Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (39 page)

By the end of the 1979–80 season, it was no secret that Dexter’s authority had been circumvented, if not subverted, by his partners. At a January 1980
meeting of the executive committee, Bliss characterized Dexter as “a troublesome colleague. . . . His temper tantrums and abuse of colleagues have proved intolerable.” Bliss and Levine tried hard to persuade the press that the triumvirate had never been intended to last, that once Dexter had brought the technical operation up to snuff, the position of director of production would have outlived its usefulness (
Times,
July 16, 1980). In a long memorandum to Levine and Bliss dated September 24, 1980, Dexter complained of “being under some kind of attack, more or less day by day,” of being ignored, contradicted, undermined. By then, the British director could take satisfaction in having left his imprint on the company. Rarely had the likes of his spare, conceptual schemes been seen in a theater identified with opulent décors and literal stagings. Dexter’s aesthetic politics were known to the many New Yorkers who remembered the pantomime he devised for Pizarro’s crossing of the Andes in the 1965 Broadway run of Peter Shaffer’s
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
. At the Met, his calling card had been the 1974
I Vespri Siciliani,
stripped of picturesque signs of thirteenth-century Palermo. For a time, the claims of frugality trumped those of tradition, and cost-conscious trustees were happy enough to acquiesce to Dexter’s subversive stage. In a 1977 letter to a patron, the director of production decried the grandiosity that the gilded opera house invited, and the clutter: “If there is not too much on the stage you can see any detail, you can see every face and movement. If you concentrate and if you are shown where to look. It’s a question of angle, of stage relationship with the audience, and volume. . . . The audience should be looking for faces, not windmills.” But Dexter’s dazzling originality came at a price: having to put up with the man himself. As Volpe described it, “When Dexter entered a room, he altered the atmosphere. Everything about him was dark—his gaze, his temper, a beard that came and went.” With varying degrees of austerity—and success—the twelve new productions he staged through 1979–80, nearly half the total for the period, hewed to his program of reform. He articulated its tenets repeatedly in interviews, and in the letters, memoranda, and diary entries assembled for his posthumous, incomplete autobiography,
The Honourable Beast
. Under Dexter’s irascible ways, acid tongue, and relentless quest for excellence, the cash-strapped Met became a cutting-edge theatre.
⁸

Dexter first imposed his vision on two of the very grandest operas,
Aïda
and
Le Prophète
. His Spartan credo served neither Verdi nor Meyerbeer. By purging
Aïda
(Feb. 3, 1976) of what he considered gratuitous spectacle, Dexter sought to disclose the racial, political, and cultural chasm that
separated the repressive Egyptians (read white) from the subjugated Ethiopians (read black). The languishing princess lost her couch, the victorious hero lost his horse, the large scale ballet of the Triumphal Scene was reduced to a pas de deux to the death between two male dancers, a haughty pharaonic warrior and a defiant Ethiopian captive. Standing sideways, hands pronated, Radamès, Amneris, the King, Ramfis, and the populace of Memphis and Thebes were constricted by the hieratic attitudes of Egyptian iconography, whereas the Ethiopians were free to move naturally. But in banishing the Hollywood colossal, Dexter unleashed the B-movie gestures of
The Mummy
. As for the principals, Leontyne Price, although still glorying in her upper register, was beginning to exert her will over Verdi’s rhythms; Marilyn Horne’s Amneris was underpowered at those moments that want the punch of an authentic Italian dramatic mezzo.
Le Prophète
(January 18, 1977) had been forgotten by the Met for fifty years. Elsewhere, Meyerbeer was making something of a comeback. Dexter staged the opera on a unit set representing a half-finished Gothic cathedral into which were dragged wagons suggestive of the various locales: a castle, an inn, a war camp, a city square. As the director saw it, “While not explicitly stated, the opera will appear to be acted out by . . . the craftsmen who are building the cathedral, as a kind of morality play that attempts to explain the relationship of man to God” (
Times,
Jan. 16, 1977). The misbegotten stratagem was dressed in Peter Wexler’s drab décor. “What Mr. Dexter has dismissed . . . is the scenic power of Meyerbeer’s opera, based on carefully planned contrasts of moods, colors, decors, depths and densities of setting. He has achieved the visual monotony the composer sought to avoid.” It was left to Meyerbeer and the singers to supply the grandeur of
le grand opéra
. The stentorian James McCracken found an elegant, unearthly falsetto and
voix mixte
(the melding of chest voice and head voice) for the prophet’s divine visions. Renata Scotto charged the ungrateful part of Berthe with a manic intensity that compensated for her strident top notes. Marilyn Horne, the astonishing Fidès, had the plangent timbre, the agility, the two-and-a-half-octave range, and the manner for what is arguably the most demanding role written for her voice type. She sang “with the virtuosity that among mezzos is hers alone these days.” In fact, no Met contralto/mezzo-soprano in the five decades since Margarete Matzenauer, the previous Fidès, could have risen to her performance.
⁹

Dexter was in his element in twentieth-century opera. The Met premiere of Francis Poulenc’s
Dialogues des Carmélites,
in English, took place on February 5, 1977. The director came to consider this production
the exemplum of his method. By cannibalizing costumes and sets from the warehouse, he kept the cost at an absurdly low $65,000. The décor consisted of a sloping cruciform platform and a few props—a chandelier, a gate, an altar. Dexter’s memoirs impart his relief at Callas’s refusal of the role of the Old Prioress and his joy at Régine Crespin’s acceptance; she had been the New Prioress in the opera’s 1957 Paris premiere. The remarkable cast was headed by Maria Ewing as the tormented Blanche and Shirley Verrett as the sublime Madame Lidoine. Jessye Norman and other interpreters have faced the guillotine in Dexter’s staging and David Reppa’s minimalist bricolage in seven subsequent revivals, the most recent in 2012–13. The director of production was riding high. Later that season, he would again affirm the viability of twentieth-century opera with another house premiere, Alban Berg’s
Lulu,
in the unfinished two-act version. The production, “sensitively directed, lovingly conducted, and intelligently and aptly designed,” struck a balance between expressionism and naturalism in the fin-de-siècle/art moderne sets of Jocelyn Herbert. Donald Gramm and Tatiana Troyanos were luxury casting in the roles of Dr. Schön and Countess Geschwitz. The title role was intended for Teresa Stratas; she withdrew a month before the first night in a dispute over rehearsal conditions. Her cover, Carole Farley, an experienced Lulu, had little of the magnetism Stratas would radiate when three years later the Met put on the full version of Berg’s opera with its third act, edited by Friedrich Cerha. Dexter and his team had made the case for
Lulu:
the box office in 1977 was strong and in the curtailed 1980 season more than respectable. In 2009–10, Fabio Luisi led the work, still fresh in the Dexter-Herbert edition.
¹⁰

Dexter delivered
Rigoletto
(Oct. 31, 1977) and
Don Pasquale
(Dec. 7, 1978) from timeworn practice as he had
Aïda
and
Le Prophète
—with the same disappointing results. The striking central element of the unit set for
Rigoletto
was a tall, decaying tower that revolved from scene to scene and pushed most of the action downstage to the sector Dexter favored. The advantage to voice and gesture, no doubt welcomed by Sherrill Milnes, Ileana Cotrubas, and Plácido Domingo, was offset by the loss of playing space and the profusion of decoration. The mise-en-scène “seemed almost incompetent in the way it tamed what should be a stirring drama.”
Don Pasquale,
Beverly Sills’s Met swan song, was conceived, said its director, as “a charming offering to her,” transposed to the Edwardian era, whose fashion “would suit her well” (
Times,
Dec. 3, 1978). The song this late in the soprano’s career rang somewhat brittle. Desmond Heeley confected the outline of a valentine as an inner proscenium;
Dexter should have had second thoughts about converting the opera buffa into a drawing-room comedy. His
Don Carlo
(Feb. 5, 1979) was enriched by the restoration of the opening scene in the forest of Fontainebleau, whatever Dexter’s objections to the flamboyant details forced upon him. Levine led a cast dominated by Nicolai Ghiaurov’s Philip. This
Don Carlo
would be the last of Reppa’s schematic decors. It would also be the end of the line for Met house designers.
¹¹

 

FIGURE 34
.
Dialogues des Carmélites
, act 1, scene 1, 1977 (James Heffernan; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

Benjamin Britten’s
Billy Budd,
Dexter’s return to the twentieth century, was an unqualified hit. The director employed the stage elevators to smashing effect for the
HMS Indomitable
, designed to disclose the harsh life of late-eighteenth-century seamen, on the one hand, and the stacking of the ship’s multiple decks as she is prepared for battle, on the other. The choreography of the large ensemble spoke to the class divide between officers and crew, the moral dilemma of Captain Vere (Peter Pears), the seraphic innocence of Billy
(Richard Stilwell), and “the Lucifer-like beauty, sorrow, and passion” of the evil Claggart (James Morris). The production has been revived six times, most recently in 2011–12. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
is a political satire rooted in the cabaret tradition. How well it weathered repotting was up for debate. For Manuela Hoelterhoff, “the work [did] not carry in a place the size of the Met. It needs an intimate setting for dramatic effect.” Schonberg, who had no problem with the fit of the piece to the big stage, was tough on the text and the score: “It is a pretty dated example of dialectical materialism, and to these ears much of the music is dated.” When Stratas sang the lilting “Moon of Alabama,” all else was beside the point. Levine and Dexter stuck with Weill and Brecht through twenty-seven performances in two successive seasons;
Mahagonny
came back in 1983–84 to dismal box office, and then in 1995–96, when it did much better.
¹²

The Bartered Bride
(Oct. 25, 1978) and
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
(Oct. 12, 1979) were revivals long overdue. The production of Smetana’s comedy, panned by most critics (Andrew Porter called it a “disaster,” a “horrid travesty”), beat a hasty retreat. Dexter and Svoboda, ever distrustful of the pretty, had drained the work of its considerable charm. The superb diction of Stratas, Vickers, and Nicolai Gedda exposed a second deadly flaw: the distortions of an English translation hell-bent on matching the stressed syllables of the Czech original.
Entführung
was a down payment on Levine’s pledge to bring lesser-known Mozart operas into the active repertoire.
The Abduction from the Seraglio,
as it was known in its English-language introduction, had been dropped after only five performances in 1946–47. Where Donald Oenslager’s filigree décors were a riot of color, Jocelyn Herbert insisted on simple lines and a subdued palette. Bass Kurt Moll’s Osmin left the strained Belmonte and Constanze of Gedda and Edda Moser in the dust. The production has resurfaced six times; in 2007–08, Matthew Polenzani and Diana Damrau excelled in the difficult principal roles.
¹³

Among rarities not signed by Dexter, although staged under his baleful eye as director of production, two succeeded in restoring major works to the repertoire. The three one-act operas of Puccini’s
Il Trittico
(Dec. 19, 1975), reunited for the first time since 1920, finally caught on despite uninspiring first casts and Reppa’s just serviceable décors. When Scotto took on the three contrasting soprano parts, the house went wild.
I Puritani
(Feb. 25, 1976) was on the bill for the first time in more than half a century. We have not seen as serendipitous a quartet as Sutherland, Pavarotti, Milnes, and Morris in the four revivals of Bellini’s opera, the last in 2006–07. Three showcases for
reigning stars were borrowed from San Francisco. Massenet provided
Esclarmonde,
in its company premiere, for Sutherland and
Thaïs
(Jan. 18, 1978) for Sills, and Donizetti
La Favorita
(Feb. 21, 1978) for Verrett and Pavarotti.
Esclarmonde
proved the most intriguing of the three, if only for Beni Montresor’s handsome décors and the diva’s bravura.
Thaïs,
a stronger piece, no longer suited Sills’s increasingly fragile instrument; it suffered too from a tacky production. Verrett, whose Leonora had thrilled a Carnegie Hall audience three years earlier, was off form in the disappointing
La Favorita
.
¹⁴