Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  FIGURE 42. Peter Gelb, right, in production truck, simulcast of Aïda, Dec. 15, 2012 (© Marty Sohl)

  The new medium provided the opera novice intimate contact with the forbidding art form, extracted from its inaccessible habitat, magnified, and subtitled, its ceremonial demystified by intermission interviews and shots of stagehands striking one set, erecting another. Satellite television preserved operagoing as a communal venture, collecting audiences to share the real time of performance in the Met’s red and gold hall. By the same token, shots of the in-house spectators, most of whom had spent five to ten times the price of a HD admission for their seat, made the sociological divide between the two audiences emphatically clear, one observed surrounded by patrician splendor, the other left to its observation in ordinary surroundings. Still, it was not uncommon for attendees miles and time zones distant from New York to applaud, to shout “bravo” along with the privileged few thousand at Lincoln Center.

  The telecasts were not without warts. There were those who objected to the sacrifice of the full stage to close-ups that exposed the more hapless singers as they strained for high notes and high volume. Some were disconcerted by the abrupt transition from the enchantment of the stage to the frenzy of backstage interviews. There were vagaries of sound and image reproduction, occasional interruptions or distortions in the satellite transmission, and the unwelcome smell of popcorn. The irremediable grief was the amplified acoustic, the electronic mediation between singers trained to project their voices without intervention and listeners frustrated at the interference of sound engineers. On the technologically leveled playing field, performers swamped by the orchestra in the house came through loud and clear at the multiplex. Without question, “Live in HD” was not the same as being there, as the host of each telecast was duty bound to insist. Gelb himself made the point: “It’s like watching ‘Monday Night Football.’ You’re getting extra information and commentary, but there is still no replacement for the visceral thrill, excitement, and sound of being at the actual opera house.”11

  Stagings

  The new productions of 2006–07 continued the drift away from the pictorialism ubiquitous in the years prior to the Volpe/Levine regime. Only Il Trittico (April 20, 2007) could be counted, as Gelb described it, a “wedding-cake production.” The general manager shoehorned a Madama Butterfly of his own choosing into his first opening night (Sept. 25, 2006), reviving the Bing tradition of kicking off the season with a new production. This Butterfly could not have been more unlike its 1994 investiture. Michael Scott’s detailed Japanese house, leafy garden, and honest-to-goodness pond gave way to Michael Levine’s unadorned box, its high-polished floor sloping upstage, a mirror slanted above to reflect the action. Sliding screens defined and redefined the spaces, minimal props were brought in as needed. As critical as the décor was the staging of Anthony Minghella, Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, in his opera debut. Minghella and his wife and collaborator, choreographer Carolyn Choa, brushed an already stylized mise-en-scène with borrowings from Bunraku theater. Their most wondrous invention was Trouble, Butterfly’s son, a puppet artfully manipulated by three veiled puppeteers garbed in black. The patently artificial effigy of a Japanese-American boy in a sailor suit, fondled by his mother first in love and pride and then in grief, was infinitely more affecting than the flesh-and-blood prop conventionally carted about by Cio-Cio-San and her faithful Suzuki. Other details remain indelible: the entrance of Butterfly in a line of geishas appearing from below; the love duet in a garden of lanterns and bamboo stalks wielded by actor-dancers; the mimed opening of act 2, Pinkerton vanishing in the time it took for a screen to cover his exit, leaving behind an empty chair as a sign of his absence. Viewers would have been hard put to recall a more moving presentation of the opera or a more gorgeous series of stage pictures. With this sortie, Gelb kept his tricky promise: the Minghella/Levine Butterfly challenged the audience while shielding it from the “unpleasant artistic experiences” of regietheater commonly dubbed “Eurotrash.” As Alex Ross wrote joyfully of the coproduction with the English National Opera and the Lithuanian National Opera, “for the duration of the gala, there was no more fabulous place on earth, which is as it should be.”12

  From the second night of the 2006–07 season to the start of 2009–10, the extent of Gelb’s responsibility either for new productions or for the selection of repertoire, directors, designers, and casts, necessarily made years in advance, is difficult to calculate. Tan Dun’s The First Emperor (Dec. 21, 2006) was a world premiere, and Richard Strauss’s Die Ägyptische Helena had last been heard at the Met in 1928. Fan Yue’s unit set for The First Emperor, a stage-filling staircase, bore the weight of Qin’s resolve to unify China. Film director Zhang Yimou was left minimal downstage space to block the sketchy personal drama. The score called for the chant of a Beijing opera singer, the twang of the zheng (a Chinese zither), the thud and clank of various percussive surfaces, Tibetan singing bowls, and a giant bell stationed at the foot of the proscenium. Musical interest waned when the composer looked to the West: “The lyrical set pieces in The First Emperor are couched in a sickly sweet Americana idiom that sounds rather like watered-down Copland or Bernstein with a dash of Hollywood banality.” Sixty-seven-year-old Domingo, his middle range still warm and secure, had nothing to fear from a role tailored to his bari-tenorial register. Despite Tan Dun’s negative notices, spurred by Domingo’s stardom The First Emperor did very well at the box office through its two-season run. Die Ägyptische Helena (March 15, 2007) was a vehicle for Deborah Voigt. The soprano had lost some of the gleam and thrust that had made her an authoritative Straussian. But even in prime vocal form, she would have strained to win an audience for the opera’s riff on marriage and adultery, encumbered as it is by a ludicrous scenario. Director and designer David Fielding set the action (again!) “in a dream landscape . . . in the head of Aithra [the sorceress]. . . . It’s as if the opera is driven by her own psychosis or psychoanalysis.” Fielding’s surrealist take—skewed walls, crooked doors, a flat etched with the silhouette of a man running, Helena’s giant bed, the clash of business suits and classical gowns—was preferable to the exhausted alternative of cramming an irrational libretto into an ersatz depiction of an ancient civilization.13

  FIGURE 43. Cristina Gallardo-Domâs as Cio-Cio-San with “Trouble” and puppeteer in Madama Butterfly, September 11, 2006 (© Ken Howard, 2006)

  It was Gelb who brought in Bartlett Sher, fresh from his Tony-nominated A Light in the Piazza, for Il Barbiere di Siviglia (Nov. 10, 2006). Sher’s nimble staging of Rossini’s opera buffa put Michael Yeargan’s portable barbershop, moveable doors and orange trees, and floating balcony and staircase through their paces. The director and designer came up with an ingenious ramp that circled the pit, creating the intimacy wanted by comedy. Peter Mattei, Juan Diego Flórez, Diana Damrau, and the rest of the cast enacted the madcap goings-on with wit, and tossed off the fioritura with ease. For Il Trittico (April 20, 2007), Volpe had contracted Broadway heavy hitter and three-time Tony winner Jack O’Brien. But it was Gelb, heralding the advent of his era once again, who introduced O’Brien to the board on June 25, 2006. O’Brien bounced the ruses of Gianni Schicchi from thirteenth-century Italy to the Italian boom years of the 1950s, a perfect fit for the greedy tricksters tricked. Each of Douglas W. Schmidt’s realistic sets drew applause: the bedchamber of Gianni Schicchi that sank below stage, giving way to a sunny terrace overlooking Florence; the barge of Il Tabarro jutting downstage, framed by a row of factory buildings and the high arch of a bridge; the cobblestoned convent courtyard of Suor Angelica. Two stands of rotating risers replaced the routine of crumbling Grecian columns in the Orfeo ed Euridice (May 2, 2007) of director Mark Morris and set designer Allen Moyers. Orfeo’s pleated tunic gave way to couturier Isaac Mizrahi’s modish black, the winged Amore flew earthward in sneakers and spangled shirt, the dancers were turned out like twenty-somethings on a gambol in the park. Stacked in the bleachers were choristers
costumed as Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Garbo, Honest Abe, Jackie O., Princess Di, and on and on, witness to the timelessness of the Orpheus myth. Morris’s playful choreography made its strongest effect in the happy finale. The run was dedicated to mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson who had been scheduled to play the lead. At her death in July 2006, the role passed to countertenor David Daniels.14

  That first exciting year, along with HD simulcasts that projected the newly reerected Great Wall of China, the reconceived Sevillian farrago, and the restored Puccini triptych onto movie screens, Gelb programmed video transmissions of Die Zauberflöte and Eugene Onegin, among the most conspicuous stagings of the Volpe era, and for Anna Netrebko, the Met’s newest star, I Puritani.

  TELEGENICITY: 2007–2009

  Star Vehicles

  At the board meeting of January 19, 2006, Gelb announced that he had assurances of two productions per season, on average, from Renée Fleming, Marcello Giordani, Susan Graham, Karita Mattila, Anna Netrebko, René Pape, and Bryn Terfel, and further, that these top draws would sing longer into each run. As never before, in promoting itself the company would promote its most bankable assets. In 2006 an anonymous geisha was displayed on the sides of Metropolitan Transit Authority buses; in 2007 millions of New Yorkers and Big Apple tourists gaped from the sidewalks at Natalie Dessay as Lucia (“You’d Be Mad to Miss It”), in 2008 at Fleming as Thaïs, in 2009 at Mattila as Tosca, in 2010 at Terfel as Wotan, in 2011 at Netrebko as Anna Bolena, in 2012 at Jonas Kaufmann as Parsifal.

  Within a few months, visual media in its various expressions had come to define Met stardom. True, it had been decades since a voice, if great enough, was all it took and a diva could brush off the director with impunity, as Zinka Milanov had Margaret Webster. Equally true was that the history of the Met was replete with wonderful singers who were also charismatic actors, among them Jean de Reszke, Emma Calvé, and Antonio Scotti in the Gilded Age, Olive Fremstad, Geraldine Farrar, and Fyodor Chaliapin in the early 1900s, Maria Jeritza and Lawrence Tibbett, who made their debuts in the 1920s, Regina Resnik, Risë Stevens, Astrid Varnay, Licia Albanese, and Ljuba Welitsch in the 1940s, and since then Hildegard Behrens, Maria Callas, Leonie Rysanek, Renata Scotto, Teresa Stratas, Shirley Verrett, and Jon Vickers. As far back as the 1890s, with the end of the German seasons, critic W. J. Henderson had issued this warning: “The Italian singer is always a singer, and he conceives it to be his divine right to face the footlights, sing directly to the audience, and dwell on all his high notes. . . . This style of thing, however, is dead in New York” (Times, March 22, 1891). To stand and sing, as Henderson had formulated it, or “park and bark,” as Gelb and others delighted in calling “this style of thing,” was not at all dead at the end of the nineteenth century. It would soon be outmoded to oppose the wooden Verdian to the thespian Wagnerian, a vanishing breed once the resurrected star system displaced the ensemble. At about the same time, Edmund Stanton protested that the audience would “not tolerate the old-fashioned style of operatic art, in which every illusion of the stage is sacrificed to the display of the voice.” For decades, audiences did more than tolerate it; in the main, they lived with it quite happily.15

  The lineup Gelb promised the board in 2006 affirmed that, under his producer’s eye, the whole star package, image and acting, voice and technique, would be the rule, not the exception. Voigt’s journey served as an object lesson: fired in 2004 from a Covent Garden Ariadne auf Naxos, ostensibly because the little black dress the director had in mind would have fit incongruously on her large frame, Voigt risked gastric bypass surgery and reset the trajectory of her career. Together with Renée Fleming, Natalie Dessay, Susan Graham, Patricia Racette, and Sondra Radvanovsky, she not only has starred in several simulcasts, but has been the presenter of many of the Saturday intermission features.

  As early as 2004, Gelb had determined to hoist one name to the top of his A-list. Sometime after his appointment, he flew to Vienna to meet with Anna Netrebko; over lunch, he proposed to make the young Russian soprano “the star of the Met,” a postmodern prima donna assoluta. By the end of 2012–13, she was tied with Fleming, twelve years her senior, for the HD lead; each had chalked up eight telecasts. Fleming had long been marketed as a beautiful woman with “The Beautiful Voice,” the title of one of her best-selling CDs, and not as an exceptional actress. What the audience took away from her opening night gala (Sept. 22, 2008), the first to honor a single artist, was the sound of her velvety timbre and the sight of her as Violetta, Manon, and Capriccio’s Madeleine in well-publicized costumes created for the occasion by a trio of high-fashion designers. Netrebko, by contrast, was acknowledged as “a natural actress blessed with sensational looks,” “a true stage animal,” labels rarely affixed to opera singers. And when they are, for better or for worse, it is in consequence of some memorable bit of stage business. Geraldine Farrar, for example, captured the sweetness of Königskinder’s heroine by tending a gaggle of geese; Maria Jeritza will forever be associated with Tosca by her “Vissi d’arte” delivered face down on the floor; the place of Marjorie Lawrence in Met lore was assured by her equestrian ride into the flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Netrebko’s moment was recorded in her first telecast, I Puritani (Jan. 6, 2007). In a gesture some dismissed as grandstanding and others found breathtaking, near the climax of Elvira’s mad scene, the soprano ran to the lip of the stage and then lay on her back, as if in the throes of desire for her absent lover, her long hair dangling into the orchestra pit. As she explained with her customary bluntness, “Was crazy, no? But felt good. Yes, was my idea. I agree to sing this opera, then open score and don’t like, it’s crap, I want to cancel. And Met production was so dull, stage director no help. I had to do something, so I get on floor.”16

  Of greater import than Netrebko’s coup de théâtre was the whole of the performance. Her dissing of one of Bellini’s richest works notwithstanding, she stayed in character throughout, inhabiting the deranged world of the febrile English damsel with palpable sincerity. Movie audiences enjoyed at least one advantage over those at the Met that afternoon: they were privy to the emotions inflected on Netrebko’s face and in her smallest movements. She showed no concern for the next coloratura hurdle, played not to the audience but to her colleagues on stage, and avoided stock postures and the exaggerated expressions that close-ups often render irritating to the telepublic. During a Puritani intermission, the star made plain that she was as much a screen as a stage animal; she was acutely aware of the camera and gauged her attitudes accordingly. Netrebko is in top form for the telecasts of the 2011–12 season, sensitive to the many moods of Manon (April 7) and to the regal dignity of Anna Bolena (Oct. 15). Massenet’s transgressive protagonist emerges in all her complexity: naïve, pensive, conflicted, ironic, seductive, forlorn. And for Bolena, in what is certainly her most moving HD performance, Netrebko revisits the on-again, off-again lunacy of Elvira and Lucia, but on the tragic plane befitting a queen facing the executioner’s block with the defiance born of pride.

  It was another singing actress, Natalie Dessay, who reaped the extraordinary exposure of three new bel canto productions in just two seasons, 2007 to 2009. Chicago-based director Mary Zimmerman signed Lucia di Lammermoor (Sept. 24, 2007), a title that had long awaited a passable staging. What it got in the end was no better than a mixed bag. Zimmerman piled on distracting inventions: the ghost of a murdered girl (to dramatize Lucia’s act 1 narrative), a wedding photographer (to shoot the stasis of the sextet), a physician (to administer a hypodermic to the unhinged protagonist), and the ghost of Lucia herself (to assist in Edgardo’s suicide). More successful was the mad scene staged on Daniel Ostling’s skeletal staircase and balcony, the site of Lucia’s anguished entry into the bridal chamber, and then of her precipitous descent into insanity. The press received the director’s efforts with greater warmth than did Dessay, openly critical of Zimmerman’s inexperience.

  By the time of La Sonnambula (March 2, 2009), director and diva were on the sa
me page. Neither was disposed to take seriously the story of an innocent maiden who walks in her sleep; the victim of ignorance and prejudice, a vessel of pathos, became the target of their derision. Dessay had admonished early on, “whatever you do, don’t set it in a Swiss village,” and Zimmerman had obliged with a contemporary New York rehearsal studio. She turned Amina into a hip soprano, armed with cell phone and shades, winking along with her stage coconspirators both at the character she plays and, more generally, at Romantic sensibility. Here and there, she resorted to low comedy, a register discordant with the elegiac score. The heavy hand of her ironic rereading came close to annihilating Bellini. Thankfully, the director rose to the two sleepwalking scenes: in the first, the spotlighted somnambulist wandered down a long aisle of the Met’s orchestra floor; in the second, she teetered on the ledge outside the windows of the rehearsal space. The third of the Dessay vehicles, La Fille du régiment (April 21, 2008), directed by Laurent Pelly, was, on the other hand, ideally suited to low comedy. In dingy undershirt and trousers, sprouting a Raggedy-Ann braid, the French soprano reveled in the slapstick, all the while sharing tender moments with bel canto paragon Juan Diego Flórez who was regularly called to encore his nine high Cs. An endless clothesline hung with the regiment’s underwear, sleepy servants dusting to a slow waltz, and a tank coming to the rescue at the climax were just a few of Pelly’s hilarious sight gags. Donizetti’s opéra-bouffe was everyone’s delight, a virtual sellout.17