as a musical performance. That's not really a change in emphasis, more a recognition that opera is a hybrid art form.
It's why the first great operas by Monteverdi have a symbiotic relationship between the text and the music, why Da Ponte's librettos for Mozart are masterpieces in their own right, and why Wagner was obsessed with the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk , the all-embracing art work in which every element - music, words, design, drama - would be fused into an indissoluble unity.
Opera reviews should reflect that new awareness. Readers thinking of investing in a couple of tickets for Don Giovanni (at a cost that could buy them at least two complete recordings of the work, and more like a dozen if they were thinking of sitting in the stalls at the Royal Opera House) are not going to be convinced by a review that merely details how well the Leporello sings the Catalogue Aria, or whether the Elvira can get round Mi Tradi - the kind of "words about singing" that Steane misses so much.
They will want to know whether the show makes sense as a whole, whether the production tells them anything about the work they did not suspect before, and whether the singers involved create characters that are dramatically and emotionally credible.
They need to know whether they are getting a complete package, otherwise they might just as well stay at home and listen to the hi-fi.
