Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  The ham-fisted Fidelio of Jürgen Flimm (Oct. 28, 2000) embedded Beethoven’s meanings in a present-day banana republic cluttered with khaki uniforms, assault rifles, and bare bulbs. Symptomatic of the overall blunder was the mob lynching of the sadistic Pizarro, a violation of the triumphantly humanistic act 2 finale that celebrates Leonore’s virtue and courage. In the October 28 telecast, Mattila is a youthful and intrepid protagonist; René Pape turns Rocco into a star vehicle. The other refittings of German revivals and those of Mozart’s Italian operas evinced taste and occasional originality. The cherished 1984 Die Meistersinger was replaced by an equally gemütlich Nuremberg (Jan. 14, 1993). Dieter Dorn’s restrained staging of Tristan und Isolde (Nov. 22, 1999) accommodated the limited mobility of the weighty Jane Eaglen; none but the hidebound estate of Sybil Harrington would find Jürgen Rose’s spare, geometric designs controversial. Elektra’s rage had its correlative in the broken statue of a mammoth horse beneath Mycenae’s walls (Elektra, March 26, 1992). The canny tiered set of Ariadne auf Naxos (March 11, 1993) stacked a grand mansion above the grubby backstage of its private theater. Looming shadows conveyed the burden of existence that destroys the downtrodden, untermensch protagonists of Berg’s Wozzeck (Feb. 10, 1997). Julie Taymor’s puppets and masks for Die Zauberflöte (Oct. 8, 2004), shades of her Broadway The Lion King, were just the ticket for Mozart’s singspiel. An earthy kitchen for Despina distinguished this Così fan tutte (Feb. 8, 1996) from its elegant predecessors. Bartoli, a Rossini specialist, had her many New York fans scratching their heads at the choice of the undemanding role of the meddling maid for her debut. But even without recourse to her bravura technique, from the moment she entered, grinning mischievously, pulling an entire house at the end of a rope, she stole the show. When it came to Le Nozze di Figaro (Oct. 29, 1998), Bartoli turned the tables: this time the role was not virtuosic enough. For three of her seven performances, she prevailed on Levine to substitute two florid arias for Susanna’s more lyric “Venite inginocchiatevi” and “Deh vieni non tardar.” Director Jonathan Miller took his irritation public; he has not since returned to the Met. Nor has Bartoli, for reasons not altogether clear. With the exception of Ariadne auf Naxos, Levine led the revivals of each of these conductor’s operas.35

  The Italian and French refittings were, by contrast, of uneven quality. We sample here just a few from a large group. The vigor of Nabucco (March 8, 2001) reverberated in a series of bold images, the most arresting the appearance of the Children of Israel on a revolving stage piled high with rough-hewn stone blocks, an apposite rostrum for the choral lament, “Va pensiero,” inevitably encored to sold-out houses. Allusions to Renaissance astronomy that idealized the erotic attraction of the “star-cross’d lovers” of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette (Nov. 14, 2005), their marriage bed floating in the Empyrean, were among the best of the period’s directorial inventions. Zeffirelli’s were among the worst. In his second La Traviata (Nov. 23, 1998), he paid no more mind to the opera’s intimate scale than he had in his first: Violetta was made to drag herself from her consumptive bedroom down a flight of stairs to breathe her last in her party-girl ballroom. Don Pasquale (March 31, 2006) sacrificed wit to gags. Donizetti’s comedy was a romp for the acrobatic Anna Netrebko. Her mugging and flouncing, presumably blessed by director Otto Schenk, unleashed justifiably outraged notices: “the most self-serving performance this writer has ever witnessed”; “a caricature of a tough Italian whore.” Volpe’s bel canto bona fides were better served by the exhumation of Semiramide (Nov. 30, 1990), primarily for Horne, and the Met premiere of Il Pirata, a vehicle for Fleming. For disparate reasons, among them Levine’s indifference, the Met was very late in programming the lesser-known Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini pieces that, for decades, Sutherland, Horne, and Caballé had sung the world over. While the company refitted chestnuts such as Lucia for Sutherland and Il Barbiere di Siviglia for Horne, and dusted off I Puritani and L’Italiana in Algeri, other theaters presented the likes of Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda, titles in the Met’s future.36

  CLOSING THE BOOKS

  Volpe had two announcements for the board meeting of February 2004: that Levine’s title would revert to music director and that he himself would relinquish his position as general manager at the expiration of his contract, August 2006: “This is a young man’s job. I live a block away; I’m here night and day. The job is the focus of your life. No matter where you are, there’s always some problem” (Times, Feb. 10, 2004). The lame-duck thirty months to come worried the critics. One suggested that Levine had “left Mr. Volpe in the curious position of being the de facto artistic director, a job that he has no doubt coveted but for which he is perhaps less than ideally suited. . . . Can he plan repertory and oversee casting and productions with the requisite, insightful sophistication and taste?” Others suspected that not much would change, that it had been an entire decade since Levine had been fully engaged in “the overall artistic profile of the company.” The outlook was further troubled by the worsening balance sheet. The Met had lost $10 million in each of the two preceding seasons. Donations had dropped significantly; audience capacity, at 91 percent prior to 9/11, had fallen to 82 percent in 2001–02 and 80 percent in 2003–04. And “with empty seats [came] renewed questions not just about Mr. Volpe’s policies, but also about his methods, and especially his combative personality. Within the company more people are probably barked at by the general manager than is absolutely necessary; it’s hard to give your best when you’re constantly demeaned.” Most damning was the “persistent criticism . . . that he [had] fostered a creative climate . . . dominated more by fiscal than by artistic priorities.” At the same time, there was fulsome recognition of Volpe’s managerial genius: he would leave behind an extraordinarily efficient operation, durable labor peace, Met Titles, reconfigured subscription packages, a beefed-up international touring schedule, a longer season, and an impressive record of fund-raising. Nonetheless, the consensus painted Volpe as musically oafish, intrusive, bullying, and consumed with the bottom line.37

  When all is said and done, Volpe’s legacy rests on the rigorous policy of repertoire remapping he pursued together with Levine. Nearly a third of their seventy-three new productions was allocated to American, Slavic, and twentieth-century European works, and of these, the great majority were company premieres. Whereas Bing had tagged the Met a repertory theater frozen in the nineteenth century, a proud “museum,” Levine and then Levine and Volpe, despite pushback along the way, oversaw a house of expansive and expanding repertory. The flag of staging reform, waved briefly by Bing, and then strenuously by Dexter, fluttered repeatedly over Volpe’s Met when Jonathan Miller, Elijah Moshinsky, Tim Albery, Robert Carsen, and Robert Wilson were in residence. New repertoire and the prestigious stratum of the core were the particular beneficiaries of their determination. Zeffirelli, Schenk, Schneider-Siemssen, and other pictorialists had to make do with a smaller share of the pie.

  As for Volpe’s rosters, they broadcast that the stock of stars capable of arousing the infectious passion of operaphiles was not what it had been at Bing’s house of singers. For new productions, the solo bow before the encore curtain had given way to a short run to the center of the final set, and then a few steps forward from the line of principals. If cheering was sometimes lusty, it was invariably brief. Only rarely did a bouquet sail across the pit or bits of paper rain down from the family circle. The more egalitarian ritual acknowledged the entire cast, including chorus and dancers. That said, in the course of Volpe’s sixteen seasons, individual performances were among the best by any standard. To name only a few: for Mozart, the Pamina of Kathleen Battle and the Sarastro of Kurt Moll, the Countess of Renée Fleming and of Anja Harteros, Dorothea Röschmann’s Donna Elvira, Bryn Terfel’s Figaro; for Wagner, Mattila’s Eva and Elsa, Heppner’s Walter von Stolzing and Lohengrin, James Morris’s Hans Sachs, René Pape’s King Marke, Waltraud Meier’s Kundry; for Strauss, Natalie Dessay as Zerbinetta, Deborah Voigt as Ariadne, Gwyneth Jone
s as Elektra; the Natasha and Andrei of War and Peace of Anna Netrebko and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the Abigaille of Nabucco of Andrea Gruber, the Didon of Les Troyens of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Stephanie Blythe and David Daniels in Giulio Cesare, Olga Borodina and Juan Diego Flórez in L’Italiana in Algeri, the Billy Budd of Dwayne Croft and of Thomas Hampson. At Volpe’s farewell gala, May 20, 2006, Plácido Domingo was in the pit to accompany tenors Roberto Alagna and Ramón Vargas. When he took the stage, nearly forty years after his debut at Bing’s 39th Street Met, the audience thrilled to his familiar burnished tone.

  ELEVEN

  In the Age of New Media, 2006–2013

  PASSING IT ON

  EIGHT MONTHS OF SPECULATION on the succession followed Joe Volpe’s announcement of his retirement. Among the ten or so names floated were those of six general managers of opera houses in the United States and Europe, two symphony orchestra and ballet company directors, and the head of a national performing arts center: David Gockley, Houston Grand Opera; William Mason, Lyric Opera of Chicago; Plácido Domingo, Washington Opera; Sir Peter Jonas, Bavarian State Opera; Pierre Audi, Netherlands Opera; Gérard Mortier, formerly of Salzburg, later to take over in Paris; Deborah Borda, Los Angeles Philharmonic; Lesley Koenig, San Francisco Ballet; and Michael M. Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center. Only Peter Gelb had run neither a performing arts company nor an arts complex.

  It was Beverly Sills, chair of the board from 2002 to 2005, who prevailed on her colleagues to interview Gelb. Within forty-eight hours, the agreement was sealed and delivered. The appointment on October 29, 2004, took everyone by surprise. Gelb would join the Met in August 2005, spend 2005–06 preparing to take over from Volpe, and assume the title of general manager on August 1, 2006. Board president William Morris later pointed to “knowledge of marketing” and “youthful vigor” as the two qualities of “particular interest” to his colleagues. Typical of the response of Met watchers at large was the initial reaction of Mercedes Bass, whose $25 million came as one regime was handing the reins to the next: “I thought, Oh, there’s a man who doesn’t have a clue about how to run an opera company!” She went on, “But then Beverly Sills, bless her heart, said, ‘Mercedes, don’t worry, you will love him.’ And I must say she was right. . . . The first impression was that he had so much vision, and we were not used to so much vision.” As Gelb remarked later, “My pitch to [the search committee] was that the Met was an organization that had a great history and past, but that was completely disconnected from contemporary culture and society. I was very straight with them. I told them what I really believed, which is that it had disengaged itself and that it needed to be re-engaged.”1

  Peter Gelb

  The general manager–elect first set foot in the Met in 1967. With his father, Arthur, then metropolitan editor and later managing editor at the New York Times, fourteen-year-old Peter sat in Rudolf Bing’s box for a performance of Carmen. His mother, Barbara, niece of violinist Jascha Heifetz and stepdaughter of playwright S. N. Behrman, is a biographer of Eugene O’Neill (with her husband) and of John Reed and Louise Bryant, and the author of other works of nonfiction. By his own admission, Gelb concluded early on that “access was more important than wealth,” and indeed, given his aspirations, this youthful judgment proved correct. While in school, Gelb took a turn as usher at the Met and worked in Sol Hurok’s mailroom, and then again for Hurok for a year before enrolling grudgingly at Yale, leaving after just one semester to launch his career as a publicist with an artist management firm. In 1978, he was director of promotions for the Boston Symphony; there he oversaw the first tour of an American orchestra to China after the thaw in relations with the West. In 1980, he shepherded Vladimir Horowitz’s return to the stage, and for the next decade he was manager to the great pianist. In 1982, back in New York, Gelb went to work for Ronald Wilford, chairman and CEO of Columbia Artists Management Inc. (CAMI). As he remembered it, Wilford gave him “an office and a salary, and said, ‘You decide what to do and create your own job.’ And out of that, CAMI Video was born” (Times, Nov. 6, 2004). Between 1988 and 1992, while at CAMI, Gelb was executive producer of the Met’s media department with responsibility for “The Metropolitan Opera Presents,” a series of twenty-five telecasts that included the 1990 “Ring.” Working with the Maysles brothers, vérité documentary filmmakers, he also produced and “occasionally directed” more than fifty television events around Horowitz, Karajan, Rostropovich, and Battle, among other artists. In 1993, when his division was bought from Wilford, Gelb followed CAMI Video to Sony Music Entertainment. “He didn’t leave,” the “Black Knight of 57th Street” was quoted as quipping, “I sold him.”2

  As head of Sony Classical U.S.A., then in 1995 of Sony Classical internationally, Gelb was finally positioned to redefine the marketing of music and musicians. He first rescinded recording projects in the standard repertoire. He then went about resetting the boundaries of classical music by presenting cellist Yo-Yo Ma in multimedia Bach and in trio with folk virtuoso fiddler and composer Mark O’Connor and bass player Edgar Meyer; he released pop musician Joe Jackson’s Symphony No. 1. Turning to the big screen, Gelb recorded John Corigliano’s score for The Red Violin and Tan Dun’s for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The road from the concert hall to the movie palace was well traveled: in 1908, Camille Saint-Saëns was recruited for the silent L’Assassinat du duc de Guise and, in 1938, Sergei Prokofiev for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. What was new—and dubious—was Gelb’s contention that “anything written for film is classical music.” That premise led to the reassignment of movie soundtrack CDs to the classical bins, John Williams’s themes for Star Wars, James Horner’s for Titanic. But then, Titanic sold an astounding twenty-nine million copies worldwide. In the course of his career in media, Gelb collected a Grammy and six Emmys.3

  All this no doubt dazzled the Met directors, as it had Mercedes Bass. But those who had heard Renée Fleming in duet with Michael Bolton in their bizarre “O soave fanciulla” must have been at least somewhat conflicted. Would the Met stage have to make room for a pop singer’s yen to play Rodolfo against the Mimì of its star diva? “Popera” was the specter the vituperative Norman Lebrecht raised online. Volpe warned, “Pop singers are definitely not the answer. . . . Pop singers brought in for one act of an opera to attract an audience detracts from the aesthetic you’re presenting.” The more serious question surrounding the Gelb appointment was this: did he have the resumé of a legitimate Metropolitan GM? From his vantage, the many parts of his working life taken together produced a sum that credentialed his claim to the position. He cited his sole lyric theater credit, the Oepidus Rex he organized in Japan for Seiji Ozawa’s festival, and added, “between projects like that and being executive producer of Fantasia 2000 [conducted by Levine], and running a record label, I’ve had a wide variety of experience dealing with artistic temperament, production deadlines, and budgets. And through my experience at Sony, I’ve learned the fiscal responsibility of running a for-profit company” (Times, Oct. 30, 2004). If both supporters and skeptics were uncertain how to define him (publicist? artist manager? media executive?), Gelb was glad to set them straight: “a producer . . . is what I consider myself to be” and, later, “I am a marketer. I’m not ashamed to be a marketer.” 4

  In truth, very few of Gelb’s fifteen predecessors throughout 123 years of Met history brought with them a textbook curriculum vitae. In the context of that history, the board’s choice was not all that exceptional. Henry Abbey and Maurice Grau were theatrical and concert impresarios; Leopold Damrosch was primarily a symphony conductor; Edmond Stanton, a son of New York’s aristocracy, had been secretary to the board without particular métier; Heinrich Conried was an actor-director-manager in theater and operetta; after heading a conservatory, bass Herbert Witherspoon had been the one-year artistic director of the Chicago Civic Opera when it shut its doors; Edward Johnson was a tenor, Schuyler Chapin a media executive; Anthony Bliss and Bruce Crawford were businessmen and membe
rs of the board; and Hugh Southern dealt in arts management. Only three came with records to match the job: Rudolf Bing had been general manager at Glyndbourne, though a festival and not an opera company; Goeran Gentele had run the relatively small Swedish National Opera; Joseph Volpe had risen from carpenter to assistant general manager at the Met. And only one, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, came with an impeccable pedigree: he had been intendant at La Scala for a decade.

  Preparatory Season: 2005–2006

  From September 2005 to May 2006, Volpe and Gelb reported monthly to the board’s executive committee, and from time to time to the full board. In general, Volpe was responsible for keeping the directors up to date on labor talks, on the “horribly” limp box office, on cuts to offset the drop in ticket sales ascribed primarily to the contraction of tristate patronage. Gelb had the more grateful role. He kept the trustees abreast of changes in staffing (tellingly, the first were new directors of marketing, communications and editorial comment, and development), of repertoire and casting plans, and of media initiatives designed to “reach out to a broader audience and give the Met a new exciting high exposure.” At the annual meeting of May 25, 2006, board president Morris cited audience capacity as the single greatest challenge facing the organization: it had fallen below 77 percent in the season just concluded. Gelb, he said, had evolved a seven-part strategy to reverse the downward slide: he would increase the number of new productions from four to six, commit the biggest stars to more performances each season, program contemporary works each year, market through new media, introduce family entertainments at holiday time (Hänsel und Gretel and an abridged Die Zauberflöte [both in English]), forge relationships with visual artists, and open the doors wider to the public. (The meeting was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Levine. He had wanted to assure the board that his shoulder was on the mend after his fall on the stage of Boston’s Symphony Hall and to express his delight at the prospect of working closely with the new leadership.) Volpe took the floor to report on the season loss of $2.2 million, noting pointedly that the general manager transition had come to approximately $2.5 million. The good news was that, over many months, he and Gelb had reached five-year agreements with the Met’s three largest unions, that the musicians had accepted terms for media rights, and that negotiations for these rights were ongoing with the other locals. Gelb zeroed in on his signature innovation: he would “make the Met’s performances available in every possible media format, including the internet, with digital downloading and satellite radio. If the unions give us the rights, we will start many of these media initiatives next year, including transmitting into movie theatres around the country the Saturday matinee performances in high definition, so people will be able to go to their local cinemas to see a Met performance live in surround sound.” In place of the crushing up-front fee per product released, labor would share in the revenues.5