One is the opera of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte: titanic, classic and, here, well-sung and largely well-acted.

The other is the production director Jonathon Loy envisions, a reimagined “Giovanni” for a new age. This one lives in the veneers and shadows, dancers doubling principals and props rethought into new, contemporary forms. We see only glimpses of it, intelligently sketched but, on the whole, unrealized. Only on three occasions do these parallel productions meet.

Twice, we are there with Loy’s vision — in the famous Champagne aria and in the title character’s mandolin serenade to an unseen maid — we can see where Loy wants to go, and it’s enthralling. Once, in the showstopping finale that drags Giovanni to hell, it is overdone, and leaves one wondering whether the vision should not have itself been reimagined.

[...] Megan Moore’s Elvira was revelatory, especially in a quietly devastating scene where she apparently contemplates suicide yet resolves to steel herself for whatever lies ahead. Moore has a preternatural ability to distill and convey the myriad conflicting drives within her character, the only one who truly did love Giovanni, even if she knew better.

Ottavio was a golden-voiced, dynamic Joshua Blue who, in key moments, managed flashes of strong characterization. He was betrayed by a ridiculous costume of vest and high-waisted trousers out of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” but when sang, when he defined his love for Anna in soft, stinging poetry, we believed his every word.

[...] From the overture’s start — an arresting pair of notes then tempestuous scales that will return later as Giovanni is condemned — we hear for ourselves that his fate, “the rake punished,” is sealed.

Giovanni the man, it is clear, lacks the capacity for change others have. “Giovanni” the opera, it becomes clear, may also — by virtue of Mozart’s compositional skill, Da Ponte’s misogynist and frequently comic libretto, and the full weight of 235 years of audiences — be as unalterable as Il Commendatore’s cold, stone hand. [...]

As she accompanied herself on baroque guitar in the introductory piece that opened a program of early music at St. James Place on May 11, she personified the musical spirit of those operatic pioneers who strove to create a new kind of vocal music some four centuries ago.

As the 16th-century Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione wrote, such “singing to the lute … is more pleasant than the rest, for it adds to the words such a grace and a strength that is a great wonder.”

[...] Most ingeniously, [conductor Christine] Gevert sandwiched the work between that introductory piece and a celebratory closer. Both were intermedi, the tunes that enlivened courtly dramatic spectacles and were opera’s most direct antecedent. Both showed how rooted early opera was in what came before, yet how radically different.

In truth, Cavalieri didn't need much help. Converted-church setting and moralistic topic be damned, his frequent choruses and his solo melodies high on vocal showmanship were as operatic as they come.

[...] Still, Cavalieri and his compatriots felt strongly that, in their new form, virtue lay in a clear declamation of the libretti that they felt was missing in earlier music. Gevert elaborated on this point during one of her informative entr’acte discussions.

The voice was secondary to the poetry, and the underlying orchestra was secondary to the voice.

So it was unfortunate that diction, vocal clarity, and the dynamic relationship between voice and orchestra were the concert’s weakest points. I wondered whether the soloists would have been better suited to a more traditional placement in front of the orchestra, rather than peeking out from behind it.

[...] When the voices did carry, though, as with Sandoval’s full, regal voice as she stood and strummed as she sung, it was sufficiently powerful to take us back to the sounds and spectacles of opera’s birth.

In “Music for New Bodies” at Seiji Ozawa Hall on Thursday, it was a quartet of percussionists that formed the beating heart of this “vocal symphony” that became opera and oratorio, tone poem and funk break across its five movements.

[...] A cabasa was the whooshing air to a breathing bassoon and a bass drum was the crashing thunder to a stormy, percussive low flute. Hand drums evoked a primal, visceral earth and tubular bells heralded a shimmering, resolving heaven. Clublike electronic noises, supplemented with claves, was ring tone, radar and cardiac monitor all at once.

[...] That energy comes straight from the work’s conception. Its authors — the composer and conductor Matthew Aucoin; the stage director Peter Sellars; and the poet Jorie Graham — clearly have formal roles on paper, but in practice it is clear that their influences overlap one another as so much does in this exciting, original work that earned full commitment from its musicians and singers.

[...] Indeed, as precise and considered as it was, “Music for New Bodies” never shed the air of freshness that made it feel as though improvised just for us, never to be replicated. That was a remarkable high-wire act to pull off.

The fourth movement also gave us the work’s most surprising, double-take moment, as a tuneful but decidedly freeform work notched into the groove of a jazzy standalone song. In rhyming, hopping words, the voices as one sang of sickness and medicine to a melodic, almost hip-hop beat.

It gave us the work’s worst feature, too: an oppressively loud drone of subwoofer bass that badly misjudged the limits of its Tanglewood audience and broke the work’s hard-won spell with unnecessary, show-offy ear-curdling.

It said a lot about Aucoin’s prodigious skill and Sellars’ unrivaled wisdom that there were precious few of these “know when to say when” moments.

Tongue-in-cheek platitudes spoken directly at the audience layered tacky gilt onto a lily that didn't need it, and the woodwind section’s distracting midshow relocation had no discernible purpose. Yet for the most part, it was a work that heartily rejected the didactic in favor of constant, exhilarating musical evolution.

In the monumental crescendo that ended a rejuvenating night, the Earth cried out, “Remember me!” So forceful a new work will be hard to forget.

Behind, paralyzed in taxidermy and taxonomized into hermetic boxes, is Peale’s collection, from paddlefish to penguins to portraits of the great scientists. From his personal gallery, Peale immortalizes in oil the museum’s sacred, crowlike task: to gather up intriguing things, ferret them away and show them to people.

In some places, opera looks more like a museum piece these days.

Fiscal woes have seen companies circle the wagons around standard productions of big hits, with a result that could live in one of Peale’s cubicles: unchanged and (if recalcitrant naysayers are heeded) unchangeable. Our all-too-human compulsion to categorize (what an opera must or simply mustn’t be) has become its own cage.

I’m not the first to say this; critics have bemoaned the “museumifying” of opera for at least 50 years. And it has some virtue, in scouring dusty libraries for forgotten works and zealously maintaining as complete a record as possible for each generation.

But opera, like any colorful bird, cannot live long in a bell jar.

[...] [Impresario Anthony Roth] Costanzo can rightfully trumpet a sold-out season, but that couldn't summon the dozens of pernicious no-shows I spotted. To sustain success, he’ll have to deliver creatively, too, as a rather forgettable “Don Giovanni” didn’t leave me itching to return.

But Opera Philadelphia has taken the momentous first step of acknowledging that opera is far too expensive for the vast majority of people to access and doing something to lower prices.

I got hooked on free student passes, and I don’t think it’s gauche to acknowledge that, on my newspaper salary, I could not see the amount of opera I do without press comps and parental generosity. So how is the rest of my generation, or anyone else without significant disposable income, supposed to fall in love with this art form?

Opera Philadelphia emphatically rejected the conventional wisdom that safe bets are all that’s safe for opera companies, and the way it’s done so — no rush ticket lottery, no demographic discounts, no section restrictions, no special programs; just affordability — may not only bolster its audiences but democratize them.

“For opera to move into the 21st century, we need to break down the preconceived notions that it is only for people of a certain status, or of a certain social rank, or of a certain financial rank,” [tenor Joshua] Blue said. “Having an opportunity to sit anywhere in the house … breaks down those societal barriers that opera has set up, of saying ‘Oh, well people that can afford really nice tickets can sit here, and if you can’t afford it, you have to sit up here.’ … Well, no!”

[...] After the opera, I ventured down narrow colonial streets to the aging brick rowhouse, three blocks south of Peale’s old museum at Independence Hall, that was unlikely home to Lorenzo Da Ponte, the man who wrote the libretto of “Don Giovanni” and two more of Mozart’s greatest operas.

Da Ponte lived eight months in Philadelphia, having pinballed around Europe amid an unending series of indignities. Another, involving a Corsican confectioner, ensured he didn’t stay long here, but Mozart feels so foreign and ancient that the cognitive dissonance of being able to take Amtrak to his greatest librettist’s house is too delicious to pass up.

[...] Above all, the transience that brought Da Ponte to Philadelphia, and the tragic poverty that made Mozart’s life story as much a core myth of classical music as his music is, crystallizes the enduring truth that even at its darkest moments, opera has found a way forward because the people who love it survived. The only sure death would be to stymie the next crop of devotees.

I come from another “dying” industry, and I know firsthand that if all you do is fear the imagined, inevitable doom, you make no progress and have no fun. I also know that the conventional narrative rarely tells the full story.

[...] [N]othing is permanent. Just ask Da Ponte.

After he left Pennsylvania, a period of uncharacteristic good fortune in New York enabled him to establish our nation’s first purpose-built opera house. It closed, debt-ridden, after two seasons, and Da Ponte died five years after it opened, but the love for opera he’d sparked in New Yorkers lived on.

Fifty years later, the city got its fourth major opera house: The Metropolitan, where, this spring, none other than Sun-Ly Pierce sang “Voi che sapete,” one of the most beautiful, boyish, blushing poems Da Ponte penned.

Music like that doesn’t just keep that flame burning; it is the flame. And a flame is a living, breathing thing.

To keep it alive requires two distinct actions in direct conflict, one conservative and museumlike, one fiery and radical: We must shield it from the blustery winds with careful preservation of what we have, and we must expose it and stoke it with a blazing appetite for what comes next.

[...] [W]hat piqued my interest, in conversation with the creative team and at the work’s workshop concert premiere on Oct. 20, was what they did with it next. Approaching the housewives at face value — with comedy, sure, but also an intense empathy and no scintilla of jaded millennial irony — now that is a surprise.

“As absurd as these women can be, and as absurd as the reactions and their catchphrases and all of that can lean, there’s something that hits, that strikes a chord with all of us,” [composer Sharon] Kenny said. “It exists as-is, and we just kind of musicalized what was already there.”

[...] For its part, “RHONY: An Unauthorized Opera” operated firmly within the vein of “Jerry Springer: The Opera” — which is to say, it was not an opera.

The sung-through piece instead lived comfortably within the lexicon of musical theater, with diverse stylistic influences, vocal affectations and contagiously emotional middle-range singing.

But the line between art forms is blurry if it’s even useful, and, for her part, Kenny called her piece a musical, an operetta or “opera lite” across our conversation.

“It’s winking at opera,” she said.

[...] In imagining a wedding day that never was, Kenny and Guenther flew closest to the sun in moments that were not reality but cuttingly real. I’m not sure I’d want my life subjected to the same treatment — after all, most opera characters are fictional or long dead. But from a safe distance, they nailed it.

Approaching the housewives with sincere admiration meant they weren’t bogged down in judgment.

[...] In the sweet-on-the-verge-of-saccharine climax that owed something spiritually to “The Wizard of Oz” and musically to “Company,” Tinsley seemed to step out of the screen for a moment as she reappraised her onetime reality TV tormentor.

"She’s not evil, she’s just misunderstood,” she sang. “Forget the frigging fairytale, I want a love that’s real.”

In operas, as on the Bravo network that originally existed to air them, real can be a tall order.

That is the story of "opera seria," literally serious opera, an 18th-century reform in which librettists prized solemnity and excised frivolity from their Metastasian masterpieces, creating a sharp delineation between what could be funny and what couldn’t.

“This was a failure with the public,” explained Paul O’Dette, co-artistic director of the Boston Early Music Festival. “The public went to these tragic operas and they missed the fun, missed the color, the variety, the lowlife characters. … And the librettists refused to budge.”

Never leave a poet to do a producer’s job. Enter intermezzi, unrelated trifles that added comic relief between the acts of their stern counterparts.

“It allowed the librettists to keep their reforms, but also for the impresarios to produce projects that pleased the public,” O’Dette said. “The color, the comedy, and so on, was back.”

[...] At the Mahaiwe, BEMF’s period instrument specialists will take another cue from baroque performance practice, staging “Pimpinone” alongside another, more serious work, Telemann’s “Ino.” They’ve also flipped the script, surrounding the serious work (a short, single-voice cantata) with the comedy.

[...] “Ino” is a mythic drama. It opens as the title queen flees her murderous husband, having already lost one child and desperate to protect the other. Cornered, she flings herself and her son into the sea, pleading with the gods for providence. They oblige, and mother and son ascend to their ranks, Ino becoming the spirit of sea foam.

It was among Telemann’s last works, written when he was 84 years old and experimenting in a style that O’Dette said presages the transition from baroque to classical music. “Pimpinone,” on the other hand, was written at the height of Telemann’s fame, using a familiar baroque continuo group to underpin its music.

It follows the quest of Vespetta, a forward-thinking maid, to ingratiate herself to the hapless old bachelor Pimpinone — and his wealth. Running his household, she pushes for a marriage proposal — and a dowry — that he gives on the condition she maintain her feigned innocence. Once the ink’s dry, she lets loose and drives him mad. But it’s too late; he’s fallen for her and realizes it’s better to shut up.

If the plot feels familiar (Gaetano Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” is particularly congruent), it’s because both, and myriad more, are drawn from the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte. Stock characters like the bumbling Pantalone (Pimpinone, Pasquale) and the scheming Colombina (Vespetta, Norina) enlivened carnivals and country fetes across Italy with familiar, endlessly riffable antics.

BEMF has leaned into this, casting dancer-choreographer Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière as a silent Arlecchino, the genre’s famous trickster, dressed in jester’s motley and mask.

[...] And if Arlecchino steals away his Colombina? Well, that’s another opera …

One decade and one pandemic later, Garman and co-founder Jonathon Loy could not have been more right.

A whole season moved online. Second-stage contemporary operas came and went. An executive director gave way to a president and CEO, and a pair of off-and-on venues settled into one long-term home.

But four choristers and nine musicians who were there in 2016 are still with the company, and two principal singers from that first mainstage, “Madama Butterfly,” will return for its next, “La Traviata,” Aug. 23, 26 and 29, at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center.

“Perhaps the thing I’m proudest of at this point, 10 years in, is the fact that we’re still here,” Garman told The Eagle ahead of an anniversary concert, 7:30 p.m. Aug. 14, at the Mahaiwe [...]. “To be able to survive the pandemic and come through it intact on the other side is something that we’re very proud of.”

[...] Asked for one word that came to mind from that inaugural “Butterfly,” Loy offered “Chanel suit.” Garman was a bit more general: “Excitement.”

[...] By 2018, Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” Garman abandoned all concision. “That was the production where I really sensed that we were building a consistent, loyal audience that really took us seriously,” he said.

[...] But then came COVID-19, and single words just wouldn’t do.

[...] In the rose-tinted past before they opened, Garman and Loy said they envisioned as many as three staged productions each season and performances of original commissions. The late Eagle critic Andrew Pincus wrote that those plans “sound like a lot,” but maintained that, “if it can avoid the money trap that sank its predecessors … [BOF] should find a ready home in the region.”

He was right on both counts: Those ideas were a stretch, but the company has found a base and stayed afloat.

[...] “We need to give the Berkshires more programming,” Loy said. “But I think the reason we still exist is because we’ve been so careful about how we do it.”

The anniversary concert, BOF’s first recital to feature its 28-voice chorus and 54-piece orchestra, is a step in that direction. It’s one that will allow the company to try out music of a style or scale that wouldn’t fit a mainstage offering. At least one offering, though, will be familiar: “Un bel dì” from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” the show that started it all.

Like fully staged opera in a county where it had fallen silent. Like plans, finally put into motion after years of dormancy. Or like a major milestone, celebrated one twisting, turning decade since the curtain first rose.

“If I had to give myself advice, let’s say the night before ‘Butterfly’ opened, looking back now, my advice would be: Stick with it and don’t give up,” Garman said. “Frequently, something will happen that makes you just want to throw in the towel on the whole thing, but you don’t. And the rewards are so great when it really works that it outweighs all of the challenges.”

When it came time for her professional debut — as Violetta Valéry, the confident, tragic heroine of “La Traviata” by Giuseppe Verdi — O’Flynn learned the role in just three months.

She even fibbed to the Texas Opera Theater that she had experience singing before a full orchestra, all for the privilege of 12-hour bus rides touring Verdi “in places that Texans have never heard of.”

“I was 27 and raring to go,” said O’Flynn, now an actor and vocal coach based in Lenox. It echoed the spirit of Violetta, who ends Act 1 extolling, at least for a while, joyous independence.

Still, it took O’Flynn longer than three months to truly nail Act 3, when Violetta, terminally ill and briefly reunited with her beloved Alfredo, meets her end. In fact, it took an entire career.

In 2012, with the Indianapolis Opera, O’Flynn knew that her time singing Violetta — from Texas towns to the Metropolitan Opera House to back home in the Berkshires — was ending.

“It’s when I actually learned how to sing the final act, because I was dying; my Violetta was dying. My Violetta was not going to be seen again, my Violetta was not going to be heard again, and everything crystallized,” O’Flynn said. “Everything became slow motion. It was like there was shivering onstage. … It was like, ‘Oh, this is why he wrote it this way.’”

[...] [Soprano Vanessa] Becerra knows her way around a precocious maid.

Or a coquettish peasant, like Zerlina, or a bubbly ingenue.

They’re a key part of the operatic canon who sing some of its most charming arias, but as Becerra’s career matures, the time was right to expand. And though Violetta may share a diminutive suffix with some of the famous soubrettes, the role is anything but.

“I’m 35, so I’ve been singing the -ina, -ana, -etta repertoire for a while,” Becerra said. “Naturally, there’s a maturity, and so I think the roles that I’ve been doing have been setting me up naturally, in a way, to where this is an intimidating piece, but I feel really good about knowing … my instrument better now.”

That instrument will have a lot to navigate, most notably the 10-or-so minutes that close Act 1, from the recitative “É strano” through the famous aria “Sempre libera” (“Always free”), in which Violetta is the only one onstage. The party guests of Act 1 have left, and even Alfredo, serenading Violetta, is heard from the wings.

O’Flynn said that the singing is only part of the trial.

“Is it difficult? Absolutely. Vocally, it can be difficult,” O’Flynn said. “It’s more difficult emotionally, because what she went through is what most women go through, and she should never have gone through. It’s soul-killing misogyny. … But it needs to be out there, and my hope is that, someday, the slant on this thing is going to be more about the wrongness of this than the glorification of victimized women.”

[...] Onstage at Berkshire Community College in 2003, opposite a close friend (baritone William Stone), life and art collided.

In Act 2, after Germont finally berates Violetta into leaving Alfredo by invoking the reputation of his daughter, Violetta has a request: “Embrace me like your daughter, to give me strength.”

“That part starts, basically, with her just singing, and the orchestra comes in,” O’Flynn said. “And I could feel Bill’s hands on me, and I could feel this incredible embrace that we hadn’t rehearsed. I had this massive rush of grief that I didn’t know I still had. And that movement, that I thought was from Bill, kept me from sobbing, and I got through the scene.

“We got offstage, and I thanked him, and he said, ‘What are you talking about?’” O’Flynn recalled. “I said, ‘Well, you know, the way that your hand went up my arm.’ And he went, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I said, ‘What are you talking about?’

“And he just looks at me and he goes, ‘That was your dad, honey.’”