Zinka Milanov? Who's he?.(Coda)

A few years ago, I strode into my studio at Juilliard, dressed to the nines. "Big night tonight, Mr. Blier?" asked my graduate student (a tenor). "Oh, yeah. I'm going to the Met. It's going to be emotional--Leonie Rysanek is doing her farewell." "Wow! Um, who's Leonie Rysanek?" (Short pause to get a grip on the situation.) "Oh! My. Well. You know, she's been a star at the Met for ..." (quick calculation) ... "thirty-seven years." (I get a brilliant idea.) "She's the one who came in to make her debut when Bing fired Callas!" "Bing fired Callas? Wow. Who's Bing?"

I decided to end the conversation before he asked me who Callas was. I admit I was thunderstruck: a piece of opera history that I took for granted was unknown to this sophisticated young singer studying in an institution situated just a stone's throw from the Metropolitan Opera. I have conversations of this kind every week, and I'm not only talking about events from the dim past. A young black soprano had never heard of Harolyn Blackwell; a third-year undergraduate working on Acis and Galatea was unaware that New York City Opera had just mounted a production of it that season; a master's-degree candidate had no idea that the Met broadcast its Saturday matinees live; another was ignorant of New York's main classical-music station, WQXR. Of course, this extends beyond the realm of music. Most of my students know about the fairly obscure French composer Reynaldo Hahn, but when I mention, "You know, he was Proust's boyfriend for a while," they look blank. They've never heard of Proust.

To know something about Hahn and nothing about Proust is bizarre, but it's not a federal offense, and after all, that's why I am there: to educate. Someone's got to do it. We live in the information age, and there is a mountain of information for all of us to absorb. I myself have huge gaps in knowledge. It took me months to get clear on the difference between Bob Kerrey and John Kerry. Still, I admit that my students have lapses that shock me.

Occasionally you run across a young singer who is obsessed with the history of opera and can tell you what year Leyla Gencer started her decline. But in general, young singers tend to know only about past artists in their own vocal category. Tenors and coloratura sopranos are particularly apt to identify with specific voices whose technical skills they emulate. A tenor I work with studies Gedda, Bjorling and Wunderlich but is usually hard-pressed to identify the other singers on their recordings. A young soprano astonished me when she brought in Cleopatra's first aria from Handel's Giulio Cesare, copying the showy ornaments Beverly Sills had sung in 1966, but had no knowledge of current trends in Handel style, or of superstar Baroque conductors such as Marc Minkowski, Harry Bicker and Rend Jacobs. Some great artists of the recent past seem to have cluded most of the young people I talk to: Margaret Price, Sena Jurinac and Renato Bruson are among names that tend to evoke embarrassed, blank stares. One young man eventually was able to identify the Russian icon Galina Vishnevskaya: "Isn't she the one mentioned in the lyric from ...