Good news from the Metropolitan Opera, sort of.

In a moment of stark idiocy, the powers that be at the Metropolitan Opera decreed that Opera News, a magazine published by the Met and sent to its patrons and donors, would no longer run reviews of opera productions at the Met.

The problem, apparently, was that some reviews in Opera News were the wrong kind: critical not only of certain productions, but of the direction in which the Met seems to be going.

As news of the ban spread there was what in opera circles passes for a huge brouhaha. Angry letters were penned, protests were murmured and one understands that some china teacups were actually rattled.

But sanity returned, and Opera News will continue to run reviews, some of them perhaps harsh, of opera performances in Lincoln Center.

This is as it should be. In the first place, controversy is a healthy and necessary part of any arts organization. Fame, Sir, is a shuttlecock, Samuel Johnson noted.  If not struck at both ends of the court, it falls to the ground.

Arguing about the merits of a production, denouncing the hideous errors of the powers that be, inveighing against rising tides of mediocrity or modernism or whatever is part of what people like to do when they attend cultural events. The goal of the Met’s management can’t be to have everyone like everything the Met does; it must be to create an engaged community that cares passionately about the Metropolitan Opera. That will include people who love what the current leadership is doing and people who think it’s a terrible travesty of everything art should be about.

You can’t have an enterprise without fans; you won’t have fans unless people care enough about what you do to form their own strong opinions. And this won’t be happening unless some of the people who follow your enterprise are passionately engaged in criticizing you and the horse you rode in on.

This is true for the management of any cultural enterprise; it is much more true for a management that is trying to do innovative and controversial things. If you are staging what you believe are challenging and innovative productions, presumably you expected and indeed hoped that some people wouldn’t like them. A production that everyone spontaneously loves can hardly be called cutting edge.

To deliberately set out and challenge people’s assumptions, to radically restage operas like Traviata, Tosca and Rigoletto (three of the great warhorses of the operatic repertory which reliably attract some of the more traditionally minded opera goers) is to invite and indeed to beg for opposition. To be wounded and surprised by that opposition when it comes is not, perhaps, a sign of thinking things through. If you aren’t expecting some people to go apoplectic with rage, why set Rigoletto in Rat Pack-era Las Vegas (as the Met is doing next fall)?

Tonight I’m scheduled to attend what I’m told is a challenging and innovative production of Aida here in St. Petersburg, Russia. I go ready to have my assumptions challenged, my expectations thwarted, my horizons expanded. Maybe I’ll love it, maybe I’ll hate it — but if the people who staged it were only interested in pleasing elderly traditionalists, they presumably wouldn’t have gone for a minimalist production and would have crowded the stage with the usual horses and camels during the march scene.

I’m going to Aida with an open mind — and confident that whether I like or hate the production I am going to hear some sublime music. Productions like this will continue to appear, but in general, I think that the golden age of “épater-le-bourgeois” opera productions is behind us.

The biggest new thing in opera is the ready availability of the translated libretto; audiences all over the world now can follow the story line in real time as supertitles or, as in the Met’s excellent system, on the backs of the seats in the next row. For the first time, any audience anywhere can follow the drama line by line.

The difference is huge. In the very recent past, opera was a remote and forbidding cultural mountain. People studied in advance so they could “appreciate” an opera.  Most of the audience might have some general sense of the plot, but few knew exactly what was being said (sung) at every moment along the way.  Now, you can literally walk in off the street to an opera you’ve never seen before and have a more direct and fresher experience than all but the most experienced and expert opera goers had just a few years ago.

This opens the possibility to stage much more engaging performances and by enhancing the acting and staging — without gimmicks — to create a far more immediate and gripping theatrical experience than past generations of opera goers often knew. It changes the relationship of the audience and the art form far more profoundly than even the most inspired radical stagecraft can do.

The torrid response to HD live broadcasts suggests that under these new conditions grand opera has the chance to attract the kind of audience, young as well as old, that it thought was gone for good.

You don’t need to do a nude Traviata or place Tosca in the space shuttle to get the young people to come or even to make opera interesting to the old; you just need a production that highlights the drama and the pathos that is already there. This certainly doesn’t have to mean unthinking traditionalism in production and set design, but it means that the purpose of a production should focus on elucidating and highlighting the drama within — rather than trying to impart some kind of artificial excitement. As the acting and the dramatic quality of opera improves, something incidentally the Met has been very good at under Peter Gelb, the need for and the value of self-conscious staging declines.

The great cultural achievements from any time period involve addressing universal human themes by making the most of whatever the unique features and facilities of a given moment in time. In our time and in opera this means using the new intimacy and immediacy of operatic performance to return opera from the realm of the cultural museum to the world of living theater. With the huge wealth of talent now available (more promising young singers and musicians are getting better training and guidance than ever before in world history) companies like the Met now have an unparalleled and unprecedented opportunity to bring all the riches of this art form into full view.

On the whole, the Met does this extremely well and it is getting better every year. Last winter’s inspired production of Enchanted Isle demonstrated just how rich the possibilities are for returning opera to the dynamism of its great creative periods. As the art form and the art world gradually explore the new possibilities, there will be controversies and there will be missteps.

But there are also going to be some amazing breakthroughs and some glorious nights.

I’m glad that Opera News is free to keep reviewing the Met. The dogs are free to bark and sometimes I’ll be barking with them; meanwhile, the gloriously improbable and sublimely impractical caravan of opera moves on.

[Image: A full house, seen from the rear of the stage, at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1937; courtesy Wikipedia.]