The Met in the Time of Pandemic: The unfinished Season, May 2020, Maria Stuarda, Kát’a Kabanová

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access moving images and sound.

 

COVID-19 continued to rampage through New York in May 2020. On May 1, the closure of public schools was extended to the end of the academic year; two weeks later, the Governor ordered the continuation of the state of emergency, the lock-down of all but essential services, and strict limitations on gatherings until the middle of June. By the end of the month, the virus had claimed 100,000 lives in the U.S. alone.

 

The Met orchestra and chorus, along with its stagehands, had gone without pay since the end of March. On May 5, the General Manager announced the furlough of forty-one members of the administrative staff, a measure the company had earlier thought it could avoid. And some full-time employees were reduced to part-time status. There were shards of good news in the midst of so much uncertainty and foreboding. On May 7, the Met announced that 15,000 new subscribers had signed on to its on-demand video service; emergency fund-raising was going well, thanks in part to 10,000 new donors. Nonetheless, the losses were staggering.

 

In May, too, the Met mourned the passing of two stars of a previous generation, Rosalind Elias and Gabriel Bacquier. We will have profiles of these artists and clips of their performances in most favored roles in our next post.

And May saw also the last gasp of the unfinished 2019-2020 season with the cancellation of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, scheduled to run through May 9, and Leoš Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová, scheduled to open on May 6. The two works shared this thwarted aspiration: to secure a predictable spot in the company’s repertoire.

Maria Stuarda

In its 2012 Met premiere and its 2016 revival, Maria Stuarda had shown itself to be a congenial vehicle first for Joyce DiDonato and then for Sandra Radvanovsky who took on Donizetti’s two other Tudor queens, Elisabeth in Roberto Devereux and Anne in Anna Bolena the same season. (See our post of Feb. 4, 2016, https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7211323416075256950/77602516158896126) Diana Damrau was to be Maria Stuarda in 2020.

 

In this ensemble scene from a 1982 English-language performance at London’s English National Opera, Mary is sung by Janet Baker, Elizabeth by Rosalind Plowright, The Queen of Scots, prisoner of the Queen of England, is outraged at her cousin’s imperious contempt. In the presence of a chorus )of horrified principals and anguished courtiers, Mary hurls insults at Elizabeth—and seals her fate. (Our post of Feb. 4, 2016 includes a clip of Janet Baker in another excerpt from Maria Stuarda.)

 

In Act III, Donizetti’s tragic queen faces execution on the block. The Maria here is Mariella Devia in a 2008 La Scala performance. Her intermittent Met career spanned fifteen seasons. In the clip that follows, at the age of sixty, her technique astonishing, her voice warm and still fresh, Devia demonstrates her peerless command of bel canto style. (Our post of Feb. 4, 2016 includes a clip of Mariella Devia in another excerpt from Maria Stuarda.)

Kát’a Kabanová

Susanna Phillips, slated for the 2020 revival, would have been the Met’s fourth Kát’a Kabanová. With its first Met staging in 1991, the opera introduced Czech to the company’s roster of languages. The beleaguered heroine, tormented by her provincial existence and by guilt over her adulterous desire, was Gabriela Beňačková, whose success in Janáček’s works eased their way into the world’s theatres. The composer’s late masterpiece is difficult to excerpt. See below the link to a 1979 New York concert performance that, despite inferior sonics, captures Beňačková’s soaring soprano and deeply-felt attachment to the title role. 

Kát’a Kabanová concert performance 1979

We will have to await future reprises of Maria Stuarda and Kát’a Kabanová to know whether either title has succeeded in drawing a wider public to its cause.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Met in the Time of Pandemic: The Unfinished Season, April 2020, Simon Boccanegra

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access moving images and sound.

We follow our previous post on the Metropolitan’s unfinished 2019-2020 season (https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7211323416075256950/7161019381826796963) with a backward glance at the month of April 2020. This was the month, now a full year ago, in which Governor Andrew Cuomo extended the New York State stay-at-home order and the public-school and public-space closure edict, including theatres of course, through the middle of May. That April, the State suffered more COVID-19 infections than any country, the U.S. aside. The Governor mandated that masks be worn in public and that New York City subway service be suspended between 1:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. It was clear from the start that the economic fall-out from the lock-down would be drastic. The arts industry alone was projected to lose tens of billions of dollars in revenue. As a point of reference, year after year, attendance at Broadway’s 41 theatres outpaced that of all of the city’s professional sports teams combined. 

The performing arts on both sides of the Atlantic responded with extraordinary urgency to the human, artistic, and financial catastrophe. By the middle of March opera companies had developed plans to stream performances without cost. The Met opened its archive of television and Live in HD transmissions for daily broadcast. The collections of the Vienna State Opera and the Paris Opera, to name just two, were made similarly available.  

The most elaborate of all Met initiatives was the four-hour-long gala concert streamed live on the company website beginning at 1:00 p.m. on April 25. The total number of views including replays was expected to reach one million by midnight. Forty Met stars, almost all recorded at home, participated in the program--Peter Mattei from Sweden, Piotr Beczala from Poland, René Pape from Germany, Roberto Alagna from France, Renée Fleming from Virginia, Matthew Polenzani from New York and the rest scattered far and wide. Some went ahead and accompanied themselves on the piano. The most unusual and moving accompaniment was that arranged for Joyce DiDonato in Handel’s “Ombra mai fu.” Each member of the Met’s viola section had recorded his or her part separately in tribute to Vincent Lionti, a Met violist who had succumbed to COVID just three weeks earlier. And Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted the orchestra and chorus, again recorded individually, in an uplifting rendition of Verdi’s “Va, pensiero.”

The Met’s April 20, 2020 revival of the 1995 production of Simon Boccanegra was, of course, not to be. The opera had been on the boards at 39^th Street and at Lincoln Center since its company premiere in 1932. With its complex scenario and dark musical texture, Boccanegra is less approachable than the familiar Verdi titles that are staples of the world’s opera houses. A favorite of critics and operaphiles, it remains anchored on the fringe of the core repertoire. Audiences in 2020 had anticipated the return of Spanish baritone Carlos Álvarez as Boccanegra, Ailyn Pérez, one of the company’s leading lyric sopranos, as his daughter Amelia, and spinto tenor Joseph Calleja as her lover, Gabriele.

The 1857 Venice premiere of the opera had been a failure. Verdi himself thought it too sad, too gloomy, and weighted down by a preponderance of low male voices. He revised the opera twenty-five years later with the help of librettist Arrigo Boito, the composer’s soon-to-be collaborator on his final masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff. The maturity Verdi had developed in the interim, palpable in Don Carlo, Aïda and other scores, infuses the work with uncommon gravitas. The revised version was a success at La Scala in 1881.

Paternal love and political intrigue are the dominant themes of Simon Boccanegra. Early in the opera’s prologue, the patrician Fiesco, grief-stricken by his daughter’s recent death, expresses the depth of his sorrow in the bass aria “Il Lacerato spirito (The wounded spirit).” We hear Ezio Pinza, the Met’s first Fiesco, as he sets a very high standard for his successors in the role.

Fiesco’s daughter and her lover, Simon Boccanegra, then a young corsair, had had a child. Twenty-five years later, in Act I, Simon, now the benevolent Doge of Genoa, quells a rebellion that erupts in the Council Chamber and inveighs for peace between his city and Venice. His heartfelt plea dominates the ensemble that includes the voices of Fiesco, Amelia (revealed to be Simon’s daughter), and the other principals. This excerpt features Lawrence Tibbett whose Simon was the lynchpin of the Met’s original triumphant production.

The Council Chamber Scene, added in the Verdi/Boito revision, is one of the most memorable pages in the composer’s canon and is undoubtedly responsible for the opera’s claim to lyric stages everywhere.