Maybe we can't cast them so easily these days? Is the emotional reach of the music too limited for our "sophisticated" ears... do we need an array of horns and wagner-tubas to satisfy our expectations? I agree they're staged sometimes... but in cases of "rare exception", rather than their previous pride-of-place in the repertoire of any opera-house worth the name.
Not being able to cast them is certainly part of the problem - although this is a self-fulfilling problem (if you can't cast them, you can't perform them, so singers won't learn them...).
The rot probably set in with
Faust, which was done to death in performances which overlaid the work with Victorian piety, and which totally neglected the work's lyricism and indeed its eroticism - in their youthful attitude towards women there is a sense in which Gounod and Goethe were much closer in outlook and temperament than many people (and almost all Germans) would care to admit, and it is interesting that Gounod set elements of
Faust that are almost all Goethe's own work. The ENO production, replacing the recitatives with spoken dialogue, turned Faust into something very different from the Victorian morality-play it can all too easily become.
I also wonder whether the growth of recording, with its emphasis on the Italian repertory in particular, may have had an impact. The growth of recording is linked inexorably with the career of Caruso - the first million-selling recording artist, regarded as a classic now but denounced in his day as someone who trashed the art of lyrical singing and went instead for a histrionic, over-robust style. I'm speculating here, but I wonder whether the vocal tradition that preceded Caruso in the Italian repertory was much closer to what we normally think of as the French style. Is it conceivable that the apotheosis of Caruso and his legions of imitators may have helped condemn French opera to the fringes?
