Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  Other Stagings

  In what has become a commonplace of reinvestiture, the fourth-century Hellenic Egypt of Thaïs (Dec. 28, 2008) was updated to something like the 1890s—when the work was first heard—to the detriment of the outcome. The opera’s libretto instructs the lubricious courtesan to strike poses still thought daring in 1907 when Mary Garden stood admiringly before her mirror at Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House. One hundred years later, neither Fleming’s beauty nor her seductive song could prevent early-twentieth-century scandal from devolving into twenty-first-century camp. Like Thaïs, La Rondine (Dec. 31, 2008) was a well-traveled retro production created for a specific diva, Angela Gheorghiu, who would sing it in multiple venues. The eight remaining new productions of 2007–09 bore the mark of contemporary practice. None could be mistaken for the decorative shows that were Met specialties only a decade or so earlier. The black-and-white Macbeth (Oct. 22, 2007), in which the witches sported the pocketbooks and bobby socks of 1950s bag ladies, dripped with blood; the gritty, Goyaesque Trovatore (Feb. 16, 2009) bristled with violence and eroticism, its revolving set riot with camp followers and buffed blacksmiths naked to the waist. The nightmarish Hänsel und Gretel (Dec. 24, 2007) was hell-bent on terrifying children far in excess of the tale’s demands. The tormented protagonist of Peter Grimes (Feb. 28, 2008) found himself oppressed throughout by a wall of weather-beaten boards as threatening as the community they represented.18

  Iphigénie en Tauride (Nov. 27, 2007) had been given in 1916–17 in German, in a version by Richard Strauss; La Damnation de Faust (Nov. 7, 2008), it too effectively a company premiere, had stopped at the Met in concert performances in 1896 and in a 1906 staging for Farrar early in her debut season. On Thomas Lynch’s rough-hewn unit set for the Temple of Diana, Stephen Wadsworth’s mise-en-scène for Iphigénie infused graphic realism into the classical subject. Oreste was the thirty-seventh Met role appropriated by Domingo, only his second in an eighteenth-century opera. La Damnation de Faust, conceived for the concert hall, is a series of arias, ensembles, and bravura pieces for orchestra. For his initial Met assignment, Robert Lepage devised startling stage pictures: acrobats striding horizontally from floor to ceiling and then ceiling to floor (a nod to the director’s collaboration with the Cirque du Soleil), soldiers marching backward, sylphs swimming under water, and replicated silhouettes of Faust and Méphistophélès on their ride to Hell, all framed in tiers of stacked boxes. New technologies connected projections of virtual scenery to the music through microphones and motion sensors. Lepage’s gadgetry made an intriguing, occasionally forceful case for staging a work meant to appeal to the mind’s eye. That said, his visuals eclipsed the protagonists: “All these devices remain external to the drama itself. Like a painting with brilliantly executed background and accessories but blank faces, the production often treats the three principals as supporting players.”19

  The Gluck and the Berlioz, as well as the company inaugurals of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha and John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, made good on the old pledge of repertory expansion. Satyagraha abstains from conventional narration. The subject is Gandhi’s awakening to nonviolent resistance. The Sanskrit text, drawn from the Bhagavad-Gita, tells the story not of the Mahatma’s political struggle as enacted on the stage, but of his spiritual journey. Director Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch contrived their staggering production from homely materials consonant with Gandhi’s message of love and hope for the downtrodden: newsprint, corrugated metal—and tape. As Anne Midgette describes it: “In the final act, singers crossed the stage with rolls of packing tape, unrolling them at all different heights, until the whole space was filled with dozens of shimmering bands, vibrating like the music around them; this whole construct was eventually crumpled into a small ball, showing visuals as ephemeral as the passing notes.” Glass’s musical patterns and the cast’s ritualized movements led inexorably to the sublime logic of the final scene: singing a repeated rising phrase, Gandhi stands at the foot of a podium upon which Martin Luther King Jr., facing upstage, preaches in silence. Penny Woolcock set much of Doctor Atomic against tiers of portals, a structure reminiscent of the stacked boxes of La Damnation de Faust, and the walls of Peter Grimes and Satyagraha. Led masterfully by Alan Gilbert, the drama of anxiety over the horrific effects of the atom bomb is played out between government officials and researchers at Los Alamos, and privately in the bedroom and soul of the project chief. The silken tone and the barely contained intensity of Gerald Finley’s J. Robert Oppenheimer kept the balance between the lover of poetry and the conflicted scientist.20

  FIGURE 44. Satyagraha, act 2, 2008 (© Beth Bergman 2008, NYC)

  RECESSION: 2009–2011

  In the first two years of Gelb’s stewardship, the Met’s budget had grown more than 16 percent from the $221.7 million of fiscal year 2006, the last of the Volpe era, to $258.2 million in fiscal year 2008. Whether the path Gelb had charted was sustainable was open to mounting question. Gelb responded that he had anticipated losses in years one, two, and three. In 2008–09, the operating budget surged again, this time to approximately $282 million, roughly quadruple that of San Francisco, the next largest opera company in the hemisphere. Ballooning expenditures, the explanation went, were due to the increased number of new productions and to costly media initiatives. At the same time, there were signs that validated Gelb’s high-wire mantra—you have to spend money to make money. Following six years of declines, capacity in 2006–07 climbed to nearly 84 percent from the dispiriting 77 percent of 2005–06; revenues, too, were higher. The next year, the annual report put capacity at a heartening 88.1 percent.21

  The onset of the Great Recession in fall 2008 came just as Gelb was set to announce plans for 2009–10, the first season entirely under his purview. He spelled out the Metropolitan’s plight in a January 2009 interview: The endowment was down by a third from $300 million, donations were off by $10 million, ticket sales were expected to miss goals by several million more. Gelb said he had taken a 10 percent cut, a step that did little to quell grumbling over his $1.5 million in salary, benefits, pension, and expense account; 10 percent cuts in pay for the rest of the staff would take effect at the end of the fiscal year; he would seek concessions from the Met’s many unions—shades of the draconian actions taken by Gatti-Casazza in the early 1930s and the dire measures threatened in 1975 by Anthony Bliss. Four revivals were scheduled for the season to come, 2009–10: The Ghosts of Versailles and Benvenuto Cellini, both expensive shows, would be replaced with familiar works, and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Die Frau ohne Shatten with the less costly Ariadne auf Naxos and Elektra. Plans to raise ticket prices would be shelved.22

  The gravity of the situation came home to the public in March 2009 with the news that the Met had put up its Chagall murals as collateral on a $35 million loan, “a decision of last resort,” according to one board member. The bank had judged the shriveled nest egg inadequate guarantee on its note. The endowment had been drawn down by more than 8 percent in 2008–09 and would be again in 2009–10, amounts in perilous excess of the 5 percent sanctioned for not-for-profits. The following spring, Gelb owned that even the $30 million unrestricted donation of board member Ann Ziff, the largest in Met history, was “not enough to save us” (Times, Mar. 27, 2010). When the last word was in on 2009–10, the Met’s operating budget of $289.8 million had surpassed that of any other arts organization in the city. And the deficit had spiraled upward to $47 million. Dependency on donations, and especially on the purses of managing directors, had reached the point that half the budget rested on the shoulders of development; for every dollar spent, something less than one dollar had to be raised. In fiscal 2009, contributions accounted for 45.3 percent, up from 38 percent in 2005, ticket sales for only 33.1 percent. In 2010–11, contributions grew again by an astonishing 50 percent to $182 million. Still, the debt, the endowment (in three years, $61.5 million had been redirected to operating expenses), and the underfinanced pension accounts continued to be
enormously worrisome, especially in the face of the $325 million operating budget and further declines in capacity: from the 87.9 percent of 2008–09 to 83.2 percent in 2009–10 and then to 79.2 percent in 2010–11, only two percentage points above Volpe’s nadir. If the depth of the recession had sent the Met staggering, it had dealt a deathblow to many other performing arts organizations, driving the New York City Opera out of Lincoln Center (and eventually out of business) and shutting down Baltimore Opera, Connecticut Opera, and Opera Boston, among others.23

  Gelb claimed one bit of good news: the average age of the audience had fallen to sixty-two or sixty-three, presumably from the earlier estimate of sixty-six. More impressive was the success of the HD simulcasts. In fiscal 2011, profits reached $11 million, after, as Gelb explained, “we’ve covered all of the incremental production costs including cameras and satellite, and payments to artists and unions.” He forecast the sale of three million tickets globally in 2011–12; the ten-millionth ticket would be issued in that season. As the sixth simulcast year was just underway, he “acknowledged for the first time” what so many had maintained from the outset, “that competition from the HD transmissions may have cannibalized [a term Gelb later repeated and ultimately regretted] box office sales, particularly from people in nearby cities like Boston, who might have traveled to New York before.” Gelb would test this and related hypotheses through a summer 2012 survey circulated to Met members via e-mail. Among the queries related to the impact of HD on house attendance was this: “Overall, since attending Live in HD has your attendance at Met Opera House performances increased significantly, increased slightly, not changed, decreased slightly, decreased significantly?” Several questions touched on productions—are they “consistently excellent”? “highly innovative”? is “production quality slipping”? The Met’s press office has declined to make the survey results available. At one point, Gelb did admit that data showed that opera was, generally speaking, not new to the HD public, which seemingly means that the telecasts had not, by and large, created a new public for opera. In late 2012, with the first bond sale in the Met’s by now nearly 130-year history, company finances drew press attention once again. In the context of the slow recovery and growing operating expenses and losses, management looked to raise $100 million; $63.2 million would go to repay loans extended by Bank of America, the balance toward operating expenses and renovations. As Moody’s reported in assigning the bonds its seventh highest rating, A3, if the Met’s “uncommonly high amount of donor support” was a strength, the company’s “high reliance on gift revenue” was a “challenge.”24

  Stagings

  Eight new productions would be on the calendar for 2009–10 and seven more for 2010–11, a number unparalleled in eighty years. However painful the belt-tightening exacted by the recession, it would not interfere with Gelb’s program of repertoire renewal. The first season totally of Gelb’s devising opened with a new Tosca (Sept. 21, 2009), a collaboration between Swiss director Luc Bondy and French designer Richard Peduzzi. There was no escaping the two Puccini comparisons that would either buoy or sink this Tosca’s reception, one with the fascinating 2006 Madama Butterfly, the other with the 1985 Zeffirelli Tosca Gelb had vowed to replace. As it turned out, the Bondy/Peduzzi effort got the worst of both matchups. It drowned in an ocean of boos that reverberated in furious notices: “The Met’s New Twist on Tosca? It’s the Audience That Gets the Knife”; “an uneven, muddled, weirdly dull production that interferes fatally with the working of Puccini’s perfect contraption”; “puny and halfhearted.” The Times called it “A Kinky Take on a Classic,” and faulted Bondy for turning “the twisted, complex Scarpia into a cartoonish lecher.” When the production reached the Bavarian State Opera in 2010, a Vienna paper shouted “Schweinerei” (trash); when it got to La Scala in 2012, a Milanese headline sputtered, “Volgare verismo.” One or two European publications found some good in the New York performances. A Zurich correspondent was taken with the staging’s “refreshingly blasphemous edge,” and Opera Britannia with the “life and relevance” the production lent the work. But for once, the favorable views from abroad were not attributable to the American-European divide over regietheater. This Tosca was no rereading of a beloved title rejected by unreconstructed conservatives; it was, in essence, nothing more than an extreme refitting.

  For its part, the Bondy/Peduzzi production made no pretense to a radical reinterpretation of the text, let alone to an ideological subtext. Instead, the artistic team lodged its claim to originality in drastic mutations of the scenario. In act 1, a huge painting of the bare-breasted Magdalene hung on the otherwise unadorned brick walls of an inauthentic Sant’Andrea della Valle as it waited to be slashed by a jealous Floria Tosca. Not to be outdone, a statue of the Virgin waited to be kissed on the lips by a sex-crazed Scarpia. In act 2, red divans provided a garish setting for three prostitutes invented to minister to Scarpia’s every pleasure. To the puzzlement of the audience, Bondy discarded the time-honored stage business wherein Tosca sets candlesticks by the body of the freshly murdered police chief, throws a crucifix onto his chest, and stealthily makes her exit. In its place, he had Tosca climb to a window, contemplate suicide, think better of it, and then repair to one of the divans to fan herself as she gathered her wits until the curtain finally fell. At the end of act 3, a Tosca double attached to a wire leaped from the parapet of the Castel Sant’Angelo and hung in midair, affecting a pointless freeze-frame.25

  In numbers too great to be ignored, the crowd in the orchestra, the galleries, and even on the plaza staring at the giant screen exercised the prerogative of booing that—though common to other arenas of spectatorship, theatrical and sporting—is the signature privilege of opera. The history of this tradition has its own three acts: the first targeted the composer, the second, particularly popular at Bing’s Met, the singer. The third, the booing of productions, is a phenomenon of recent vintage, that is, since designers and directors have had the freedom to ignore convention as they put their own stamp on décor and staging. Booing greeted the 1979 Fliegende Holländer, whose action, from start to finish, took place in the dream of the Steersman; the 1982 Macbeth, a Halloween-fest complete with witches flying about on broomsticks; the 1992 Lucia, whose heroine had to enact her mad scene all by herself; the 2000 comic book Trovatore; and most recently the contemptuous 2009 Sonnambula. Gelb’s response to the noisy Tosca controversy? Subscribing to the timeless maxim that it is preferable to be spoken of ill than not to be spoken of at all, he was gratified at so much attention from the media, only much later conceding that Tosca had been a “fiasco.” Zeffirelli’s take? That Bondy was “not second rate. He’s third rate” (Post, Sept. 23, 2009). Bondy rebutted, “I’m a third-rate director, and he is a second assistant of Visconti” (Times, Sept. 23, 2009).26

  Unlike Tosca, the other refittings of the period, Carmen (Dec. 31, 2009) and Boris Godunov (Oct. 11, 2010) originating at the Met, and Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet (March 16, 2010) and Don Carlo (Nov. 22, 2010) coming from Barcelona and London, were standard productions at their core. They shared largely positive notices. It made little difference that Bizet’s opera was fast-forwarded by almost a century to the Spanish Civil War. What mattered more was the extensively retouched portrait of Carmen herself, no longer the hip-swinging gypsy, but a woman so confident in her alluring individuality that she carried off the “Habanera” seated, casually washing her smock and then her feet in a bucket of water. Carmen (Elina Garanča) and Don José (Roberto Alagna) kept their wrenching appointment with fate, brilliantly staged by British director Richard Eyre, beneath the threatening overhang of the Plaza de Toros, one of Rob Howell’s four superb sets. Known to New York for her elegant Rossini, Garanča applied musical rectitude and her creamy, equalized voice to the passionate protagonist. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, soon to be named music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, made an auspicious debut. But alas, this edition of Carmen succumbed, as did many Met productions, to the apparently irresistible tem
ptation to mime the purely orchestral passages of the score. Well before Gelb, overtures and preludes had been taken as invitations to enact what composers intended to be heard and not seen. Such passages were sometimes funny (Sher’s for Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Le Comte Ory), sometimes arresting (Decker’s for La Traviata), often no more than distracting. The Carmen inserts were among the most egregious. For the preludes to act 1 and act 3, Christopher Wheeldon choreographed smoldering pas de deux so explicitly erotic that the music receded into mere accompaniment to the dance. And Eyre took the false step of cutting away from what should have been the opera’s final image, the distraught lover cradling the inert body of the woman he has just stabbed. The stage revolved to disclose the interior of the bull ring, spectators in the stands, the toreador Escamillo, his sword pointed at the slain bull. Unforgettable, yes, but better forgotten. The searing climax of Bizet’s masterpiece had turned into a tacky coup de théâtre.