Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  The refittings of Hamlet, Boris Godunov, and Don Carlo, all comparatively uncontroversial, shared a stripped-down aesthetic that permitted the free and rapid movement of singers and sets. Unadorned walls rearranged in full view of the audience, or lowered from above, redefined locales. The focus fell on text and interpretation, and on the music, of course. Hamlet’s principals, led by Simon Keenlyside’s melancholy Dane, carried off the melodrama with panache, and no one more than Marlis Petersen, the Ophélie, called in after the final dress rehearsal to replace the indisposed Dessay. In the withering, twenty-minute-long mad scene, the score’s best pages, she rendered the pain of derangement in high notes that bordered on hysteria, and in a display of grizzly self-mutilation that covered her breast, arms, and white nightgown in blood. At the conclusion, Ophélie lay prone on the ground, blanketed by flowers, in a chilling simulation of drowning. René Pape, the preeminent bass of his generation, was at once an imperious Boris and a czar of human dimension, most poignantly in the scenes with his children. The sum of the many excellent parts of this production might well have been greater had Stephen Wadsworth not been saddled with sets conceived for the famed German director Peter Stein. Stein had withdrawn from the assignment the previous July, citing rude treatment from the consular bureaucrat responsible for processing his work visa and his distaste for Gelb and the Met: “I’m not used to working in a factory” (Times, Sept. 4, 2010). Nicholas Hytner’s Don Carlo respected the work’s majesty, made sense of its complex mesh of love and politics, and found something of a solution for the opera’s problematic ending. The libretto stipulates that a friar, actually the ghost of Emperor Charles V, drag Don Carlo into the tomb. Here, instead, Carlo duels with the king’s guard, is mortally wounded, and dies in the arms of his beloved Elisabetta as the ghost appears.27

  Three high-concept rereadings unveiled between the winters of 2009 and 2010, Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Dec. 3, 2009), Attila (Feb. 23, 2010), and La Traviata (Dec. 31, 2010), fueled the debate around stagings. Broadway’s Sher and Yeargan returned for Offenbach. The concept was that E. T. A. Hoffmann, an analogue for Franz Kafka, was, like the Prague-born novelist and the Cologne-born composer, a Jew, an outsider. But Hoffmann as Kafka failed to emerge with purpose from a flood of disordered detail. To the derby hats of 1920s Mittel-Europa, Sher added Federico Fellini grotesques, clowns, and prostitutes. The director granted that he had not had “enough time to . . . get [it] right.” He had been pressured by a company strapped for money and time enough to mount a whopping eight new productions in one season. And the cast was less lustrous than promised. Rolando Villazón, felled by a vocal crisis, was replaced by the affecting Joseph Calleja. Anna Netrebko, contracted for the poet’s four loves, bowed out of two, retaining only Antonia, the consumptive singer, and the mimed role of Stella. René Pape decided to forgo the four villains altogether. If the reception of Les Contes d’Hoffmann was poor, worse still were the notices for the lustily booed Attila at its company premiere. The audience was accustomed to stagings of Verdi’s early works that cleaved to the letter of the scenario. Here, the high-fashion costumes of Miuccia Prada and the décor of hip architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron smothered the narrative. The team’s “post-Apocalyptic” construction of “political instability,” of the “contrasts between the old and new world and the clash of religions,” took a backseat to the look of the production: a magnificently arranged pile of rubble and tremendous wall of foliage. Director Pierre Audi was left with little space to play out the drama. The principals, dressed in Prada’s outlandish leather and fur, had nowhere to go, no option, save to “park and bark,” pace Gelb. The Wall Street Journal called the “stage picture . . . all concept and no theater—a monumental and bizarre creation in which the singers interacted with neither the set nor each other.” Only that paragon of Verdi conductors, Riccardo Muti (in his Met debut), came off with distinction.28

  Willy Decker’s La Traviata trailed the prestige of the full-blown regietheater production that was the darling of critics and public at its 2005 Salzburg premiere. Many at the Met saw this Traviata as a Eurotrash challenge to the performance practice of the third-most-frequently-programmed opera in the repertoire. The director emptied the stage of whatever might distract from his concept: that the protagonist is stalked by two implacable forces, her illness and the patriarchal society that engulfs her. Banished were the picturesque mock-ups of nineteenth-century France indulged in previous editions, notably in Zeffirelli’s two extravagant antecedents; the luxurious ballroom, the charming country hideaway, the splendid gambling house, and the dying woman’s bedroom were jettisoned in favor of a bare, curved wall, a bench, a few boxy modern sofas, and a giant clock. Violetta exchanged her long gowns for a short red dress and white slip. The dumb show enacted at the start prefigured the end. As the conductor gave the downbeat, Violetta entered, staggered slowly across the stage, doubled over in pain, and then collapsed into the arms of her aged doctor, an incarnation of death whose recurring presence would haunt the action. When the final notes of the mournful prelude faded away, the chorus of menacing merrymakers, males and females dressed alike as men in dark business suits, was propelled by the feverish rhythm toward the lone, frightened woman in red. A moment later, she morphed into the dissolute party girl. As one critic wrote, even if some of the director’s “reconceptions . . . are as heavy-handed as the melodramatic clichés he abhors in traditional productions,” this was “an involving and theatrically daring production that belongs at the Met.” La Traviata became a high-profile addition to the company’s slim stock of illuminating rereadings.29

  FIGURE 45. Natalie Dessay as Violetta in act 1, La Traviata, March 30, 2012 (© Marty Sohl)

  Lastly, from 2009 to 2011, the Met fielded five company premieres. We discussed in chapter 9 Janáček’s From the House of the Dead and Shostakovich’s The Nose, continuations of the Slavic project. Two more were entries in the bel canto expansion, Rossini’s Armida and Le Comte Ory, and one was American, Adams’s Nixon in China. For Armida, apparently still unpersuaded that music, words, Met Titles, program notes, and above all the imagination of the audience could be trusted, Zimmerman once again reached for cue cards. This time it took “Ballo” to tell us that a ballet was about to begin, and “Fine” to alert us that the final curtain was falling, echos of her enervating use of the blackboard in La Sonnambula. Opera News saw “the thumbprint of her staging [as] a busyness that trivializes music Rossini intended to be noble and mocks music he intended to be fantastical.” Zimmerman’s condescension to the material was seconded by Richard Hudson’s jocular design for the gates of Jerusalem; his pleasure palace and garden were barren, uninviting places of purported enchantment. The flamboyantly arduous Armida that had given Fleming a hand up as she rose to international stardom in 1993 now obliged the soprano to a degree of caution that compromised Rossini’s incisive line. The composer got all he asked from Lawrence Brownlee and several other of the six bel canto tenors the opera prescribes. The Met premiere of Le Comte Ory, it too originating at Lincoln Center, recalled once again Sher and Yeargan, the team that had restored the fizz to Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Their version of Rossini’s French bedroom farce was witty and well paced. A crotchety prompter, kin to the sleepy servant Ambrogio much in evidence in Il Barbiere, presided over a nineteenth-century theater where birds flew, castles materialized, and storms raged through tricks as transparent as the nun’s habit donned by the raunchy count. Direction and music coalesced uproariously—and sublimely—in the trio for Ory, his young aide Isolier, and the Countess Adèle, object of the passionate affections of both master and page. Flórez, Joyce DiDonato, and Diana Damrau executed the intricate threesome choreographed for Adèle’s bed, all the while carrying off the filigree of Rossini’s fioritura.30

  Peter Sellars’s staging of Nixon in China, imported from the English National Opera, re-created its 1987 Houston world premiere. Sellars was joined at the Met by his original collaborators, designer Adrianne Lobel, chore
ographer Mark Morris, John Adams, conducting his own score, and James Maddalena, who had been the first to play the thirty-seventh president. The sets bore the imprint of photographs of the 1972 encounter of Nixon and Henry Kissinger with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai. In Sellars’s blocking of the final scene, the world leaders and their wives, on beds lined up side by side, meditate on the intersections of their private lives and clashing cultures. By 2010, Nixon in China had shaken off the hostility it had first aroused. It now wore the patina of an indigenous classic.

  POWER AND PERFORMANCE: 2011–2013

  We bracket the initial half-dozen years of Gelb’s regime with two pieces by Alex Ross, one of October 9, 2006, “Metamorphosis,” and the other of May 23, 2012, “Crack-up at the Met.” The first flattered Gelb with a comparison to the visionary Otto Kahn, and continued, “For time out of mind, the Met has been a stately and secretive place, impenetrable yet strangely predictable, where stars have sung in plush productions of standard operas, to the accompaniment of minimum publicity. . . . The old behemoth is suddenly . . . flying by night in high style.” Six years later, referring to Gelb’s clumsy move to silence Opera News criticism of Met performances, Ross suggested that “America’s leading opera company was cracking up in public.” In the interim, Gelb had consolidated the power he had become famous for exerting over the many facets of the company’s operations. He emerged not only as the Met’s CEO, producer, marketer, and executive producer of HD simulcasts, but also as its director of productions. To Anthony Tommasini’s suggestion that he bring in a stage professional in the manner of John Dexter, Gelb replied, “I am the director of productions. I hope you will accept that” (Times, April 4, 2012).31

  Levine’s consuming commitment to the Metropolitan was no longer beyond question. In 2004, with his appointment as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he had relinquished his post as artistic director to reassume the lighter cloak of music director. A series of medical crises conspired to limit his presence at Lincoln Center further. In March 2006, there was the tear of his rotator cuff caused by the fall in Boston. In 2008, a malignant cyst required the removal of a kidney. At this point, Levine had taken to conducting seated at the podium. Three back surgeries followed, occasioning frequent cancellations and, in 2011, his resignation from the BSO. Its management and the orchestra, not to mention the Boston press and public, were undisposed to the patience shown by his own profoundly indebted Metropolitan community. A more calamitous fall in August 2011 resulted in a severe spinal injury. Levine had no alternative but to cancel all performances for 2011–12. Fabio Luisi, guest conductor since spring 2010, was appointed principal conductor. However much respected by the orchestra and admired by the audience, Luisi had little clout. In late 2011, responding to a comment that “from the outside, it’s hard to say who’s directing the musical operation,” he confided, “it’s not easy to understand from the inside either,” adding almost bemused, “sometimes the administration invites me to sit in on auditions.” Levine’s health kept him from the Met podium for a second season, 2012–13. In an unusually forthright interview in fall 2012, he spoke of his inability to walk and “acknowledged what many had suspected for a while,” that since 1994 he had had “a nonprogressive condition related to Parkinson’s disease that causes hand tremors, which his doctors called ‘benign Parkinsonism.’ ” He would lead the Metropolitan orchestra in Carnegie Hall in May 2013 (which he did to a dithyrambic reception) and was scheduled for Wozzeck, Così fan tutte, and a new production of Falstaff in 2013–14.32

  Speculation was rife that Gelb was just as happy to be at some remove from Levine’s powerful sway, particularly as it affected the stage. There had been talk from the outset that the artistic director, “a dramaturgical traditionalist,” and the general manager were likely to collide over reinterpretations of the standard rep. Levine had been openly dismissive of the shift away from the preeminence of singer and conductor in this directors’ era that Gelb saw as key to the salvation of the genre. In an uncharacteristically biting moment, Levine complained, “For some people, you keep redefining the cutting edge—and then you are a conservative if you are not on it,” and, “There is a degree to which some aspects of the operatic repertoire cannot be reinvented.” Levine’s shuttling back and forth to Boston and absences for reasons of health left the field to Gelb. His iron grip has been extended to 2022, the expiration date of his most recent contract.33

  Stagings

  Anna Bolena (Sept. 26, 2011), L’Elisir d’amore (Sept. 24, 2012), Maria Stuarda (Dec. 31, 2012), and Don Giovanni (Oct. 13, 2011) were unsurprising refittings typical of the company’s approach to bel canto and Mozart. Manon (March 26, 2012), Un Ballo in maschera (Nov. 8, 2012), and Rigoletto (Jan. 28, 2013) were provocative refittings bent on enlivening the nineteenth-century repertoire. The genuine rereadings of Faust (Nov. 29, 2011), Parsifal (Feb. 15, 2013), and Giulio Cesare (April 4, 2013) were relatively tame intrusions of regietheater. The Enchanted Island (Dec. 31, 2011) and The Tempest (Oct. 23, 2012), a world and a company premiere, escape categorization.

  Opening night 2011 paraded the sixteenth-century royals of Anna Bolena in splendor modeled on Holbein’s Tudor portraits. A diagonal wall marked out corridors and rooms, exteriors and interiors that favored the public/private schism at the court of Henry VIII. It also favored the HD audience. Those seated some distance from the center of the Met auditorium were out of luck: they would see little if anything of key moments staged on the “wrong” side of the wall. L’Elisir d’amore, the second consecutive opening night for Netrebko and for Donizetti, was a “big, old-fashioned-looking show.” The soprano’s star turn was marred by what critics agreed was a sound no longer suited to the score’s leggero requirements. Sher’s attempt to inject Risorgimento violence into a bucolic romantic comedy was bound to result in a “dramatic mishmash.” Maria Stuarda was clothed in trappings of no particular distinction, “hardly a bold take” on an opera that, nonetheless, provided a stunning vehicle for the glowing tone and irresistible fervor of DiDonato in the title role. And nothing about the new Don Giovanni gave off the excitement director Michael Grandage (a Tony for Red, a Laurence Olivier for Caligula) generated in the legitimate theater. The moveable curved walls pierced by doors and windows were all too familiar. To complaints of timidity such as “this Don Giovanni almost makes you yearn for those new stagings where the creative team is booed on opening night” (Times, Oct. 15), Gelb shot back, “Don’t get me started on that. . . . I feel damned if I do, damned if I don’t” (Guardian [London], Dec. 9, 2011). Maurice Grau, Heinrich Conried, and Giulio Gatti-Casazza, chided in the press for putting on the same-old, same-old and then blasted for departing from the beaten path, would have said “amen.” In their time, it was contemporary repertoire, not contemporary staging, that made them liable to critical double jeopardy.34

  The premiere of the new Manon ended in triumph for Netrebko and Piotr Beczala, and in isolated bravos, half-hearted applause, and a smattering of boos for Laurent Pelly’s production. Two of Chantal Thomas’s sets were variants on conventional designs: a love nest atop a staircase open to the tangled comings and goings of the plot; for Manon’s death, a barren road lined with street lights receding in forced perspective. Moved forward from the eighteenth century, the queen of the Belle Époque demimonde found herself surrounded not by sinuous Art Nouveau décors true to the transposed action, but vamping about a gaming establishment one reviewer compared to a “maximum-security facility.” The libretto does indeed specify that Manon seduce Des Grieux in Saint-Sulpice, that the Chevalier fall into her arms, and that the two run off together at the scene’s conclusion. But frenzied love-making on a cot unaccountably placed within the sanctified perimeter of the church was a very different proposition: the crass enactment of blasphemy managed to subvert the erotic charge of music and text. In the end, the director succeeded in giving the work a shove strong enough to set it back on its heels, and not so strong as to lay it flat. Both Un Ballo in m
aschera and Rigoletto were robust enough to survive similar pushback. An American director with long experience in European avant-garde production, David Alden, dropped Ballo into a near-abstract Sweden of the 1920s. A giant image of Icarus hovered over the stage, presumably to presage that the ambition of King Gustav III would, like the hubris of the young Athenian, lead to his downfall. The conceit was irrelevant and ultimately grating. Altogether riveting was Alden’s direction of the actors. Michael Mayer chose to transplant Rigoletto from elegant, decadent sixteenth-century Mantua to the amoral Las Vegas of the 1960s in all its vulgarity. Mayer took his metamorphosis one step further: not only did il Duca became the crooner Duke, but Duke became a stand-in for Frank Sinatra, Rigoletto for comedian Don Rickles, and the courtiers for the Rat Pack. The fit was generally, if not always, plausible. But much of the opera’s emotional complexity was lost under the glare of Vegas neon. At best, “This rejiggered Rigoletto offers no great revelations or insights, nor is it likely to stand the test of time, but it makes for an enjoyable alternate spin on a familiar work.”35

  Des McAnuff’s regietheater rereading of Faust, a London import, wielded shock and currency in a desperate effort to bring the favored opera of the Gilded Age into the twenty-first century. The production telegraphed an unequivocal pacifist message. The jaded philosopher was here a scientist horrified at the fallout of his work on the atom bomb; a photographer’s flash sent a traumatized veteran into fits of hysteria; the Walpurgis Night was a hellish banquet for disfigured survivors of Hiroshima. But like so many rereadings, the high-concept enunciated from the start acknowledged the score and subject only sporadically. The love story that is, after all, at the heart of the opera moved uneasily among metal staircases and railings discordant with the familiar lilting melodies. The most offensive of the inventions had Marguerite give birth onstage and then drown her baby in a baptismal font. Opera News called the new Faust “contrarian yet predictable”; for the Times, “the grimness and irony . . . felt imposed on Gounod’s opera, not drawn from it.” François Girard’s Parsifal had its detractors as well, but they were outnumbered by those who thought the production “perfectly suited to the music” and replete with “arresting, consistently absorbing stage pictures.” In the place of Klingsor’s magic garden was an immense pool of blood, a referent for Amfortas’s unstanchable wound; the blighted realm of the knights was bisected by the bed of a stream, sometimes dry. The opening moments established a strong bridge to present-day operagoers, many of them disturbed by the ideology Wagner embedded in the chivalric romance. During the prelude, a group of men removed their jackets and shoes in silence. They played their parts in stripped-down contemporary garb for the six hours of music that followed. These were the Grail knights, formerly in quest of Christian redemption and now modern seekers of meaning and healing. The three principal male singers, Jonas Kaufmann (Parsifal), René Pape (Gurnemanz), and Peter Mattei (Amfortas), gave listeners a taste of a Wagnerian golden age long past. If the stars of Giulio Cesare, David Daniels (Cesare) and Natalie Dessay (Cleopatra), fell short of consistent vocal distinction, they offered a compelling mix of sometimes remarkable singing and always astonishing acting and dancing. McVicar’s anachronistic production had originated at Glyndebourne in 2005 and was known through the DVD recording and subsequent presentations elsewhere. Gelb’s decision to bring the show to the Met was a rare feather in his 2012–13 cap: “so stuffed full of treats and surprises that even if some are not to your taste, you’re likely to enjoy what you find in the next slice,” “all the theatrical ideas worked, and their arc captured the opera’s potent mix of wit and pathos.” Handel, the British Raj, and Bollywood commingled smartly in the challenge march/dance of Cesare and Tolomeo (the acrobatic Christophe Dumaux), in Cleopatra’s seductive gyrations during “V’adoro, pupille” (“I adore you, eyes”), and in many more of the director’s ploys. Production, cast, and the virtuosic leadership of conductor Harry Bicket proved that a long evening of da capo aria and recitative, in the right hands, has immense appeal to modern audiences.36