Margaret Juntwait 1957 - 2015

News posted yesterday that Margaret Juntwait, the voice of the Met broadcasts for the last 10 years, has died of complications from ovarian cancer. She was 58 years old.

The opera grapevine extends far, but often not so far as this blog. But in our age, at once media-saturated and cancer-saturated, there's a cancer-shaped lacuna that begins to form when a media personality (I hate to use that term for her, but there it is for lack of a better) abruptly disappears, and for an extended period. It's the foremost of likely causes, and, as Mary Jo Heath's casual addition "filling in for Margaret Juntwait" began to harden into a constant refrain, it also, in time, acquired an air of tribute, and of soldiering on. Which I suppose is the long-winded way of saying we are not altogether surprised, but we are no less saddened by the loss.

From the perspective of an audience member, I think it's safe to say that Margaret Juntwait got handed a job of work in 2004. First, she had to fill the microphone presence of Peter Allen, who had been the unmistakable voice of the Met broadcasts for almost 30 years. His style was hieratic, some might say mannered, but it had a stylistic retro cool that was performative in and of itself. He could speak words, in that Voice of his, and you would find yourself taking the plot of La Gioconda seriously. It was like his X-Men superpower.

And by 2004, it was what we had been used to for a long time. Then he retired, and Juntwait's task was to step in and alter our expectations, not only of the type of voice behind the mic, but of the type of things that voice would say. If you listen back, you can hear the cautious beginning, the Classical Radio voice, carefully on script, carefully modulated, no digressions. It was all very accomplished, professional, proper at the beginning. Smooth. A little slick, maybe. Not Peter Allen's theatricality, but, you thought, they could have done worse. And you figured she'd grow into it if she stuck around.

She did stick around, and she did grow into it. And there was another aspect to Juntwait's tenure which was unprecedented: we only ever heard Peter Allen on Saturdays from December to May. But Margaret Juntwait ushered in the Sirius broadcasts, which run the whole season from late September, and which, in the beginning, ran four live performances a week. That ended up being a whole lot of mic time.

The Met has gradually scaled back its live Sirius presence, but that robust start gave them a lot of time to experiment, invent a groove, and settle into it. They moved to two commentators (William Berger during the week, Ira Siff on Saturdays), interviews were introduced, things got (mostly) way more relaxed and conversational. Margaret Juntwait, the voice of Met Opera broadcasts, developed along with the audience she shepherded, through performance after performance, from a radio booth often directly connected to that audience through email or social media. Connected, not abstractly, as in the days of old, but in realtime, in a very real way.

So you could say she was a pioneer at a fascinating period in the history of opera. You could say that, when opera entered the 21st century, she was there at the head of the vanguard. No one else will occupy the airspace she did, at that first moment that brought the Met stage and the Met audience closer than it had ever been before. That moment has already gone.