I say a little prayer for you

Family ties, artistic legacies, and finding the time.

I’m spending the morning catching up with the Kennedy Center Honors, filmed several weeks ago, aired for the rest of us last night. As happens every year, five great artistic careers are lauded by fellow artists for a gala crowd in Washington DC. The impact of these performances can vary a lot, and every now and then someone nails it - for example, Ann Wilson singing “Stairway to Heaven” for Led Zeppelin, or Aretha Franklin singing and playing “Natural Woman” for Carole King, two incredible moments that I regularly revisit on YouTube for sheer inspiration. Last night’s major diva performance didn’t quite reach that exalted level, but it was wonderful in a classic way.

A gorgeous, famous woman in an over-the-top statement gown took center stage and flawlessly delivered a well-known composition. Her healthy vocalism was perfectly tuned, rhythmically true, and personally communicative. And when she hit her climactic high note and hung on, the orchestra stopped behind her, and the crowd cheered. If you watched, you know I’m talking about actress, singer, Tony and Grammy award-winner Cynthia Erivo (she once portrayed Aretha!), singing “What’s It All About, Alfie?” to honor Dionne Warwick.

Five opera singers also participated last night in honor of Renée Fleming, one of the most accomplished and celebrated and recognizable opera singers of our generation. Four of them sang the big aria from the opera Rusalka, one of Renée’s signature pieces. The artists - Julia Bullock, Ailyn Perez, Angel Blue, and Nadine Sierra - enjoy significant international careers, each of them achieving gorgeous performances on the regular in the process of building their individual legacies. These four divas delivered the aria almost like a hymn, gazing with love up at the woman who had inspired them and stood as a model for their singing and their careers.

They didn’t hold the big high note.

In fact, the tributes to Renée were very anti-diva in a way, which is no shade to any of the divas who performed. I don’t mean they weren’t excellent - they were - only that they didn’t offer up a collection of star turns in tribute to a star. And, as much as Cynthia Erivo’s performance was a star turn, it was in so many ways very traditional - the gown, the unabashed warmth of the orchestration, and especially her very deliberate nod to the style and vibe of Warwick’s original. Sure, the opera quartet was singing in Czech an aria that had never been in a Michael Caine movie, but the relative popularity of the songs was the biggest difference between the two tributes. Both nodded skillfully and reverently up to the north stars sitting in the balcony. Both were optically elegant and aurally expert. Both, dare I say, displayed impressive knowledge about historical performance practice. They didn’t seem very far apart in many ways. Maybe just a little in style, but almost not at all in practice.

Opera seemed, more than ever before in this particular format, like a cousin of the other genres rather than the luxe aunt at whose grand house the nieces and nephews tried to behave.

Speaking of cousins, the royal-est family representative at the KC Honors was definitely Ms. Warwick, with all apologies to Barry Gibb (I love the BeeGees with all my heart and also Andy Gibb and will not be taking questions at this time; nobody gets too much heaven no more). Two of Dionne Warwick’s maternal cousins are Leontyne Price and Whitney Houston, a sentence I’ll never get tired of typing because OH and HOW and THANK YOU. Three profession-altering singers, all from the same family - of course that unprecedented level of talent would have a common thread. There may well be big differences in style between “O patria mia,” “Walk On By,” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” But is there a difference in the required gifts to execute those works - the vocal beauty, the physical and mental intelligence, the energy and drive, the personal charisma?

I’m asking because opera is dying. Haha, just kidding! I love saying dramatic stuff like that and so do my friends, several of whom contacted me and asked that I write about the KC Honors specifically from the standpoint of Opera Is Dying. What they wrote to me is nothing I don’t see on the socials on the regular, so by continuing I’m fairly certain I’m talking about opera practitioners and fans in a more general sense, not just a couple of pals.

There’s a growing sense of loss from a group of people trained to love parts of the past. One industry friend admitted that they had to google one of the opera singers from last night, and lamented that There Are No Divas Anymore: no one knows who we are, not even us! This thought probably has a special sting in the wake of everyone watching MAESTRO over the last few weeks. Within my own memory, classical music and opera used to take up much more cultural space - or at least it seemed to, in the limited world of three networks, PBS, and one Great American Conductor.

That’s kind of an easy one to talk about. Things change, Jo (non-opera readers, that was an inside opera joke, be warned of more such trouble ahead). Opera used to be big and now it’s smaller. Happens. Gregorian chant used to be big too, but some people still sing it. It can hurt to feel the culture flex away from something you love, but everything’s gonna be OK. Let’s get you back to bed, grandma.

But folks aren’t simply tenderly mourning the death of all things fancy and refined, like some mass Rosenkavalier experience (OK, big footnote: that’s a 1911 opera by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal in which the fear and grief at the global conflict barreling toward Vienna is dressed up as a sweet meditation on the passing of time and the brave decision not to sleep with teenagers anymore. Its leading soprano role was another of Renée Fleming’s calling cards, and I was lucky to hear her sing it a lot. I don’t mean to imply she shares any of my opinions about the piece).

The deepening crisis of our institutions, from academies to performing groups, is obvious, palpable, and frightening. People aren’t just posting and bitching, they’re working their hardest to try and figure it out. I think we’re all obsessed with how on earth to continue, much less thrive. Because opera is dying, at least the opera we’ve built our institutions around, and it’s proving very difficult to reimagine how we do it in a wholly different way.

Opera as it existed in MAESTRO’s era, with the famous one-percent standouts and the multimillion dollar budgets, the white supremacy and patriarchy baked into the systems and even into the works themselves (if you bristle at that, tell me - how wide a variety of voices are allowed to sing that Rusalka aria? And where’s the opera equivalent of eighty-year-old Gladys Knight coming out last night to brilliantly give us “I Say A Little Prayer?”) - that opera is dying. I don’t know how we afford it going forward, especially if the sheer number of people from whom unpaid labor is required for opera to run decide they’re not going to do it anymore. In my little corner of the industry, for example, pianists are starting to add up the hours for off-the-books or off-the-clock coachings required or pressured by soloists or management or faculty, along with the hours we spend learning to essentially improvise our music since simply playing it off the page isn’t an option (an issue for us and no other musician in the whole process), and figuring how just how much less we are making in a system that cannot run without us.

Let me dial back the soapboxing (it’s how I do) and ask different questions. What happens as more and more information is shared freely, continuing to erode the ways in which academies and training programs have traditionally functioned? Does it make sense for robustly endowed schools to essentially buy the most promising talents, only to release them into an environment that supports almost no performing institutions to the same level? What if we continue to let the mid-level performing opportunities in our culture decline and deteriorate, so that there’s nowhere for artists who don’t hit the big time (or don’t want to) to land?

It takes so much investment from within and without to nurture and grow a performing artist, and much of that early investment remains largely invisible. Renée Fleming’s parents were music teachers; Dionne Warwick sang with a family gospel group, the Drinkard Singers. Rarely does a good career, much less a great one, arise without musical participation from a young age; those early fundamental experiences are certainly far more important to long-term success than the finishing-school trainings in diction, deportment, and dress.

Laments are loud in many genres, not just opera, about audiences: where are they, why won’t they pay attention, why don’t they come back? We keep tweaking the product at the top end of our pyramids hoping to find the answer. Meanwhile, every family has less leisure time, fewer extra resources, and fewer community or amateur musical outlets than a generation ago. Our artistic soil is depleted and we, as a culture, keep depleting it, treating teachers with disdain, caregivers with impatience, and all citizens as limitless workhorses. It’s a testament to human talent, generosity, and ingenuity that, in spite of everything, art and music still happen, artists still bring what they have to us. Life still insists its way forward, even when we try and make it impossible.

I loved seeing an operatic tribute that thrust forward no single star, one that paid some attention to some diversity, one that centered messages of dreams, risk, hope, and community. I also loved seeing four powerful, luminous women sharing the stage in an atmosphere of equality and generosity. That was anti-old opera, very true to who Renée is, and important to see in such a public forum. And the artists made that happen through their creative arrangement of the aria, the art form didn’t provide it for them. That is anti-old opera as well.

Outside the opera bubble, the Kennedy Center audience seemed mostly politely bored by the music (although it might just have been the camera operators who didn’t show us enthusiastic fans). Maybe the KC Honors categories won’t always feature classical music, who knows? Think about it from this angle: there is no other musical art form rooted in nineteeth-century practice that has existed so successfully into the twenty-first. We’ve had a great run. I’m sure people will continue to be drawn to these older musics and traditions; the question isn’t their popularity. But if popularity can’t be the economic driver of the art form, what can be? Because Lord knows this art form takes a lot of dough.

Here’s my little prayer for us, for opera and classical music in general, as we cross over into 2024 and whatever battles and honors it may bring.

I hope we can step together bravely, away from the era of divas and maestros, of supporting the few at the expense of the many, and that we can courageously face together the inevitable destruction of some things we’ve held dear. I don’t know nearly enough to know what can survive and what can’t up in the spotlight. But art making, storytelling, singing - it’s what we humans do and what we crave. And in the service of that, learning, practicing, trying and failing - these things we might do, given time and space.

Let’s look at the invisible, unsung, local things we can do to restore environments in which exceptional artists may grow, along with all of the rest of us, all related in the same gorgeous family.

I see you, opera, slowly inching over toward your cousins, less and less interested in what sets you apart. Keep going.

Thanks to the four who know who you are. Thanks to all the singers from KCH2023 and all of the other musicians too. Happy New Year, y’all.