By Janelle Gelfand
The Cincinnati Enquirer

With stars like Deborah Voigt (above), do looks matter in opera? Tell Janelle Gelfand what you think. Phone: 768-8382; e-mail: jgelfand@enquirer.com. The Associated Press/RICHARD DREW

When Deborah Voigt lit up the stage in her recital at Dayton's Schuster Center last month, the only size that mattered to the audience was the size of her voice.

But Voigt, one of the great leading ladies of our time, was unceremoniously dumped from a production of Ariadne auf Naxos scheduled this summer at London's Covent Garden because of her dress size.

The scandale has erupted into a blizzard of indignant columns worldwide. And nearly every headline evokes that unpolitically correct phrase: "It ain't over till the fat lady sings," credited to sports broadcaster Dan Cook at a 1978 basketball game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Washington Bullets.

Yet, outside of the opera house, TV shows like Ally McBeal (starring rail-thin Calista Flockhart), the skimpily clad Britney Spears and waifs on fashion runways define a culture obsessed with thinness. The Atkins and South Beach diets have not only affected restaurant menus, but also the food on grocery shelves, such as "low carb" bread.

Has this obsession invaded the opera stage, too? Many of today's finest singers do have matinee-idol looks, such as mezzos Susan Graham and Denyce Graves, soprano Renee Fleming and tenor Richard Leech.

"Yes, singers are thinner," says Sandra Bernhard, chair of the opera department at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. "We are competing with movies and television. Audiences, especially in the cities between New York and San Francisco, are expecting their opera to look more like their theater. At the same time, we are asking for the American singer to learn how to move, act and be a performer all the way around - not just in singing."

But Voigt believes the opera stage should be "the last bastion of overlooking that sort of thing, for the greater good."

Singers have long believed the need for stamina and weight behind their voice to sing "big" repertoire like Wagner and Strauss that soars over a huge orchestra.

"When you look back historically, what great singers would we not have experienced?" Voigt says.

Historically, productions were often designed around the singer. The late New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg once remarked that watching Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at the Met reminded him of "whales gravely coming together." What these stand-and-sing productions lacked in staging, they made up for with the spectacular voices of legendary singers such as Lauritz Melchoir, Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson.

Would today's full-figured stars like Jessye Norman or British soprano Jane Eaglen, the world's reigning Brunnhilde, be canceled because their size didn't fit the director's concept? Superstar tenor Luciano Pavarotti is so heavy, he barely moved onstage in his farewell performance of Tosca at the Met in March, but the sold-out house gave him a lengthy standing ovation.

Like that of Voigt, these talents represent the highest artistry a voice can achieve.

Cincinnati Opera artistic director Nicholas Muni says priorities may vary from company to company, but he believes the voice should be the primary consideration.

"At Cincinnati Opera, inclusion and diversity are guiding principals for everything we do," he says.

"This question will never go to rest," says James Conlon, May Festival music director and principal conductor of the Paris Opera. "In an ideal world, everybody looks like a movie star and they sound like the best singer in the world. It's never so. But I think that there is no opera that is not meant to be fundamentally sung as well as possible.

"If you tell me that the person who sings Ariadne as well as everybody else in the world and maybe better, and you don't want to do a production with her, then I start to ask where your values are. Deborah Voigt can sing with me, anytime."

She might not look like the diminutive Mimi (La Boheme), says Bernhard, but "Voigt has a voice that is one in a millennium. She is also an incredible actress, performing roles such as Ariadne with fantastic acting qualities and vocal prowess."

E-mail jgelfand@enquirer.com