The Lost Season, April-May 2021: Il Pirata

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In the final two months of the lost season, April and May 2021, audiences were deprived of the company premiere of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking starring Joyce DiDonato, Susan Graham, Etienne Dupuis, and Latonia Moore, and three important revivals: Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten with Nina Stemme, Elza van den Heever, Michael Volle, and Klaus Florian Vogt; Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd with Matthew Polenzani and Joshua Hopkins; and Vincenzo Bellini’s Il Pirata, with Diana Damrau, Javier Camarena, and Christopher Maltman. For the present post we have chosen to focus on Bellini’s opera, not heard at the Met since 2002-2003.

Il Pirata had its highly successful world premiere at Milan’s La Scala in 1827, launching Bellini’s career as a major composer for the lyric stage. Neglected in the early 20^th century, Il Pirata found a champion in Maria Callas who first sang Imogene at La Scala in 1958, then in a New York concert performance in 1959, now available on CD. Imogene became a congenial role for sopranos, notable among these Montserrat Caballé and Renée Fleming, with the range and the bel canto technique to meet its virtuosic demands. The Met’s first Pirata was mounted for Fleming in 2002; Marcello Giordani was Gualtiero, the pirate, and Dwayne Croft, the husband. Had Covid not intervened, the 2021 revival would have featured Diana Damrau, Javier Camarena, and Christopher Maltman.

We learn from the back story that, years before, Gualtiero and Imogene had been in love. Against her will, Imogene had been forced to marry Ernesto, Duke of Caldora. Thereupon, Gualtiero, the Duke’s rival, took to piracy. The opera reunites the three protagonists, the distraught wife, the jealous husband, the disconsolate lover.

We have chosen two excerpts that feature Maria Callas. The first is drawn from the Act II duet, “Tu mi apristi in cor ferita (You opened my wounded heart).” The furious Ernesto exacts from his wife the confession that she had, indeed, loved Gualtiero who, at this point, was falsely reported drowned. At the same time, Imogene rejects the accusation that she had been unfaithful to her husband. Constantino Ego is the baritone in this live 1959 Carnegie Hall performance.

Imogene’s mad scene is the opera’s conclusion. Delirious, she has a vision of her husband, now dead, together with their son. She is shocked by a fanfare announcing Gualtiero’s death sentence. Her frenzy grows as she imagines the scaffold being readied for his hanging. This excerpt is drawn from a 1959 concert in Hamburg. We are privileged to hear Callas’s masterful fusion of Imogene’s state of mind with Bellini’s elegant phrases while we see her face and hands convey the depth of the character’s anguish.

Post script: During the florid cabaletta of the final scene Imogene repeats the phrase “Il palco funesto (the fatal scaffold).” The word “palco” has a very different meaning in the context of the theater where it signifies a box. At the 1958 La Scala revival of Il Pirata, Callas, who was feuding with Antonio Ghiringhelli, the company’s intendant, pointed at Ghiringhelli’s box as she hurled the words “palco funesto” in his direction.

 

 

 

 

 

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

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Rosina, High and Low

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Gioacchino Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, presented in New York in 1825, was the first opera in Italian to be heard in the city, just nine years after its Rome world premiere. That November night at the Park Theatre on Park Row the audience included Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist of Le Nozze di Figaro, among other Mozart operas. Le Nozze was seen this season in the Met’s “Live in HD” series and was the subject of a recent OperaPost. Il Barbiere di Siviglia will be simulcast on November 22. Both operas are based on comedies by the 18^th-century French playwright Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Il Barbiere has rarely been absent from the Met since its very first season, 1883-84, Le Nozze since 1939-40.

We focus here on Rosina, the lead female character of Il Barbiere, and a rare example of a role in the core repertoire that has been attributed to either the high or low voice. Rossini wrote Rosina for Geltrude Righetti, the contralto who also created Angelina in his La Cenerentola. But despite the composer’s intentions, throughout the 19^th century and much of the 20^th the part has been held hostage by sopranos who have had few qualms about raising the key of some passages, singing the higher octave of others, and interpolating high notes where none were indicated. In 2006-07, for example, coloratura soprano Diana Damrau was the season’s first Rosina; mezzo Joyce DiDonato took over later and can be seen in the video of the simulcast. Here they are in the familiar “Una voce poco fà,” They are both terrific.

Whether performed by high soprano or mezzo soprano, Rosina is a showcase for prodigious dexterity. The opera’s scenario incudes a singing lesson for which Rossini provided an aria, “Contro un cor.” It became common practice, however, for sopranos to depart from the score and substitute pieces that better showed off their virtuosity. In 1883, the “Letter Scene” simply stole the show. One reviewer of the Met’s first performance gave his notice over to Marcella Sembrich’s mini-concert during which the Rosina selected the difficult Proch variations and two German songs, all of which post-date the character’s playlist. In the course of her sixty-four subsequent Met Rosinas, a record still unbroken, Sembrich sometimes sang Bellini, sometimes Chopin or Johann Strauss. In the 1920s, Amelita Galli-Curci picked a bel canto aria, not necessarily by Rossini, and followed it religiously with “Home Sweet Home,” the latter chosen to privilege the singer’s legendary legato and creamy timbre. This is Galli-Curci’s 1927 recording of the old standard.

The Met’s first experiment with a mezzo Rosina, a single performance by Jennie Tourel in 1945, left reviewers cold. In the new production of February 1954, the audience at last heard Rossini’s own aria in the “Lesson Scene,” but it was sung by coloratura Roberta Peters. Two months later Rosina was restored to her earthier, mezzo self. The rapturously received Victoria de los Angeles made an irrefutable case for the lower voice. And mezzos Teresa Berganza and Marilyn Horne ultimately ended the hegemony of the high coloratura. Since then, mezzos have taken the advantage, two to one. This Saturday’s Rosina will be mezzo Isabel Leonard. 

In point of fact, male roles dominate Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Nonetheless, the jocular baritone, the dulcet-toned tenorino, the scene-stealing basso buffo and basso profondo have often played second banana, served up with great gobs of shaving soap, to Rosina, high or low.  The production that will be heard and seen this Saturday was new in 2006-07. Wittily staged by Bartlett Sher, its cast formed a remarkable ensemble for which bel canto embellishment was a sign of joy rather than an excuse for vocal calisthenics. The other role that requires extensive embellishment is that of Count Almaviva. His “Cessa di più resistere,” restored at the Met only in recent decades, is a long aria that tests the display of fioritura and the legato of cantilena and crowns the comic climax. Here is how this coming Saturday’s Almaviva, Lawrence Brownlee, sang it in concert in 2005.