Public radio saves northern Maine from rhythm, noodles

You know that schtick in opera where the singers don’t actually sing but instead talk rhythmically while the orchestra quietly noodles? It’s called recitative (accent on “teeve”) and it’s a centuries-old device used to fill in the audience on the background of who’s who and what’s what so the singers can get down to the real business of belting out tunes about love, beauty and homicide.

The Metropolitan Opera of New York begins its 61st season of live radio broadcasts of Saturday matinees this week with the traditional gala preview of the 20-week season that opens Dec. 9. Opera fans (actually, the technical term is “buffs”) who expect to tune in on Maine Public Radio will be hearing a lot of recitative, only without the rhythm and the noodles. Just the talk.

MPR announced a couple of weeks ago that is was going to a “new and improved” schedule that included canning the Met and cutting back other classical music programming, and largely replacing them with talk shows. The prevailing sentiment among the public that listens to public radio – if letters and phone calls to this newspaper are any guide – is that this is a betrayal of an important part of public radio’s mission and that if there’s one thing radio, public or commercial, does not need it is more talk.

This, incidentally, is not a local phenomenon. Across the country, public radio stations, convinced that listeners want more chat and fewer arias, are either pulling the plug on classical programs or shoving them off to the wee hours where they won’t bother anybody. And across the country, listeners are peeved. They’re peeved in Washington (both D.C. and the state), they’re peeved in Boston and Baton Rouge, they were so peeved in Roanoke that the station manager got fired for dropping the Met.

I called Charles Beck, the MPR vice president who has the thankless job of explaining this. Mr. Beck assures me that he and his station love classical music, they adore the Met, but Saturday afternoon ratings numbers indicate the public feels otherwise.

Mr. Beck also suggests that the situation would be entirely different if the Met would bend on its currently inflexible policy that stations either carry the opera broadcasts live when the curtain rises or not carry them at all.

I called the Met. A spokeswoman there, as friendly and helpful as New York’s attitude ordinance allows, explains to me that some radio stations have been whining for years about the live-only policy and that the policy isn’t about to change. She’s obviously been through this kind of interview before; she quickly rattles off the answers to save me the trouble of asking the questions.

Texaco, the sponsor of these broadcasts since they began in 1940, has spent more than $200 million bringing the world’s greatest opera company to homes across the nation; Texaco’s position is that live is live – a big part of the excitement is that you’re hearing it unedited as it happens; if the mezzo brings the house down or the soprano swallows a fly in mid-trill, you are there. The program is provided to stations absolutely free and it’s not polite to quibble about a gift. More than 350 stations carry the Met broadcasts live. Every year a few drop out, a few more sign up. Maine’s dropping out is Maine’s problem.

Actually, it’s only the Other Maine’s problem. One justification Mr. Beck offered for this change is that a commercial classical with transmitters in southern Maine and the midcoast region carries the Met. Mos it. If you live in that northerly and easterly part of Maine where this newspaper is delivered to your door, however, you probably won’t.

A key element of bad decisions often is bad timing and this is no exception. Next year, 2001, happens to be the bicentennial of the birth of Verdi, the guy who put the grand in grand opera, and the Met is presenting five of his roof-raising spectacles. The rest of the lineup includes some of the very best stuff by Mozart, Wagner, Donizetti, Puccini and the rest of the meat-and-potatoes crowd. Heck, on Jan. 20, the Met is even doing Busoni’s rarely heard “Doktor Faustus,” which I believe to be (based upon having played in the pit for it in college) the most gloriously awful piece of music ever composed by anyone, anywhere, any time. Folks in Cape Elizabeth can judge for themselves.

Folks in Calais will just have to take my word for it.

MPR bases this bad decision upon a perceived decline in Saturday afternoon listenership from 5,600 in the fall quarter of ’99 to 4,600 in the spring quarter of this year. Statisticians probably question comparing two different quarters, especially in a place as season sensitive as Maine. Since MPR says it has 125,000 different listeners a week, statisticians also might question whether having roughly 5,000 listeners in what amounts to one-fourth of a reasonable listening day in one-seventh of a listening week is all that bad.

I question whether MPR didn’t spoil the specialness of the Met live broadcasts by filling the other 32 Saturday afternoons with taped operas from elsewhere. The Chicago Lyric Opera, The Houston Grand, Glimmerglass, the Opera and Fly-fishing Society of Idaho are all fine ensembles, but they’re not the Met. Nobody goes to the opera every week, not even Mama Pavarotti.

Many MPR members I’ve talked to question why no mention was made of this change during the fund-raising campaign the station held just before the announcement, especially given public broadcasting’s constant “If we don’t do it, who will?” theme. One member I spoke to pointed out that one of the Met’s best productions this year should be Mozart’s gorgeous comic opera of romantic misadventures and mistaken identity, “Cosi Fan Tutte,” which translates roughly to “They all do it.” What, this member wondered, was the Italian for “We’re not going to do it either.”?

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.