The Met in the Time of Pandemic: The Lost Season, June-September 2020, Aïda

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The summer of 2020 began with the disheartening announcement that the Met had cancelled the fall season. The company hoped to reopen on New Year’s Eve, a full seven months away. On September 23, the pandemic raging unabated, the administration had no choice but to cancel the spring 2021 season as well. The theater would be dark for another painful year.

 

Between June 1 and the end of September the Met continued to make news. Tragically, a second musician, assistant conductor Joel Revzen, had succumbed to the virus. His orchestra colleagues, furloughed since the end of March, had had to make major personal adjustments to compensate for the suspension of their $190K average salary. For its part, management anticipated a loss of revenue amounting to $100 million by the end of the year. And, to make matters worse, the Met was ineligible for the government loan program due to the magnitude of its payroll. 

 

The success of the daily streaming of titles from its archive and subsequent donations from thousands of grateful new contributors on lockdown led to the launching of a series of digital concerts at the nominal fee of $20 each. Unlike the earlier free recitals and the gala that were shot as amateur videos (see our post of April 16, 2012, https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7211323416075256950/3307619185363703156), this new series, originating from sites proximate to the artists’ homes, was professionally recorded. The first of the seventy-five-minute performances featured Jonas Kaufmann, the Baroque library of a Bavarian abbey serving as background. He was followed by Renée Fleming, Anna Netrebko, and nine other Met stars in standard arias from the operatic repertoire.

On September 20, one day before the lost season of 2020-2021 had been scheduled to open with Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda, a New York Times headline read, “The Met Opera Fired James Levine Citing Sexual Misconduct.” According to this report, the company, which had dismissed Levine in March 2018, settled with its former music director emeritus for $3.5 million. So ended what the Times called “one of the highest-profile, messiest feuds in the Met’s nearly 140-year history.”  

The night of September 21, 2020 would have have been the twelfth time Aïda opened a Met season. And in terms of titles most often programmed by the Met since its 1883 founding, Aïda ranks second after La Bohème. Verdi’s grandest opera was to have a new staging and a renowned cast: Anna Netrebko, Anita Rachvelishvili, Piotr Beczala, and Ludovic Tézier, conducted by Levine’s successor as music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Here are the selections we have chosen for this post, three magnificent duets, all performed in the 1960s, one of opera’s most fabulous eras.

The first is the Amonasro/Aïda duet. The claims of patriotism, patriarchy, and paternity come together in the Act III confrontation between the Ethiopian king and his daughter. Amonasro evokes their home, accuses Aïda of disloyalty to fatherland and father and, after a struggle, exacts the promise to betray her beloved Radamès, leader of the Egyptian troops. In a commercial recording conducted by Herbert von Karajan, Renata Tebaldi and Cornell MacNeil are brilliant adversaries in this epic conflict between duty and love.

Amneris's great scene is Act IV, Scene 1. She pleads for the life of Radames with the unyielding high priest, Ramfis. The power and timbre of Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr are to the measure of the despairing Egyptian princess. In this commercial recording conducted by Georg Solti, Giorgio Tozzi is Ramfis.

In the opera’s final scene, Radamès has been condemned to death and Aïda joins him in the tomb that closes in on their last moments. In the love duet “O terra addio (Farewell, O Earth)” they look ahead to the Heaven that awaits them and back on the vale of tears they are leaving behind. In this excerpt, drawn from a live performance, both principals float ethereal high pianissimi. Verdi specialist Carlo Bergonzi was a frequent Met Radamès; Aïda is Leyla Gencer whose long international itinerary did not include a stop at the Metropolitan, alas. Their stock gestures, troublesome on video, would not have distracted the audience seated in the vast space of Verona’s Roman arena unduly. At the very end we see and hear mezzo Fiorenza Cossotto as Amneris.

 

Remembering Licia Albanese

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On March 13, 2015, we attended a concert sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera Guild in memory of beloved Met soprano Licia Albanese (born 1909) and star Met tenor Carlo Bergonzi (born 1924). Both artists died in 2014. We devote the next post to Bergonzi.

This post is devoted to Licia Albanese. The year was 1939. Italian opera singers had been barred by the Mussolini regime from travelling to the United States. A flurry of telegrams housed in the Metropolitan archives documents the negotiations among the Metropolitan, the State Department, the Italian Embassy in Washington, and the responsible Italian government agency. On September 28, a cable from the Federazione Fascista Lavoratori Spettacolo (Fascist Federation of Theater Workers) informed the Met that three singers scheduled to make their Metropolitan debuts that year, and six who had been reengaged, would not be honoring their contracts, among them Maria Caniglia, Mafalda Favero, and Carlo Tagliabue, who had already made successful debuts, and the much awaited Ebe Stignani. The most damaging cancellation was that of Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, whose return after six seasons had been eagerly anticipated. As the Times (Oct. 7, 1939) explained it, several of the singers forbidden to travel were committed to Italian theatres following their tour at the Met; there was concern that increasing international tensions might delay their timely reentry. Of more diplomatic consequence was the eventuality that Italian artists caught in the United States would be marooned on enemy shores should America enter the war. There was nevertheless a good deal of back and forth on the matter over the course of many months. The Italian authorities were sensitive to the propaganda value of italianità at the Metropolitan and were, therefore, reluctant to offend the management; they were also loath to forego the hard currency their nationals would deposit in Italian banks. The Met applied what pressure it could, both at home and in Italy, through numerous intermediaries. One such go-between, the retired soprano Lucrezia Bori, long a U.S. resident and great friend of the company, was asked by Edward Johnson, the Met general manager, to communicate the Metropolitan’s position to the Italian ambassador in Washington: if the nine contracted singers did not come, the management would have no recourse but to redraw the season’s repertoire, with serious consequences for the company and for Italian opera itself. On the other hand, should Johnson receive assurances that the restrictions imposed in 1939-40 would be lifted for 1940-41, he would be favorable to scheduling a greater number of operas by Italian composers than had originally been planned. In May 1940, Johnson received the guarantees he sought from the consul general. In the end, none of the nine came in 1939-40. Only Licia Albanese, who was not one of the nine, was allowed to come.

 

And that was how--a result of an international flap, and something of a fluke—Albanese’s twenty-seven-season-long Met career began. In February 1940, she made a smashing debut as Cio-Cio San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. She soon became one of New York’s most popular lyric stars. She would spend the war years in the United States, marry Joseph Gimma, an Italian-American lawyer, and become an American citizen.  Her last Met appearance was as one of fifty-seven artists who sang in the farewell to the old Met in 1966. Her “Un bel di’” brought down the house.  To shouts of “Save the Met” from the many in the audience who opposed, as she did, the plan to demolish the 39^th Street theatre, she kissed her hand and bent to touch the stage floor with her fingers. And in the decades that followed, on many, many opening nights at Lincoln Center her voice would ring over the sound of the audience on its feet for the “Star-Spangled banner” as she nailed the high note of “the land of the FREE.”

Albanese followed in the wake of Lucrezia Bori (mentioned above), the company’s reigning lyric soprano in the 1920s through the mid-1930s, and was contemporary with the lyric-coloratura, Bidú Sayão. All three had bright, tangy voices, not voluminous, but with sufficient focus to carry in the large auditorium, to make every word count. We offer below audio clips of each diva, Bori, Sayão, and Albanese, in, “Addio del passato” from Verdi’s La Traviata so that you can make the comparison for yourselves. The dying Violetta, after reading a letter promising the return of her lover, despairs that she will live long enough to see him.

Violetta was one of Bori’s favored roles. This acoustic recording captures the delicacy of her art, her attention to detail. Of particular effect is the phrase “l’amore d’Alfredo perfino mi manca (I have been deprived even of Alfredo’s love)” where the precise calibration of her instrument accommodates the compelling expansion of the line.

Lucky Met operagoers heard Sayão’s Violetta twenty-three times from 1937 to 1949. Sayão infuses the “legato” written into the score with subtle stresses on key syllables. Notice, for instance, the word “mai” in the first phrase, the elongation of the first word in “l’anima stanca,” the various weights with which she utters the repeated “tutto” at the end. She maintains the tonal purity of the line while giving full value to the text.

Albanese performed Violetta a record eighty-eight times with the Met. Her affinity for the role was well recognized when Arturo Toscanini chose her for the 1946 concert rendition of the opera with his orchestra, the NBC Symphony. The transcription of the broadcast was a best-seller in the early lp era. With the imprimatur of Toscanini, Albanese’s performance became the Violetta of choice for a generation of listeners. Here, in the dress rehearsal of the broadcast (you can hear Toscanini’s raspy singing in the background), is the opening of the final act, through the aria.  In an aural image of the vivid physical gestures that were her trademark, Albanese follows the feverish pace of the conductor, audibly snatching breath at the end of phrases, not out of necessity, but in order to convey the physical distress of the tubercular heroine.

 

The Met has seen Violettas with creamier or more prodigious voices, but probably none more moving than Bori, Sayão, or Albanese.

Macbeth at the Met

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It was general manager Rudolf Bing who, in January 1959, first brought Giuseppe Verdi’s opera to the Metropolitan. He had launched his stewardship eight seasons earlier with the Met premiere of the composer’s Don Carlo.

The Macbeth production promised to be the hit of the season, a starry affair, a spectacular vehicle for Leonard Warren and Maria Callas. Callas had sung at the Met in the previous two seasons to great acclaim. In November of what would have been the third, Bing fired her in as public a manner as he could contrive. She had committed herself to alternating Lady Macbeth with Violetta and, for the first time, to the national tour. But the diva changed her mind, presenting the excuse that toggling between the heavier and the lighter Verdi roles, even with a week’s rest in between, would invite vocal strain. Bing suggested she replace Violetta with Tosca or Lucia, upon which Callas retorted: “My voice is not an elevator, going up and down.” When she failed to comply with her agreement by the deadline Bing set, he sacked her for breach of contract, to the outrage of the press and the public.

That was not all. Shakespeare’s unlucky “Scottish play” lived up to its reputation when in January 1959, the very month Macbeth was to open, the conductor, Dimitri Mitropoulos, suffered a heart attack. Leonie Rysanek, in her Met debut, took over for Callas, Erich Leinsdorf for Mitropoulos. As the Viennese soprano made her entrance, there came from the audience the shout of “Brava Callas.” Bing later confessed that it was he who had arranged for the offensive outburst; he had wanted to win sympathy for his substitute. Despite uncertain lower and middle registers, and a frequently ill-tuned though resplendent top, the charismatic Rysanek notched a great success. Warren and Carlo Bergonzi (in the essentially one-aria role of Macduff) acknowledged the belcantist traces of Verdi’s score. This was the third Macbeth with which Bing was intimately involved, all three directed by Carl Ebert and designed by Caspar Neher. But by 1959, their expressionistic concept had had its day. 

The Met’s next Macbeth came in 1982 and set off one of the most boisterous receptions in memory. Peter Hall and John Bury had had the ingenious notion of returning Macbeth to the theatre practice of Verdi’s youth, with flying witches and a giant cauldron from which emerged a nearly nude Hecate and effigies of the apparitions. James Levine conducted Verdi’s complete 1865 Paris revision of his 1847 score; it included a ballet danced by sylphs in tutus as Macbeth lay dying. The public saw it as Gothic gone amok; it responded with laughter, boos, and a few altercations. During the third and last revival of the Hall/Bury show, the Macbeth curse struck again. On January 23, 1988, the Saturday matinée was suspended at the second-act intermission by the suicide of Bantcho Bantchevsky, an eighty-two-year-old Bulgarian singing coach and Met habitué, who jumped eighty feet to his death from the family circle. 

The current blood-splattered, black and white production of Macbeth dates back to 2007, Peter Gelb’s second year. It will be seen “Live in HD” on Saturday, October 11. Adrian Noble’s provocative updating to the 20^th century eschews both the picturesque rendering of Scotland and the literal enactment of the scenario: the witches sport the pocketbooks and bobby socks of 1950s bag ladies, Macduff sings from a Jeep, Lady Macbeth teeters on a row of chairs in the “Sleepwalking” scene. The Met’s luxury casting for the 2014 revival has had rapturous reviews: Zeljko Lucic in the title role, Anna Netrebko as Lady Macbeth, René Pape as Banquo, and Joseph Calleja as Macduff.

The clips that follow feature four sopranos in two of Lady Macbeth’s arias, and a baritone in Macbeth’s death scene: Anna Netrebko and Shirley Verrett, Maria Callas and Martha Mödl, Leonard Warren.

Here Netrebko sings Lady Macbeth’s entrance aria, recorded in the 2012 concert that inaugurated St. Petersburg’s new Mariinsky Theatre. While she conveys ferocity with dramatic coloratura, abrupt descents to the lower register, incisive attacks on high, and a powerful, dark sound, Netrebko's character remains generalized. This is early in the transformation of the erstwhile belcanto soubrette of L’Elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale into the heavy-duty dramatic soprano she is becoming. (Netrebko will open the Met's 2017-18 season in a new production of Norma.) Viewers of this Saturday's simulcast will be able to contrast the two versions for themselves, as they will be able to contrast Netrebko’s representation of Verdi’s monstrous heroine with Shirley Verrett’s iconic interpretation in the subsequent clip.

 

In 1988, near the end of her more than two-decade career with the company, Verrett sang her sole Met Lady Macbeth. By that time, she had seesawed between mezzo-soprano and soprano roles, with the result that register breaks had become all too pronounced. Seen here in 1978, in Giorgio Strehler’s remarkable La Scala production of Verdi’s opera, she is at the peak of her powers, her scale even, and as always, her presence and her intensity fully deployed. Masterfully conducted by Claudio Abbado, Verrett brings the full force of her concentration to this portrait of untrammeled ambition. The clip ends with the two-minute-long ovation she received from the Milan public.

 

With her abrupt exit in 1959, the Met lost the chance to hear the Callas version of the role. The recording of the “Sleepwalking” scene released that very year is evidence that she would have registered a triumph in New York. Callas’s temperament and musical imagination were made for Lady Macbeth. The horrific murder of King Duncan and the overwhelming guilt that followed are vivid in the soprano’s timbre, by turns veiled, as in a trance, and exposed in naked pain. Please note: the orchestral introduction to the "Sleepwalking" scene lasts approximately three minutes.

In Martha Mödl’s 1952 German-language recording of the “Sleepwalking” scene, Verdi’s phrases are altered by the preponderance of final consonants. If neither the singer’s sound nor highly expressionistic approach can be called Italianate, her voice approximates the composer’s specifications--“una voce aspra ... vorrei che la voce di Lady Macbeth fosse qualcosa di diabolico! [a bitter voice ... I would like Lady Macbeth's voice to have something of the diabolic].” Many have found her reading mesmerizing, beautiful in its own terms. Mödl, who never sang Italian opera in her brief Met career, was, like Verrett, a mezzo who, for a time, took on soprano roles, mostly in Wagner. Here she is caught at her best, before the cost of dramatic utterance, often at the highest emotional pitch in the top register, caught up with her. Mödl eventually returned to the mezzo realm and sang character roles brilliantly well into the 1980s.

In opposition to Lady Macbeth’s noctambulist bravura, Macbeth’s final aria, “Pietà, rispetto, amore [Pity, respect, love],” reflects a calm acceptance that his misdeeds have deprived him of respect and that no kind words will be engraved on his tombstone. Leonard Warren, the Met’s first Thane of Cawdor, evinces the dynamic range and the perfectly calibrated legato that place him in the very top rank of 20th-century Verdi baritones.

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