The Lost Season, October-November 2020, Role Debuts: J’Nai Bridges, Russell Thomas, Christine Goerke, Lise Davidsen

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The cancellation of the 2020-2021 season deprived audiences of the conducting debut of Speranza Scappucci. Had the opportunity to conduct La Traviata not fallen to the wayside on account of the virus, she would have added her name to the handful of women who have led the Met orchestra in its nearly 140-year history. The public was also denied the long overdue company premiere of The Fiery Angel. Prokofiev’s opera had been slated to enter the repertoire at long last, in a production directed by Barrie Kosky. (It had been performed under the title The Flaming Angel by the New York City Opera in 1965.)

Four singers were to have made house role debuts in 2020-2021: J’Nai Bridges, Christine Goerke, Russell Thomas, and Lise Davidsen. We hear them in this post in parts they had been scheduled to sung in productions of Carmen, Tristan und Isolde, Il Trovatore, and Fidelio.

Mezzo J’Nai Bridges was the anticipated Carmen. She had made a successful 2019 Met debut as Nefertiti in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, a role she had sung in Los Angeles in 2016. Days before the Kennedy Center went dark, Washington Opera heard her first Dalila. Here, in a clip from her 2019 San Francisco performance in Bizet’s Carmen, Bridges sings the alluring “Habanera.”

Two years after her 1995 debut in a minor role, and following several extended absences from the Met, dramatic soprano Christine Goerke came back in 2013 a star, acclaimed for her Elektra, Brünnhilde, and Turandot. She will be heard as Puccini’s heroine in New York in Fall 2021. Her first Lincoln Center Tristan und Isolde was scheduled for the lost season. This excerpt from Act II, drawn from a 2019 Washington concert with the National Symphony, documents what Met audiences missed. Gianandrea Noseda conducts; the Brangäne is Ekaterina Gubanova.

Dramatic tenor Russell Thomas, who made his 2005 Met debut as the Herald in Don Carlo, has been assigned few major roles in his sporadic engagements with the company, most recently Rodolfo in La Bohème. It was not until 2020 that the Met planned to showcase Thomas as Manrico in Il Trovatore. Here he is in the troubadour’s stirring aria “Di quella pira (From that pyre)” in a 2019 performance from the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Her international reputation well established through major roles on European stages, dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen made her Met debut in 2019 as Lise in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades.  Not surprisingly, she was received enthusiastically by critics and public. She was to have sung Fidelio’s Leonore at the Met in 2020. This excerpt from a 2019 performance at the Royal Opera House increases our anticipation of hearing her in Fidelio in some future season. Davidsen takes on the taxing “Komm Hoffnung (Come Hope)” with command of legato, impeccable passage work, and thrilling high notes. The conductor is Antonio Pappano. She has been contracted for Ariadne auf Naxos, Elektra (as Chrysothemis), and Die Meistersinger for the 2021-2022 seasonat the Met.

Fidelio: Echoes of 1941

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In our Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (University of California Press, 2014), we lean on contemporary reports for this evocation of what is arguably the single most memorable performance of Fidelio in Met history. The star on that occasion, the evening of February 14, 1941, was by all accounts, the conductor, Bruno Walter.

“Walter made his way to a podium that sat high on the raised floor of the pit. Conductor and players were visible throughout the performance. The Leonore Overture No. 3 provoked an outburst that lasted more than a minute; at the opera’s conclusion, the ovation for the cast was punctuated by shouts of ‘Walter.’ European audiences knew him as a conductor of opera as well as symphony; America had known him only in concert, never in the opera house. He first appeared in the United States in 1923 with the New York Symphony Orchestra. He returned frequently as guest from coast to coast. No conductor, with the exception of Arturo Toscanini, had more cachet.

Walter’s Fidelio belongs to that rarified theatrical category in which history, work, composer, and performer come together to inscribe a single narrative. Here was a moment in which the grave issues confronting the nation converged with those engaged by the masterwork. These same issues intersected with the biographies of the lionized artists. Uncompromising, defiant, Beethoven and Walter were conflated in a common profile whose prominent feature was the massive cranium of genius. The deteriorating situation overseas—an all-too-present story of oppression and persecution--reverberated in the ardent libretto and score. As the conductor put it some years later, ‘In the first act of Fidelio . . . we witness the hand of the tyrant. In the second, we observe the victim, bent but unbroken. In the finale, we see the Minister of State, representative of goodness, and share in the glorious apotheosis of brotherhood.’

The media blitz surrounding Walter’s debut imbricated the Fidelio scenario and the exemplary life told and retold in the national press, in newsreels, and on the radio: an illustrious musician of German-Jewish origin, having escaped religious and political persecution by fleeing first Germany, and then Austria, and finally France, takes refuge in the United States, and for the first time in his long career conducts an American performance of a magisterial work by one of nineteenth-century Europe’s titanic composers, a fierce champion of freedom. Fidelio’s place in the Walter mythology was further privileged by the fact that the first work he conducted at the Met was also the last he chose to perform in Munich and then in Berlin. Had Walter not left, like so many who shared his liberal views and/or Jewish heritage, he might have suffered a fate much like that of Florestan, the idealistic hero of Fidelio, imprisoned by order of a tyrant. There the parallel ends. Leonore, Florestan’s loving wife, disguised as the eponymous youth, rescues her husband from the political prison of the villainous Don Pizarro.”

Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad was the Leonore of Bruno Walter’s debut. She first appeared with the company in 1935. Her success was such that the management sought to showcase her Wagnerian voice in as many roles as possible. Fidelio was a logical vehicle for her second season, an uncomfortable choice for general manager Edward Johnson. Less than a year prior to Flagstad’s initial New York appearance, Lotte Lehmann had made her own thrilling Met debut. Lehmann was celebrated for her Leonore. The Austrian soprano was understandably miffed when she was passed over in favor of the newcomer.

We, however, are fortunate to hear them both. And they offer their markedly different temperaments and strengths to Leonore’s great aria “Komm Hoffnung (Come hope)” in which the character, disguised as a male turnkey, manifests her determination to save her husband, a political prisoner, from death. Flagstad’s version, from a 1937 recording, Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, includes the powerful introductory recitative “Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin? (Monster! Where do you go?) addressed to Don Pizarro. The size, richness, and clarity of Flagstad's voice are perhaps unequaled in expressing Leonore's courage.

The Lehmann rendition, from a 1927 recording, unfortunately lacks the recitative. The aria demonstrates the soprano’s irresistible intensity, her exemplary diction, her unforgettable timbre, and her skill at turning her short-breathed vocal technique to expressive advantage.

The Florestan of the 1941 Walter performance was Belgian tenor René Maison, frequently heard at the Met in French opera and as the lighter Wagnerian heroes. His plaintive sound is suited to the anguish of the shackled Florestan, despairing in the outcry of his opening recitative “Gott, welch ein Dunkel hier! (God, what darkness here!),” ecstatic at the vision of his beloved Leonore at the aria’s end (“Ein Engel, Leonoren, Leonoren der Gattin so gleich (An angel, Leonore, my wife so like [a fragrant rose]).”

On April 1, 2017, the Met’s most recent edition of Beethoven’s only opera will be broadcast via radio. 

Jon Vickers (In Memoriam: 1926-2015)

Jon Vickers, a leading Metropolitan tenor for more than twenty-five seasons, died last summer, on July 10. Vickers is remembered for such diverse roles as the comic, stuttering Vasek in The Bartered Bride, the towering Aeneas in Les Troyens, a Samson who toppled the temple as much with the force of his voice as with the restored strength of his arms, Laca in Jenufa, quick to anger, transcendent in forgiveness. Audiences and critics may have carped about Vickers’s tendency to hug the underside of the pitch and to croon at pianissimo. They nonetheless agreed about the power, clarity, and individuality of his timbre, the sensitivity of his phrasing, the force of his personality, and most importantly, the depth of his understanding of the musical and dramatic dimensions of his roles. His Siegmund expressed the fullest measure of passion, his Otello and Canio vented unfathomable rage.

And then there are the two characters that he made singularly his own, his incomparable Florestan and Peter Grimes, roles for which he holds the house records. With Leonie Rysanek, then with Hildegard Behrens, Vickers gave Fidelio a currency in the repertoire that it had never before enjoyed in New York. At the start of Act II, Florestan, imprisoned in a dark dungeon for his opposition to despotic rule, laments his loss of freedom. Suddenly, a vision of his beloved wife fills him with hope. The tenor easily surmounts the difficulties of the aria and makes palpable the character’s despair, then his ecstasy.

In the final scene of Peter Grimes the eponymous hero, cast out by his community, suspected of having been responsible for the death of his two apprentices, tormented by his own demons, delirious, recalls the events that have brought him to the verge of suicide. Accompanied only sporadically by a foghorn and an offstage chorus, it is Vickers, now keening in legato phrases, now issuing brief interjections, who finds a universal message in the confusion and anger of the poor fisherman. 

   

It is Tristan that should have been a third role in the Vickers pantheon. Alas, he sang it only twice with the company. In 1973-74, he was announced for an eight-performance run of Wagner’s opera. When the scheduled soprano bowed out, Vickers first refused to sing with her replacement, changed his mind for the broadcast, and finally appeared opposite the greatest Isolde of her generation, Birgit Nilsson. That single smashing evening told Met audiences how otherwise impoverished were the contemporary Wagnerian ranks. Regrettably, by reason of indisposition  and of the peripatetic life of the opera singer in the 1970s, the voices of Vickers and Nilsson twined only once in the “Liebesnacht” in New York. Here they are in performance from Vienna.

A small number of dramatic tenors have assumed some of the Vickers roles with great distinction and success, notably Plácido Domingo and Jonas Kaufmann. But Florestan and Peter Grimes still belong to him.