Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  Like it or not, with or without stars, Zeffirelli’s formula, the deluxe investiture of a popular opera, was a winner. In the wake of his La Bohème, his Tosca (March 11, 1985) would fill the house season after season, indifferent to singers or conductors. The opening of act 3 was by any measure an example of scenic gesture meant principally to astound. Puccini’s evocation of dawn breaking over the Castel Sant’Angelo fell victim to the razzle-dazzle of stage machinery as the terrace rose to reveal Cavaradossi’s dungeon and then sank back into place for the opera’s denouement. The management had attracted a major conductor, Giuseppe Sinopoli; the orchestra was unhappy with him, he with the rate of exchange, and he never again played at the Met. Of the first-night cast, only Domingo had sufficient sweetness and brilliance. Hildegard Behrens, exciting as always, though handicapped by her increasingly weak bottom and thin middle registers, was a curiously unaffecting Tosca; for Scarpia, MacNeil, his voice nearly drained of vibrato, had to lean heavily on experience.29

  The Peter Hall/John Bury Carmen (March 10, 1986), substantially grown since its birth on the small stage of Glyndebourne, would have been easily forgotten had it not been for Maria Ewing. Her gypsy was pouting, rude, roughly sung, and erotic despite her refusal of the trappings of eroticism. She made Andrew Porter’s “short list of those who have left an indelible impression” in the role; she was trounced by many other reviewers (“only a little short of complete travesty,” “a manic-depressive urchin who has fits,” “an object lesson in how not to do the role”). Porgy and Bess had its much belated house premiere at last (Feb. 6, 1985). In the mid-1930s, Otto Kahn had wanted the Met to be the first to mount George Gershwin’s opera. The composer rebuffed the company’s chintzy guarantee of only two performances and turned to Broadway instead. A world tour of the often revived Broadway format with spoken dialogue, kicked off in 1952, was an early triumph for Leontyne Price. The Met’s Bess and Porgy were Grace Bumbry and Simon Estes. Not the “less than convincing” principals, but the large ensemble, Levine in the pit, and Florence Quivar’s definitive Serena argued persuasively for Gershwin as grand opera. Porgy and Bess played to packed houses through its four-season run.30

  Among the other new productions of 1984–86, a revival and two premieres added to the company’s prestige if not to its profits. Khovanshchina (Oct. 14, 1985), sung in Russian, was embraced as a masterpiece. August Everding and Ming-Cho Lee took a spare approach to Mussorgsky’s posthumous work, the better to tell the convoluted story as clearly as possible. The final scene made expressive use of the revolving stage as the “Old Believers” advanced from the forest to the interior of the hermitage for their mass immolation. La Clemenza di Tito was the last of the three neglected Mozart operas Levine added to the repertoire. Ponnelle’s architectonic set, wide steps, porticos, and balconies suited the composer’s late masterpiece. As for Handel’s Samson, Moshinsky and his designer, Timothy O’Brien, attempted to counter the oratorio’s endemic stasis by varying the arrangement of chorus and props. Conductor Julius Rudel played fast and loose with the score’s length and its Baroque embellishments. Vickers’s Miltonic hero, blind at the gate of his Gaza prison, was the lynchpin of the production. Samson was a parting gift to the tenor who had touched New York audiences so deeply since 1960. He would make his farewell to the Met the following season as Samson again, this time in Saint-Saëns’s opera.

  National Tour, 1883–1986

  Bliss was barely out the door when Crawford scuttled the annual national tour, a tradition as old as the Met itself. The growing strength of regional opera, coast-to-coast access to the Metropolitan via television, the increasing difficulty of drafting prominent singers, and, above all, significant losses were reasons to call it quits. In 1883–84, Henry Abbey, an inveterate tour manager, had taken his Grand Italian Opera on the road. At different points in the season, the company visited Boston, where it presented the Met premieres of Carmen and Martha, Cincinnati for its first Le Prophète and Hamlet, and Philadelphia for Roméo et Juliette. Abbey’s troupe traveled as far west as Chicago and St. Louis and south to Washington. The Grand Italian Opera played more performances away that season than on 39th Street. The German ensembles of 1884–1891 were homebound by comparison: for three seasons they did not budge. Under the management of Abbey, Grau, and Schoeffel in 1891, the tour reclaimed its share of the schedule. The De Reszke brothers and Emma Eames made their Met debuts not in New York, but in Chicago during a five-week engagement that featured the premieres of Otello and Cavalleria rusticana. Just before and after the turn of the century, the company journeyed for long stretches, adding to its itinerary numerous stops, including two in Canada, en route to the Pacific. On November 9, 1900, Los Angeles heard Melba as the Met’s first Mimì; on April 17, 1906, Fremstad and Caruso sang Carmen in San Francisco only hours before the earthquake. Beginning in 1903, tours were confined to the spring, with rare exception. In the climactic months of the 1910 competition with Hammerstein, not one but two brigades were dispatched from Broadway, the first to Chicago for a month, the second to the midwest and then across the Atlantic to Paris.

  With Hammerstein out of the way, Gatti, no friend of long excursions, could afford to keep his stars in his backyard, Brooklyn or Philadelphia. The sole far-flung destination was Atlanta, where opera week was the height of the social season, the occasion for masked balls and lavish parties honoring fun-loving singers wont to reciprocate with musical antics. It was in 1910 that the first citizens’ committee was organized to sponsor a Met visit: the Atlanta Festival Association headed by “Colonel” Peel. A prize attraction was the alluring and sometimes shocking Geraldine Farrar; the press took special note of her offstage “peek-a-boo” blouse and her onstage Zazà panties. Atlanta knew what it wanted. Mrs. Peel warned Edward Ziegler, Gatti’s assistant, that the patrons would not put up with “a bargain counter affair,” that the roster had to include “Hell Cats” (if not Farrar, then Frieda Hempel), that Maria Barrientos was “very unpopular here” and Ponselle “an unknown quantity,” and that Il Trittico, whose New York world premiere she had attended that very evening, was “an awful conglomeration” and “a perfect mess” (Dec. 14, 1918). Although Atlantans did not get their favorite “Hell Cats” and had to suffer the unpopular Barrientos, they had little cause for complaint: the “awful” Trittico did not venture below the Mason-Dixon line, the young Ponselle was a hit in Atlanta as she had been in New York, and Caruso was all theirs in three of the seven performances. The circuit grew again in the 1920s with the inclusion of Cleveland, Rochester, Baltimore, and Washington. When one port of call dropped out during the Depression, another close by, Newark, Hartford, or suburban White Plains, took its place. By the end of the 1930s, a truly national tour struck out for New Orleans, Dallas, and points between. Local papers had lots to say about gowns and jewels on display for opening night. And lucky the city favored with Lily Pons or Risë Stevens, who exuded not only the chichi of high culture, but the chic of mass media, radio, movies, and the ubiquitous cigarette advertisement, particularly apt for Stevens’s smoldering Carmen.31

  If the star singers of the 1950s found the American road less appealing than had their elders, from the point of view of management the tour remained a necessity. Bing was categorical: “The tour is the Metropolitan’s economic basis for existence: if we have no tour the Metropolitan will close because we will not have the funds to support ourselves. If we continue to tell the important tour cities that they cannot have the distinguished artists who have such outstanding success in New York, they will decline to accept our tours.” The particular “distinguished” artist he had in mind was Renata Tebaldi, whose fee he sweetened by a then munificent $500 per performance. Tebaldi’s Violetta and Tosca were the drawing cards of the 1957 tour. The following spring, the casts were as good as, and sometimes better than, those in New York: Aïda and Madama Butterfly with Antonietta Stella and Carlo Bergonzi; Don Giovanni with George London, Eleanor Steber, and Cesare Valletti; and Otello with Mario Del Monac
o, Leonard Warren, and Zinka Milanov. Nonetheless, that very season, the ranks of first-tier traveling artists were perilously thin. The company had had no choice but to announce at the outset two tenor comprimarios in principal roles, Giulio Gari as Turiddu, and Charles Anthony as Almaviva. It was downhill from there.32

  Twenty years later, the Times plumbed the sorry depths to which the tour had descended (June 13, 1976). In many cities, the auditoriums were cavernous civic centers or hockey rinks whose acoustics required amplification, whose tiny pits forced reduced orchestras, and whose pitiful stages were inadequate to the scenery. To avoid paying overtime, scores were hacked: Carmen sometimes lost the children’s chorus and the orchestral entr’actes, Meistersinger a quarter of its music. Too often, management pulled a bait and switch whereby stars listed in the initial announcements were replaced by dimmer lights. Levine himself decried the look and sound of the shows: “The Met used to depend a lot on painted sets. Now our style is so complex that we find it hard to adapt productions to the theatre stages and orchestra pits now available to us. The lack of resonance from concrete floors in the pit, for example . . . changes drastically what we can accomplish” (Times, Jan. 17, 1982). From Crawford’s perspective, the problem was the repertoire, the Peter Grimes, the Francesca da Rimini, the Rinaldo for which he blamed Levine: “If you had deliberately set out to sabotage the tour [of 1984], you couldn’t have done a better job.”33

  Once a cash cow, the tour had become a cash leech, a $1-million-a-year drag on the budget. In 1986, only Boston, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Minneapolis booked the woeful final sampler. If it is unfair to compare Atlanta’s Santuzza and Turiddu, Nicole Lorange and Vladimir Popov, to their 1919 counterparts, Ponselle and Caruso, as recently as 1970 the leads of Cavalleria rusticana had been the high-powered Fiorenza Cossotto and Plácido Domingo. The national tour went out with a whimper. At its last matinée performance, in Minneapolis on May 31, 1986, neither the Roméo, comprimario Jon Garrison, nor the Juliette, Monique Baudoin, had ever sung their roles at the Met. In fact, Baudoin had never sung any role at all at the Met. Later that June, she came as close as she ever would to Lincoln Center when the company presented Gounod’s opera in the Great Meadow of Central Park.

  Repertoire and Singers: 1986–1990

  By the end of 1986–87, it was bruited about that Crawford had invaded the artistic realm. Not only had he taken to auditioning singers, but it was he who succeeded in enticing the revered and elusive conductor Carlos Kleiber to the Met. At about that time, Levine had asked to be relieved of some administrative duties so that he might concentrate more fully on the music. He continued to corner new productions. Wagner, Mozart, most of Verdi, and the two modernist works, Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung, were his. Among the guests, only Kleiber enjoyed prestige equal or superior to Levine’s. Richard Bonynge was something of a regular as conductor of his wife, Joan Sutherland. Marek Janowski, Manuel Rosenthal, and Charles Dutoit had only brief Met careers. But despite the repeated riff on Damn Yankees, “Whatever Jimmy wants, Jimmy gets,” with Crawford’s growing influence it was plainly no longer “Jimmy’s show” alone (Times, July 23, 1987; Sept. 22, 1985).

  In March 1987, the auditorium was named for Sibyl Harrington. The announcement came during one of Zilkha’s onstage corporate dinners. Harrington’s generosity had come with the caveat that she would support productions in the grandest manner only. To Dexter’s disgust, the horse and wolfhounds on which she insisted had been front and center in the Fontainebleau scene of his Don Carlo; and to Zeffirelli’s glee, she took a special fancy to his recurrent menageries. Harrington’s clout provided another opening for lamentations on the state of opera in New York. “Serious opera fans have received the dedication as a defiant Bronx cheer,” griped one critic. Zeffirelli’s La Bohème, Tosca, and Turandot, all underwritten by Harrington, had “turned the Metropolitan from house of art into tourist attraction, a nice conclusion, perhaps, to a bus tour including lunch at Mama Leone’s” (Times, Nov. 12, 1987).34

  For four consecutive seasons, in its pursuit of black ink, the Met channeled the Zeffirelli/Harrington aesthetic. From 1982 to 1986, the company had mounted fourteen new productions, seven of them premieres or revivals of operas long absent. Among the eighteen new productions of 1986–90, there were only two premieres, Giulio Cesare and Erwartung, and no resurrections. Instead, the “Ring,” Aïda, La Traviata, and other chestnuts acquired the look of luxury. The promise of an expanded repertoire made by Levine and Dexter in the mid-1970s, honored for a decade, was deferred indefinitely. The critics bristled when the company retracted its commission for a new work by Jacob Druckman and canceled a Levine pet project, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron: “For box-office reasons, the company has been pulling in its horns ever since James Levine and Bruce Crawford took charge as artistic director and general manager”; “The general manager conceded that it was now company policy to concentrate on popular operas that could fill the Met’s 3,800-seat theatre.”35

  For 1986–87, Schenk and Schneider-Siemssen were entrusted with two highly visible projects, the first installment of their “Ring” and Die Fledermaus (Dec. 4). Schneider-Siemssen designed a far more naturalistic tetralogy than the one he had contrived for Karajan a decade earlier. Bucking the doctrine of abstraction in vogue since the first postwar Bayreuth festival, 1951, the Met Die Walküre (Sept. 22) opted for faithful adherence to Wagner’s scenic and dramatic instructions. Levine took command of the Wagnerian marathon for the first time; Behrens was a gripping Brünnhilde; James Morris established himself as the Wotan of his generation. But where were the heldentenors? During the first years of the run, none of the Siegmunds approached the Vickers standard; worse still, none of the Siegfrieds came close to passable. Schenk, who found the Rhine more salubrious than Bad Ischl, the waters of Fledermaus, drowned the operetta in age-old Viennese shtick. The lyrics were restored to the original German for the first time since 1905. Although the premiere was an off night for everyone (“about halfway through the first act . . . it became painfully clear that the most generous approach to the remainder of the evening would be to look for bright spots amid the gloom”), the New Year’s Eve telecast captures Te Kanawa, the Rosalinde, back in form in a lush “Csárdás.” Despite the dwindling box office of subsequent seasons, the Eisensteins and their fellow bon vivants would cavort in their revolving ballroom in nine revivals through 2006.36

  Zeffirelli’s immense Turandot (March 12, 1987) was even more overstuffed than his La Bohème or Tosca. The audience gasped in amazement, and many critics in dismay, during the act 2 riddle scene when the princess’s imperial backpack gushed multicolored streamers. Opera News raised the specter of the opera itself getting “lost in the shuffle” when “the machinery works better than ever.” In the April 4 telecast, Marton’s icy princess is frequently strident, Domingo sacrifices the unknown prince’s dreamy tenderness to the role’s heroic outbursts, and Mitchell is a rich-toned Liù. The intimacy of Verdi’s La Traviata (Oct. 16, 1989) was smothered under Zeffirelli’s hyperbole. The Met’s hi-tech stage held out the temptation of re-creating the effects that his 1982 motion picture reduction of the opera owed to camera and editing. He invented action for the two preludes, upstaging as great a conductor as Carlos Kleiber. For Don Giovanni (March 22, 1990), with a backward glance at Rococo stagecraft and the canny manipulation of sliding panels and trompe-l’oeil backdrops, Zeffirelli eschewed his customary realism. First-night critics were divided. In the engrossing video, Ramey’s forceful Giovanni heads a strong cast; the Elvira, Karita Mattila, in her debut role, displays the bloom and energy audiences would cherish through sixteen seasons and counting. When Zeffirelli’s design for Aïda was rejected as exorbitant, the commission went to Sonja Frisell and Gianni Quaranta; the management was after Zeffirelli’s manner, not his pricetag. Frisell and Quaranta’s still-extant spectacle (Dec. 8, 1988)—its monumental statues framing the opening scene, the colossi of act 2 so tall that they exceeded the height of the proscenium—leave
s us to wonder at the scale of Zeffirelli’s proposal. Ponnelle’s “elephantine” Manon (Feb. 6, 1987), tested in Vienna and Munich, sported a two-level, four-chamber gambling den, a Cours-la-Reine tightrope walker, and a final scene sited in a garbage dump—a window, said Andrew Porter, into the designer-director’s opinion of the work.37