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      Jazz and Opera Come Together in ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’

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      Two critics discuss Terence Blanchard’s “Fire,” the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer.“Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season last week, was a milestone: the company’s first work by a Black composer. The music, by Terence Blanchard —  a jazz trumpeter also known for his scores for Spike Lee films — has earned praise from both classical and jazz critics.The New York Times’s chief classical critic Anthony Tommasini described “a compositional voice dominated by lushly chromatic and modal harmonic writing, spiked with jagged rhythms and tart dissonance.” The jazz writer Nate Chinen wrote for NPR that “the smooth deployment of extended jazz harmony, often in breathing, fleeting passages, marks the piece as modern — as does the work of a rhythm section nestled within the orchestra.”The Times sent two more critics to the second performance on Friday. Seth Colter Walls, based on the classical desk, and Giovanni Russonello, who specializes in jazz, have both covered figures who cross with ease between concert halls and jazz clubs. But “Fire,” based on a 2014 memoir by the Times columnist Charles M. Blow, was their first night at the opera together, the spur to an extended discussion.SETH COLTER WALLS As we walked into the Met, you described yourself as an opera neophyte. But as Duke Ellington said, good music is good music. And from our intermission chats, I know we agree that this was a richly enjoyable work. How do you place it within Blanchard’s career?GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO We knew going in that Blanchard’s body of work is one of the broadest and most imposing of any living jazz musician. But I was struck by how many aspects of his past output seemed to come together in “Fire.” He’s one of the rare jazz composers who can load up a piece with rich harmony and real rhythmic pleasure, without feeling the need to tie things up neatly or deliver a clean payoff. That style fed perfectly into the emotional ambivalence that gives this opera its power.WALLS I find that quality to be one of the weapons he offers Spike Lee, who in his films tends to delight in keeping alive ambiguous tension. Blanchard can suture small wings of hope to what otherwise seems a rock of despair, and keep you wondering whether the whole assemblage will rise or fall.Will Liverman, left, and Angel Blue star in “Fire” at the Met.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRUSSONELLO From the opening scene of “Fire,” his diverse palette was put in the service of narrative nuance. As Charles, the main character, speeds down the highway, holding a pistol and a fatal decision in his hands, a distant swing feel wafted up from the pit, propelled by the bassist Matt Brewer and the drummer Jeff Watts, who’s known in jazz circles as Tain. It had the same restless, pushing-forward feeling as many of Blanchard’s small-group jazz compositions. But a drape of violins also hung above, moving in unison with the baritone Will Liverman’s vocal lines — and calling to mind some of those sweeping film scores.WALLS True, though Liverman also sounded a bit swamped by some of that opening brass-and-percussion-heavy writing. But soon after, the subtlety of his singing impressed me. Flintier aspects of his tone dominated during the first act, but then fell away as the night wore on. Even by the time of the “golden buttons” melody in the first act, I think we both were moved by the warmth in his voice.RUSSONELLO And by the gravitas of his duet on that melody with the soprano Angel Blue, who plays three characters: the half-menacing Destiny; the all-too-sympathetic Loneliness; and Greta, with whom he falls in love.Which leads me to another successful element of “Fire” that reflects Blanchard’s roots in the Black musical tradition: the interplay between vocalists, in duets and ensembles. Some of the most rousing moments were not solos but shared performances: When Charles’s mother, Billie (Latonia Moore), sings about her frustrated dreams early in the opera, the chorus is behind her describing the tough conditions of their town, giving her struggles texture and weight. Charles’s brothers’s recurring taunt — “Charles baby, youngest of five” — becomes one of the opera’s most memorable refrains.From left, Blue, Walter Russell III, Latonia Moore and Liverman. One of the opera’s strengths is in the interplay between vocalists in duets and ensembles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWALLS Following Billie to her job at the meat-preparation plant also turns into a fine group number. And, crucially, there are laugh lines in these and other scenes.RUSSONELLO Group dance performances stood out, too. Act II’s opening ballet sequence and the step-team number in Act III were probably the clearest examples of African diasporic tradition meeting opera convention; in both moments, something sparked.Blanchard has said that, like his first opera, “Champion” (2013), “Fire” is an “opera in jazz.” But like any postmodernist, his understanding of what constitutes jazz is quite open. It can mean wildly extended harmony, blues inflections, odd-metered cadences, unconventional instrumental pairings. With “Fire,” the blueprint was classic Italian opera, but the furniture was these other elements. And magnetic rhythm was a constant throughout.WALLS The cast clearly loved sliding bluesy figurations between passages delivered with operatic vibrato.At the start of Act III, when Charles pledges the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, the step routine drew the night’s longest and most vigorous applause.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRUSSONELLO Blanchard has such a knack for counterintuition: A consequential scene at a blues club begins with the orchestra playing some straightforward blues in the background, but when the bandleader character (Spinner, Charles’s scalawag father, played by Chauncey Packer) gets onstage, he sings something more operatic and complex.WALLS I loved that head-fake from Blanchard. (I also wanted to attend a full set of Spinner’s at that club.)RUSSONELLO Spinner’s “Lord Love the Sinner” is a rapscallion anthem that harks back to Sportin’ Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” in “Porgy and Bess.” Which brings up the question of how “Fire” relates to other works in the American canon that toe the line between blues, jazz and opera — including works by William Grant Still (a favorite composer of yours, Seth) or Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. (What powerful work might they have made with a Met commission?) Were there any major touchstones that jumped out as we took in “Fire”?WALLS Blanchard sounds like Blanchard, which is key. He’s coming out of a folk tradition, like Still. He’s adding ringers from his jazz career to the opera pit, like Anthony Davis and Leroy Jenkins have done. But he’s his own composer. Some piano-led moments made me think of what Jelly Roll Morton, known to riff on Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” would have done if given a chance to let his New Orleans aesthetic shine forth from the Met stage.Blanchard, holding up his finger, rehearses the jazz ensemble that is embedded in the “Fire” orchestra.Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesRUSSONELLO It bears noting that New Orleans — Blanchard’s hometown, too — has its own rich (though badly forgotten) history of Black opera. The first opera in the United States was staged there, and in the years between Reconstruction and Jim Crow a number of opera houses featured casts of color. Blanchard’s father, an amateur opera singer, was an inheritor of that tradition; this, in turn, became part of his son’s musical DNA.WALLS That second-act dream-ballet music — perfect for the languid, suggestive dancing that it was paired with — was but one passage suggesting Blanchard’s love for the standard repertory. Yet we haven’t had anything quite like “Fire.” Leonard Bernstein looked at intergenerational trauma amid a distinctly American sound world in “A Quiet Place” — and while I love it, it’s also a notorious problem piece. And “Porgy and Bess” has never really worked as an evening of theater for me. (Great tunes, though.)So my response to this big-budget production was: Finally! Real classical music resources are being used here, for a real exploration of American musical culture. I feel like there’s a huge potential audience for this material — even for people who may not think of themselves as operagoers. (“Fire” will be simulcast to movie theaters on Oct. 23 as part of the Met’s Live in HD program.)RUSSONELLO At the start of Act III, when Charles pledges the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, the step routine drew the night’s longest and most vigorous applause. It tapped into a dance tradition that’s basically unrelated to opera, but was accorded a different kind of power appearing at the Met.WALLS One of the virtues of Kasi Lemmons’s libretto — and what Blanchard does with it — is that we get these sequences that are at are both encomiums to bulwarks of Black life and critiques. Charles’s extended family, his church and his fraternity each play a part in keeping him from telling the truth about being molested by his cousin. The drama and the music keep braiding together pride and frustration, in a way that makes the opera’s conclusion and Charles’s self-acceptance feel truly momentous. More

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      Carlisle Floyd: Artists Share Memories of a Composer

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      The writer of “Susannah” and other operas is remembered by a tenor, a conductor and an impresario who worked closely with him.The career of the American composer Carlisle Floyd, who died on Thursday at 95, spanned nearly 70 years and the heydays of a host of musical styles. But through them all, Floyd stayed stubbornly true to himself and his vision: creating operas with clear, strong narratives — often about intolerance and social outcasts — and scores grounded in tonality.While some academics and critics who favored a thornier modernism found Floyd’s works simplistic, artists and audiences embraced his compelling characters and passionate music.Here are edited excerpts from interviews about him with the tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, famed as Lennie in Floyd’s adaptation of “Of Mice and Men”; the conductor Patrick Summers, a frequent collaborator and Houston Grand Opera’s music director since 1998; and David Gockley, who as general director of the Houston company from 1972 to 2005 presented six of Floyd’s works.Anthony Dean Griffey, left, as Lennie, one of his signature roles, and Elizabeth Futral as Curley’s Wife in “Of Mice and Men” at Houston Grand Opera in 2002.George Hixson/Houston Grand OperaAnthony Dean GriffeyWhen I started singing, I had a close connection to outsider characters, because I felt a bit like an outsider when I was growing up in North Carolina. I’m a large guy, and that got pointed out.In 1997, Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York contacted the Metropolitan Opera, where I was in the young artists program, and said they were auditioning for Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.” I had worked every summer with special needs children and adults, so I really knew the character. The audition was the next day, so I learned the “mice aria” overnight. And I was cast, and my life changed forever. Carlisle’s music gave me a place in the opera world that I didn’t think I could have.After Glimmerglass, it took off and went to New York City Opera, and then I sang it at one opera house after another. I was concerned about being typecast, and maybe I was, but I didn’t mind that. I’d rather at the end of my career and life be known for a role that really made a difference, rather than 120 roles and no one knew what I did.I felt that Carlisle captured Lennie perfectly. The part is quite rangy, and for me the challenge was keeping his innocence while singing a very wide range in terms of the tessitura. Lennie has different emotions, very sporadically. He can turn on a dime. He’s lyrical when he dreams about his future with George and the rabbits and chickens, but his outbursts are dramatic and heavy. I’ve always thought of myself as an actor who sings and a singer who acts. So I made sounds that were not always beautiful tones, but they were what Lennie would have done.Carlisle was hands-off. I’ve done a lot of new music and sometimes composers have very specific ideas and get in the way of your interpretation. But he gave me the license to almost recreate the role. He was always complimentary, kind and generous. And always thanked me. I felt like I should be the one to thank him. I grew up very poor, and being able to buy my mother a house she could call her own — that was like Lennie’s dream. I call my mom’s house The House That Lennie Built.The conductor Patrick Summers, left, Houston Grand Opera’s music director, and Floyd during rehearsals for “Cold Sassy Tree” in 2000.George Hixson/Houston Grand OperaPatrick SummersWhen we did “Of Mice and Men” at the Bregenz Festival in Austria, I was the one — not Carlisle — worried that his musical idiom might not totally translate into the land of Schubert and Strauss and European modernism. He had none of those worries. And the Austrian audiences reacted so well to that opera because it’s great. Audiences don’t care about theory; the idea that musical language has to be somehow dumbed down to be accessible is very much a construct of criticism and academia. And though he was an academician himself his whole life, Carlisle never wrote in that world. He stuck to his guns, and his guns just happened to be in G minor. The subject of a great many of his operas is hypocrisy, and the effect of a crowd on an individual. That was the dominant theme of his life: how to be true to yourself.He never wrote outside his own voice. I had so many conversations with him about various composers — Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter and John Adams — whom Carlisle loved. But it just wasn’t how he wrote. Most of his subjects were American, but not all. He did a gorgeous “Wuthering Heights,” and his last opera, “Prince of Players,” was British-set. But largely he was attracted to American stories, and writing in the American vernacular was as natural to him as anything, though he didn’t like the term “folk opera,” which he was branded with because of “Susannah.” And that was kind of an anomaly; it’s the only really folkish work that he wrote, even with the Americana, Copland feel in “Of Mice and Men.” In general he assimilated all kinds of traditions and made them his own. That’s what this country does.He thought in terms of big orchestras; he was very much of that era. And the psychological world of his operas is in the orchestra. But he was a story person, a narrative person. If the story required a great and memorable tune, he provided it. If the story needed very thorny dissonance, he provided that. He was a servant of the narrative.Carlisle absolutely loved what he did. He loved going to performances; he loved his fellow composers; he loved their success. This was a great, grand gentleman. He didn’t play all those games that so many people play. And I think one hears that honesty and that geniality in his music.David Gockley, right, the general director of Houston Grand Opera from 1972 to 2005, presented six operas by Floyd, left. They are shown in 1991, during preparations for “The Passion of Jonathan Wade.”Ava Jean Mears/Houston Grand OperaDavid GockleyIn the late 1960s, my wife at the time, a soprano named Patricia Wise, had sheet music for the two arias from “Susannah.” I was really impressed: Here was modern opera that was beautiful, touching and — I hate to say it — listenable.Soon after, I got the job in Houston, and just after I did I went to Cincinnati Opera to hear “Of Mice and Men,” which is when I first met Carlisle. Having heard that opera, I told him that during my first season as general director I was going to program it in Houston, and I offered to commission a work that turned out to be “Bilby’s Doll,” the start of a series of new operas he did there. He was also offered a position at the University of Houston, so he and his wife, Kay, made the move. Our relationship began to flower, and we became tennis buddies. Looking back, he is — was — my best friend.I left the subject of his operas to him, but virtually all of his ideas were brought to life. My favorites, I think, are “Susannah,” “Of Mice and Men” and, I would say, “Cold Sassy Tree.” He brought that book to me as an idea; I read it and I thought it was charming and folksy, bringing forth characters that were familiar from his previous works but taking them further. It came out of a period in his life when he was suffering from serious depression. He always had his demons, but he said my encouragement of “Cold Sassy Tree” brought him through a really terrible period, and got him to the other side. Obviously I was glad to have played that part.We very seldom were at odds. I felt that my job was to facilitate getting the operas from his head to the stage, and getting co-producers involved. That meant that the works would get automatic revivals in different cities. It was a great formula.He and I developed the Houston Grand Opera Studio in the late ’70s because both of us were very interested in providing opportunities for young artists. In the ’50s, rising Americans had to go to Europe, so this was an alternative. We wanted to use the opportunity of Carlisle’s appointment at the University of Houston to bring the university into partnership with us. And they put forward a good deal of money over a period of time to provide fellowships to engage faculty, and we had studio productions that were given on the campus.I think his legacy is probably six significant works that are worthy of the repertoire. I think that if you talk to someone like Jake Heggie, there’s a whole generation of composers who look to Carlisle like a godfather. He and his work gave them the confidence to have their own voices and to have those voices be loved by contemporary audiences. More

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      Review: In ‘Upload,’ Do Blockchains Dream of Electric Lizards?

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      Michel van der Aa’s new opera weaves technology into a traditional form with masterly restraint for a sci-fi spin on a fundamentally human tale.AMSTERDAM — “I’m here, that’s for sure!” the digital facsimile of a father tells his daughter early in Michel van der Aa’s new opera, “Upload.”What exactly it means to be “here” — particularly when someone exists only as consciousness stored on blockchain data spread across thousands of servers — is up for debate, and guides the drama in “Upload,” a masterly weaving of music, film and motion-capture technology that opened at the Dutch National Opera here on Friday, ahead of a run at the Park Avenue Armory in New York next spring.But that sci-fi premise is little more than a veneer. Not for nothing did Mary Shelley give “Frankenstein” the subtitle “The Modern Prometheus”; the finest genre fiction has always examined humanity through allegory. So, too, does van der Aa’s spare yet richly complicated work, which is preoccupied less with futuristic speculation than timeless matters of the heart and mind, whether corporeal or in the cloud.Which is not to say that van der Aa is uninterested in the bleeding edge. Rather, for decades, and with mixed success, he has been at the fore of marrying traditional forms with new media — inventing software and putting his film degree to regular use — through, for example, 3-D technology in the opera “Sunken Garden” and virtual reality in the poetic installation “Eight.”The challenge, always, is in making sure the shiny new thing doesn’t overtake the music, but instead is gracefully incorporated into a balanced whole. Van der Aa achieved something like that in “Eight,” complementing the immersion of VR with a score of poplike directness. And “Upload” is the work of an artist in absolute command of his toolkit, employing a restraint that makes for smooth shifts between acoustic and electric, live performance and film, without any one thing drawing attention to itself throughout the opera’s brisk 80 minutes.Most important, van der Aa — who not only composed “Upload,” but also wrote the libretto, staged it and directed a film version streaming on medici.tv — tightly binds technology and dramaturgy. No deployment of theatrical magic is extraneous. Its transparent presence even enhances the drama, such as when the Father, at one end of the stage, sings into motion-capture cameras while the Daughter interacts with his digital avatar mere feet away in a paradox of proximity and unbridgeable distance.That father, the libretto slowly reveals, recently lost his wife. In a state of unbearable grief, made worse by thoughts of his own mortality and what it would mean for their adult daughter, he secretly undergoes a procedure to upload his consciousness — and in the process end his physical existence. It’s technology so new that, despite its thorny implications, has yet to be regulated. He then returns to his daughter, granted virtual immortality but unable to, say, give her a hug on the way in.We’ve seen this before, in fact and fiction — real-life chatbots imitating departed love ones or, on “Black Mirror,” given android form. “Years and Years,” Russell T Davies’s mini-series of our near future, ends with a terminally ill woman becoming the first person to live on as an uploaded consciousness that can speak through Alexa-like devices. If the technology isn’t inevitable, at least the aspiration to it is. As a scientist says in “Upload”: “Every piece of information in the world has been copied and backed up. Except the human mind. It’s the last analog device in the digital world. Until now.”Van der Aa’s take on this subject is not a cautionary tale — despite his gentle satirizing of the hubris of Silicon Valley culture in his treatment of the upload company’s chief executive (Ashley Zukerman of “Succession”) — but a focused study of an emerging technology and the questions it raises about what constitutes life, through one family’s story.As if to keep the piece rooted in its humanity, van der Aa begins with only a voice in the dark: the Daughter, sung by the soprano Julia Bullock with subtle longing as she lists bodily word associations like “expand — lungs,” “support — bones” and “pull — muscle.” The electronics track slyly enters, atmospheric, and she is joined by the Father (the baritone Roderick Williams, whose warm tone and charisma create a wellspring of sympathy for his character).The Father ends that poetic list with “weight — less,” which cues skittering sounds of the lively and nimble players of Ensemble Musikfabrik, under the assured baton of Otto Tausk. Van der Aa’s score here provides a tense transition, one of many to come, including a glitchy hybrid of acoustic and electronic music that introduces the first filmed sequence, establishing a parallel track to the Father and Daughter’s interactions.These scenes, spoken and performed by actors (among them Katja Herbers of “Westworld” and “Evil”), take place starting three months earlier, at the bucolic facility where uploads take place. They at first seem to tell more than show, explaining the procedure by way of a tour for prospective clients. But in also tracing the Father’s experience there, a complex portrait of him emerges as he undergoes the creation of a so-called Mindfile based on interviews with friends and family — pointedly, not the Daughter. He also develops a Memory Anchor, a crucial tool that keeps a digital brain from, as it’s described, “drifting off into open space like an astronaut”; his is of a place he used to visit with his parents as a child, where birds chirped as he tried to catch lizards along a stone wall that was hot to the touch in the summer sun.Williams in the opera, whose staging employs transparent, moving screens to smoothly incorporate live action, film and motion capture technology.Marco Borggreve/Dutch National OperaOccasionally, the spoken films overlap with live performance. Williams, in one moment, is shown singing words like “sheep” and “ship” into a machine to teach it the contours of his speech. But otherwise the singing is limited to the Father and Daughter’s scenes together; van der Aa’s musical writing for their exchanges follows the natural rhythms of the English language. But in their monologues, melodies take flight: long, lyrical lines — lushly delivered by Bullock with rending emotion — that are amplified, complicated and contradicted by orchestral undercurrents.When briefly in a “paused state,” the Father realizes that something failed in the upload; it should have suppressed the trauma of his wife’s death but didn’t, dooming him to grieve her for eternity. He wants to be terminated, an irreversible action that can only be carried out by his daughter.If that dilemma doesn’t feel entirely compelling or earned, it’s because the Daughter is never properly developed. She is introduced as curious about her father’s new form, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone feeling more than shock or anger in her place. Instead, she is shown only in various states of mourning. (And this might be too New York-centric a fixation, but how on earth can this young woman afford to live in an airy TriBeCa penthouse with a garden terrace?)Maybe it’s for the best, then, that we never see her decision. The parallel stories arrive at parallel endings: the past, the night before the Father’s upload, and the present, the night before his likely termination. In a stunning coup de théâtre, a white curtain springs out, suspended over the audience. On it are the Father and Daughter projected in split screen. Although at opposite ends of the stage, even different planes of existence, they are presented as if lying head-to-head.As they drift into sleep, we are left with the Father’s Memory Anchor, a dream rendered digitally — the green of the earth too green, the blue of the sky too blue. Everything we’ve heard about is there: the stone, hot to the touch, a lizard at rest. But the image occasionally flickers, defaulting to the 3-D line drawings of drafting software, until the resolution degrades into soft fields of color. Only the sounds of breeze and birdsong remain.It’s a mysterious final scene, but not one that requires any answers. Regardless of what happens next, someone will be forced to live with the pain of loss. And no technology, it seems, can spare us that fundamentally human experience.UploadThrough Oct. 8 at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam; operaballet.nl. More

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      Carlisle Floyd, Whose Operas Spun Fables of the South, Dies at 95

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      His celebrated works drew from the musical traditions of revival meetings and country hoedowns, telling stories of intolerance.Carlisle Floyd, the composer-librettist whose operas explored the passions and prejudices of the South in lyrical tales that drew on rural fundamentalism, the Great Depression, the aftermath of the Civil War and other regional themes, died on Thursday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was 95. His death was announced by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.The son of an itinerant South Carolina preacher, Mr. Floyd grew up with the music of the South: revival meeting hymns, square dance fiddlers, rollicking country hoedowns and folk songs. He wrote them into many of his operas, whose plots were largely derived from classics of literature, featuring social outcasts and narrow-minded neighbors who ostracized them.Mr. Floyd said his exposure to religious bigotry early in life had shaped his operatic themes. “The thing that horrified me already as a child about revival meetings,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “was mass coercion, people being forced to conform to something against their will without ever knowing what they were being asked to confess or receive.”His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.With hymns, square dances and arias simulating folk songs, “Susannah” leapt to national renown at the New York City Opera under Erich Leinsdorf in 1956. It won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award, was entered at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 as an outstanding example of American opera, and over the years became a favorite of regional companies, one of the most performed operas of the American musical stage.Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.American audiences flocked to regional performances of Mr. Floyd’s work, especially “Susannah” and “Of Mice and Men.” But New York critics were negative about his music, if not his storytelling. In 1999, four decades and some 800 regional performances after it opened, “Susannah” was finally performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Valhalla of grand opera in America.Renee Fleming as Susannah Polk and Samuel Ramey as Olin Blitch in the Met Opera’s 1999 production of “Susannah,” composer Carlisle Floyd’s best-known work.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Amiable, direct, wholly without guile, Carlisle Floyd’s American heroine and the work that bears her name arrived at the halls of grand opera on Wednesday night, looking like some lonely tourist lost in the vastness of Grand Central Terminal,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.He added: “The piece is perfect in size and difficulty for the regional opera house or the amateur production, but lesser singing, I suspect, reveals its thinness even more. Mr. Floyd has a nice way with hoedowns, countrified modal melody and drumroll crescendos, but there is amazingly little going on at the musical end of this opera.”Other critics disparaged his operas as narrowly drawn. But Mr. Floyd insisted that his stories reflected larger realities and that his characters — insular people fearful of outsiders and anyone different — were universal. And he scoffed at perceptions of his music as folk opera, implying that its tonal country sounds were naïve.“A lot of critics don’t like to acknowledge that there are no absolutes in taste, which is intensely personal and which governs a composer’s choice of idiom,” he told Opera News in 1999.Mr. Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, at the New York City Opera in 2003. From left: Rod Nelman as George Milton, Anthony Dean Griffey as Lennie Small and Peter Strummer as Candy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Floyd never sought to join the New York-Northeast musical establishment. He devoted much of his life to teaching, starting at Florida State University in 1947, and over 30 years wrote most of his operas in Tallahassee. From 1976 to 1996, he was a professor at the University of Houston, where he wrote several of his last operas, including “Cold Sassy Tree,” based on a novel by Olive Ann Burns about the romance between an aging widower and a young northerner that scandalizes a small Georgia town.His last opera, “Prince of Players,” was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in March 2016, months before his 90th birthday, and was performed by the Little Opera Theater of New York at Hunter College in February 2017.Adapted from a Jeffrey Hatcher play (and subsequent 2004 film) about Edward Kynaston, one of the last actors of Restoration England to play female roles, “Prince of Players” centers on Kynaston’s crisis in 1661, when Charles II declares that all female roles on London stages must be played by women.Reviewing the Houston production, Opera News said it revealed “Floyd’s deep understanding and sympathy for issues that pervade our culture today — the complexities and subtleties of gender identity, sexual preference and their social consequences — played out in a story from 17th-century England.”Anthony Tommasini, in a review of the New York production for The Times, said: “It’s miraculous that a composer whose reputation dates to his 1955 ‘Susannah,’ one of the most performed American operas, is still working with assurance and skill.”Carlisle Sessions Floyd was born in Latta, S.C., on June 11, 1926, one of two children of Carlisle and Ida (Fenegan) Floyd. He and his sister, Ermine, were schooled in a succession of South Carolina towns where their father was a Methodist preacher. Their mother nurtured Carlisle’s creative instincts, giving him piano lessons and encouraging him to write short stories.After graduating from high school in North, S.C., he entered Converse College in Spartanburg in 1943. He studied music and piano under the composer Ernst Bacon. In 1945, when Mr. Bacon became director of the music school at Syracuse University, Mr. Floyd followed him there and earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1946.He began teaching at Florida State and was soon composing. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree at Syracuse. His first two operas sputtered, but “Susannah,” his third, thrived. It opened at Florida State in 1955, and its New York City Opera premiere was hailed a year later. Ronald Eyer, in Tempo, called it an “unadorned story of malice, hypocrisy and tragedy of almost scriptural simplicity.”In 1957, Mr. Floyd married Margery Kay Reeder. She died in 2010. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Floyd’s only non-American subject, an interpretation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 1958.After a long gestation, “Of Mice and Men” opened at the Seattle Opera in 1970. It was widely performed by regional repertory companies. But when it finally landed at the New York City Opera in 1983, Donal Henahan of The Times said it “failed ultimately because it is a feeble score too dependent on gray declamatory lines and melodramatic clichés of the sort that no longer turn up even in television serials.”Composer/librettist Carlisle Floyd, right, talks with conductor Patrick Summers about the music for Floyd’s upcoming opera “Cold Sassy Tree” during rehearsals Thursday, April 6, 2000, in Houston. “Cold Sassy Tree,” set to open Friday, April 14 in Houston, is Floyd’s latest and perhaps final opera.BRETT COOMER/Associated PressIn 1999, David Gockley, then general director of the Houston Grand Opera and a longtime admirer of Mr. Floyd’s work, told Opera News that New York reviewers were unfair to composers like Mr. Floyd.“Carlisle Floyd is America’s foremost opera composer,” Mr. Gockley was quoted as saying. “If you’re not part of the Northeastern establishment, specifically the New York scene, you have no status. Because Floyd always lived and taught in Florida or Houston, he has been regarded as a regional figure, when in fact he is a national one.”Mr. Floyd, who lived in Tallahassee, received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at the White House in 2004. In 2008 he was named, along with the conductor James Levine and the soprano Leontyne Price, as among the first honorees of the National Endowment for the Arts for lifetime achievement in opera.“Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, the Authorized Biography” by Thomas Holliday, was published in 2013. More

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      Review: After a Met Opera Milestone, ‘Boris’ Brings Another

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      The company is performing the terse, original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” for the first time.You may have heard about the widely publicized landmark with which the Metropolitan Opera opened its season on Monday: Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first work by a Black composer. Flying under the radar is the less momentous but still significant milestone that followed on Tuesday, when the company finally performed the original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”Opera is littered with competing editions and unclear authorial intentions. Does the Giulietta act go before or after the Antonia act in “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”? Do you sing Verdi’s masterpiece in Italian as “Don Carlo,” or — as the Met will do for the first time in its history late this winter — in the original French, as “Don Carlos”?But probably no major work is as vexed as “Boris Godunov.” Mussorgsky had never written an opera when he created this often brusque, raw, darkly sober, oddly spare score about a troubled czar and his troubled country. We’re not entirely sure why it was rejected by the imperial theater directorate, but the main reason may have been a banal one: The piece lacked a major female character.The scene of Boris’s coronation as czar in this revival of the Met’s spare production, new in 2010.Richard Termine for The New York TimesSo Mussorgsky gamely (perhaps even happily) revised, adding material — including Marina, a leading lady of sorts — and taking chunks out; a version of that version premiered in 1874. Then, after Mussorgsky’s death, his friend Rimsky-Korsakov took it upon himself to reorchestrate, rejigger and sometimes recompose the work to make it more colorful and less idiosyncratic. This seems scandalous to us, but without Rimsky “Boris” would never have entered the international repertory early in the 20th century.Over the past 50 years or so, as part of a general vogue for presenting art as its creators envisioned, Rimsky’s glittering interventions fell from grace in favor of Mussorgsky’s starker orchestrations. But his revised, post-1869 version has remained the norm. Or, more precisely, an amalgam: The available options have served as a kind of grab bag, with scenes and passages kept or left out at will, and ordered in various sequences. (That all this is possible speaks to how strange and episodic the work is, as well as to how compelling it remains in almost any form.)It was therefore not unusual that, when the Met’s current production premiered in 2010, it could contain, among other choices, both the act set in Poland (from Mussorgsky’s revised version) and the scene at the Cathedral of St. Basil, which had been cut after 1869. This was a sprawling, two-intermission affair of almost four and a half hours.Maxim Paster, center, and Aleksey Bogdanov, just left behind him, are two of several singers making their Met debuts in this production.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe 1869 version, still a rarity, runs about half that, in a single act of seven scenes presented at the Met without intermission. (The edition being performed is by Michael Rot.) This is by no means an abbreviated “Boris.” But conducted with cool, efficient clarity and seriousness by Sebastian Weigle, it is certainly a lithe evening, a sour shot of a demanding, easily manipulated populace and the leader that the crowd alternately acclaims and reviles: the title character, privately tormented by guilt at having come to power by murdering the 8-year-old heir to the throne.Lithe, too, is the Met’s nearly set-less staging, which the director, Stephen Wadsworth, took on at the last minute back in 2010 and which works well in this version, allowing for fluid scene changes and reflecting the austerity of Mussorgsky’s original vision. His orchestra acts not as a Wagner-style character in its own right, nor as an melodic interlocutor. (There aren’t many melodies.) Instead, it serves as a propelling undercurrent and atmosphere for exposed vocal lines tailored to the rhythms of Russian speech — anticipating Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” which borrows audibly from “Boris,” and Janacek. Adroitly handled, the technique allows the opera to be talky while flowing ever forward.And this was a cast of sonorous, articulate singing talkers, led by the production’s star from 2010, the bass René Pape, his voice as burnished and secure as ever as Boris. If Pape’s tonal pleasures have often seemed to come at the expense of vivid characterizations — as in his beautiful, bland Gurnemanz in Wagner’s “Parsifal” — he fits the restraint of this conductor, chorus and production.This staging is the occasion for several accomplished Met debuts: the bass Ain Anger, commanding as the monk Pimen, who predicts Boris’s downfall; the tenor David Butt Philip, bright yet brooding as Grigory, who proclaims himself Dmitry, the believed-to-have-been-killed rightful heir to the throne; the baritone Aleksey Bogdanov, firm and forthright as the nobleman Shchelkalov; and the tenor Maxim Paster, bronze-toned and cynical as Prince Shuisky.David Butt Philip (left, against wall) plays a monk pretending to be the heir to the Russian throne who falls in with Varlaam (Ryan Speedo Green, arm raised), a vagrant monk.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, the best singer in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” has equally rich, unforced power here as the drunken monk Varlaam. The mezzo-soprano Tichina Vaughn, as a piquant inn hostess, and the tenor Miles Mykkanen, as the plangent Holy Fool who haunts Boris, are both excellent.Should we prefer the 1869 original? I actually find the revised version’s ending — the angry mob, bent on revolution, is yet again flipped into cowed fervor, this time by the false Dmitry — to be more effective and haunting than the curtain falling on Boris’s death, particularly in Pape’s all too mellow performance here. But I don’t miss the Polish act, which has always seemed a bit out of place in its deployment of operatic conventions. And the work’s general pessimism seems better suited to its original terseness than to more epic scale.My answer — today, at least — is yes.Boris GodunovThrough Oct. 17 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: Sounds and Styles Playfully Collide in ‘Only an Octave Apart’

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      This show brings together two convention-inverting artists: the cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond and the opera singer Anthony Roth Costanzo.“Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be normal?” Justin Vivian Bond, the doyenne of downtown cabaret, asks the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo a few songs into their show, “Only an Octave Apart,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse.The gag, of course, is that both Bond and Costanzo — whose pristine and ethereal voice has been heard at venues like the Metropolitan Opera and the Palace of Versailles — are utterly singular artists.Bond, 58, is a veteran and pioneer of alternative live performance, polished in appearance but satisfyingly rough in voice and manner, a diva whose response to having seen it all is both a yawn and a wink. Costanzo, 39, who will return to the title role in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Met this season, has demonstrated a voracious appetite for mashing up disciplines. Perhaps that is in response to the limited countertenor repertoire, “music written before 1750 or after 1950,” as he has said.Their teaming up came about by chance and circumstance, they banter in “Only an Octave Apart.” Costanzo recalls seeing one of Bond’s shows at Joe’s Pub and professing instant fandom; Bond remembers thinking Costanzo was hot. They became fast friends, and their relationship led to the St. Ann’s performance, which takes its name from a TV special the soprano Beverly Sills and the actress Carol Burnett recorded at the Met in 1976, in a campy meeting of so-called high and low culture.Conceived with and directed by Zack Winokur, “Only an Octave Apart” feels like something between “Honey, I Shrunk the Opera” and oversized cabaret. Or an operatic highlight reel wedged into a freewheeling stage revue. Or an improvised set of concept singles. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. The uneasiness of its hybrid form is part of the point, and reflective of its stars’ convention-inverting talents.Costanzo, left, and Bond in the show, which teases out the obvious humor and dissonant beauty in their sounds.Nina WesterveltA ventriloquist-style number inspired by “Singin’ in the Rain,” for example, plays off their bucking of gendered expectations: Costanzo sings from behind the curtain while Bond lip-syncs, aligning his countertenor with Bond’s high-feminine presentation. Then they switch. (“Act butcher!” Bond barks.)The show finds both obvious humor and a dissonant beauty in combining sounds. Under Thomas Bartlett’s brilliantly agile music direction, nimble arrangements by Nico Muhly and Daniel Schlosberg flit seamlessly from plucked strings to erotic disco beats. The stars’ voices at times collide to strange, glorious effect (as in a languid take on Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March”); or they playfully intersect in ways that throw their differences into sharp relief.Bond thrills most in haunting ballads that animate the eerie exigencies of isolation (“Me and My Shadow”) and the melancholy in holding onto hope (“I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”). Cutting a glamorous figure beneath worshipful lighting by John Torres, Bond issues an enchanting warble, its gravelly depths echoing with comfortable wisdom.Costanzo also dazzles in solos that showcase his rich yet delicate voice, which glints and swoops like intricately painted blown glass. Before performing Lizst’s arresting art song “Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh,” Costanzo explains that it’s about despair, from poetry that Goethe is said to have carved into stone as he died alone.If the show speaks to the moment, it does not seem by design. The organizing principle of non sequiturs (“We’ve sung about flowers and water, now how about leaves?”) is charming to a point, though ultimately comes at the expense of assurance and momentum.Bond, a seasoned stage personality, is at ease riffing off the cuff and ribbing an insider crowd — but feels rather far away peering over the nine-piece orchestra, with a hand shielding the glare. Costanzo’s element is vocal storytelling; he’s less at ease, however, as a co-host, even though he’s clearly game.Their self-mythologizing repartee (an avant-garde legend and an opera star walk into a bar …) keeps the audience at a guarded remove, while the songs yearn for connection. It’s a paradox starkly rendered in fabric by the first of Jonathan Anderson’s costumes, velvety-soft, floor-length gowns that jut out at harsh angles, like front-turned bustles whose bell curves have been replaced by blunt machetes.Bond and Costanzo are extraordinary artists, though it’s not until the night is nearly over that they allow us to see them as vulnerable ones, too. “Only an Octave Apart” was meant to be a live show, then an album; the pandemic forced them to work in reverse. They poured themselves into creating this odd and beguiling record, they say, over the worst of the past year.Now onstage, they seem electrified, their nerves raw and frayed, dazed to be in communion again — in other words, more like the rest of us than they’d dare to let on.Only an Octave ApartThrough Oct. 3 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 90 minutes. More

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      Packing Your Purse (or Pockets) for a Night at the Opera

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      When I was in graduate school in Manhattan, my friend Bernard and I went to the opera without eating supper.Bernard and I had met at a fancy food market in SoHo where we both had part-time jobs behind the bread station. I was going to be a famous writer and he a famous set designer. But in the meantime, we spent our bread wages on the cheapest Family Circle tickets at the Metropolitan Opera, then hummed the arias from “Eugene Onegin” and “La Bohème” while we sliced seven grains and stacked up the baguettes.Our shift lasted past dinnertime, and the sandwiches and flutes of Champagne at the intermission bars were beyond our students’ budget. So we always came packing snacks — hearty, filling bites that could sustain us through “Götterdämmerung” but were small enough to stash inside my vintage beaded purse.Ready for intermission with, from left, brownie shortbread bars, almond-stuffed dates and hand pies. Don’t forget the napkin.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanIn nice weather, we munched egg salad sandwiches and homemade chocolate truffles perched at the edge of the fountain in Damrosch Park adjacent to Lincoln Center. When it was stormy, we would eat leaning against the rails of the balcony, watching fancy patrons savor their intermission baked alaskas at the Grand Tier restaurant below, assuming that one day in the distant future, that would be us.That distant future has arrived, and I’m still toting intermission nibbles to the Met in the same vintage purse. I plan to continue this season as well (the Met reopens Monday). But these days, I’m accompanied by my husband, Daniel, whose essential contribution is a (possibly illicit) flask full of bourbon or pre-mixed Manhattans tucked into his pocket.By now we could spring for sandwiches and Champagne at the bar, or even the Grand Tier, but we rarely do. My picnics, which are made to order — and, I think, a much more fun way to pass the 30 to 40 minutes of an average Met intermission — have become part of the opera ritual. And this year, picnicking offers another advantage: pulling your mask down to eat outside at Damrosch Park can be a Delta variant-savvy way to go.Ms. Clark with the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. Before his days of starring as Akhnaten at the opera, he picnicked on a bench, too.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOver the years of Falstaffs and Salomes, I’ve learned a few best practices when it comes to packing these petite opera tidbits.The first and foremost is to minimize the mess by avoiding sloppy, saucy morsels. I like to think of opera snacks in the same way that I’d choose hors d’oeuvres for a party. Neat, self-contained finger foods that can be nibbled in one hand while you hold a drink in the other work best, preferably things that taste good at room temperature.I’m partial to small tea sandwiches stacked with onion, cucumbers or smoked salmon for the first intermission, followed by some kind of sweet bite — say, almond-stuffed dates or homemade brownie shortbread bars, for a sugar jolt — to get me through that final act. Phyllo pastries filled with anything from ground lamb and feta to butternut squash and mint, or all manner of sweet or savory hand pies, could also work well.Then there are maki rolls, as long they’re filled with vegetables or something cooked. You don’t want raw fish sitting under your seat for the entire 100 minutes of the first two acts of “Don Carlos.”At top: savory options, including hand pies, kimbap and tea sandwiches. Below, the sweet: truffles, stuffed dates and brownie shortbread bars. On the side, a tin of sea salt and a flask, for washing it all down.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanThe countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who is reprising his star turn as Akhnaten in the 2021-22 season, used to bring homemade kimbap or avocado-cucumber maki to eat on a bench in the park back when he was a student, and these are an excellent option that you can either make or buy.“I certainly picnicked a lot when I used to attend the opera as a youth,” he said. “As a performer, backstage picnicking is a whole other level of intrigue with meals that will make you sing well but not look zaftig in your costume.” (Perhaps particularly because Mr. Costanzo spends part of Akhnaten with almost no costume at all.)Once you’ve decided which snacks to bring, you should consider the packing vessel (you’ll want something that can fit in a small purse or bag). That old plastic yogurt container may work just fine, but a cute and colorful bento box or metal tiffin container is a lot snazzier to set atop your lap. And a thin linen napkin can save your opera finery from splashes and drips.One thing you must avoid is ever going to the opera hungry. The mid-20th century writer Joseph Wechsberg describes the consequences at the Viennese opera house in his epicurean memoir, “Blue Trout and Black Truffles.”Egg salad sandwiches have the protein to sustain you.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanMr. Costanzo has to snack smartly backstage, given his revealing costume.Winnie Au for The New York Times“Sometimes my stomach would start to make rumbling noises just as the tenor sang a pianissimo, and everybody looked at me. Some well-fed people made ‘shsh-t!’ It was very embarrassing,” Mr. Wechsberg wrote.His response was to bring raw bacon sandwiches sprinkled with paprika to munch during the first act of “Die Walküre.”“While Siegmund and Sieglinde sang their beautiful duet about sweet Love and Spring, the sweet scent of paprika seemed to descend, like light fog, all over the fourth gallery.”It’s best to bring the sort of finger foods that can be nibbled in one hand while you hold your drink (or your food stash) in the other.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOf course, eating in the auditorium during the opera at the Met is always forbidden, and especially now. But eat paprika-sprinkled sandwiches at the second interval, and the sweet scent will carry you most of the way through Act III.Bernard and I once made one of Mr. Wechsberg’s opera sandwiches, though I admit that after much deliberation, we cooked the bacon before showering on the paprika, and stuffed it all in between slices of sourdough, courtesy of the fancy food shop where we worked.We were still wrapped in our light fog of paprika as Brünnhilde fell to dreaming in her magic ring of fire, our bellies content, all our senses alert, our hearts full.If only my past self could see what a culinary gift was passing down to future me. And an entire tier of opera patrons has been saved from indiscreet rumblings during the pianissimos. More

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      ‘Aria Code’ Explores the Meaning Behind the Music

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      The podcast hopes to extend the appeal of opera, “an art form that comes with a fair bit of baggage,” to a larger audience.For many fans, the highlight of any opera is a standout aria, like “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” or “Vesti la giubba” from Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.”But there’s more to these works than one intense tune, and many listeners are turning to opera-themed podcasts to better understand the layers of this emotion-filled art form.One such podcast among many is “Aria Code,” a collaboration by the classical music radio station WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera in New York and hosted by Rhiannon Giddens. A singer, composer and musician originally from North Carolina, Ms. Giddens studied opera at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and helped found the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band in which she sang and played fiddle and banjo.Rhiannon Giddens, a singer, musician and composer, said she jumped at the chance to host “Aria Code,” in part because of “the sheer universality of opera.”Karen Cox for The New York Times“Aria Code” uses the tagline “The magic of opera revealed, one song at a time” and humorous episode titles like “Once More Into the Breeches: Joyce DiDonato Sings Strauss” and “Breaking Mad: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.”The series has expanded its audience in this, its third season: Downloads of the podcast have increased more than 20 percent from season 2, according to its co-creator and lead producer, Merrin Lazyan.The podcast has also helped the Met reach its audience while the opera house was shut down for nearly 18 months by the Covid-19 pandemic. (The opera officially reopens on Monday, although it played host to an audience on Sept. 11 for a live performance of Verdi’s Requiem.)Gillian Brierley, assistant general manager of marketing and communications at the Met, said by email that the podcast was one way the Met was “reaching out not only to opera lovers but also to new audiences, bringing to life the range of emotions in opera through vivid storytelling and interviews as well as treasured recordings from our audio archives.”The seed of the idea for “Aria Code” came from Ms. Lazyan, who studied classical voice performance at the Royal College of Music in London. At WQXR in 2017, she suggested a segment in which a Met artist would explain the “Queen of the Night” aria from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” scored using the Met’s archival recordings. But colleagues saw wider potential, proposing a series “that could potentially open up an art form that comes with a fair bit of baggage to a wider audience,” she wrote in an email.Merrin Lazyan, the show’s co-creator and lead producer, planted the seed for the podcast with an idea in 2017.Rick StockwellAs the format evolved, Ms. Lazyan said, a team from WQXR and WNYC Studios (the podcast division of New York Public Radio) hit upon including multiple guests and people from outside the opera world to make the topics more relevant to modern lives. (Episodes conclude with a recorded Met performance of the selected aria.)“We realized that the best version of this show would be one that delights existing opera fans, but is also accessible to an audience that’s new to opera, or perhaps even skeptical of it,” she said. “We didn’t want to water it down, but we did want to break through the barriers.”In choosing an aria for an episode, Ms. Lazyan works closely with the Met. “Prepandemic,” she said, “all of the selected arias and artists were featured in the Met’s current onstage season, and we did our best to align episode releases with their production schedule. This year, we chose arias from both their canceled and upcoming seasons.”To keep “Aria Code” interesting, producers aim for a mix of well-known operas and what Ms. Lazyan called more obscure gems, along with a variety of voice types and even languages.“When it comes to the other guests on the show — the musicologists and dramaturges, the scientists and doctors, the athletes and writers and more — I choose them,” she said, sometimes with input from Ms. Giddens and others.Finding the right host was also key, she said, calling Ms. Giddens a “dream host for so many reasons.”“It was important to us to find someone who understands and appreciates this music, but is not necessarily an opera insider,” Ms. Lazyan said, but a guide for “lifelong opera lovers, people who are curious but have only dipped a toe in, and people who thought it was all a bunch of senseless caterwauling.”Ms. Giddens’s “focus in her own music is on excavating the past and telling bold truths about our present,” Ms. Lazyan said, “which is exactly what ‘Aria Code’ aims to do as well.”Ms. Giddens in the studio at WQXR, which produces “Aria Code” with the Metropolitan Opera.Max Fine/WQXRMs. Giddens said she jumped at the chance to host in part because of “the sheer universality of opera — these deeply emotive stories reflect the best and the worst of human nature, done with mind-bending talent and artistic collaboration.”She added that she has always been interested in equal access to the arts. “If given the chance,” she said, “people who hate the idea of opera could actually love it, if exposed to it in the right way.”That’s not always easy. “Helping listeners connect to the emotion within opera can be a challenge offstage,” Ms. Lazyan conceded.“For some arias, the sheer athleticism of opera performance is front and center,” she said. “Singing is such a personal and internal process, and it can be difficult to verbalize the nuanced inner workings of an artist’s technical and interpretive approach.“But hearing a singer describe how hitting the high note at the end of an exuberant coloratura passage feels like being up in the heavens among the stars, and simultaneously hearing that final high note ring out like a bell as the singer is talking about it, makes this process immediate and thrilling for listeners.”Other arias “welcome a much more personal and intimate kind of storytelling,” Ms. Lazyan said. “For those, I seek out guests with a personal experience that parallels the events or the emotional heart of the music.”For “Madama Butterfly,” the psychotherapist Kyoko Katayama “told the story of her mother, whose love affair with an American G.I. who abandoned her, pregnant, in Japan was an uncanny parallel to the abandonment and betrayal of Cio-Cio San in the opera,” Ms. Lazyan said.“Throughout the episode, you hear Kyoko’s story in parallel with the ‘Butterfly’ story. You hear how deeply personal it is, and that really opens the door to a different way of feeling the power of this music.”While the music and its composer can be the main draw, what about the librettists who fashioned the words?“Aria Code” certainly doesn’t ignore them, but the opera director Keturah Stickann, based in Knoxville, Tenn., puts them squarely in the spotlight in another podcast, “Words First: Talking Text in Opera.” She highlights librettists, she said by email, “because I feel like they sort of disappear when talking about a work. I like to make sure we say their names.” More