Ken Howard

Juan Diego Florez as Tonio in the Met's production of "The Daughter of the Regiment."

After Pittsburgh Opera music director Antony Walker's amazing singing from the pit while conducting, other stories about opera will pale this season. But the industry is abuzz with the encore of "Ah! Mes Amis" that Juan Diego Florez gave in his performance of Donizetti's "Fille du Regiment (The Daughter of the Regiment)" this week at the Met in New York.

The reason it's a big deal is that most opera houses, including Pittsburgh Opera, don't allow encores, especially in the middle of an act. Florez's was reportedly pre-arranged and authorized by the Met, in part to show off his fantastic voice that can hit the aria's nine high Cs with grace and ease (Florez is a singular talent, a light-voiced, high tenor that you don't hear that often) and probably to create a little news, too. I asked the Pittsburgh Opera's artistic director Christopher Hahn about it.

"I don't have an official policy about encores because the assumption has been for the longest time that they don't happen," he says. "It is only in the very rarest of occasions that they happen. They clearly interrupt the drama and the flow."

While in Donizetti's time, it was a common practice, "for most of the last century it has been frowned upon," says Hahn. "Now, it is so not part of the practice that no singer could just decide spur of the moment to give an encore because the conductor would not know what [the singer] is doing. It would have to be discussed earlier. But back then, the conductor would whisper to the orchestra and make eye contact with the singer and do it again."

He doesn't have a big problem with Florez and the Met, though. "The Daughter of the Regiment" is a comedy and it is so clearly a show piece aria it is difficult to argue it disturbs the flow of the opera."

I agree with him. In comedies it would be nice to see more of this. The idea that most comic operas should maintain a theatrical flow akin to film is a strange one. While productions of tragic operas have truly gained from the influence of theater and film, comedies have lost some of their original sass and just fun, I think. Occasionally pulling the curtain back and revealing the artifice of the production can be liberating and lighthearted (certainly it is seen in theater from time to time), not to mention historically accurate, so why not? At the end of the day, it is singers we go to hear and hearing great ones sing an aria more than once would be welcome, in moderation.