Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (52 page)

That first exciting year, along with HD simulcasts that projected the newly reerected Great Wall of China, the reconceived Sevillian farrago, and the restored Puccini triptych onto movie screens, Gelb programmed video transmissions of
Die Zauberflöte
and
Eugene Onegin,
among the most conspicuous stagings of the Volpe era, and for Anna Netrebko, the Met’s newest star,
I Puritani
.

At the board meeting of January 19, 2006, Gelb announced that he had assurances of two productions per season, on average, from Renée Fleming, Marcello Giordani, Susan Graham, Karita Mattila, Anna Netrebko, René Pape, and Bryn Terfel, and further, that these top draws would sing longer into each run. As never before, in promoting itself the company would promote its most bankable assets. In 2006 an anonymous geisha was displayed on the sides of Metropolitan Transit Authority buses; in 2007 millions of New Yorkers and Big Apple tourists gaped from the sidewalks at Natalie Dessay as Lucia (“You’d Be Mad to Miss It”), in 2008 at Fleming as Thaïs, in 2009 at Mattila as Tosca, in 2010 at Terfel as Wotan, in 2011 at Netrebko as Anna Bolena, in 2012 at Jonas Kaufmann as Parsifal.

Within a few months, visual media in its various expressions had come to define Met stardom. True, it had been decades since a voice, if great enough, was all it took and a diva could brush off the director with impunity, as Zinka Milanov had Margaret Webster. Equally true was that the history of the Met was replete with wonderful singers who were also charismatic actors, among them Jean de Reszke, Emma Calvé, and Antonio Scotti in the Gilded Age, Olive Fremstad, Geraldine Farrar, and Fyodor Chaliapin in the early 1900s, Maria Jeritza and Lawrence Tibbett, who made their debuts in the 1920s, Regina Resnik, Risë Stevens, Astrid Varnay, Licia Albanese, and Ljuba Welitsch in the 1940s, and since then Hildegard Behrens, Maria Callas, Leonie Rysanek, Renata Scotto, Teresa Stratas, Shirley Verrett, and Jon Vickers. As far back as the 1890s, with the end of the German seasons, critic W. J. Henderson had issued this warning: “The Italian singer is always a singer, and he conceives it to be his divine right to face the footlights, sing directly to the audience, and dwell on all his high notes. . . . This style of thing, however, is dead in New York” (
Times,
March 22, 1891). To stand and sing, as Henderson had formulated it, or “park and bark,” as Gelb and others delighted in calling “this style of thing,” was not at all dead at the end of the nineteenth century. It would soon be outmoded to oppose the wooden Verdian to the thespian Wagnerian, a vanishing breed once the resurrected star system displaced the ensemble. At about the same time, Edmund Stanton protested that the audience would “not tolerate the old-fashioned style of operatic art, in which every illusion of the stage is sacrificed to the display of the voice.” For decades, audiences did more than tolerate it; in the main, they lived with it quite happily.
¹⁵

The lineup Gelb promised the board in 2006 affirmed that, under his producer’s eye, the whole star package, image and acting, voice and technique, would be the rule, not the exception. Voigt’s journey served as an object lesson: fired in 2004 from a Covent Garden
Ariadne auf Naxos,
ostensibly because the little black dress the director had in mind would have fit incongruously on her large frame, Voigt risked gastric bypass surgery and reset the trajectory of her career. Together with Renée Fleming, Natalie Dessay, Susan Graham, Patricia Racette, and Sondra Radvanovsky, she not only has starred in several simulcasts, but has been the presenter of many of the Saturday intermission features.

As early as 2004, Gelb had determined to hoist one name to the top of his A-list. Sometime after his appointment, he flew to Vienna to meet with Anna Netrebko; over lunch, he proposed to make the young Russian soprano “the star of the Met,” a postmodern
prima donna assoluta
. By the end of 2012–13, she was tied with Fleming, twelve years her senior, for the HD lead; each had chalked up eight telecasts. Fleming had long been marketed as a beautiful woman with “The Beautiful Voice,” the title of one of her best-selling CDs, and not as an exceptional actress. What the audience took away from her opening night gala (Sept. 22, 2008), the first to honor a single artist, was the sound of her velvety timbre and the sight of her as Violetta, Manon, and
Capriccio
’s Madeleine in well-publicized costumes created for the occasion by a trio of high-fashion designers. Netrebko, by contrast, was acknowledged as “a natural actress blessed with sensational looks,” “a true stage animal,” labels rarely affixed to opera singers. And when they are, for better or for worse, it is in consequence of some memorable bit of stage business. Geraldine Farrar, for example, captured the sweetness of
Königskinder
’s heroine by tending a gaggle of geese; Maria Jeritza will forever be associated with Tosca by her “Vissi d’arte” delivered face down on the floor; the place of Marjorie Lawrence in Met lore was assured by her equestrian ride into the flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Netrebko’s moment was recorded in her first telecast,
I Puritani
(Jan. 6, 2007). In a gesture some dismissed as grandstanding and others found breathtaking, near the climax of Elvira’s mad scene, the soprano ran to the lip of the stage and then lay on her back, as if in the throes of desire for her absent lover, her long hair dangling into the orchestra pit. As she explained with her customary bluntness, “Was crazy, no? But felt good. Yes, was my idea. I agree to sing this opera, then open score and don’t like, it’s crap, I want to cancel. And Met production was so dull, stage director no help. I had to do something, so I get on floor.”
¹⁶

Of greater import than Netrebko’s coup de théâtre was the whole of the performance. Her dissing of one of Bellini’s richest works notwithstanding, she stayed in character throughout, inhabiting the deranged world of the febrile English damsel with palpable sincerity. Movie audiences enjoyed at least one advantage over those at the Met that afternoon: they were privy to the emotions inflected on Netrebko’s face and in her smallest movements. She showed no concern for the next coloratura hurdle, played not to the audience but to her colleagues on stage, and avoided stock postures and the exaggerated expressions that close-ups often render irritating to the telepublic. During a
Puritani
intermission, the star made plain that she was as much a screen as a stage animal; she was acutely aware of the camera and gauged her attitudes accordingly. Netrebko is in top form for the telecasts of the 2011–12 season, sensitive to the many moods of Manon (April 7) and to the regal dignity of Anna Bolena (Oct. 15). Massenet’s transgressive protagonist emerges in all her complexity: naïve, pensive, conflicted, ironic, seductive, forlorn. And for
Bolena,
in what is certainly her most moving HD performance, Netrebko revisits the on-again, off-again lunacy of Elvira and Lucia, but on the tragic plane befitting a queen facing the executioner’s block with the defiance born of pride.

It was another singing actress, Natalie Dessay, who reaped the extraordinary exposure of three new bel canto productions in just two seasons, 2007 to 2009. Chicago-based director Mary Zimmerman signed
Lucia di Lammermoor
(Sept. 24, 2007), a title that had long awaited a passable staging. What it got in the end was no better than a mixed bag. Zimmerman piled on distracting inventions: the ghost of a murdered girl (to dramatize Lucia’s act 1 narrative), a wedding photographer (to shoot the stasis of the sextet), a physician (to administer a hypodermic to the unhinged protagonist), and the ghost of Lucia herself (to assist in Edgardo’s suicide). More successful was the mad scene staged on Daniel Ostling’s skeletal staircase and balcony, the site of Lucia’s anguished entry into the bridal chamber, and then of her precipitous descent into insanity. The press received the director’s efforts with greater warmth than did Dessay, openly critical of Zimmerman’s inexperience.

By the time of
La Sonnambula
(March 2, 2009), director and diva were on the same page. Neither was disposed to take seriously the story of an innocent maiden who walks in her sleep; the victim of ignorance and prejudice, a vessel of pathos, became the target of their derision. Dessay had admonished early on, “whatever you do, don’t set it in a Swiss village,” and Zimmerman had obliged
with a contemporary New York rehearsal studio. She turned Amina into a hip soprano, armed with cell phone and shades, winking along with her stage coconspirators both at the character she plays and, more generally, at Romantic sensibility. Here and there, she resorted to low comedy, a register discordant with the elegiac score. The heavy hand of her ironic rereading came close to annihilating Bellini. Thankfully, the director rose to the two sleepwalking scenes: in the first, the spotlighted somnambulist wandered down a long aisle of the Met’s orchestra floor; in the second, she teetered on the ledge outside the windows of the rehearsal space. The third of the Dessay vehicles,
La Fille du régiment
(April 21, 2008), directed by Laurent Pelly, was, on the other hand, ideally suited to low comedy. In dingy undershirt and trousers, sprouting a Raggedy-Ann braid, the French soprano reveled in the slapstick, all the while sharing tender moments with bel canto paragon Juan Diego Flórez who was regularly called to encore his nine high Cs. An endless clothesline hung with the regiment’s underwear, sleepy servants dusting to a slow waltz, and a tank coming to the rescue at the climax were just a few of Pelly’s hilarious sight gags. Donizetti’s opéra-bouffe was everyone’s delight, a virtual sellout.
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In what has become a commonplace of reinvestiture, the fourth-century Hellenic Egypt of
Thaïs
(Dec. 28, 2008) was updated to something like the 1890s—when the work was first heard—to the detriment of the outcome. The opera’s libretto instructs the lubricious courtesan to strike poses still thought daring in 1907 when Mary Garden stood admiringly before her mirror at Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House. One hundred years later, neither Fleming’s beauty nor her seductive song could prevent early-twentieth-century scandal from devolving into twenty-first-century camp. Like
Thaïs, La Rondine
(Dec. 31, 2008) was a well-traveled retro production created for a specific diva, Angela Gheorghiu, who would sing it in multiple venues. The eight remaining new productions of 2007–09 bore the mark of contemporary practice. None could be mistaken for the decorative shows that were Met specialties only a decade or so earlier. The black-and-white
Macbeth
(Oct. 22, 2007), in which the witches sported the pocketbooks and bobby socks of 1950s bag ladies, dripped with blood; the gritty, Goyaesque
Trovatore
(Feb. 16, 2009) bristled with violence and eroticism, its revolving set riot with camp followers and buffed blacksmiths naked to the waist. The nightmarish
Hänsel und Gretel
(Dec. 24, 2007) was hell-bent on terrifying
children far in excess of the tale’s demands. The tormented protagonist of
Peter Grimes
(Feb. 28, 2008) found himself oppressed throughout by a wall of weather-beaten boards as threatening as the community they represented.
¹⁸

Iphigénie en Tauride
(Nov. 27, 2007) had been given in 1916–17 in German, in a version by Richard Strauss;
La Damnation de Faust
(Nov. 7, 2008), it too effectively a company premiere, had stopped at the Met in concert performances in 1896 and in a 1906 staging for Farrar early in her debut season. On Thomas Lynch’s rough-hewn unit set for the Temple of Diana, Stephen Wadsworth’s mise-en-scène for
Iphigénie
infused graphic realism into the classical subject. Oreste was the thirty-seventh Met role appropriated by Domingo, only his second in an eighteenth-century opera.
La Damnation de Faust,
conceived for the concert hall, is a series of arias, ensembles, and bravura pieces for orchestra. For his initial Met assignment, Robert Lepage devised startling stage pictures: acrobats striding horizontally from floor to ceiling and then ceiling to floor (a nod to the director’s collaboration with the Cirque du Soleil), soldiers marching backward, sylphs swimming under water, and replicated silhouettes of Faust and Méphistophélès on their ride to Hell, all framed in tiers of stacked boxes. New technologies connected projections of virtual scenery to the music through microphones and motion sensors. Lepage’s gadgetry made an intriguing, occasionally forceful case for staging a work meant to appeal to the mind’s eye. That said, his visuals eclipsed the protagonists: “All these devices remain external to the drama itself. Like a painting with brilliantly executed background and accessories but blank faces, the production often treats the three principals as supporting players.”
¹⁹

The Gluck and the Berlioz, as well as the company inaugurals of Philip Glass’s
Satyagraha
and John Adams’s
Doctor Atomic
, made good on the old pledge of repertory expansion.
Satyagraha
abstains from conventional narration. The subject is Gandhi’s awakening to nonviolent resistance. The Sanskrit text, drawn from the Bhagavad-Gita, tells the story not of the Mahatma’s political struggle as enacted on the stage, but of his spiritual journey. Director Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch contrived their staggering production from homely materials consonant with Gandhi’s message of love and hope for the downtrodden: newsprint, corrugated metal—and tape. As Anne Midgette describes it: “In the final act, singers crossed the stage with rolls of packing tape, unrolling them at all different heights, until the whole space was filled with dozens of shimmering
bands, vibrating like the music around them; this whole construct was eventually crumpled into a small ball, showing visuals as ephemeral as the passing notes.” Glass’s musical patterns and the cast’s ritualized movements led inexorably to the sublime logic of the final scene: singing a repeated rising phrase, Gandhi stands at the foot of a podium upon which Martin Luther King Jr., facing upstage, preaches in silence. Penny Woolcock set much of
Doctor Atomic
against tiers of portals, a structure reminiscent of the stacked boxes of
La Damnation de Faust,
and the walls of
Peter Grimes
and
Satyagraha
. Led masterfully by Alan Gilbert, the drama of anxiety over the horrific effects of the atom bomb is played out between government officials and researchers at Los Alamos, and privately in the bedroom and soul of the project chief. The silken tone and the barely contained intensity of Gerald Finley’s J. Robert Oppenheimer kept the balance between the lover of poetry and the conflicted scientist.
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