Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (48 page)

TABLE 19
Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1990–91 to 2005–06

 

 

TABLE 19
(continued)

 

 

TABLE 19
(continued)

 

 

Peter Gelb extended the Slavic wing with two stunning premieres: Patrice Chéreau’s Spartan
From the House of the Dead,
already seen in Vienna, Amsterdam, and Aix-en-Provence, and William Kentridge’s kaleidoscopic
The Nose
. Richard Peduzzi’s baleful yard for the Janáček piece glossed Chéreau’s explicit intention: to evoke “all the prisons in the world . . . at once the Gulag and all the camps of the 20th century, a place that can become almost abstract.” Esa-Pekka Salonen, in his debut, led the ensemble cast through ninety relentless minutes. There was no less enthusiasm for the collage of effects Kentridge arranged for the strident, farcical
The Nose:
“the Met found the perfect match for Shostakovich’s sensibility in William Kentridge . . . the biggest cheers at the curtain call went to him and the rest of his design team.” Gogol’s Czarist 1830s became the Soviet 1920s, crammed with Constructivist bits of newspaper, poster art, words, projected images, and film clips that included stop-action animation and the composer at the piano. Gelb demonstrated the power of crafty marketing by coordinating the run of
The Nose
with the Museum of Modern Art’s Kentridge show.
The Nose
was a hot ticket.
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The company mined the same voguish vein in its ongoing exploration of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western European repertoire as it had for its Slavic survey. And with that, the Met moved squarely to the center of the debate that continues to dominate discourse on operatic practice. The polemic was joined early in the Bing era, swelled first under Dexter and Levine, then under Volpe and Levine, and crested with the installation of Peter Gelb in 2006. At one extreme are direction and design that propose—many would say, impose—radical rereadings of familiar and sometimes unfamiliar titles. Of the nearly 170 new productions mounted in the forty years between the beginning of Bing’s era in 1950 and the start of Volpe’s in 1990, we count only nine as rereadings. The first two—the much scorned, updated
Cavalleria rusticana
and the somewhat surreal
Pagliacci
of Bing’s inaugural season—came just as avant-garde productions were taking hold at the reopened Bayreuth Festspielhaus. But the
Regietheater
(director’s opera) that would soon become the norm in Germany and elsewhere in Europe remained exceptional at the stubbornly retro Metropolitan. In a defamiliarizing reinvention, Tyrone Guthrie rid
Carmen
of many of its tired trappings. Peter Brook’s
Faust
dumped Gothic Germany for Gounod’s own nineteenth century. With the move to Lincoln Center, Bing took a chance on a
Lohengrin
in the abstract style of Wieland Wagner. A decade would go by before Dexter unveiled his Brechtian take on Meyerbeer’s
Le Prophète
. The 1982
Macbeth
reclaimed the apparatus of Romantic melodrama. The cartoonish 1979
Der Fliegende Holländer
was strapped into the straitjacket of the Steersman’s nightmare; in 1989, Salome did her number in a basement of a decadent modern city.
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This brings us to the late 1990s.
Moses und Aron
(Feb. 8, 1999), Arnold Schoenberg’s magnum opus, was a peak that a world-class house would sooner or later have to scale. Shunning Hollywood-Biblical iconography, Graham Vick and Paul Brown turned the children of Israel into modern Jews, the “Golden Calf” bacchanal into a paparazzi shoot. Levine, the cast, and the stage machinery combined to pull off Schoenberg’s “impossible snarl of religion, politics, and musical aesthetics.” Thomas Hampson repeated his tour de force in the
Doktor Faust
that had originated at the 1999 Salzburg Festival. Time and place were transposed once more. The doublets and capes of medieval Wittenberg became shabby overcoats, dark against a wintry landscape. In this version of Ferruccio Busoni’s thorny work, the action unfolded in the protagonist’s “daydream . . . a journey inside his head.” The intriguing anachronisms and abstractions of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
were edgy, emphatically “anti-pretty.” In the Britten opera, the midsummer dream was “a dream by classical Athenians about a life that hasn’t happened yet because it’s happening in the 20th century.” The directors’ arcane conceit no doubt eluded many in the audience.
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Jonathan Miller hatched illuminating rereadings of
Pelléas et Mélisande
(March 25, 1995) and
The Rake’s Progress
(Nov. 20, 1997). Debussy’s enigmatic characters had hitherto been swathed in impenetrable mists, and Stravinsky’s Tom Rakewell and Anne Trulove reduced to the single dimension of their names. John Conklin replaced the medieval castle of
Pelléas
with an immense revolving nineteenth-century manor whose shifting public and private spaces implicated the audience in the disturbing voyeurism that permeates the libretto. For
The Rake,
Miller took on “the brave task of humanizing an opera that may be more about style than people.” Updated from Hogarth’s eighteenth century to 1920s England, Stravinsky’s neoclassical pastiche delivered an unexpected emotional punch. In a time shift that recalled the updating of
Moses und Aron
to the decadent twentieth century, Jürgen Flimm propelled the Biblical Judea of
Salome
(March 15, 2004) into the contemporary Middle East, Herod’s court revels into a jet-set orgy, the daughter of Herodias into a teenaged lush. As sensational as Mattila’s full frontal nudity at the climax of
“The Dance of the Seven Veils” was her fearless confrontation with the role. Designer and director Herbert Wernicke, who projected his Marxist vision of
Die Frau ohne Schatten
(Dec. 13, 2001) inside a dazzling mirrored box, disparaged the opera’s 1966 landmark production: “With all those set changes and props, I’m sure the audience didn’t get what the story was all about.” Wernicke was liable to his own criticism: even among New Yorkers, many would not “get” this “parable of New York” in which the “lofty Central Park West” spirit world was dialectically opposed to the “underworld of poor people.”
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Just a handful of the rereadings of the Volpe era fell to the dominant Romantic corpus. When
La Cenerentola
finally came to the Met, Rossini’s infectious opera buffa was chosen to exercise the hyperkinetic Cecilia Bartoli. Thanks to her extraordinary technique and industrious publicists, Bartoli had recently become an international celebrity. She dispatched an irrepressible Angelina with coloratura of military precision. The venerable fairy tale was retold in a surrealist lexicon borrowed from Magritte. For
Lohengrin
(March 9, 1998), Robert Wilson banished representation altogether: the banks of the River Scheldt, the castle, and the bridal chamber were nowhere to be seen. The singers were confined to slow, ritualized movement. Some operagoers were bewildered by the absence of narrative signposts, others infuriated. But for others still, Wagner’s score glowed through Wilson’s abstract light show. Booed on the first night, Wilson drew bravos when the opera returned in October. For
La Juive
(Nov. 6, 2003), Günter Krämer came up with the reductive scheme of dramatizing religious conflict in fifteenth-century Constance by splitting the stage horizontally. The Christians, mostly in white period costumes, occupied the steeply raked, larger, brightly lit upper level; the Jews, in mid-twentieth-century black, huddled in the claustrophobic den below. The contrast was numbingly simplistic. Neil Shicoff, the guiding spirit of the project, justified the Holocaust analogue during his overwhelming voicing of Eléazar’s great aria as he removed his coat and shoes in a gripping figuration of the gas chambers.
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The two truly grievous rereadings of the period were inflicted on
Lucia di Lammermoor
(Nov. 19, 1992) and
Il Trovatore
(Dec. 7, 2000). In yet another iteration of the dream/nightmare/hallucination frame, John Conklin’s skewed ruins, projections of Lucia’s crumbling mind, mirrored the psychological space in which the action transpired. Gone were the Scottish lairds and ladies in Francesca Zambello’s construction of solipsistic dementia. June Anderson sang the heroine’s runs to herself while balancing precariously on a pile of coffins. The company swallowed its pride, and the loss; it endured this version of Donizetti’s opera for a slim two seasons. As for
Il Trovatore,
the
irony that Vick and Brown visited on Schoenberg and Shostakovich was misplaced on Verdi. The evening was strewn with unintentionally comic touches: an oversized hoop skirt for the soprano, identical beards, mustaches, and pasty white lookalike makeup for the tenor and baritone, unsuspecting to the end that they are long-lost brothers. The loudest guffaws came in the convent scene: as if to illustrate that Manrico had actually descended from heaven to rescue his beloved Leonora (“sei tu dal ciel disceso”), a slender ramp, in the form of an inverted cross, dropped noisily to the stage, bearing the anxious hero. Volpe took the blame for the absurd production, much modified as early as the second performance.
Il Trovatore
came back two seasons later, minus the names of the director and designer, and then never again.
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FIGURE 40
.
Lucia di Lammermoor
“Mad Scene,” June Anderson as Lucia, 1992 (Winnie Klotz; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

Among the premieres out to renew rather than reinterpret was
Capriccio,
displaced from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, and filled with beguiling fashions and furnishings that flattered Kiri Te Kanawa, the
star for which it was mounted. To compensate for the weak libretto of
Benvenuto Cellini,
another company first, director Andrei Serban dished up endless stage business: the ironic miming of a commedia dell’arte troupe; two nearly nude male models, stand-ins for the sculptor’s statues; a stand-in for Berlioz himself, scribbling away as he roamed the stage. The décor, a semicircular colonnade surrounded by two curved staircases, at times moving singly and at others revolving together, defined the playing space. Berlioz’s fascinating though flawed work died after one season. In the interest of realism, Stephen Wadsworth’s staging of
Rodelinda
swept away the stock poses inseparable from the Baroque da capo aria since time immemorial. Thomas Lynch rolled out contiguous spaces that mimicked the flow of cinematic continuity. The “off-camera” courtyard replaced the “on-camera” apartment, only to be replaced in turn by the stable, and then back again. Surrounded by representations of the quotidian—a washbasin, an unmade bed, shelves filled with books—the characters passed from one environment to another in a simulation of real time. Renée Fleming, Stephanie Blythe, John Relyea, and Bejun Mehta enacted the narrative with fervor and sang with astounding technique. David Daniels, who had done so much to accustom the public to the exquisite timbre of that relative newcomer to the operatic stage, the countertenor, was remarkable as the heroic Bertarido. Handel sold out the Met.

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.
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