[Will, it's been a while since we've recommended anything, hasn't it? I recommend this one--a 1959 recording of Lucia di Lammermoor with (who else?) Joan Sutherland in the title role.]

There's a certain sense of suspension of disbelief that goes on into viewing an opera--part of it, of course, is in the viewing (are we really supposed to believe that some three-hundred-pound unkempt hirsute tenor is a strapping young warrior for the Gods and savior of humanity? That a soprano, taller lying down than standing up, eye-liner running, makup melting, is the object of undying lust of the bright-eyed youth of some far-off fairy-land?), and, for better or worse, this degree of suspension of disbelief is being amended by a new generation of (how to say?) more decorous opera singers.

But on another level, we're asked to believe the unbelieveable--that although there are characters in plain sight of each other, they are unable to really see each other--that although there are characters that are plainly audible in the farthest reaches of the opera-house, they cannot be heard by their comrades standing five feet away.

This, of course, is what I thought was happening this afternoon when I was faced with a recording of Lucia di Lammermoor going mad. In this famous mad scene, the soprano singing Lucia is asked to perform a cadenza with the flutist--ostensibly mimicking a bird in this scene. Acrobatics aside (and--to be sure--Joan Sutherland does this the best of the recordings and performances I've come across), why is this, of all things, the dramatic conclusion of a scene in which Lucia is going mad? Are we to believe that just because Lucia hums along with a bird, that she is insane (Mary Poppins should be proscribed to Bedlam)?

The answer is much deeper than I was initially ready to give credit: here is Lucia, just now having killed the husband she married and did not love, blood still staining her hand, still in her wedding dress singing like a bird, and that's precisely the play Donzietti's hoisted: opera audiences are born and bred in this suspension of disbelief, but here is the ultimate test: we hear the bird, and we hear Lucia, of course it's extremely beautiful, and of course it's fun to hear Lucia and the flutist duel it out in front of God and the New York Times Arts reporters. But Donizetti must mean for none of the characters on stage not to hear the flute. The scene is chilling: Lucia staggers into court, blood-stained, bedraggled, and singing (singing!) like the world's most accomplished robin, only because she thinks she's vehemently arguing with one, while there's not a bird in sight.

And we, the audience, are invited to glimpse but a small fraction of her madness.