Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (46 page)

The US/USSR politico/operatic nexus threads through the Metropolitan archives beginning on August 10, 1921, with correspondence from a representative of the English Gramophone Company to Edward Ziegler. The subject was the plight of penniless Gramophone artist Fyodor Chaliapin. The Russian bass had been at the Met in 1907–08, the season before Giulio Gatti-Casazza took over; he had sung Mefistofele, Don Basilio, and Leporello. No Russian roles were available; in fact, no Russian opera had yet found its way to 39th Street. The Gramophone agent informed Ziegler that Chaliapin, hoping he would be granted permission to leave the soon-to-be Soviet Union, pleaded to be met in Riga with cash sufficient for travel to Western Europe. The suspected Bolshevik was unwelcome in Great Britain. Was there a chance he might be welcomed in the United States? Chaliapin did, in fact, sing
Boris Godunov
at the Met that year and remained with the company until 1928–29 as one of its major attractions. Between Chaliapin’s 1908 departure and his return in 1921, and for the ensuing decade, Gatti sought to bolster the Slavic wing of the repertoire. From 1909 to 1931, the Metropolitan premiered, in Italian, French, or German, Smetana’s
The Bartered Bride
(1909), Tchaikovsky’s
The Queen of Spades
(1910), Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
(1913), Borodin’s
Prince Igor
(1915), Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Le Coq d’or
(1918), Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin
(1920), Weis’s
The Polish Jew
(1921), Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Snegurochka
(1922), Janáček’s
Jenufa
(1924), Stravinsky’s
Le Rossignol
(1926), Rimsky’s
Sadko
(1930), Mussorgsky’s
The Fair at Sorochintzy
(1930), and Weinberger’s
Schwanda
(1931), thirteen in all, almost twice as many as the seven that would be premiered under Volpe’s second Slavic wave. Nearly 50 percent of the Slavic titles Gatti introduced returned after their initial runs. And of these, three,
Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades,
and
Boris Godonov,
would become firmly embedded in the core. Two more,
The Bartered Bride
and
Jenufa,
hover on the edge of the standard rep. His initiative can be counted a lasting success.
¹⁹

In the 1930s and 1940s, Soviet/American relations continued to inject themselves into Metropolitan affairs, and then with increasing intensity at the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s. Mihály Székely, a Hungarian bass at the Met from 1947 to 1950, was barred by Budapest from returning to fulfill his 1950–51 contract. In the same season, Bing’s first, the United States refused admittance to the Bulgarian bass residing in Italy Boris Christoff for the opening night
Don Carlo
. Christoff would never sing at the Met. In 1951, Bing felt impelled to write to Eleanor Belmont in defense of director Margaret Webster, who had been accused of Communist sympathies; as far as Bing was concerned, Webster had not been cited as subversive by the government—and that was good enough for him. He would take neither “
Red Channels
nor any other publication as an official guide” (Nov. 7, 1951). On the death of Josef Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union made overtures to the West for cultural exchange. Two years later, Emil Gilels, David Oistrakh, and Leonid Kogan made historic appearances as the first Soviet artists to be heard in America in decades, and
Porgy and Bess
went to Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad. The next year, Isaac Stern and Jan Peerce performed in Russia. In 1958, the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement, in line with President Eisenhower’s policy of “People to People” exchange, was first signed. The Soviets grumbled that the United States had failed to invite their most prominent artists, hinting that they would be willing to send bass Ivan Petrov or baritone Pavel Lisitsian, or both, to the Met for the 1958–59 season. Lisitsian sang in a single
Aïda
on March 3, 1960; Galina Vishnevskaya played Aïda and Cio-Cio-San in fall 1961. The most consequential of the preperestroika breakthroughs came in the summer of 1975 when the Bolshoi brought six operas to New York and Washington. The authenticity of the performances, sung in the original by artists native to the culture, was a revelation. It was mezzo-soprano Elena Obraztsova who would have the most extensive Met career during the thaw; she sang thirty performances of Amneris, Dalila, Charlotte, Carmen, and Adalgisa from October 1976 through April 1979. Baritone Yuri
Mazurok sang Germont and Onegin in 1978–79. In early 1980, Washington suspended talks surrounding the renewal of the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement as one response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In Moscow, there was fury over the recent defection of Bolshoi dancers Alexander Godunov and Leonid and Valentina Kozlov (
Washington Post,
Jan. 29, 1980).
²⁰

Only six years later, in a speech to the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev made perestroika a household word. It came to stand for the policy of economic, social, and political restructuring, as glasnost did for the opening to the outside, particularly to the West. Operaphiles would see in the breach of the Berlin Wall three years later, and in the collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe, “the most important development in the world of opera in the last several decades.” Perestroika released a “deluge of Russian opera” (
Times,
June 26, 1994), and Czech as well, that has yet to subside.
²¹

In the wake of the seismic geopolitical shifts of the late 1980s, the collaboration with the unstoppable Gergiev, and the tide of Eastern European singers, the map of the Met’s repertoire was once again redrawn. During the sixteen years of the Volpe era, six Gatti bequests were revived in new productions
(The Queen of Spades, Eugene Onegin, Jenufa, Boris Godunov, The Bartered Bride, Le Rossignol)
along with
Khovanshchina,
the single Slavic novelty introduced in the more than half-century that separated Gatti from Volpe. Seven Slavic premieres were on Volpe’s calendar: Janáček’s
Kát’a Kabanová
and
The Makropulos Case
(in its first season given in English), Antonín Dvořák’s
Rusalka,
Dmitri Shostakovich’s
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,
Prokofiev’s
The Gambler
and
War and Peace,
and Tchaikovsky’s
Mazeppa
. The Slavic project reached the impressive total of fourteen Russian and Czech works, and two more through 2012–13 under Peter Gelb, Janáček’s
From the House of the Dead
and Shostakovich’s
The Nose,
with more to come.

Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov,
in the repertoire since its 1913 premiere and revived in 1990–91 in the Everding/Lee production, was the portal to the newly opened Eastern Europe. The first to step through was
Kát’a Kabanová
. With the Janáček work, Czech took its place among the company’s languages. The beleaguered Kát’a, tormented by her provincial existence and by guilt over her adulterous desire, was Gabriela Beňačková, whose success in the operas of her native country had eased their way into the world’s theaters. She
had made her US debut as Kát’a in 1979 with the Opera Orchestra of New York in Carnegie Hall, and in the decade that followed she played the eponymous leads of Smetana’s
Libuše,
of
Rusalka,
and of
Jenufa
with the same group. At her Met debut, the
Wall Street Journal
went out on a long limb: “This is the most ravishing voice in the world.” Beňačková held the stage against the formidable Leonie Rysanek in the role of the monstrous mother-in-law, Kabanicha. Charles Mackerras, an influential proponent of Janáček, was in the pit. The team of director Jonathan Miller and designer Robert Israel set the piece in vaguely surreal exteriors that respected the modernity of the composer’s idiom without violating the nineteenth-century origins of the subject. Their sober concept came as a relief: “This relatively modest new production . . . reminds us of something so often smothered here by miles of drapes, overdressed extras and acres of sets. Music matters.” In its first run and two revivals, the public failed to give
Kat’a Kabanová
the following it deserves.
Rusalka
did decidedly better. Beňačková won all hearts with the water sprite’s apostrophe to the moon, by then familiar as a favorite showpiece of lyric sopranos. Schneider-Siemssen’s wooded glen and shimmering pond were marvels of illusion. By whetting the public’s appetite with few performances in any one season, and by capitalizing on Renée Fleming’s affection for the title part, the Met saw scalpers hawking tickets outside its doors in 1996–97; attendance held up well in 2003–04.
²²

TABLE 18
Chronology of Slavic Operas in the Metropolitan’s Repertoire, 1990–2014

 

 

In December 1992, Beňačková and Rysanek squared off once more in the first Czech-language iteration of the 1974
Jenufa
. Just two weeks earlier, the 1957
Eugene Onegin,
revived for the sixth go in its original language, was conducted by Seiji Ozawa in one of his two Met assignments; the other would be
The Queen of Spades. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
introduced Met audiences to a third Russian manner, not Mussorgsky’s “national music dramas” nor Tchaikovsky’s “lyric scenes,” but Shostakovich’s biting, broadly comic, and racy social comment. The Graham Vick/Paul Brown production was a circus of theatrical effects, among them the delivery of a double bed by means of a forklift, a crushed red automobile that served as a coffin for the murdered husband, an airborne set of mourners, and a disco ball revolving over a wedding party, all in sync with the violent momentum of the score.
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
carried with it the notoriety of its birth and infancy. The opera had had an enormous succès de scandale at its 1934 Leningrad premiere. It soon racked up an impressive total of outings in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Drawn by publicity that exploited its blatant sexuality, in February 1935 New Yorkers filled the rented Met for Artur Rodzinski and his Cleveland
Orchestra staging. Stalin first saw the work at the Bolshoi the following year—and two days later a
Pravda
editorial, damning what it called the decadence of music and subject, effectively banned any further performances in the Soviet Union. A somewhat expurgated
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
resurfaced in Moscow in 1963 and made the rounds with the title
Katerina Ismailova
. The Met went back to Shostakovich’s original score and libretto.

Valery Gergiev led the Met’s 1995 new production of
The Queen of Spades
. On the recommendation of Domingo, he had made his debut in
Otello
in spring 1994. That same year, the agreement between his company, St. Petersburg’s Kirov, and New York’s Metropolitan was sealed: Volpe would give or lend the Kirov old productions, mostly Italian, and the Kirov would give the Met elements of its Russian shows in return. By then, Gergiev was a celebrity and he and Volpe had joined forces. Born in Moscow in 1953, Gergiev was raised in the Caucasus, within the borders of Georgia. He studied conducting at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and at twenty-three was the winner of the Karajan Competition. At twenty-five, as assistant conductor at the Kirov, Gergiev made his debut in
War and Peace
. A decade later, in 1988, he was appointed chief conductor and artistic director of the company and set about the task of introducing original versions of Russian operas redacted or outlawed by the Soviets. He signed a recording contract with Philips in 1989, a move designed to promote Russian opera and the Kirov worldwide and to rake in hard currency. In summer 1992, the Kirov Opera came to New York and played at the Met for the first time, presented by Satra Arts International.
Boris Godunov, The Queen of Spades,
and Prokofiev’s
The Fiery Angel
met with unusual excitement. And Gergiev returned to Russia with the dollars that would help fund his ambitious program. For the Metropolitan’s
The Queen of Spades,
Gergiev had an outstanding cast headed by Ben Heppner. Karita Mattila was Lisa; her top notes shone in an aura reminiscent of the young Rysanek, who here played the old Countess to terrifying effect. In his debut as Yeletsky, Dmitri Hvorostovsky staked out his place as one of the company’s stars with silken tone, long-breathed legato, and handsome presence. Mark Thompson’s St. Petersburg was the site of entrapment and hallucination, framed by an unsettling canted interior proscenium. Elijah Moshinsky captured the work’s feverish pulse most memorably in the act 1 sexual encounter of Lisa and Gherman and in the Grand Guignol materialization of the Countess’s ghost in act 3.