The Met: Looking Back in a Time of Pandemic

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It has been some months since Operapost published its last entry. We take up our blog again, glad to be joining the individuals and organizations that are bringing more and more music into our isolation. Their number and reach tell us how very crucial music is at this moment and how critical the diffusion of music of all genres has become.

Over the years, our posts have centered largely on the history of New York’s dominant opera company, the Metropolitan. The Covid-19 pandemic that has attacked New York so cruelly, draws us once again to the Met’s past, particularly as we contemplate its future. In this installment, we look to three critical periods of the company’s history: that of the 1918 Spanish flu, of the Great Depression, and of the 1969 stand-off between management and labor that shut the theater for months. How the company fared during and after these crises may help us to anticipate how the Met will survive the current humanitarian and economic catastrophe.

Although New York was hit less hard than nearby Boston and Philadelphia during the three waves of the Spanish flu it endured between September 1918 and February 1919, the city suffered a terrible blow.  Thirty thousand New Yorkers of a total population of 5,600,000 died. Theaters and other entertainments, including the Metropolitan Opera, remained open for the entire 1918-1919 season--albeit under stricter regulation and inspection by the Department of Health. And despite its full  performance schedule, in the ten years that separate 1911 from 1921, the 1918-1919 season saw the deepest dip in gross box-office receipts.

More telling than the comparison between the Spanish flu and Covid-19 on the operations of the company is the comparison of the effects of the strike of 1969 with the current closure. (See our three posts on labor-management conflict at the Met, Ars et Labor: 1. The Met, 1906-1966, Ars et Labor: 2. The Met, 1969, Ars et Labor: 3. The Met, 1980). Under General Manager Rudolf Bing, the Met shut its doors for three months, from September to December. When the company finally opened the delayed season, the average percentage of filled seats fell from 96% to 89%. A significant number of patrons failed to renew their subscriptions. Eleven years later, in 1980, when yet another contract dispute threatened the season, subscriptions still lagged behind the 1969 tally by 16%. We should note that as recently as the 2016-17 season the capacity at the Met was 67% and the strength of its financial profile is not nearly what it was in the late 1960s.

The current predictions of depression-level unemployment in the coming months suggest that even a fleeting  glance at the effects of the Great Depression on the Met may be instructive. The company stayed afloat, unlike the Chicago Civic Opera forced to go under by its balance sheet. The fragile equilibrium that obtained through 1929–30 was undone by the more than 10% decline in subscriptions in 1930–31 and another 10% the next year.  Principal singers, with very few exceptions, agreed to reductions in contracts and fees. Ticket prices were lowered; the lost revenue was offset by a major reorganization. As 1932–33 began to take shape, and more than one-tenth of the city’s population was on public or private assistance, the season was shortened from twenty-four to sixteen weeks, and subscription costs were halved and individual ticket prices reduced in order to generate more robust sales. But the drastically reduced prices did little to spur subscriptions. The company took to the radio in a “Save the Met” campaign. Within two months the $300,000 goal was achieved. An astonishing one-third of the total was contributed by radio listeners. (We will devote our next post to the story of the Saturday afternoon broadcasts.)

The Met was, in no small part, “saved” also by the box-office draw of a late-1930s contingent of superlative Wagnerians. (See our  three posts, Wagner's Last Golden Age at the Met: I, The Dramatic Soprano, Wagner's Last Golden Age at the Met: II, The Heroic Tenor, Wagner's Last Golden Age at the Met: III, Other Voices) on this remarkable moment of Met performance history.) The stars of this cohort were the Norwegian dramatic soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the Danish heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. The Flagstad-Melchior team guaranteed a full house in the seven seasons they sang together in New York—a stunning average of nearly thirty performances per season. We hear them at their peak in this 1939 studio recording of the duet that marks the triumphant finale of the prologue to Götterdämmerung. As the lovers declare their transcendent passion, Brünnhilde urges Siegfried on to new heights of heroism. Like the audiences of the Great Depression, we too are lifted out of our gloom by the boundless exuberance of these voices.

 

Wagner's Last Golden Age at the Met: III, Other Voices

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In the first of three linked posts (http://operapost.blogspot.com/2019/03/wagners-last-golden-age-at-met-i.html) we undertook a fleeting review of the dramatic soprano during the fourth and last Wagnerian Golden Age at the Metropolitan Opera. The second post (Wagner's Last Golden Age at the Met: II, The Heroic Tenor) was devoted to the Heldentenor, and specifically to Lauritz Melchior. In the third and last post of the series we turn our attention to other voices that drew clamoring audiences to 39^th Street and Broadway during the brilliant Wagnerian decade of the 1930s--the Jugendlich dramatischer (literally the young dramatic soprano), the dramatic mezzo, and the Heldenbariton (the heroic baritone).

The Jugendlich dramatischer is endowed with a lyric instrument suited to the gentler vocal demands placed on Elsa, Elisabeth, and Eva, the heroines of Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, and Die Meistersinger. Her repertoire extends to Mozart’s Contessa and Verdi‘s Aïda. So it was for the versatile Elisabeth Rethberg who took on nearly thirty German, Italian, and French roles at the Met. We hear her in a 1932 recording as Elsa in Act I of Lohengrin. A warm yet silvery sound and limpid legato suffuse her recital of the dream in which a virtuous knight comes to her rescue.

Another remarkable Jugendlich of the time, Lotte Lehmann, yearned to sing Isolde, one of the great Hoch dramatischer roles. But she understood that while dramatic sopranos might poach in the precinct of the lyric soprano, the reverse was fraught with peril. She feared for the survival of her voice. In this 1930 recording she lent her passionate temperament to the “Liebestod” but never sang the whole of Isolde’s long and arduous part.

   

The Wagnerian dramatic mezzo sometimes ventures into lead soprano territory—Ortrud in Lohengrin, Kundry in Parsifal—but is most often obliged to content herself with important yet secondary parts. Here is Kerstin Thorborg whose rock-solid technique fills out Brangäne’s exceptionally long phrases as she warns the adulterous Tristan and Isolde of the danger that awaits them.

Friedrich Schorr was the undisputed dominant Heldenbariton of the interwar period. In New York and elsewhere he was called on to sing Wotan (three “Ring” operas), Amfortas (Parsifal), Kurwenal (Tristan und Isolde), the Dutchman (Der Fliegende Holländer), and Hans Sachs (Die Meistersinger). In this 1927 recording, he applies his sweet tone and silken phrasing to Wolfram’s hymn to the Evening Star from the last act of Tannhäuser.

Rethberg, Lehmann, Thorborg, Schorr, and the other artists mentioned in our two previous posts formed a constellation surrounding the two most luminous stars, Flagstad and Melchior. There is not today, nor has there been since 1950, a roster of singers sufficient to sustain a Wagnerian golden age at the Met or, indeed, anywhere.

Tannhaüser, the Wandering Minstrel

The very first work performed in German at the Metropolitan was Richard Wagner’s Tannhaüser, the opera the “Live in HD” global audience will hear and see this coming Saturday, October 31. Tannhaüser premiered during the Met’s second season, 1884-1885, and has been a staple of the repertoire ever since. 

That is not to say that Wagner was absent during the Met’s inaugural season. Lohengrin was on the calendar, albeit in Italian, in 1883-1884. That was the year the Met’s founding impresario, Henry Abbey, brought his Grand Italian Opera to 39^th Street and Broadway, the Met’s home until the move to Lincoln Center. In that first season, all opera, whatever the intended language, was sung in Italian. That tradition would have held had Abbey not driven his company deep into the red, causing the Metropolitan board to seek another general manager and a more fiscally viable performance practice.

As the board was deliberating, along came Leopold Damrosch, a well-established symphony conductor, who proposed a season entirely in German, its repertoire principally consigned to works composed on German texts, with casts recruited in Germany at fees far lower than Abbey’s stars had commanded. The orchestra would be drawn from the German players of his New York Symphony Society, by all accounts superior to the Italian instrumentalists Abbey had hired. Damrosch would do all the conducting. In making his case, he contended that the German speakers of New York, the population he was confident of luring to the half-empty upper tiers, was interested neither in Italian opera nor in German opera sung in Italian. Ultimately, and despite resistance from influential boxholders who preferred the embellishments of bel canto to the declamations of music drama, the bottom line won out. Like the Met’s many devoted connoisseurs, the critics were delighted. One Gemanophile reviewer pointed to the German-language Lohengrin as proof of his axiom: that the “sincere and realistic” interpretation of German artists was in all ways superior to the Italian manner of privileging “a few tuneful numbers.”

Skipping ahead to Lauritz Melchior’s 1926 Met debut, as Tannhaüser, we note with surprise that the Danish tenor was not particularly well received. But after five or so seasons of sporadic appearances, he became recognized as the world’s dominant heldentenor. In this recording, he makes easy work of the role of Tannhaüser, one of the most strenuous in the Wagner canon. In Act I, having betrayed the order of courtly love, the minstrel languishes in the arms of Venus herself. His hymn in praise of the goddess demands great stamina, but also a touch of grace not often accessible to heroic singers.

A Wagnerian Golden Age at the Met centered on Kirsten Flagstad’s pre-war New York engagement, from 1935 to 1941. The Norwegian soprano, along with Melchior and their remarkable cohort, assured a level of performance perhaps unsurpassed in the company’s history. During this period, Flagstad shared Tannhauser’s Elisabeth with Lotte Lehmann. These superlative artists, and sometimes professional rivals, had distinct approaches, timbres, and techniques. At the opening of Act II, Lehmann’s impetuous greeting to the Hall of Song overflows with rapturous anticipation. Her beloved Tannhaüser has renounced the pleasures of Venus and is about to return to her.

In Act III, near death, Elisabeth prays for Tannhaüser who has gone to Rome to seek redemption for his sins. Flagstad’s timbre--massive, pure, unerringly in tune--conveys her character’s saintliness with utter directness.

Just moments later, Wolfram, the minstrel who champions chaste love, sings the opera’s most familiar melody, the “Hymn to the Evening Star.” Hermann Prey, who appeared only infrequently at the Met over a thirty-year span, made his 1960 debut there as Wolfram. He invests the aria’s long phrases with the silken legato and lyric timbre that made him an unforgettable lieder recitalist.

A word about this Saturday’s simulcast. Tannhaüser is the oldest active production in the company’s repertoire. Designed by Günther Schneider-Siemssen and directed by Otto Schenk, its style delighted critics and audiences in 1977 and continues to be a successful example of literalist staging

Die Meistersinger: The Song’s the Thing

The Metropolitan will present Die Meistersinger in its “Live in HD” series this coming Saturday, December 13. The company’s only previous telecast of Wagner’s comedy dates from 2001. Available on DVD, it was conducted by James Levine, as it will be on Saturday; it will be seen in the same pictorial, traditionalist production, the work of Otto Schenk and Günther Schneider-Siemssen. The excellent 2001 cast featured James Morris, Ben Heppner, Karita Mattila, and Thomas Allen.

Meistersinger received its U.S. premiere at the Met in 1886 and has been a repertoire staple ever since. Apart from the very early and nearly never performed Das Liebesverbot, it is the composer’s only comedy. And except for Das Liebesverbot, it is his only work devoid of the supernatural. In 16^th-century, middle-class Nuremberg there are no gods and Valkyries, mermaids, dragons, love potions, or knights of the Holy Grail. In fact, the central character, Hans Sachs, is an historical figure, a cobbler and a poet. Both his shoemaking and his knowledge of verse are deeply embedded in the libretto.

Structured around a singing contest for which Sachs, a mastersinger, is a judge, Meistersinger focuses on the place of art in society through the character of one of the contestants, Walther von Stolzing. Walther progresses from undisciplined inspiration in Act I to the Act III completion of the Preislied, a prize love-song that both expresses his ardor and wins the approbation of the mastersingers and the populace. The opera reaches its climax in a crescendo of public acclaim for Hans Sachs, for his generosity, good sense, and, problematically for generations of listeners, for his defense of German art. Sachs’s warning against foreign influences (generally understood as French or Jewish) is a direct appeal to German nationalism. On the occasion of the opera’s first production at Glyndebourne in 2011, The Guardian noted, “Music from Meistersinger was chosen to accompany the inaugural celebrations of the Third Reich in 1933, it was used by Leni Riefenstahl in her propaganda films, it was conducted on film by Wilhelm Furtwängler to symbolize the greatness of Germany's war effort, and it was the only piece performed at Wagner's theatre in Bayreuth during the war years.”

The four clips that follow provide a sampler of Wagner at his most lyrical. When asked with whom he has studied poetry, Walther answers sweetly, the medieval minstrel Walther von der Vogelweide, whose verses inspired him. And what school instructed him? The birds of the forest. His answers come forth in the three stanzas of his song. Leo Slezak, a remarkable tenor who appeared at the Met between 1909 and 1913 in roles as diverse in their demands as Mozart’s Tamino and Wagner’s Tannhaüser, sings “Am stillen Herd (At the quiet hearth)” with an ease of address and a purity of timbre preserved in this 1905 recording.

Hans Sachs, too, is a poet of nature, but with a philosophical bent, as he repeatedly proves through the course of the opera. His Act III, scene 1 monologue, “Wahn! Wahn! (Madness, madness)” first reflects on the follies of human nature in its thirst for anger and strife. Sachs, who finds peace in contemplating his beloved Nuremberg, then evokes the fragrance of his elder-tree on Midsummer’s Eve. Friedrich Schorr, a phenomenal heroic baritone and perhaps the most renowned Sachs of the 20^th century, encompasses the piece’s power and tenderness.

The first scene of Act III ends with an ecstatic quintet whose harmonies are proof that the benevolent cobbler has intervened put things right: he has given youth its due, renouncing his claim to Eva, and has helped Walther complete the song that will win Eva’s hand; Sachs has also promoted his affable apprentice David to the rank of journeyman, thereby assuring his marriage to Eva’s nurse, Magdalene. All sing as if in a dream. Led by, and then capped by the floating lines of the soprano, the five voices intertwine in common joy. The recording here is from a 1935 Vienna performance conducted by Felix Weingartner. Lotte Lehmann is the Eva. When she sang the role soon after her 1934 Met debut, Lawrence Gilman threw aside critical restraint and wrote, "with her [first] words, [she] made one exclaim involuntarily to oneself, 'But this is the real thing.'"

  

The payoff at the opera’s conclusion is Walther’s prize song. In the previous scene, Wagner whets our appetite for the finished piece; Sachs makes helpful comments as the budding poet composes. The final version of the stanzas of the Preislied signals the triumph of love, of community, of art. Lauritz Melchior, unquestionably the greatest Wagner tenor of the 20^th century, an irreplaceable Tristan and Siegfried, never sang the less demanding Walther in his long Met career. But even at the age of sixty, soon after he left the company, the freshness of his voice and his infectious joy are manifest in this 1950 television rendition of the aria.