If the dress fits...(Coda)

Could there be a more apt metaphor for Opera in 2004 than the "Little Black Dress"?

When you think about it, the sartorial conceit holds up: opera in the past year has ranged from svelte and sexy to austere and reserved; from uptight to too-revealing. Perhaps there's no better way to consider the existential predicament that the art form faced during this year than to think of it as that adaptable must-have item in every female's wardrobe.

Remember where it started? When Deborah Voigt was replaced by soprano Anne Schwanewilms in Royal Opera's Ariadne auf Naxos in June because of her inability to fit into an L.B.D. central to the production, a casting director's whimsy metastasized into a P.R. boon for Voigt. Her CD Obsessions and lauded Carnegie Hall recital debut met with nothing but approval this year from conservative-minded operagoers, who chose to judge her by the correct standards. But a dissenting few felt they had held their tongues about singers' weights for too long. Even the editorial page of The New York Times felt compelled to weigh in [sorry] on the growing girths of singers. One hopes that this great American soprano won't be remembered as the woman who couldn't fit in the little black dress.

In March, Karita Mattila made Met history with a completely different kind of exposure: a staggering performance of Salome that had little to do with the iota of onstage nudity that had been trumpeted on high to skeptical audiences. Despite actually stripping down to her birthday suit, Mattila's inspired--dare I say demented?--performance as Strauss's lascivious heroine was the type of unabashed portrayal that seemed to transcend conventional ideas of operatic decorum. Apparently nudity, just like everything else in opera, is a matter of taste.

The beleaguered English National Opera seemed to have thought that taste was beside the point in 2004. Can you blame them? When the company donned a new set of clothes to the tune of 41 million [pounds sterling] with the reopening of the London Coliseum in February, one critic found ENO's glistening neo-rococoed auditorium "so kitsch that to call it overblown would be understatement." But all the eye-catching filigree seemed only misspent energy when the company was forced to cancel its inaugural Nixon in China and later told reviewers not to bother coming to its unfit-for-critical-consumption Rhinegold. There's nothing worse than showing up to the party late, unprepared and sporting a gaudy outfit.

Not to dwell on the state of British opera, but wasn't this the year that Raymond Gubbay's Savoy Opera was to have let the English everyman into the opera house, eschewing the L.B.D. and tux for boot-cut jeans and Puma sneakers? When the company shut its doors on June 19, about a month after lukewarm reviews of its toned-down productions began rolling in, did the hope of a British "people's opera" go with it? Probably not, what with a free ENO Boheme and a Monday evening 10- [pounds sterling] seat offer from Covent Garden.

If the British opera scene seemed distended during the past year, American houses were not without an equivalent: 2004 was also the year in which Luciano Pavarotti bid farewell to the opera ...