CANCELLATION BLUES.(Natalie Dessay cancels performances)(Brief Article)

For fans of the dazzling French coloratura Natalie Dessay, the Met's spring season got off to a devastating start with the announcement that the soprano had canceled her entire run of Zerbinettas in Ariadne auf Naxos. I had heard Dessay's Zerbinetta in 1997, when she was paired with the magnificent Ariadne of Deborah Voigt. It was an indelible evening -- two great artists firing on all cylinders. Voigt was the scheduled Ariadne this time around, too. How lucky can we get, I thought, to hear this combination twice in a lifetime?

Then, on Tuesday, April 3, word came that Dessay's doctor had put her on three months' vocal rest. Ever since I was very young, I've never taken it well when something prevented me from getting a chance to experience a live performance by one of my favorite stars. Once, in the mid-1970s, when I was trying to grow up in Oregon, Bette Davis came to Portland in her touring one-woman show. I begged my parents to take me, but they wouldn't. In the middle of winter, road conditions in Oregon are often treacherous, and my parents informed me that they weren't risking life, limb and Oldsmobile Omega to drive me all the way out to Portland to see a wizened old bag they'd never liked anyway spend two hours chain-smoking and taking questions from the audience about what it was like working with Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan.

So I did what I always did when I wanted to get my way: I went into my bedroom and banged my head on the floor. After about an hour, my mother intervened. "You're being ridiculous," she said, in her best straighten-up-and-fly-right tone. "Don't forget, young man, I grew up in the Depression. We never got taken to concerts. We never got taken any farther than the grocery store. Later, during the '50s, we had a little bit more. Once I was supposed to see Judy Garland in Portland, and I drove all the way out there, and wouldn't you know it, Judy Garland canceled, because even though she was very young, she was already nothing but a damned hophead. Anyway, I certainly didn't go home and beat my head on the floor about it. I was grateful to have a floor."

Such reasoning didn't do much good when I was a teenager. Now, that I'm working on becoming a mature adult, I still get terribly disappointed when a Dessay or a Bartoli bows out at the last minute. But at least I do understand that the urgency we feel to hear great performers perform -- and the ever-present threat that something may happen that will render that impossible -- is part of the musical and theatrical experience.

Some ...