Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (47 page)

The 1995–96 season also saw the Met premiere of
The Makropolus Case,
the last Slavic work to be introduced in English. The January 5 opening had hardly
begun when it was halted by an event that blurred the divide between art and life. As the curtain rose on the set of a 1920s office, its filing cabinets reaching the full height of the stage, tenor Richard Versalle, playing the clerk Vitek and standing on a ladder to retrieve a document, sang the line “You can only live so long,” and then plunged ten feet to the floor, victim of a fatal heart attack. Destiny continued to plague
The Makropulos Case
when a blizzard caused the cancellation of the rescheduled opening a few days later. At last, on January 11, the public followed the protagonist, an eternally young 337-year-old diva, to the end of her spiritual journey. Jessye Norman had just the voice—pure, immense, deep—and the diva persona to sound the near-timelessness of Emilia Marty. Two monumental representations took the measure of the character: a sphinx that served as her throne in act 2 and, as backdrop to much of the action, her portrait, consumed by flames at the climax. The opera has taken root in three revivals in the original Czech, the latest in 2011–12.

When, at long last, the Met replaced its forty-year-old
Eugene Onegin
(March 13, 1997), the conductor was Antonio Pappano, soon to be named music director of Covent Garden. The
Times
was not alone in bashing the Robert Carsen/Michael Levine production: “So difficult was it to hear and see, one can only assume that a strategy of concealment was at work.” It was left to three revivals that featured Thomas Hampson and Solveig Kringelborn (2001), Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming (2007), and Hampson and Mattila (2009) to establish that this refitting was not a “concealment,” but a revelation. The 2007 telecast, led by Gergiev, is among the most warmly remembered of the HD series. Three undecorated walls confine the playing space. The action unfolds within minimalist borders, chairs and tables arranged in a square for the provincial cotillion, richer seating to distinguish the gathering of cosmopolitan society. During the “Letter Scene,” Tatiana, whose bedroom is delimited by no more than the outline of a swept floor, bursts forth from the implied interior of the chamber to express ecstatic longings in the sea of surrounding foliage. Carsen elides the intermission between the duel and the grand Petersburg ball of some years later: Tchaikovsky’s famous polonaise is heard, but not danced, while the stationary, world-weary Onegin is attended by a bevy of servants who dress him, buff his nails, and perfume his gloves. In the final scene, on a stage bare but for a single chair, Fleming and Hvorostovsky, both at their peak, sum up the drama in one anguished moment of connection before separating forever.
²³

While Gergiev was in New York preparing and performing the 1995–96
The Queen of Spades,
the Mariinsky’s chief administrator and its choreographer
were detained on charges of bribery, a situation the conductor was apparently expected to handle long-distance through his well-known political connections. The next year, 1996, Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, turned complete control of the Mariinsky opera and ballet over to Gergiev. The close association of Gergiev with the regime was founded on his friendship with Vladimir Putin dating from 1992, when Putin was first deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. A critic for the London
Times
ventured, “I don’t know of any case in musical history, except maybe for Wagner and mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, where a musician has been that close to a powerful ruler.” In reply to those who groused that he had devolved from musician to businessman and politician, Gergiev retorted, “There are artists who do not care who is in the government. A society like America, they don’t even have to know the name of the president if they are working in Hollywood. . . . If you run the Mariinsky and say you don’t care what is happening in the government, you are a liar.” Here is a sequel to the story. In summer 2013, on the heels of Russia’s new law criminalizing “propaganda on non-traditional sexual relations,” blowback from the sort of defense Gergiev made in 2009, and more specifically from his support of Putin’s 2012 reelection, brushed up against the Met. Gergiev would not comment on the homophobic statute. To calls that the Met dedicate to Russia’s LGBT community the 2013 opening night
Eugene Onegin,
with Gergiev in the pit and Anna Netrebko, also in the Putin camp, as Tatiana, Gelb responded, “We . . . stand behind all of our artists, regardless of whether or not they wish to publicly express their political opinions. As an institution, the Met deplores the suppression of equal rights here or abroad. But since our mission is artistic, it is not appropriate for our performances to be used by us for political purposes, no matter how noble or right the cause.”
²⁴

Volpe and Levine held their second joint press conference in more than twenty years in September 1996; their secretive MO had long been a sore point with reporters. The event was staged to present a united front in announcing that Gergiev had been appointed the first principal guest conductor in Met history, a post created expressly for him, and that he was committed to eight productions in five years, including two premieres. “I’m in heaven,” Volpe enthused, “just to think what can be accomplished with everything Jim and I have tried to do, and now with Valery coming on and adding what he can do” (
Times,
Sept. 16, 1997). Behind the decision was, no doubt, the expectation, first, that the extroverted Gergiev would serve as backup—and antidote—to the very private Levine, and, second, that he would continue to expand the repertoire in the Slavic direction peripheral to Levine’s interests. In fact, the
only Slavic opera Levine conducted in this period was his well-oiled
The Bartered Bride
. Volpe returned to his old refrain: “People claim that James Levine is hogging everything, but that is just not true. . . . In bringing Valery to the Met, we are really beginning to get the world’s premier conductors into the house” (
Times,
Dec. 19, 1997). Reminiscent of his nod to Dexter was Levine’s “We have the most marvelous interaction” (
Times,
Dec. 15, 1997). Gergiev’s appointment raised eyebrows in New York and hackles at home. A government official chided, “Gergiev must not take unilateral steps and sign foreign contracts without informing the Russian government of this and coordinating the matter with it.” While denying that Gergiev’s growing influence implied that Levine might soon be leaving, Volpe acknowledged that in that event, “Gergiev is the man he would go after.” Meanwhile, despite his many remunerative and exhausting distractions, Levine kept up his Metropolitan schedule. In 1999–00, for example, he conducted sixty-five performances, very close to his habitual quota of 25 percent of the season’s total.
²⁵

In May-June 1998, the Met assumed the risks, and ultimately reaped the rewards, of bringing the Kirov to New York under its own aegis. On the esoteric program were Prokofiev’s
Betrothal in a Monastery,
Tchaikovsky’s
Mazeppa,
Borodin’s
Prince Igor,
and Glinka’s
Ruslan and Lyudmila
. Sarah Billinghurst spoke warmly of the growing relationship: not only had the Met gained a first-flight conductor for extended periods, but through his good offices the company would have the opportunity to bring its partner troupe to New York every four or five years, exchange productions, and engage the Kirov’s best singers. This was, she suggested, an extraordinary win-win proposition. The very next year, Gergiev was no longer “the man [Volpe] would go after” in the case, for whatever reason, of a Levine withdrawal. He was categorical in answering a sticky question put to him by Johanna Fiedler: “[Gergiev] won’t be Jimmy’s successor, because, as long as I’m here, Jimmy will be here. . . . You can say he’ll become music director over my dead body.” Besides, it had been widely reported that Gergiev had increasingly “tense relations with the Met musicians and choristers . . . [who were] dismayed by what they consider his idiosyncratic technique, lack of focus and penchant for showing up late to rehearsals.” Gergiev was on a souped-up treadmill of conducting at home and abroad, touring with the Kirov, administering an opera and ballet company, directing the White Nights Festival, fund-raising, and much more.
²⁶

War and Peace,
February 14, 2002.
In March and April 1999, Gergiev was busy with Met revivals of
The Queen of Spades
and
Khovanshchina;
in 2003–04,
he would take on the Stravinsky triple bill. His imprint is best measured by the Kirov/Met coproductions,
The Gambler, War and Peace,
and
Mazeppa
. Prokofiev’s reading of Tolstoy’s epic novel was by far the most newsworthy of the three. Coverage of
War and Peace
at the Metropolitan had begun in the early 1940s, the time in which the Soviet Union and the United States were World War II allies. Even before the opera’s 1944 Moscow concert premiere, the Met had opened negotiations for a copy of the score. Correspondence that extends from July 1943 to November 1946 includes letters from the Met general manager, the board, the State Department, the US embassy in Moscow, agencies of cultural cooperation, and the New York clearing house for the rights to Soviet music. In February 1948, Edward Johnson wrote to Eleanor Belmont that, pending receipt of a usable score and an adequate translation, he would be in a position to assure an Opera Guild–sponsored concert presentation in English that fall. The very month of Johnson’s letter, the composer and opera were censured by the Soviet government, and that was that. Prokofiev did not live to see his full version performed. NBC transmitted a little more than half of
War and Peace
to American television screens in 1957; Sarah Caldwell put it on in Boston in 1974; the Bolshoi presented it during its 1975 US tour; the English National Opera’s production came to New York in 1984.
²⁷

The Kirov and the Met were hell-bent on producing the most complete and spectacular
War and Peace
ever. At a cost estimated between $3 and $4 million (much of it charged against Alberto Vilar’s pledge), with fifty-two soloists, 227 supers, 120 choristers, forty-one dancers, a horse, a dog, and a goat, the show promised to live up to its ambition. Film director Andrei Konchalovsky handled the throngs of haughty aristocrats, oppressed peasants, and Russian and French soldiers; George Tsypin provided a design whose central feature was a perilously tilted, revolving dome. Just minutes before the curtain fell on the first performance, a super, one of the Grenadiers, slipped and rolled toward the pit, saved only by a provident net at the lip of the stage. The
Times
complained, “The set is terribly distracting for the audience. How can you be swept away by the operatic drama when you are worried about the singers’ safety?” The
New Yorker
was effusive: “the most visually compelling opera production that I have seen in New York in many years,” many of its scenes echoing “some of the great tours de force of the Russian cinema.” Anna Netrebko, the Natasha, in her company debut, would make a meteoric ascent to enormous popularity.
War and Peace
was near the top of the box-office chart that season. A year earlier, the composer’s
The Gambler
had done better than anticipated. In adapting Dostoyevsky’s short story, Prokofiev was intent on defying convention—there were no arias to speak of, no ensembles, nothing much in the way of melody. The text was all. One reviewer observed that “a conscientious patron was . . . forced to read [the titles] first, to watch and listen second.” Tsypin and director Yuri Alexandrov contrived overdetermined, postmodern décors for
Mazeppa:
projected images of a Nazi death camp, an array of white statues displaced and dismembered through the course of the opera, a platform whose variable rake, as in
War and Peace,
occasionally threatened to send the artists sprawling. Gergiev traced a sure path through the changing landscape of Tchaikovsky’s score, from the romantic yearnings of the young Maria for her far-too-mature godfather, the traitorous Mazeppa, to martial orchestral passages and nationalistic choruses, and finally to the lullaby the unhinged heroine sings to her dead past. Another high-profile Russian conductor, director of the Glyndebourne Festival, Vladimir Jurowski, led a new staging of
Jenufa,
still a hard sell, despite Mattila, definitive in the title role, and Deborah Polaski, a fearsome Kostelnicka. The spare production took its focus from two walls receding on the bias. There were objections to the ever-present rocks, in particular to the huge boulder that sat in the middle of the act 2 farmhouse.
²⁸

 

FIGURE 39
.
War and Peace
, part 2, scene 4, 2002 (Winnie Klotz; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)