Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  The previous season, the Met had paid homage to the Baroque with The Enchanted Island. George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Philippe Rameau, André Campra, Jean-Marie Leclair, Henry Purcell, Jean-Féry Rebel, and Giovanni Battista Ferrandini were credited with the posthumous collaboration. Gelb had tapped Jeremy Sams to fashion a libretto for this pasticcio, a form of musical anthology dating back to the seventeenth century. Sams mixed The Tempest with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, adding Caliban’s mother, a female antagonist for Prospero, to the brew. The production and performance were better received than was the musical compilation. For some, it was a question of quantity. There was just too much of Handel et al. Others objected to the bland rhymed couplets awkwardly set to the music. But there was general delight over the cast headed by DiDonato and Daniels, and the conducting of Baroque specialist William Christie. Domingo’s appearance as Neptune surrounded by his aquatic court, four mermaids dangling above his throne, was applauded wildly, as were the direction and the sets. Prospero’s island returned, absent its “midsummer night” contingent, in Thomas Adès’s The Tempest. Apart from complaints about Meredith Oakes’s trite verse, the work, “magical in every respect,” was welcomed for its musical sophistication, for expert performances, and most particularly for the production itself. Robert Lepage’s riff on theatricality situated Shakespeare’s scenario inside Milan’s La Scala, with a different perspective on stage and auditorium for each of the three acts. Among the many extraordinary images were the tempest itself, Ariel twirling madly on a chandelier above a rippling cloth, and the enraptured Miranda and Ferdinand in silhouette on a moonlit beach.37

  “The Machine”: 2010–2012

  “There’s nothing that defines an opera house more than new productions. There’s no new production that’s more significant or more important than the ‘Ring’ cycle,” Peter Gelb asserts in the documentary he commissioned, Susan Froemke’s Wagner’s Dream (2012). The scale of “Der Ring des Nibelungen” tested the limits of his ambition. Each part of the tetralogy lays down its own gauntlet: the three swimming nixies of Das Rheingold, the seven equestrian warrior maidens of Die Walküre, Siegfried’s dragon, and the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung. Gelb turned to Lepage and Fillion who had brought off the floating sylphs and the ride to Hell of La Damnation de Faust. The team came up with a “tectonic” set, as Lepage called it, a beam almost as long as the width of the stage, supporting twenty-four massive planks that moved separately and together, rotated and tilted, functioned as floor, wall, and ceiling. Developed, constructed, and rehearsed over the span of two years in the director’s Québec studio, carrying a price tag of $16 million, give or take, the set was hyped as no other Met production since Conried’s 1903 Parsifal. The immense “Machine” would reconfigure itself to represent river, forest, and mountaintop, and to reflect computerized projections of the imagery issuing from music and text. If Wagner was moved to build his Festspielhaus to the measure of his creation, and Conried to rebuild the 39th Street stage for his grandiose Parsifal, Gelb saw to buttressing the Lincoln Center stage for the ninety-thousand-pound apparatus to which he had given his repeated blessing.38

  TABLE 20. Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 2006–07 to 2012–13

  The playbill of the first “Ring” opera heard at the Met, Die Walküre, triumph of Leopold Damrosch’s 1884–85 season, reassured the public that “the stage settings, by Herr Wilhelm Hock, are after the original at Bayreuth.” Slavishly devoted to the Master’s blueprint, cognoscenti took exception to the slightest deviation ventured by the three subsequent reinvestitures through 1913–14—a curtain in place of a door, the scarcity or excess of foliage. Apart from a refitting of Die Walküre in 1935 attacked for minor infractions of the rule, the 1913–14 sets were trotted out for more than three decades. Lee Simonson’s perspectives of the Hudson Palisades in 1948 rankled purists. When Karajan and Schneider-Siemssen unveiled the first installment of their “Ring” in 1967, what little could be made out in the dimly lit décor proposed a reading that would have been legible to charter Wagnerites of the 1880s. And these same apostles would have been thrilled at the reverence paid to Wagner’s dictates in the late 1980s by Schenk and Schneider-Siemssen. Thanks to their edition, the Met became a Mecca for traditionalists infuriated by the heresies of regietheater.

  The opening minutes of Das Rheingold (Sept. 27, 2010) promised a raft of imaginative applications of Lepage’s technology. The tops of the planks undulated in imitation of the river; the Rhinemaidens rose from what had the appearance of bubbly depths. But then the “water” settled into a surface on which the mermaids were made to perch far too long. So it continued, unevenly: stunning and apposite effects—the god of fire walking backward up an incline, the acutely angled descent of Wotan and Loge into the Nibelheim on a twisted stairway—and dramatically inert stretches with the principals stranded on a narrow platform for the length of two entire scenes. A few prudent reviewers withheld judgment. Most took up sides, for (“worth its weight in gold,” “audience . . . spellbound”) and against (“[Lepage was just] playing with toys”). Opera News touched a painful nerve: “The current conventional wisdom is that the Met has abandoned the ‘park and bark’ school for operatic performance, but this Rheingold often seemed like its very embodiment.”39

  FIGURE 46. Die Walküre, act 3, “The Ride of the Valkyries,” 2011 (© Beth Bergman 2011, NYC)

  Die Walküre (April 22, 2011), Siegfried (Oct. 27, 2011), and Götterdämmerung (Jan. 27, 2012), unlike Das Rheingold, seesawed between felicitous and wrongheaded solutions. In a simulation of galloping steeds, the bobbing planks made surprisingly apt conveyances for the always problematic “Ride of the Valkyries.” The natural world came alive in projections of cascading streams and tangles of flora and fauna; through 3D animation, the Forest Bird, heretofore invisible, could at last flit among the branches. Lepage erred nowhere more glaringly than at the climax of Walküre where he chose to sacrifice the emotional crescendo of the farewell to yet more trickery. The sorrowful Wotan led Brünnhilde offstage only to reappear on high and lower her body double upside-down against the tilted rock. By the finale of Götterdämmerung, the director seemed to have run out of ideas. The “Machine” and video illusions would, one might think, have been made to order for Siegfried’s funeral pyre, Brünnhilde’s immolation, the collapse of the hall of the Gibechungs, the river’s flood, the triumph of the Rhinemaidens, the drowning of Hagen, and the distant vision of Valhalla in flames. Lepage offered only a metal hobbyhorse for Grane, Brünnhilde’s brave mount, and toppling statues to mark the fall of the gods, gestures inadequate to the gigantic musical and dramatic conclusion of the composer’s sixteen-hour opus. Gelb could not have forgotten the stupendous cataclysm engineered with more conventional means by Schenk and Schneider-Siemssen. He had been executive producer for that 1990 unforgettable telecast.

  Since the early 1950s, Wagner had had to subsist on a shallow pool of hochdramatisch sopranos and heldentenors. Given the times, Deborah Voigt was an adequate Brünnhilde. The originally scheduled Ben Heppner withdrew nearly a year before the premiere of Siegfried and was replaced by Gary Lehman, who withdrew, in turn, only days before the opening. It was up to Lehman’s cover, Jay Hunter Morris, to save the show. He assumed the role with aplomb and energy, and minus the heroic voice Wagner had in mind. The “Ring” standouts were Jonas Kaufmann, a lyric Siegmund; Bryn Terfel, a Wotan inhibited in Rheingold but towering in Walküre and Siegfried; Eric Owens, a wrathful yet vulnerable Alberich; and Stephanie Blythe, a Fricka tender beneath her moral outrage. The virtuoso orchestra, led first by Levine, and then by Luisi when the music director was obliged to cancel, was by itself worth the inflated ticket price.

  Lepage argued that he had purged “layers and layers of socio-political stances,” had peeled away “all of that from the 20th century and [gone] back to the 19th century,” to the “poetical world, the mythological world” as they were first staged by Wagner himself in 1876 (Times, April 22, 2012).
Gelb boasted, “Lepage may be the first director to execute what Wagner actually wanted to see onstage” (Times, April 4, 2012). It could be argued that in producing a computer-generated translation of Wagner’s intentions, Lepage had advanced a true version of the “Ring.” But the noisy hulk was more often hostile than friendly to poetry. The other claim, that Lepage had swept away tired high concept, whether Marxist, “Green,” abstract, archaic, or futuristic, foundered, as had poetry and mythology, under the weight of the immense set. The “Machine” itself was the concept, the tectonic object the message. Décor and staging had wrestled narrative and character to the ground: theatricality, Gelb’s watchword, had swallowed drama. Having rejected pictorialism, and then concept as normally defined, this particular third way was unlikely to serve as template for future operatic design and direction.

  The culminating episode of the “Ring” saga reached the readership of the New York Times on May 21, 2012, when the paper, whose masthead had long carried the Gelb family name, ran a story under the headline “Latest Met Aria: Bad Opera News is No News.” The “Ring” had made the rare and in this instance embarrassing leap from the Arts and Leisure section to the front page. F. Paul Driscoll, editor in chief of Opera News, had announced the previous day that with the June issue the publication would no longer review Met performances, “a policy prompted by the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative critiques.” Its coverage of other companies would continue. The previous month, Opera News had panned Götterdämmerung as “less an interpretation of the opera than a desultory series of tactics for dealing with its daunting challenges.” Asked by the Times to comment on the decision, Gelb pulled out this blistering sentence from a piece by features editor Brian Kellow in the May issue: “The public is becoming more dispirited each season by the pretentious and woefully misguided, misdirected productions foisted on them.” Gelb might as easily have pointed to pans of Tosca or Armida or Faust. To his mind, such acid criticism crossed the line between Opera News and its publisher, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, and by extension between the Guild and its parent Metropolitan Opera Company, a boundary Gelb had lately blurred by appointing one of his assistant general managers to the Guild directorship and by moving Guild education programs to the Met itself.40

  Founded in 1936 and circulated year round to upward of one hundred thousand, among them Met contributors, Opera News had reviewed company performances since 1971–72, Bing’s final season. On May 22, in the wake of outrage that clotted the operatic internet and threats from subscribers to discontinue their memberships and halt their contributions, Gelb reversed himself on what he had first termed a determination made in concert with the magazine. The world perceived his action as censorship. Gelb did not. As late as March 2013, he argued, “My point was that the guild should stop publishing reviews of the Met altogether, which was not an act of censorship but what seemed to me like common sense under the circumstances. Why should the Met pay for a publication that’s writing negative reviews of Met productions?” His defense only compounded the fracture. It is hard to know whether the spring 2012 contretemps colored commentary in Opera News in 2012–13. Volume 77 was nothing if not judicious.41

  As to the “Machine,” it was dismantled in May 2013. Its parts were carted off to warehouses in New Jersey and upstate New York. First announced for revival in 2016 or 2017, the Lepage production, according to Gelb, would, in all likelihood, return in 2018–19, the postponement caused by “a certain amount of ‘Ring’ fatigue.” 42

  In 2012–13, attendance was down to 79 percent of capacity. The management put the onus on Sandy, the hurricane of October 2012, and on jacked-up ticket prices (Times, Feb. 27, 2013, Jan. 29, 2014). The Met announced that the increases would be rolled back by roughly 10 percent in 2013–14. The greater number of tickets sold would make up for the price cuts; “at least it better” was the way Gelb put it. The hard fact was that due, in part, to the hike in prices, in 2012–13, box office had yielded only 69 percent of its potential, over 10 percent less than in most of the previous decade. In late spring, the Met dissolved the last vestige of its resident ballet troupe; in the future, dancers would be hired show by show. The brunt of the blame for the company’s woes continued to fall on the number and kind of new productions, each costing $2 to $3 million, and the “Ring” much more. Extreme reinvestitures were subject to particular scrutiny, as they had been under Volpe. But their greater number under Gelb altered the equation. In the last four years of the previous administration, of sixteen new productions, only Jenufa, La Juive, Mazeppa, and Salome challenged the expected. In the first four years fairly ascribed entirely to Gelb, 2009–13, there were seven rereadings among his twenty-three new productions. And among these were the indisputably core Les Contes d’Hoffmann, La Traviata, Faust, Rigoletto, and Parsifal. It was not only the number of radical restagings that separated Gelb from Volpe; it was that Gelb’s rejection of convention tampered with operas well known and best loved. To this calculus we should also include the in-your-face refittings of Tosca, Un Ballo in maschera, and Manon.

  Whatever many Met faithful may have felt about the results, Gelb had kept his promise to breathe new life into the repertoire. To the question of whether high-concept productions of core titles were systematically rebuffed by the musical press, the answer is no: its response ranged from high praise for La Traviata, to mild enthusiasm for Faust and Manon, to thumbs down for Les Contes d’Hoffmann. The attitude of the public, though probably more generally negative than that of the critics, cannot be assessed without access to box-office figures. To the question of whether reviewers were tougher on directors with only marginal opera experience than on opera professionals, the answer is again, no. They handled veterans Bondy and Audi no more gingerly than Zimmerman, Lepage, and Grandage. Did they find less to like in productions incubated at the Met than in productions that debuted elsewhere? Here, yes. Of the sixteen Met offspring from 2009–10 through 2012–13 (counting the “Ring” as one), only The Enchanted Island and The Tempest drew raves, and Carmen strongly positive notices. A poor reflection on Gelb? Yes and no. He did, after all, have the decisive say in cosponsoring or importing productions first mounted elsewhere.

  FIGURE 47. West 72nd Street, New York City, September 2013

  POSTSCRIPT

  The owners of the original seventy boxes, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the rest, would doubtless have been gratified that fifteen of the twenty operas presented in Henry Abbey’s inaugural 1883 season are still among the offerings of the early twenty-first century. And only a handful of the titles on the calendar at the approximate midpoint of the Met’s history, the decade of the 1950s, are missing from today’s lists. In fact, all of the slices of the repertoire to which we devote our chapters—bel canto, French opera, Puccini, Wagner, Verdi, American opera, twentieth-century European opera, Baroque and Slavic opera—retain a strong presence. Crucial to the vitality of the institution, contemporary works in growing number have established themselves through the approbation of critics and public. Most astonishing to the Met’s founders would be the company’s sphere of influence. Abbey’s universe was circumscribed by the stops on his tour; Gelb projects his singers larger-than-life on satellite beams around the planet. It is no longer a matter of making an essentially nineteenth-century European art form at home in the New World. It is a question of globalizing what has been, almost from the beginning, an international enterprise, purported to speak a universal language as well as multiple national tongues. Through the intermediary of an American opera company, arguably preeminent in the world, America, or better New York, has become the imperial capital of opera.