New York City Opera has hired the bad boy from Belgium, Gérard Mortier, as its new majordomo. On Tuesday, Mr. Mortier engaged in the first of a series of lectures at the Morgan Library & Museum that is intended to introduce his thoughts on the future of opera to a curious New York audience.

Although Mr. Mortier will be devoting the maiden season of his reign to a survey of the 20th century, producing operas from the sublime — Olivier Messiaen’s “St. Francis of Assisi” — to the ridiculous — “Einstein on the Beach” by Philip Glass — he describes himself as a traditionalist, forever striving to replicate the spirit of that first great composer of opera, Claudio Monteverdi. Mr. Mortier spent considerable time on this topic, making a strong case for the pity and power of the earliest of operatic endeavors. Playing an excerpt from “The Combat of Tancred and Clorinda,” he spoke about the transcendental moment and how every great opera has one. Tying his comprehensive history of the art form into a neat package, he used as an example of such a moment the final scene of “Wozzeck,” by Alban Berg, in which the voice of the orphaned child concludes the opera so poignantly.

You can take the boy out of Salzburg, but you can’t take Salzburg out of the boy. Mr. Mortier, like Gustav Mahler at the Vienna Opera, always returns to Mozart. “We will do a lot of Mozart at City Opera” was perhaps the most comforting quote of the evening. Of course, how they will do so is the crux of the question, and Mr. Mortier used visuals to illustrate his plan. Taking the Champagne Aria from “Don Giovanni,” he first ran a black-and-white film of Cesare Siepi from the Salzburg Festival of 1954 in a classic production, designed by architect Clemens Holzmeister, that eventually wended its way to the Metropolitan Opera House. Following this clip, he ran a video from 2006 of the same aria, this time replacing doublets with business suits and the grotto with a high-rise office building. What Mr. Mortier failed to mention was the painfully obvious contrast between the magnificent singing and diction of the former — a performance conducted by Wilhelm Fuertwängler, no less — and the sloppy, soupy, and swallowed bleating of the modern Don. Having begun his lecture by speaking of the paramount importance of singing in opera, his ending film sequences left his commitment to his main point in some doubt.

There were a few tidbits of news. In his second season (2010–11), the company will mount a new production of Christoph Gluck’s “Alceste.” Mr. Mortier also announced that the director of that modern-dress “Don Giovanni” had just been hired to fashion a “Così Fan Tutte” for the ensemble. The next lecture, in the fall, will concentrate on the 20th century, so the first season of the new administration will undoubtedly be explored in greater detail.

After Berg completed “Wozzeck,” he realized that the revolutionary opera needed to be introduced to an uninitiated public who might otherwise not understand its modernity. He embarked on a long lecture tour, visiting European cities to discuss its traditional structure and cutting-edge harmonic language. Gérard Mortier is on a similar mission. Wish him well — a viable alternative to the Metropolitan is sorely needed in this town.