Romeo and Juliet X3

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To begin, a word about Roméo et Juliette’s long history at the Metropolitan. Charles Gounod’s opera was first produced in Italian during the company’s inaugural season, 1883-1884. It was not sung in French until opening night 1891, when French itself was at last heard at the Met. The currency of Roméo et Juliette, and the composer’s even more popular Faust, can be measured by the near monopoly these titles enjoyed as opening night fare during the “Gilded Age.” In fact, one or the other opened the season all but once between 1891 and 1900. A witty wag dubbed the Met the ”Faustspielhaus.” During the thirty-year period beginning in 1938 Roméo et Juliette was given in only two seasons. It reentered the core repertoire in 1967 and has been frequently revived ever since.

New this season, Bartlett Sher’s staging of Roméo et Juliette counts as one of the Metropolitan’s few successful recent productions. Those who were fortunate to be in the audience at the Lincoln Center house or at a “Live in HD” screening witnessed a performance faithful to the narrative as presented in the libretto, movingly sung and acted by the principals, Vittorio Grigolo and Diana Damrau, and beautifully conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Michael Yeargen’s unit set, a nod to Elizabethan stage practice, favored the fluid unfolding of the action. It served the youthful exuberance of the doomed couple particularly well.

Shakespeare’s play (circa 1595) has been adapted to legitimate, musical, and dance stages endless times. At least eight operas (the most famous by Bellini, Zandonai, and Gounod) are based on the story of the “star-cross’d lovers.” We offer below three versions of the tragic scene in which Romeo and then Juliet take their own lives. We begin with Shakespeare’s text, continue with a ballet danced to Sergei Prokofiev’s score (1935), and conclude with Gounod’s final scene (1867).

The traditional staging, décor, and costumes of the 1976 telefilm starring Christopher Neame and Ann Hasson adhere faithfully to Shakespeare’s scenario and text. Preceded by Romeo’s duel with Paris, Juliet’s betrothed, then interrupted by Friar Laurence, whose herbal brew produced Juliet’s simulated death, and followed by a guard who alludes to the heavy toll Verona has paid for the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, the final private minutes of the lovers are embedded in the social context of the narrative.
  

Kenneth Macmillan’s choreography (1965) was first performed by the world’s then most celebrated ballet team, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, both extraordinary actors. The hyper-expressive physical conventions of ballet that so fittingly capture extreme emotions are unabashedly present when Romeo “dances” with Juliet whose inert body he mistakes for dead. Magically rendered by Fonteyn is Juliet’s evolving consciousness that it is Romeo who has died, and her evolving determination to take her own life.

The Met’s new production of Roméo et Juliette, to which we return, originated at the Salzburg Festival in 2008 where the principal roles were taken by Rolando Villazon and Nino Machaidze. The vocal crisis that would have such a devastating impact on Villazon’s career obliged the lowering of several of the role’s high notes. It did nothing however to inhibit the passionate energy and generous outpouring that marked him as one of the most exciting tenors of his generation. By allowing Roméo and Juliette an uninterrupted final duet in which they sing their short-lived joy at being reunited, then their despair as death overtakes them, Gounod allows the couple a privacy that excludes family and society. The only available clip, from Austrian television, has German subtitles.

Post-script: In 1947, the Met cast Roméo and Juliette with ideal interpreters, Jussi Björling and Bidu Sayão, but only twice. Fortunately, one of the performances was broadcast. We urge you to search for excerpts from this Saturday matinee on Youtube.

The Met’s 2009 Les Contes d’Hoffmann: Versions .1, .2, .3

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The production of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann that the “Live in HD” audience will see on January 31, 2015 dates back to December 2009. It was, in fact, one of several high-concept rereadings unveiled between the winters of 2009 and 2010. Together with the others, Verdi’s Attila and La Traviata, Hoffmann fueled the debate around stagings that has raged since Peter Gelb took over the company in 2006. 

The director of the 2009 production was Broadway’s Bartlett Sher; it was designed by Michael Yeargan.  The concept, as Sher explained it, was that E. T. A. Hoffmann, the author of the three short stories on which the libretto is based, and an analog for Franz Kafka, was, like the Prague-born, German-speaking  novelist and the Cologne-born, French-speaking composer, a Jew, an outsider. For the most part, the concept failed to emerge with purpose from a flood of disordered detail. To the derby hats of 1920s Mittel-Europa, for example, Sher added Federico Fellini grotesques, clowns, and prostitutes. What the interpretation did allow, as Variety put it, was “a clever staging of the prologue’s Kleinzach number, in which chorus boys turn the tavern’s tablecloths into prayer shawls. It’s a gesture Hoffmann repeats at opera’s end when he returns alone and lonely to his typewriter to crank out more poetry. Otherwise, Sher doesn’t get much mileage out of the concept.” The director conceded that his vision had not come together as he had hoped, that he had not had “enough time to . . . get [it] right.”  He had been under pressure from an administration strapped for money and time. 

The 2009 reception of Les Contes d’Hoffmann was further compromised by principals who, for one reason or another, walked back their commitments. Anna Netrebko, who was to play all four of the poet’s loves, Olympia, Giulietta, Antonia, and Stella (a non-singing role), sang only Antonia. (We should add that few sopranos in the Met’s long history have taken on all four parts, most notably Joan Sutherland.) René Pape decided to forego the opera’s four villains altogether. The Hoffmann was to be Rolando Villazón; he suffered a vocal crisis and was replaced by the affecting Joseph Calleja.

But for the cast changes, what follows is an approximation of what the first night audiences would have heard.

In the opera’s prologue, Hoffmann, disillusioned and dissolute, muses about his love life as he entertains his drinking buddies with the tale of a pathetic court jester, the dwarf Kleinzach. In this 2011 Munich performance, the irrepressible Villazón is back in astonishing form after vocal cord surgery.

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The most familiar music of Les Contes d’Hoffmann is heard at the start of the Venitian act. The courtesan Giulietta and Hoffmann’s friend Nicklausse (a trouser role) sing the sinuous melody of a barcarolle. Netrebko, who dropped the low-lying role of Giulietta at the Met, here joins with mezzo Elina Garanca in a smoothly executed recording of the duet.

  

The devilish Dappertutto addresses the diamond through whose glitter he will enlist Giulietta in his evil plot to steal Hoffmann’s reflection. In a key lower than that of the usual baritone register, Pape rolls out his velvety bass and even manages the several high notes without undue stress.

Sher’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann made its first return in 2010. Notices were more positive: “What a difference a season makes. . . . The tales were told with greater success; the staging maneuvers seemed better focused. More important, most of the new singers were good, and one [Giuseppe Filianoti, the Hoffmann] was spectacular.” (Martin Bernheimer, Financial Times) 

In the 2015 edition, the title role goes to one of the Met’s recent stars, Vittorio Grigolo; the four villains will be played by Thomas Hampson, and the loves of Hoffmann by Erin Morley, Christine Rice, and Hibla Gerzmava. Whether the “high-concept staging” comes through with yet more conviction--and is therefore more convincing--remains to be seen.