Ralph, I personally quite agree with you that "Rameau's operas are admirable but indisputably smaller scale compared with a baroque operatic giant like Handel, as is Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande" (just as I agree with you about most other things!).
But who are we among so many? The vast majority of ordinary operagoers and opera-listeners consider all Handel's operas to be unutterable bores. "Very few people would esteem" any of them nowadays, just as very few people would esteem Cherubini's. Pelléas has received, and continues to receive, far more performances and far more recordings than any of Handel's operas.
So I don't see how we can say that Handel is "indisputably" an operatic giant or that Debussy is "indisputably" smaller. Surely such claims are exceedingly disputable, since most people not only can dispute them but do dispute them.
Ditto with the words "objectively speaking." How can there be objectivity in these ever-fluid waters?
"Our tastes have changed." Yes indeed! In my seven decades of operagoing I have seen two main changes in operatic taste:
1. Opera (all opera) has declined greatly in popularity, and is now cherished only by a very tiny minority of the population, most of them moribund old fogeys like myself.
2. Historically informed stagings (i.e., stagings in the manner that the composer would have envisaged) have become rarer and rarer, to the point that Regietheater has now almost totally displaced them.
I fully acknowledge, and accept, that "our tastes" have changed in those respects, just as I fully acknowledge, and accept, that Handel's operas and Cherubini's no longer appeal to "our tastes" as they did in their own day.
But does it necessarily follow that, because "our tastes" (i.e., the community's tastes) have changed, therefore my individual tastes should change, or are "objectively" and "indisputably" in error?
The truth is that tastes are infinitely diverse, and subjective, and individual. Ralph Moore declares Medea "close to perfect"; Jeffrey Lague isn't particularly impressed with it; neither will tolerate Les Abencérages, yet Michael Cookson pronounces it "one of the finest releases so far in the [Bru Zane] series and especially valuable." And we have already mentioned the views of Beethoven and Berlioz.
Who shall decide when Beethoven and Berlioz disagree? Not Evan Blackmore!
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