VOICE OF AMERICA

DESPTE ITS COLORFUL PAST, SAYS A VETERAN CRITIC, THE STATE OF THE NATION'S OPERA IS GRIM

Author: By Susan Larson

Date: SUNDAY, December 21, 1997

Page: E1

Section: Books

It is the worst of times, according to veteran music critic Peter G. Davis. In his hefty book ``The American Opera Singer,'' he surveys the lives of our best lyric talent, and concludes that though they have battled valiantly, they have lost the war for America's hearts and minds. Opera has become slick, meaningless corporate art; the big singing personalities that once blazed forth from the stage have been supplanted by generic vocal techno-jocks faxing in generic performances in generic productions that offer us little in the way of danger or delight.

Check one.

Davis's colorful, industriously researched, and dauntingly comprehensive stack of singer biographies makes entertaining reading for the opera buff, but all those toothsome tales of famous feuds, diva bitchery, brawls, scandals, and love affairs are mere diversions from his doomsday thesis. Opera, he claims, ``was never fully absorbed into the country's cultural fabric and remade into a living art form that America could call its own.'' Our cultural inferiority complex and uneasy relationship with European art, says he, have kept native singers struggling to reinvent themselves and their careers out of thin air in every generation.

Europe invented opera. Europe provided the repertoire, the institutions, the impresarios, and most of the singers, for nearly 400 years. Americans, mostly female Americans, began to crash the party in the mid-19th century, inspired no doubt by Jenny Lind's triumphal (and profitable) tour of the nation under the aegis of showman P. T. Barnum. Ambitious young ladies flocked to Europe (chaperoned by their mothers, one hastens to add) to acquire proper vocal training and make their debuts.

Emblematic of the American can-do spirit is the life of our first international superstar, Minnie Hauk. Ballyhooed by the European press as a near-savage, mustang-riding prairie maiden who charmed whooping aboriginals by singing Mozart at them, the 17-year-old Hauk had them eating out of her hand at her 1869 Paris debut. Perhaps, Davis says, her singing charmed the French; perhaps it was her frontier exoticism, or her sheer nerve.

Critical comments were cool: ``All the songstresses . . . were at the Italian Opera last night, to hear Minnie Hauk. They observed her. They studied her. All of them slept well.'' Nevertheless, the plucky Hauk clawed her way to the top and stayed there, a truly self-made woman, and a famous interpreter of Carmen and of Massenet's ``Manon,'' which she premiered in New York.

Davis reminds us that Americans had few resources at home; voice teachers and opera companies were thin on the ground. Singers cobbled their craft together in vaudeville and Broadway shows and the movies, on radio and recordings, in churches and synagogues. The ambitious ones set their sights on that preeminent temple of culture, the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

The Met's first professional general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who reigned from 1908 to 1935, liked these rough-hewn singers. He made overnight stars out of Lawrence Tibbett, an erstwhile bit-part actor, and Rosa Ponselle, a vaudeville entertainer. Gatti also liked American composers; the public did not.

During World War II and just after, the Met roster was dominated by superb Americans like Astrid Varnay, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren, and Eleanor Steber -- ``if only by default,'' Davis tartly observes. In the '50s, though, that consummate Euro-snob Rudolph Bing told Americans they need not apply; young singers had to seek work across the ocean, serving as replacements for a generation of European talent that was dead, displaced, or diverted.

Davis also chronicles the plight of African-American opera singers, who were barred from classical music's mainstream, and from the all-powerful Met, until Marian Anderson's debut there in 1955. Unsung heroines like Elizabeth Greenfield, ``the Black Swan,'' and Sissieretta Jones, ``the Black Patti,'' found acceptance in Europe; the great Roland Hayes prudently embraced concert work. The lonely triumphs of these artists may have smoothed the way for the great African-American divas who followed -- Price, Arroyo, Bumbry, Norman, Battle -- but Davis keeps mum about black men's ongoing struggle for stardom.

Nowadays, Davis laments, opera singers' cultural role has become largely ``custodial.'' The repertoire is fixed in the past, he says, and ``the music world prizes conformity above all . . . as a result opera becomes increasingly homogenized.'' American singers, admired worldwide for their technical skills, are competent in all styles but have none of their own.

One begins to detect the faint aroma of the curmudgeon here. Although Davis is fully aware that ``old-timers will always complain that the vocal standards of their youth have deteriorated,'' he cannot resist delivering himself of a death-of-art rant in his closing chapters.

Davis prophesies that opera in its present incarnation will expire from sheer lack of interest. He dismisses the highly successful work of Philip Glass and John Adams as not singer-friendly, and complains that the new crop of singers all sound alike and have lost that certain something they had in the dear old days of yore.

Taking hearty swats at such ruthlessly hyped cultural icons as Beverly Sills (``self-regarding, parochial''), Jessye Norman (``pretentious and posturing''), and the Three Tenors phenomenon (``conducted with a cynical commercial cunning that made Barnum's efforts on behalf of Lind seem positively chaste''), Davis lavishes praise on the musical mavericks who refuse to shape themselves to the soul-crushing international-corporate mold. His honors list includes Eileen Farrell, Maria Callas, Teresa Stratas, Dawn Upshaw, Thomas Hampson (with reservations), Sanford Sylvan, David Daniels, and Lorraine Hunt.

Davis loves singers (most of them, anyhow). He writes movingly about their struggles; he revels in their gorgeously messy lives. But his thesis leaks a bit. Performers have always done whatever is necessary to get work; when the market changes, they adapt. The business of opera has changed because of mass marketing, jet travel, recordings, and stiff competition from other popular entertainments. If more Americans watch the Chicago Bulls than hear Deborah Voigt, we can't assume that she's a boring singer. The best American artists are as good as ever, and the mediocre ones are probably better than their counterparts in the past.

The author holds out the forlorn hope that a grass-roots lyric drama, written by and for Americans, will arise from European opera's ashes, inspiring a new generation of vibrant vocal talent to reinvent itself and perform it. Herein lies our salvation, he says; and which of us would not agree with that?