Volpe and Levine held their second joint press conference in more than twenty years in September 1996; their secretive MO had long been a sore point with reporters. The event was staged to present a united front in announcing that Gergiev had been appointed the first principal guest conductor in Met history, a post created expressly for him, and that he was committed to eight productions in five years, including two premieres. “I’m in heaven,” Volpe enthused, “just to think what can be accomplished with everything Jim and I have tried to do, and now with Valery coming on and adding what he can do” (Times, Sept. 16, 1997). Behind the decision was, no doubt, the expectation, first, that the extroverted Gergiev would serve as backup—and antidote—to the very private Levine, and, second, that he would continue to expand the repertoire in the Slavic direction peripheral to Levine’s interests. In fact, the only Slavic opera Levine conducted in this period was his well-oiled The Bartered Bride. Volpe returned to his old refrain: “People claim that James Levine is hogging everything, but that is just not true. . . . In bringing Valery to the Met, we are really beginning to get the world’s premier conductors into the house” (Times, Dec. 19, 1997). Reminiscent of his nod to Dexter was Levine’s “We have the most marvelous interaction” (Times, Dec. 15, 1997). Gergiev’s appointment raised eyebrows in New York and hackles at home. A government official chided, “Gergiev must not take unilateral steps and sign foreign contracts without informing the Russian government of this and coordinating the matter with it.” While denying that Gergiev’s growing influence implied that Levine might soon be leaving, Volpe acknowledged that in that event, “Gergiev is the man he would go after.” Meanwhile, despite his many remunerative and exhausting distractions, Levine kept up his Metropolitan schedule. In 1999–00, for example, he conducted sixty-five performances, very close to his habitual quota of 25 percent of the season’s total.25
In May-June 1998, the Met assumed the risks, and ultimately reaped the rewards, of bringing the Kirov to New York under its own aegis. On the esoteric program were Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery, Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, Borodin’s Prince Igor, and Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. Sarah Billinghurst spoke warmly of the growing relationship: not only had the Met gained a first-flight conductor for extended periods, but through his good offices the company would have the opportunity to bring its partner troupe to New York every four or five years, exchange productions, and engage the Kirov’s best singers. This was, she suggested, an extraordinary win-win proposition. The very next year, Gergiev was no longer “the man [Volpe] would go after” in the case, for whatever reason, of a Levine withdrawal. He was categorical in answering a sticky question put to him by Johanna Fiedler: “[Gergiev] won’t be Jimmy’s successor, because, as long as I’m here, Jimmy will be here. . . . You can say he’ll become music director over my dead body.” Besides, it had been widely reported that Gergiev had increasingly “tense relations with the Met musicians and choristers . . . [who were] dismayed by what they consider his idiosyncratic technique, lack of focus and penchant for showing up late to rehearsals.” Gergiev was on a souped-up treadmill of conducting at home and abroad, touring with the Kirov, administering an opera and ballet company, directing the White Nights Festival, fund-raising, and much more.26
War and Peace, February 14, 2002. In March and April 1999, Gergiev was busy with Met revivals of The Queen of Spades and Khovanshchina; in 2003–04, he would take on the Stravinsky triple bill. His imprint is best measured by the Kirov/Met coproductions, The Gambler, War and Peace, and Mazeppa. Prokofiev’s reading of Tolstoy’s epic novel was by far the most newsworthy of the three. Coverage of War and Peace at the Metropolitan had begun in the early 1940s, the time in which the Soviet Union and the United States were World War II allies. Even before the opera’s 1944 Moscow concert premiere, the Met had opened negotiations for a copy of the score. Correspondence that extends from July 1943 to November 1946 includes letters from the Met general manager, the board, the State Department, the US embassy in Moscow, agencies of cultural cooperation, and the New York clearing house for the rights to Soviet music. In February 1948, Edward Johnson wrote to Eleanor Belmont that, pending receipt of a usable score and an adequate translation, he would be in a position to assure an Opera Guild–sponsored concert presentation in English that fall. The very month of Johnson’s letter, the composer and opera were censured by the Soviet government, and that was that. Prokofiev did not live to see his full version performed. NBC transmitted a little more than half of War and Peace to American television screens in 1957; Sarah Caldwell put it on in Boston in 1974; the Bolshoi presented it during its 1975 US tour; the English National Opera’s production came to New York in 1984.27
The Kirov and the Met were hell-bent on producing the most complete and spectacular War and Peace ever. At a cost estimated between $3 and $4 million (much of it charged against Alberto Vilar’s pledge), with fifty-two soloists, 227 supers, 120 choristers, forty-one dancers, a horse, a dog, and a goat, the show promised to live up to its ambition. Film director Andrei Konchalovsky handled the throngs of haughty aristocrats, oppressed peasants, and Russian and French soldiers; George Tsypin provided a design whose central feature was a perilously tilted, revolving dome. Just minutes before the curtain fell on the first performance, a super, one of the Grenadiers, slipped and rolled toward the pit, saved only by a provident net at the lip of the stage. The Times complained, “The set is terribly distracting for the audience. How can you be swept away by the operatic drama when you are worried about the singers’ safety?” The New Yorker was effusive: “the most visually compelling opera production that I have seen in New York in many years,” many of its scenes echoing “some of the great tours de force of the Russian cinema.” Anna Netrebko, the Natasha, in her company debut, would make a meteoric ascent to enormous popularity. War and Peace was near the top of the box-office chart that season. A year earlier, the composer’s The Gambler had done better than anticipated. In adapting Dostoyevsky’s short story, Prokofiev was intent on defying convention—there were no arias to speak of, no ensembles, nothing much in the way of melody. The text was all. One reviewer observed that “a conscientious patron was . . . forced to read [the titles] first, to watch and listen second.” Tsypin and director Yuri Alexandrov contrived overdetermined, postmodern décors for Mazeppa: projected images of a Nazi death camp, an array of white statues displaced and dismembered through the course of the opera, a platform whose variable rake, as in War and Peace, occasionally threatened to send the artists sprawling. Gergiev traced a sure path through the changing landscape of Tchaikovsky’s score, from the romantic yearnings of the young Maria for her far-too-mature godfather, the traitorous Mazeppa, to martial orchestral passages and nationalistic choruses, and finally to the lullaby the unhinged heroine sings to her dead past. Another high-profile Russian conductor, director of the Glyndebourne Festival, Vladimir Jurowski, led a new staging of Jenufa, still a hard sell, despite Mattila, definitive in the title role, and Deborah Polaski, a fearsome Kostelnicka. The spare production took its focus from two walls receding on the bias. There were objections to the ever-present rocks, in particular to the huge boulder that sat in the middle of the act 2 farmhouse.28
FIGURE 39. War and Peace, part 2, scene 4, 2002 (Winnie Klotz; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)
TABLE 19 Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1990–91 to 2005–06
TABLE 19 (continued)
TABLE 19 (continued)
Peter Gelb extended the Slavic wing with two stunning premieres: Patrice Chéreau’s Spartan From the House of the Dead, already seen in Vienna, Amsterdam, and Aix-en-Provence, and William Kentridge’s kaleidoscopic The Nose. Richard Peduzzi’s baleful yard for the Janáček piece glossed Chéreau’s explicit intention: to evoke “all the prisons in the world . . . at once the Gulag and all the camps of the 20th century, a place that can become almost abstract.” Esa-Pekka Salonen, in his debut, led the ensemble cast through ninety relentless minutes. There was no less enthusiasm f
or the collage of effects Kentridge arranged for the strident, farcical The Nose: “the Met found the perfect match for Shostakovich’s sensibility in William Kentridge . . . the biggest cheers at the curtain call went to him and the rest of his design team.” Gogol’s Czarist 1830s became the Soviet 1920s, crammed with Constructivist bits of newspaper, poster art, words, projected images, and film clips that included stop-action animation and the composer at the piano. Gelb demonstrated the power of crafty marketing by coordinating the run of The Nose with the Museum of Modern Art’s Kentridge show. The Nose was a hot ticket.29
OTHER STAGINGS
Rereadings
The company mined the same voguish vein in its ongoing exploration of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western European repertoire as it had for its Slavic survey. And with that, the Met moved squarely to the center of the debate that continues to dominate discourse on operatic practice. The polemic was joined early in the Bing era, swelled first under Dexter and Levine, then under Volpe and Levine, and crested with the installation of Peter Gelb in 2006. At one extreme are direction and design that propose—many would say, impose—radical rereadings of familiar and sometimes unfamiliar titles. Of the nearly 170 new productions mounted in the forty years between the beginning of Bing’s era in 1950 and the start of Volpe’s in 1990, we count only nine as rereadings. The first two—the much scorned, updated Cavalleria rusticana and the somewhat surreal Pagliacci of Bing’s inaugural season—came just as avant-garde productions were taking hold at the reopened Bayreuth Festspielhaus. But the Regietheater (director’s opera) that would soon become the norm in Germany and elsewhere in Europe remained exceptional at the stubbornly retro Metropolitan. In a defamiliarizing reinvention, Tyrone Guthrie rid Carmen of many of its tired trappings. Peter Brook’s Faust dumped Gothic Germany for Gounod’s own nineteenth century. With the move to Lincoln Center, Bing took a chance on a Lohengrin in the abstract style of Wieland Wagner. A decade would go by before Dexter unveiled his Brechtian take on Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète. The 1982 Macbeth reclaimed the apparatus of Romantic melodrama. The cartoonish 1979 Der Fliegende Holländer was strapped into the straitjacket of the Steersman’s nightmare; in 1989, Salome did her number in a basement of a decadent modern city.30
This brings us to the late 1990s. Moses und Aron (Feb. 8, 1999), Arnold Schoenberg’s magnum opus, was a peak that a world-class house would sooner or later have to scale. Shunning Hollywood-Biblical iconography, Graham Vick and Paul Brown turned the children of Israel into modern Jews, the “Golden Calf” bacchanal into a paparazzi shoot. Levine, the cast, and the stage machinery combined to pull off Schoenberg’s “impossible snarl of religion, politics, and musical aesthetics.” Thomas Hampson repeated his tour de force in the Doktor Faust that had originated at the 1999 Salzburg Festival. Time and place were transposed once more. The doublets and capes of medieval Wittenberg became shabby overcoats, dark against a wintry landscape. In this version of Ferruccio Busoni’s thorny work, the action unfolded in the protagonist’s “daydream . . . a journey inside his head.” The intriguing anachronisms and abstractions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were edgy, emphatically “anti-pretty.” In the Britten opera, the midsummer dream was “a dream by classical Athenians about a life that hasn’t happened yet because it’s happening in the 20th century.” The directors’ arcane conceit no doubt eluded many in the audience.31
Jonathan Miller hatched illuminating rereadings of Pelléas et Mélisande (March 25, 1995) and The Rake’s Progress (Nov. 20, 1997). Debussy’s enigmatic characters had hitherto been swathed in impenetrable mists, and Stravinsky’s Tom Rakewell and Anne Trulove reduced to the single dimension of their names. John Conklin replaced the medieval castle of Pelléas with an immense revolving nineteenth-century manor whose shifting public and private spaces implicated the audience in the disturbing voyeurism that permeates the libretto. For The Rake, Miller took on “the brave task of humanizing an opera that may be more about style than people.” Updated from Hogarth’s eighteenth century to 1920s England, Stravinsky’s neoclassical pastiche delivered an unexpected emotional punch. In a time shift that recalled the updating of Moses und Aron to the decadent twentieth century, Jürgen Flimm propelled the Biblical Judea of Salome (March 15, 2004) into the contemporary Middle East, Herod’s court revels into a jet-set orgy, the daughter of Herodias into a teenaged lush. As sensational as Mattila’s full frontal nudity at the climax of “The Dance of the Seven Veils” was her fearless confrontation with the role. Designer and director Herbert Wernicke, who projected his Marxist vision of Die Frau ohne Schatten (Dec. 13, 2001) inside a dazzling mirrored box, disparaged the opera’s 1966 landmark production: “With all those set changes and props, I’m sure the audience didn’t get what the story was all about.” Wernicke was liable to his own criticism: even among New Yorkers, many would not “get” this “parable of New York” in which the “lofty Central Park West” spirit world was dialectically opposed to the “underworld of poor people.”32
Just a handful of the rereadings of the Volpe era fell to the dominant Romantic corpus. When La Cenerentola finally came to the Met, Rossini’s infectious opera buffa was chosen to exercise the hyperkinetic Cecilia Bartoli. Thanks to her extraordinary technique and industrious publicists, Bartoli had recently become an international celebrity. She dispatched an irrepressible Angelina with coloratura of military precision. The venerable fairy tale was retold in a surrealist lexicon borrowed from Magritte. For Lohengrin (March 9, 1998), Robert Wilson banished representation altogether: the banks of the River Scheldt, the castle, and the bridal chamber were nowhere to be seen. The singers were confined to slow, ritualized movement. Some operagoers were bewildered by the absence of narrative signposts, others infuriated. But for others still, Wagner’s score glowed through Wilson’s abstract light show. Booed on the first night, Wilson drew bravos when the opera returned in October. For La Juive (Nov. 6, 2003), Günter Krämer came up with the reductive scheme of dramatizing religious conflict in fifteenth-century Constance by splitting the stage horizontally. The Christians, mostly in white period costumes, occupied the steeply raked, larger, brightly lit upper level; the Jews, in mid-twentieth-century black, huddled in the claustrophobic den below. The contrast was numbingly simplistic. Neil Shicoff, the guiding spirit of the project, justified the Holocaust analogue during his overwhelming voicing of Eléazar’s great aria as he removed his coat and shoes in a gripping figuration of the gas chambers.33
The two truly grievous rereadings of the period were inflicted on Lucia di Lammermoor (Nov. 19, 1992) and Il Trovatore (Dec. 7, 2000). In yet another iteration of the dream/nightmare/hallucination frame, John Conklin’s skewed ruins, projections of Lucia’s crumbling mind, mirrored the psychological space in which the action transpired. Gone were the Scottish lairds and ladies in Francesca Zambello’s construction of solipsistic dementia. June Anderson sang the heroine’s runs to herself while balancing precariously on a pile of coffins. The company swallowed its pride, and the loss; it endured this version of Donizetti’s opera for a slim two seasons. As for Il Trovatore, the irony that Vick and Brown visited on Schoenberg and Shostakovich was misplaced on Verdi. The evening was strewn with unintentionally comic touches: an oversized hoop skirt for the soprano, identical beards, mustaches, and pasty white lookalike makeup for the tenor and baritone, unsuspecting to the end that they are long-lost brothers. The loudest guffaws came in the convent scene: as if to illustrate that Manrico had actually descended from heaven to rescue his beloved Leonora (“sei tu dal ciel disceso”), a slender ramp, in the form of an inverted cross, dropped noisily to the stage, bearing the anxious hero. Volpe took the blame for the absurd production, much modified as early as the second performance. Il Trovatore came back two seasons later, minus the names of the director and designer, and then never again.34
FIGURE 40. Lucia di Lammermoor “Mad Scene,” June Anderson as Lucia, 1992 (Winnie Klotz; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)
Refittings
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sp; Among the premieres out to renew rather than reinterpret was Capriccio, displaced from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, and filled with beguiling fashions and furnishings that flattered Kiri Te Kanawa, the star for which it was mounted. To compensate for the weak libretto of Benvenuto Cellini, another company first, director Andrei Serban dished up endless stage business: the ironic miming of a commedia dell’arte troupe; two nearly nude male models, stand-ins for the sculptor’s statues; a stand-in for Berlioz himself, scribbling away as he roamed the stage. The décor, a semicircular colonnade surrounded by two curved staircases, at times moving singly and at others revolving together, defined the playing space. Berlioz’s fascinating though flawed work died after one season. In the interest of realism, Stephen Wadsworth’s staging of Rodelinda swept away the stock poses inseparable from the Baroque da capo aria since time immemorial. Thomas Lynch rolled out contiguous spaces that mimicked the flow of cinematic continuity. The “off-camera” courtyard replaced the “on-camera” apartment, only to be replaced in turn by the stable, and then back again. Surrounded by representations of the quotidian—a washbasin, an unmade bed, shelves filled with books—the characters passed from one environment to another in a simulation of real time. Renée Fleming, Stephanie Blythe, John Relyea, and Bejun Mehta enacted the narrative with fervor and sang with astounding technique. David Daniels, who had done so much to accustom the public to the exquisite timbre of that relative newcomer to the operatic stage, the countertenor, was remarkable as the heroic Bertarido. Handel sold out the Met.
Grand Opera: The Story of the Met Page 41
