CHACUN A SON GOUT DOUTEUX.(opera)(Brief Article)

An attention to correctness -- academic, political, musical -- may be good for a culture. Even the opinions of the opera police may serve a useful purpose.

Those who instruct us in musicianship and stagecraft certainly have the courage (and then some) of their convictions. They know the correct use of vibrato, glottal attack and chest voice. Since they have trained eyes as well as ears, they also pronounce on the correct text, design and direction of productions. So far, so good, I suppose -- but some of them do not stop there. They insist, when we demur, that we know nothing. Beckmesser's goons, they could be called, and here I draw the line.

I have a fondness for much of what the operascenti revile. I like, among other things, creamy portamento in Mozart and Donizetti, the translations of Ruth and Thomas Martin, and, yes, the silly cabalettas that work orchestras into a lather and send the singers reeling into the wings.

Now, the operascenti -- and even some composers who wrote cabalettas -- seem embarrassed by them. Verdi knew what he was doing, though, when he ordered "Di quella pira" sung twice, and when he let a tenor add the high C to the cabaletta. ("Far be it from me," the composer noted, "to deny the public what it wants.") Last summer, in the attic of Bart's CD Cellar and Record Shop, an enormous second-hand vinyl store in Boulder, Colorado, I found on an LP -- one LP -- twenty-two versions of "Di quella pira," recorded by twenty-two tenors, from the era of Tamagno to early long-play. Few versions were "correct," and -- not coincidentally most constitute, for me, a slice of Nirvana.

Pace the operascenti, I like best the raw-boned singers of "Di quella pira" and other arias, the singers who go for broke. They may scoop and sob, or narrow the range between piano and forte, or pay for their passion with occasionally brittle high notes. They can, however, exert a fatal -- and sublime -- attraction. In one long-ago production of Rigoletto, the hunchback hurled invective -- and furniture -- with such wild abandon that spectators made the baritone re-dress the set for an encore. Bravo! I say -- and not only because such spur-of-the-moment, out-of-date stage business enrages the goons.

Verdi was right (again) when he told Piave that Le Roi s'Amuse was "the best plot and perhaps the best play of modern times." Today, absent the music, Le Roi seems fusty. But most opera plots of an earlier age defied logic and beggared description, and some, forming a ...