Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  With Volpe’s promotion to general manager in May 1993, the fourth troika folded, again in short order: the Gentele/Kubelik/Chapin triumvirate lasted only days; Chapin/Levine/Dexter for a year or so, Bliss/Levine/Dexter for five years. As Volpe recounts it, he had been in his old assistant manager’s office for three years as general director when one day, irritated at finding Aprile Millo asleep on a sofa in Bing’s former “elegant domain,” lately converted into a conference room, and deciding that enough was enough, he moved lock, stock, and barrel into the space designated for the general manager. A few weeks later, he raised the matter of the change of title with the board, and soon thereafter was named general manager: “Jimmy Levine was the first to congratulate me. I told him that he would retain the title of artistic director, but that I now had final authority over all matters at the Met.” The appointment of Sarah Billinghurst, previously the artistic administrator at the San Francisco Opera, as his assistant manager in March 1994 gave legitimacy to his incursion into artistic affairs. Jonathan Friend, since the departure of Joan Ingpen responsible for casting reporting to Levine, would in the future report to Billinghurst, and Billinghurst, of course, to Volpe.4

  AMERICAN OPERA, 1991–2005

  By 1990, Levine had made good on his promise to introduce modern European works, neglected Mozart operas, and the Baroque. American music had been left behind. The omission was glaring, as was another: the music/artistic director had not yet put his stamp on a world premiere. John Corigliano’s 1991 The Ghosts of Versailles ended the drought unbroken since Martin David Levy’s 1967 Mourning Becomes Electra, the longest such hiatus in Met history. Levine had reason to be cautious: not one American opera premiered at the Met had secured a place in the company repertoire. Although a few had enjoyed brief currency, most had come up against unreceptive audiences and hostile reviewers.

  The first step on the road to The Ghosts of Versailles was taken in 1979 when conductor and composer met to discuss a concert scene based on monologues from Seneca’s Medea for Renata Scotto. Levine asked Corigliano whether he had given any thought to composing an opera; a few months later, the Met made the handsome offer of $150,000 for a work to be premiered in the centennial season. For The Ghosts of Versailles (first titled A Figaro for Antonia), Corigliano and his librettist, William M. Hoffman, invented a metaoperatic classification, “grand opera buffa,” announcing their intention to wed the spectacular and the intimate, the tragic and the comic, the high and the low. Hoffman’s libretto is an elaborate riff on the French revolution and the Beaumarchais play La Mère coupable. Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, and characters that step out of Le Nozze di Figaro and Il Barbiere di Siviglia appear together to echoes of Mozart and Rossini recast in Corigliano’s late-twentieth-century neo-Romanticism. If Corigliano and Hoffman missed the deadline for the 1983 celebrations, it was management that stalled production until 1991. Box office far exceeded its 80 percent to 90 percent projections; it did very well for the revival of 1994–95. John Conklin’s shifting staircases, interior stages, and fleet of flying objects and characters moved in tandem with Colin Graham’s whirlwind staging, all in the service of a narrative at once historical, literary, and fantastic. The Marie Antoinette of Teresa Stratas, her free upper octave sounding the queen’s anguish and ultimate resignation, Håkan Hagegård’s enraptured Beaumarchais struggling to rewrite “history as it should have been,” Gino Quilico’s affable Figaro, the slithery, acrobatic villain of Graham Clark, Marilyn Horne’s hilarious Egyptian singer, the sweet-toned Rosina of Renée Fleming in her second Met role, in fact the entire, enormous cast (forty-three names are listed in the program) testified that the company was equal to the demands of a complex contemporary work. There were those that first night, December 19, who found the tuneful score and intricate libretto both musically and politically irrelevant. Time has shown that Corigliano’s composition, though a homage to his masters, speaks a language of its own, by turn wry, lyric, and grave; Hoffman’s libretto comments trenchantly on the excesses of the ancien régime and the Terreur that followed.5

  On October 12, 1992, the world premiere of Philip Glass’s The Voyage celebrated the cinquecentennial of Christopher Columbus’s discovery. Sixteen years before, Robert Wilson’s Byrd Hoffmann Watermill Foundation had rented the Metropolitan for two performances of Einstein on the Beach, fruit of Glass’s collaboration with Wilson. In the interim, Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984) had further anchored Glass’s status as a composer of opera. The Met placed a high-stakes bet, a commission of $325,000, the largest in the company’s history, on his continued success. Playwright David Henry Hwang drew his libretto from Glass’s own scenario, a meditation on the theme of exploration: Columbus’s sailing is bracketed by episodes of previous and future journeys, the first an expedition from a distant planet to Earth during the Ice Age, the last space travel from Earth in 2092. Director David Pountney and designer Robert Israel sent the stage elevators into interplanetary warp; a wheelchair-bound scientist, modeled on Stephen Hawking, floated in the rings of Saturn; Queen Isabella’s court dissolved into the deck of Columbus’s ship. Conventional narrative and character all but disappear in the wash of Glass’s minimalism, the mesmerizing repetition of subtly varied music cells. Generally favorable reviews noted occasional dissonance, even counterpoint, unusual in the composer’s idiom. And again, the Met gave its all to the new opera, conducted by Glass specialist Bruce Ferden. The downtown crowd easily compensated for the many Met regulars who stayed away. For the revival of 1994–95, seats went begging. The rapturous critical reception of Glass’s Satyagraha in 2007–08 and the increasingly wide acceptance of his music theater point to a return trip.

  FIGURE 37. The Ghosts of Versailles, act 1, scene 3, 1991 (Winnie Klotz; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  The remaining world premieres of the Volpe/Levine regime, John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby and Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy, were adaptations of two canonical novels published in 1925. Most reviewers held that the musical embodiment of Jay Gatsby lacked the mystery F. Scott Fitzgerald had conjured on the page. The New Yorker acknowledged Harbison’s “considerable achievement,” his “individual and original language,” and his deft weave of 1920s pastiches and “music of brittle brilliance and mobile complexity.” The unduly harsh conclusion, however, was that Gatsby “outstays its welcome and becomes monotonous.” Levine led a strong contingent for his twenty-fifth Met anniversary: the production team of Mark Lamos and Robert Israel, Dawn Upshaw as the spoiled, languorous Daisy, Dwayne Croft as the rock-steady, sympathetic Nick, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as the doomed Myrtle (in her arresting debut), and Jerry Hadley as Gatsby. Despite mixed notices, the house was well filled; attendance fell for the 2001–02 revival, by which time Harbison had effected some judicious pruning. Picker and the librettist Gene Sheer brought off the heavy lift of reducing Theodore Dreiser’s nine-hundred-page An American Tragedy, fluent in Francesca Zambello’s staging on Adrianne Lobel’s three-tiered set. Nathan Gunn was Clyde, the weak-willed protagonist; Patricia Racette, Roberta, the poor girl he allows to drown; and Susan Graham, Sondra, the rich girl, his ticket to prosperity. Gunn’s musicianship, smooth timbre, and sterling diction helped compensate for a voice not burly enough for the task; Graham put over the opera’s most memorable aria, “New York has changed me”; Racette, and Dolora Zajick, as Clyde’s Bible-thumping mother, had the gravitas most reviewers found lacking in Picker’s score. Eight performances failed to stir the enthusiasm that would have warranted a revival.6

  Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah and Michael Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge had premiered elsewhere. Susannah, a staple of conservatories and regional houses, frequently presented by the New York City Opera and once, in 1965, by the Met’s own national touring company, is widely recognized as an American classic. The 1999 production was borrowed from Chicago; Renée Fleming and Samuel Ramey reprised the roles they had sung six years earlier at the Lyric Opera. The stars drew large audiences, but Floyd’s folksy,
small-bored inspiration proved a poor fit for the Met. A View from the Bridge was also on loan from Chicago. The fatal passion of Arthur Miller’s longshoreman for his niece, often labeled operatic, kindled Bolcom’s “modern-day Mascagni melodrama. Call it Brooklyn verismo.” Harbison had composed his own 1920s dance tunes for The Great Gatsby; Bolcom, indulging his love of pop music, privileged Johnny Black’s “Paper Doll,” which was written in 1915 and resurrected by both the Mills Brothers and Frank Sinatra in 1943. Predictably, it was the catchy “Paper Doll” that listeners whistled all the way home. Bolcom’s expert score, Frank Galati’s taut staging of an ensemble cast, and Santo Loquasto’s evocation of working-class Brooklyn attracted skimpy audiences.7

  STAR POWER

  The Gilded Age belonged to de Reszke and Melba, the first two decades of the twentieth century to Caruso and Farrar, 1935–1941 to Flagstad and Melchior; opening night 1991 shouted that two men, and what is more a pair of tenors, Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo, had been admitted to the exclusive club. Each sang an act from one of his signature operas; then, together, they closed the gala with the Rodolfo-Marcello duet from La Bohème. Two years later, opening night marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of their Met debuts: Domingo strutted his Wagner in act 1 of Die Walküre, Pavarotti had a go at a staged Otello (act 1) for the first and last time in his career, and the friendly rivals capped the evening with act 3, scene 2, of Il Trovatore, Domingo in the first aria, “Ah sì, ben mio,” Pavarotti in a rendition of “Di quella pira,” whose final high note rang forth with their voices in unison. Opening night 1994 coupled Il Tabarro and Pagliacci, the first with Domingo, the second with Pavarotti in one of only two Canios he would sing at the Met.

  The tenors had made their 1968 debuts two months apart. Almost immediately, Domingo established himself as one of the Met’s indispensable assets. The 1969 Il Trovatore was followed in the next twenty years by nine more new productions and eight opening nights. Pavarotti began slowly. His bow in La Bohème was not especially noteworthy. He made a strong return nearly two years later. And then, on February 17, 1972, when he nailed the nine high Cs of La Fille du régiment, the audience belonged to him. By 1990, Pavarotti had notched nine new productions and three opening nights. He owed his cannily constructed celebrity in part to the opera house and in part to concerts of popular arias and songs. His publicist-manager, Herbert Breslin, booked the tenor into arenas and sports palaces where his amplified voice reached many thousands of fans. An instantly recognized oversized man who flourished an oversized white handkerchief, he made commercials, rode a horse in New York’s Columbus Day parade, and starred in a big-studio movie, Yes, Giorgio. In the meantime, Domingo, too, was busy exploring crossover channels—Latin and show tune albums, pop duets with John Denver—all the while maintaining his primary commitment to opera. He appeared on movie screens not in an inane comedy, but in film versions of La Traviata and Otello, both directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and most memorably in Francesco Rosi’s Carmen. Domingo was and remains the consummate musician, a master of roles in Italian, French, German, Russian, and English who finds time to pursue a parallel conducting career. Pavarotti read music with difficulty. Nevertheless, through the alchemy of thorough coaching and his own prodigious instincts, he was a remarkably refined singer. And in the end, it was Pavarotti who stood for opera in the public imagination.

  FIGURE 38. Gala celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Metropolitan debuts of Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo, left to right Pavarotti, Joseph Volpe, Domingo, September 27, 1993 (Winnie Klotz; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  In July 1990, the “third” tenor, José Carreras, joined his buddies in a Rome concert scheduled to coincide with the megaevent of the soccer World Cup. Carreras’s illness and subsequent recovery provided the catalyst for a fund-raiser to benefit leukemia research. The success of the format spawned more than a decade of concerts that united the singers in stadiums around the world. Between 1996 and 2002, from Düsseldorf to Yokohama, they were partnered by Levine on eleven occasions, each of which brought the conductor $500,000. The tenors earned many millions more. However lowbrow the extravaganzas and crass the exhibition, their exploitation raised the profile of opera in the culture at large, jolting attendance at live performances, if only temporarily. In 1997, the president of Opera America declared ebulliently, “Opera’s audience is growing, and it is also growing younger.” The growth would peak that very year at 4.7 percent of the adult population, up from the 3.3 percent of only five years earlier. These were good times for the Met. The economy was strong, tourists flocked to the city, negotiations with unions were generally civil. The endowment rose from $110 million to $235 million. Looking back, Volpe wrote, “Financially, the Met was in better shape than at any time in its history.”8

  Luciano Pavarotti

  Under Bing, Chapin, Bliss, and Crawford, that is, prior to 1990, Pavarotti had a greater impact on the repertoire than did his Spanish confrere. He participated in the company’s bel canto revivals, La Fille du régiment, I Puritani, and La Favorita, and ventured Mozart’s Idomeneo. Only La Favorita failed to catch on. Under Volpe, two of Pavarotti’s three new productions cast him in operas he had often sung with success. Ten years after he played Riccardo, the Boston governor in the 1980 “American revolution” Un Ballo in maschera, he donned the royal robes of Gustavo III, Sweden’s king, in Verdi’s intended setting (Oct. 25, 1990). Piero Faggioni, who was responsible not only for the direction, but also for the sets, costumes, and lighting, mired the elegant score in vulgarity: the fortune-teller’s den was a foundry that belched in time to the music; the principals were dwarfed by mountains of scenery and lost in a welter of choristers and supers. As for Pavarotti, if there was a falling off since his earlier Ballos, it was barely perceptible. A year later, in the new L’Elisir d’amore (Oct. 24, 1991), the Met’s record-setting Nemorino had lost his boyish brio. The Times and the New Yorker (Nov. 18) noted Pavarotti’s decline, hailed Kathleen Battle’s exquisite Adina, and reviled John Copley’s direction and Beni Montresor’s triple-decker set, its long flights of steps and cartoonish backdrops “already . . . old,” “ugly,” and “unhelpful to the singers.” In the November 16, 1991, telecast, Pavarotti delivers a perfunctory “Una furtiva lagrima” at nearly uninflected mezzo forte; the tenor had sung the famous aria once too often. The Met premiere of Verdi’s I Lombardi was mounted expressly for Pavarotti. At fifty-eight, beset by physical problems that compromised his mobility, he was still capable of sustaining Oronte’s long phrases with the sound of youth. Three years later, his success in his first staged Andrea Chénier (April 6, 1996) was all the more heartening in that he had failed so miserably that same season in recreating his breakthrough performance in La Fille du régiment. Enjoying a vocal Indian summer, the singer, whose technique was no longer adequate for the high-lying Tonio, gave eloquence and unusual grace to the poet Chénier. But his acting, rarely persuasive in serious roles, was irreparably undermined by age and ailments: “He . . . spent a lot of time leaning on a sword that doubled conveniently as a cane. Contradicting the libretto, he often left the stage when he felt he wasn’t needed. He even managed to sip water between arias.” Just weeks before the gala that celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of his debut (Nov. 22, 1998), Pavarotti bowed out of an upcoming La Forza del destino, pleading inability to learn the new role. He continued to sing at the Met, ever more rarely, until March 2004. The 1996 Andrea Chénier preserves the last best example of his artistry.9

  Plácido Domingo

  At the end of 2012–13, Domingo had set an astonishing company record of forty-seven leading roles in forty-six seasons, including a good number of Met firsts and significant revivals. In the Volpe years, his energy still seemed limitless, his voice indestructible. He starred in solid new productions of La Fanciulla del West (Oct. 10, 1991), Otello (March 21, 1994), Simon Boccanegra (Jan. 19, 1995), and Parsifal (March 14, 1991), and in the house premiere of Stiffelio. Domingo had won his Wagnerian spur
s as a lyric Lohengrin in 1984; the more heroic Siegmund would eventually be one of his specialties. Parsifal, moderate in intensity, range, and length, was the purposeful stepping-stone between the two. The sets lent mood and detail to Stiffelio, a neglected work of Verdi’s middle period. Particularly striking was the staging of the final scene in which Stiffelio (Domingo), a Protestant minister, forgives his adulterous wife from a pulpit high above the congregation. The opera has been well received in two revivals. More debatable were La Forza del destino (Feb. 29, 1996), Carmen (Oct. 31, 1996), and Samson et Dalila (Feb. 13, 1998). The normally reliable Gian Carlo Del Monaco and Michael Scott came a cropper with Forza’s tortured plot, impenetrable in awkward and unsightly sets downgraded to meet Volpe’s demands for thrift. Domingo’s Leonora, Sharon Sweet, an indifferent actress, sang unevenly. And without a great Leonora, why bother with a new production of one of Verdi’s most challenging scores? Domingo’s Don José dominated Carmen: “Never has a voice so suited a role, or a role a voice” (Times). Waltraud Meier, unconventional, intelligent, and miscast, “found not a single champion among the principal New York reviewers.” True to form, and to the disadvantage of the dramaturgy, Zeffirelli lavished his attention on the picturesque two- and four-footed denizens of Seville. Richard Hudson deprived the Biblical lovers of a comfortable divan for their dalliance in the valley of Sorek; seductress (Denyce Graves) and prey (Domingo) had to make do with the hard floor. Samson suffered beneath his physical and spiritual burdens without benefit of millstone.10