Whenever I am covering singing competitions in New York, one of the most astonishing revelations is the paucity of dramatic voices. Lyric mezzos, lyric sopranos, and lyric baritones dominate, and it’s not unusual to sit through days of auditions and not hear a single viable Verdi mezzo, Verdi baritone or even a remotely acceptable Wagnerian singer. Perhaps this shouldn’t be so startling when you stop to consider the significant areas of the repertoire that are increasingly difficult to cast; when I began attending opera in the early 1980s, you could not possibly have persuaded me that there would be a time when La forza del destino and Andrea Chénier would become relative rarities, simply because there was hardly anyone to sing them.