Opera is at technological crossroads

When "Doctor Atomic," the opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project by the dynamic American composer John Adams, had its premiere in October at the San Francisco Opera, the reaction was all over the place.

But whatever one's take on the opera (I found it, overall, a courageous and haunting work), surprisingly little was made of one of the production's most unorthodox attributes: The sizable orchestra had 30 microphones positioned among the players, and the singers wore body mikes.

Not that long ago, the use of microphones in a major opera house would have provoked critics and buffs to denounce the perpetrators with blood-chilling Verdian curses of "Muori! Muori!"

A love of natural sound, the unaided human voice and traditional instruments have, after all, been hallmarks of classical music and opera. But electronic amplification has been insinuating itself into the opera house and the concert hall, much as it did on Broadway starting in the early 1960s. To the dismay of traditionalists, the public, by and large, doesn't seem to mind.

Is it the beginning of the end? The answer requires some historical context.

All art forms change over time. And the technology of amplification is more sophisticated than ever. As a composer who grew up in the age of rock and has immersed himself in electronic music, Adams, a modern master of orchestration, a digital-age Berlioz, has every right to incorporate all such resources into his works. Obviously, using body microphones for "Doctor Atomic" is not the same as using them for "Don Giovanni."

Still, there's no denying it: In the last few years, the increasing embrace of amplification has brought classical music to a technological crossroads.

In 1999, the New York City Opera, long frustrated with the dry acoustics of the New York State Theater, introduced what it called a sound-enhancement system. The decision provoked cries of protest from purists. Would the technique of singing as it had been taught for nearly 400 years continue if the practical reason for it began to disappear? But audiences were compliant.

Today, City Opera rarely receives complaints from patrons about its sound-enhancement system. And critics have mostly stopped mentioning it.

Amplification systems have popped up everywhere in recent years. The Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music has one, as does the Houston Grand Opera. The Boston Lyric Opera, which performs in the historic Shubert Theater, has "recently and happily experimented with sound enhancement," said Stephen Lord, the company's music director, to rectify acoustical deficiencies in certain areas of the theater.

This autumn, just a week after the premiere of "Doctor Atomic," the Caramoor Center in upstate New York presented a production of Bernstein's short opera "Trouble in Tahiti" in the commodious, wood- paneled music room of the House Museum. The cast includes a trio of amplified singers who evoke radio jingles of the 1950s. But Michael Barrett, Caramoor's artistic director, found that the singers in the main roles of Sam and Dinah, a quarreling suburban couple, were being overpowered by the band. In the old days you would fix this by working on balances.

Barrett simply hooked up body microphones to the two vocalists.

Though technological fixes like that may be convenient, they come at a high cost. The mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, who has watched with distress as amplification systems have been installed even in European concert halls and opera houses, calls sound enhancement the "kiss of death for good singing."

The spread of amplification, even in classical music, is inseparable, I fear, from another growing problem in America: hearing impairment.

According to a Newsweek cover story last summer by David Noonan, Americans who exposed themselves to blasting rock bands are now suffering the consequences. More than 28 million Americans, many in this age group, have a significant degree of hearing loss, and the number is expected to swell to 78 million by 2030.

Noonan reported that more than five million American children and teenagers between 6 and 19 have some hearing damage from amplified music and the general noise they encounter every day, a good deal of it funneled directly into their ears. "If they don't take steps to protect their hearing," he wrote, "the iPod generation faces the same fate as the Woodstock generation. Or worse."

Despite the proliferation of microphones, most lovers of classical music still cherish the experience of hearing voices and instruments without any electronic boosting, thank you. And most opera companies that have installed sound systems in their houses have drawn the line at hooking singers up to body microphones.

For clues as to how amplification can affect an art form, opera could look to the American musical. The musical was a word-driven art form, which is why stylish singers with small voices, like Fred Astaire, thrived on Broadway.

Look at reviews of Astaire in Gershwin and Porter shows and you never read that he could not be heard. Why? Because composers wrote songs suited to his style of delivery and kept orchestrations light.

More than that, audiences knew that when hearing a glorious belter like Ethel Merman you could sit back and bask in her singing, but when hearing Astaire you had to lean forward and pay attention.

In 1949, Mary Martin, a queen of Broadway, joined Ezio Pinza, the great operatic bass, in Rogers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific." Though they came from different worlds, vocally they were not that far apart. They essentially used the same techniques to project their voices. But when amplification took hold on Broadway, audiences inevitably grew less alert, more passive. It began changing every element of the musical, from the lyrics (which grew less subtle and intricate), to the subject matter and musical styles (the bigger, the plusher, the schlockier, the better).

Musicals became less literate and more obvious, and stars like John Raitt, who had a burnished baritone voice of operatic dimensions, became marginalized.

The nadir came in the 1980s with melodramatic stage spectacles like "Phantom of the Opera" and "Miss Saigon." Whatever one thought of the music in those shows, no one paid much attention to the sappy lyrics.

Though there are still plenty of schlocky musicals on Broadway, in recent years the literate musical has been making a comeback works like "Falsettos," "Urinetown" and "Caroline, or Change."

Still, it is notable that several of those shows and others like them played in smaller theaters that were more conducive to works where words really matter.

"The Producers" is a verbally dexterous work that is still going strong at a large theater, the St. James. So the Broadway musical would seem to have made peace with amplification. But the peace treaty has involved a trade-off.

On the upside it has enabled actors with modest voices, like Matthew Broderick, to evolve into appealing musical theater performers. On the downside, we will never again experience the rapt atmosphere of Broadway theaters in the days when musicals relied on natural vocal talents and nurtured attentive audiences.

To put the best spin on things: The musical has creatively adapted to amplification. But in doing so the art form has diminished, or at least become something different.

What might the history of the musical imply for opera? There is no doubting the right of contemporary classical music, including new opera, to use electronic resources. I sometimes wish that there could be at least two branches of opera as the genre continues to develop.

The traditional branch would remain an unamplified art form and cultivate singers with traditional techniques. But there would also be an experimental branch where works embraced all manner of electronic and digital resources and were presented in special venues. It probably won't work out that way. Breaking down barriers and assimilating different traditions is the vogue right now.

(C) 2005 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved