The most official-looking word La Cieca can find on Saturday afternoon’s Tristan HD adventure is here — and so, it seems, she was half right: Robert Dean Smith will sing the one performance, but only the one.

Now, this was just an instinct before the online evidence was presented to her, but your doyenne was going to guess that the casting for the HD would depend on how well Gary Lehman‘s performance went tonight — in other words, if he pulled it off, he would get the HD, and if he crashed and burned, then Smith would be ready to swoop in and save the show.

Now, the showman (or showgirl) in La Cieca believes that the Lehman Tristan (in combination with the Deborah Voigt “will she hurl onstage” subplot) would make for the sort of fascinating “ragtag band of misfits” narrative the media would just eat up. But, on the other hand, there are not that many performances of Tristan left to sell at the Met, and by next year everyone will have forgotten about this week of drama, with the possible exception of Anthony Tommasini, who likes to highlight the gloomy angle whenever possible.

Then again, this is Peter Gelb we’re talking about, and it’s still four days until the telecast, so he has plenty of time to change his mind again, and possibly again.