The Met in the Time of Pandemic: The Unfinished Season, April 2020, Simon Boccanegra

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We follow our previous post on the Metropolitan’s unfinished 2019-2020 season (https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7211323416075256950/7161019381826796963) with a backward glance at the month of April 2020. This was the month, now a full year ago, in which Governor Andrew Cuomo extended the New York State stay-at-home order and the public-school and public-space closure edict, including theatres of course, through the middle of May. That April, the State suffered more COVID-19 infections than any country, the U.S. aside. The Governor mandated that masks be worn in public and that New York City subway service be suspended between 1:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. It was clear from the start that the economic fall-out from the lock-down would be drastic. The arts industry alone was projected to lose tens of billions of dollars in revenue. As a point of reference, year after year, attendance at Broadway’s 41 theatres outpaced that of all of the city’s professional sports teams combined. 

The performing arts on both sides of the Atlantic responded with extraordinary urgency to the human, artistic, and financial catastrophe. By the middle of March opera companies had developed plans to stream performances without cost. The Met opened its archive of television and Live in HD transmissions for daily broadcast. The collections of the Vienna State Opera and the Paris Opera, to name just two, were made similarly available.  

The most elaborate of all Met initiatives was the four-hour-long gala concert streamed live on the company website beginning at 1:00 p.m. on April 25. The total number of views including replays was expected to reach one million by midnight. Forty Met stars, almost all recorded at home, participated in the program--Peter Mattei from Sweden, Piotr Beczala from Poland, René Pape from Germany, Roberto Alagna from France, Renée Fleming from Virginia, Matthew Polenzani from New York and the rest scattered far and wide. Some went ahead and accompanied themselves on the piano. The most unusual and moving accompaniment was that arranged for Joyce DiDonato in Handel’s “Ombra mai fu.” Each member of the Met’s viola section had recorded his or her part separately in tribute to Vincent Lionti, a Met violist who had succumbed to COVID just three weeks earlier. And Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted the orchestra and chorus, again recorded individually, in an uplifting rendition of Verdi’s “Va, pensiero.”

The Met’s April 20, 2020 revival of the 1995 production of Simon Boccanegra was, of course, not to be. The opera had been on the boards at 39^th Street and at Lincoln Center since its company premiere in 1932. With its complex scenario and dark musical texture, Boccanegra is less approachable than the familiar Verdi titles that are staples of the world’s opera houses. A favorite of critics and operaphiles, it remains anchored on the fringe of the core repertoire. Audiences in 2020 had anticipated the return of Spanish baritone Carlos Álvarez as Boccanegra, Ailyn Pérez, one of the company’s leading lyric sopranos, as his daughter Amelia, and spinto tenor Joseph Calleja as her lover, Gabriele.

The 1857 Venice premiere of the opera had been a failure. Verdi himself thought it too sad, too gloomy, and weighted down by a preponderance of low male voices. He revised the opera twenty-five years later with the help of librettist Arrigo Boito, the composer’s soon-to-be collaborator on his final masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff. The maturity Verdi had developed in the interim, palpable in Don Carlo, Aïda and other scores, infuses the work with uncommon gravitas. The revised version was a success at La Scala in 1881.

Paternal love and political intrigue are the dominant themes of Simon Boccanegra. Early in the opera’s prologue, the patrician Fiesco, grief-stricken by his daughter’s recent death, expresses the depth of his sorrow in the bass aria “Il Lacerato spirito (The wounded spirit).” We hear Ezio Pinza, the Met’s first Fiesco, as he sets a very high standard for his successors in the role.

Fiesco’s daughter and her lover, Simon Boccanegra, then a young corsair, had had a child. Twenty-five years later, in Act I, Simon, now the benevolent Doge of Genoa, quells a rebellion that erupts in the Council Chamber and inveighs for peace between his city and Venice. His heartfelt plea dominates the ensemble that includes the voices of Fiesco, Amelia (revealed to be Simon’s daughter), and the other principals. This excerpt features Lawrence Tibbett whose Simon was the lynchpin of the Met’s original triumphant production. 

 

 

 The Council Chamber Scene, added in the Verdi/Boito revision, is one of the most memorable pages in the composer’s canon and is undoubtedly responsible for the opera’s claim to lyric stages everywhere.

 

Lawrence Tibbett, 2: All-American Divo

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In our last post we traced the beginnings of Lawrence Tibbett’s remarkable operatic career and, in particular, his towering renditions of many of Verdi’s baritone roles. But it was not the Verdi wing of the repertoire alone that Tibbett expanded under the direction of the Met general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza (he ruled in New York from 1908 to 1935), but also the American wing that Gatti, more than any other general manager before or since, embraced and promoted. Among the more successful American works for which Tibbett helped draw an audience were Deems Taylor’s The King’s Henchman (1929) and Peter Ibbetson (1931).

Then there was the now iconic American role that Tibbett might have sung but, to the disappointment of many, did not. In the mid-1930’s, the Met’s great benefactor and president of the Metropolitan Opera Association, Otto Kahn, had hoped that George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess would have its premiere on 39^th Street. Tibbett would certainly have been cast as Porgy. But Gershwin rebuffed the company’s skimpy guarantee of only two performances; he took his opera to Broadway instead. However, Tibbett did get to sing the role of Porgy in the first recording of excerpts that was produced just days after the October 10, 1935 Broadway opening. (Porgy and Bess had its belated Met premiere in 1985).

Here is “I Got Plenty of Nothin’” from that 1935 recording. Tibbett is, as you will hear, a rare artist able to meld the technique required for opera and the folk/Broadway style Gershwin contrived for Porgy’s rollicking introductory number.

Together with frequent concert and radio appearances, it was his movie career that made Tibbett a household name in America. He was recruited by Hollywood at the advent of talking pictures alongside classical and popular vocalists Grace Moore, Fanny Brice, Marilyn Miller, and others. Tibbett went to M-G-M. He was first cast as the lead in The Rogue Song, a role that won him a best-actor Oscar nomination in 1930. He quickly made three more films for the prestigious studio and returned in 1935 for two Twentieth-Century Fox productions. The first of these, the positively reviewed Metropolitan, is one of the few Hollywood movies that mounted fully staged, uncut versions of operatic excerpts.

We have chosen the sequence in which Tibbett sings Figaro’s entrance aria, “Largo al factotum,” during a make-believe rehearsal. His virtuosic rendition demonstrates the individuality of his timbre and of his phrasing, and the brio of his acting. (In his more than six hundred Met performances he never played Rossini’s crafty barber.)

The full measure of Tibbett’s presence and appeal bursts forth in another sequence from Metropolitan. He sings one of his recital favorites, Oley Speaks’s setting of Rudyard Kipling's poem "On the Road to Mandalay.”

In the soft start of the repeat, as he elongates the phrase “Come you back to Mandalay,” the baritone’s voice and personality are as irresistible to us as they are to the old musical mentor he is seen addressing.

Lawrence Tibbett: Becoming an (American) Divo

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Unlike Rosa Ponselle’s beginnings in opera (see Rosa Ponselle: Becoming an (American) Diva, 10/5/17), baritone Lawrence Tibbett’s operatic career began inauspiciously. His knees shaking during the whole of his 1923 Met audition, as he recounted it, he cracked on the high note. He was dismissed by the general manager with a curt “thank you.” Three weeks went by before Giulio Gatti-Casazza agreed to a second hearing. A far less agitated Tibbett sang the “Credo” from Otello. This time, Gatti was impressed enough to hire the twenty-seven-year-old Californian who had never sung in opera, not in New York, not anywhere. Tibbett was expected to master twenty-seven roles in his debut season, mostly comprimario and secondary parts, two leads, and one role for bass. In the next year or so, he was little noticed by public or press.

Tibbett got his big break in his second season. Gatti cast him as Ford, the second baritone role in Verdi’s Falstaff. But rehearsals went poorly for the inexperienced singer, who was challenged by a weak musical memory and a difficult score. The formidable, almost all-Italian cast included Antonio Scotti as Falstaff. In fact, the revival had been staged expressly for Scotti’s twenty-fifth anniversary with the company. During rehearsal, annoyed that Tibbett’s on-the-job training was slowing things down, the Italian baritone and his veteran Italian colleagues engaged in mocking exchanges over the novice’s histrionic and vocal difficulties. Although he had never set foot in Italy and did not know Italian, Tibbett got the drift. He was furious. Then came the night of the first performance, January 2, 1925. Tibbett sang the bitter aria that concludes the first scene of the second act with an extra dose of passion. During the ovation that followed, the principals took their bows. Then Scotti came out alone. But the audience kept up the clapping, stamping, whistling, and, finally, to make its will perfectly clear, began shouting, “Tibbett, Tibbett.” Meanwhile, assuming the tribute was for Scotti, Tibbett had repaired to his dressing room two floors above. The conductor did his best to carry on with the performance, but the audience, presuming that Tibbett had somehow been denied a solo bow, would not let up. Gatti acceded to the public reluctantly; attention had shifted from the honoree of the evening to the humble newcomer: “An American audience had decided that one of its own nationality should be properly recognized for his talent” (Times). The sixteen-and-a-half-minute demonstration subsided at last and the curtain rose on the next scene. From then on, Tibbett was given increasingly important assignments and with his assumption of the title role in the Met’s first Simon Boccanegra in 1932, he was uncontested as the company’s leading baritone in the Italian and French repertoires. He sang the last of his 603 Met performances on March 24, 1950. Tibbett was the first and remains, arguably the greatest, of a line of extrordinary American baritones: John Charles Thomas, Leonard Warren, Cornell MacNeil, Sherrill Milnes, and most recently Thomas Hampson.  

Tibbett’s successful audition aria, the “Credo” from Otello, forecast the return of Verdi’s opera to the Met repertoire in 1937 after a long and puzzling hiatus of twenty-five seasons. The revival came at the peak of Tibbett’s career, his voice refulgent, his charisma compelling, his dramatic and musical acumen at their sharpest. Here is Tibbett in a 1939 recording. He captures Iago’s complex praise of evil in the elasticity of his phrasing and dynamic range.

In the course of his Met career, Tibbett sang more than thirty leading roles, eight of which were in operas by Verdi. Missing was that of  Renato in Un Ballo in maschera, a title that reentered the repertoire only in 1940, by which time the baritone had undergone a serious vocal crisis and had reduced his appearances on 39^th Street. Here is his rendition of Renato’s third act aria, “Eri tu.” The character expresses both his anger towards the man he believes to be his wife’s lover and his tenderness towards the woman he has lost. Tibbett employs his high pianissimo to especially touching effect.

The test role for all Verdi baritones is, of course, Rigoletto. Tibbett performed it thirty-two times with the company. In this excerpt, “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata,” he thunders the jester’s rage at the courtiers who have abducted his daughter; then, in heartrending supplication, he throws himself on their mercy.

Our next post will feature Tibbett in a wing of the repertoire that he made distinctly his own—American opera.

Staging Cavalleria and Pagliacci Now

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The last of the six new productions of the Met’s 2014-15 season, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, opened on April 14,  2015. In general, critical response to these recent investitures has weighed heavily on the side of disappointment. Not one of the lately unveiled stagings can be said to have enjoyed the enthusiastic consensus of reviewers. Briefly then: The reception of The Death of Klinghoffer was mostly positive, that of Le Nozze di Figaro, cool at best. The notices of Iolanta/Bluebeard’s Castle were mixed; those of The Merry Widow and La Donna del lago, negative; and those of Cavalleria and Pagliacci, primarily so. And only Mozart’s treasured comedy and the Mascagni/Leocavallo hugely popular double bill were reinvestitures of core repertoire favorites that often find themselves subjected to particular scrutiny, especially when they propose significant rereadings of the work.

In our previous post, we tracked the controversy over departures from conventional settings of the core all the way back to the 1951 Pagliacci. We argued that the heated operatic debate of the present day had its origins in the reception of a last-minute addition to Rudolf Bing’s inaugural season.

Not surprisingly, given that the April productions are new, staging was front and center in the reviews of Cav/Pag. And since the productions they replaced were signed by Franco Zeffirelli, the comparison with the Zeffirelli aesthetic, beloved by many of the public and detested by almost all critics, would inevitably come to the fore. “In the beginning, say 1970, there was Franco Zeffirelli. He turned Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, the eternal verist twins, into a pair of kitsch spectaculars. Audiences applauded the scenery” (Financial Times, April 15, 2015).

Zeffirelli’s long association with the Met began with his ecstatically received 1964 Falstaff and ended with his much derided 1998 La Traviata. Between the two, there were ten others, including his 1970 Cav/Pag. Managements have been wary of angering  Met patrons by shelving his sets with nonchalance. Only La Bohème and Turandot survive. As Peter Gelb put it some years ago:  “I promised the Met subscribers when I first came on board—well, I didn’t promise anything, but I did say that there were two iconic Zeffirelli productions, Bohème and Turandot, and that the other Zeffirelli productions are going to be replaced. A lot of these things are just sitting there like lead weights, so there is a lot of catching up to do” (New Yorker (Oct. 22, 2007).  He has been good to his word. The Zeffirelli Falstaff, Tosca, Traviata, and Carmen are history.

And now so too are Cavalleria and Pagliacci. Zeffirelli deployed much of the action of Cavalleria on a monumental church stairway that filled half the stage; realistic housefronts with balconies and views of the hill town framed this meticulous slice-of-life rendering of a bright, colorful Easter Sunday in Sicily. 

Eschewing the slightest hint of the picturesque that floods the Zeffirelli version, even in the religious procession, the David McVicar/Rae Smith production drains the stage of the specificity of the quotidian, of color and light.

 Cavalleria rusticana (model), Metropolitan Opera, 2015

Displacement here is not of place or date--the action transpires as is prescribed in a Sicilian village circa 1880--but of time. The artistic team turns day into night (some have observed that the darkness signals not mass on Easter morn, but midnight mass). A revolving platform repositions again and again a patriarchal community of subjugated women and swaggering, predatory men, the better to give  relief to the drama of individual betrayal. Santuzza, victim and ultimately avenger, is repeatedly set apart from the black-clad villagers whose codes she has broken.

Many of those glad to bid farewell to Zeffirelli’s obsessive pictorialism, including reviewers who missed few opportunities to put him down, were disappointed by its replacement, spare or not. The Times was irritated by the over-active platform, the New Yorker found the staging “relentlessly grim,” the Observer thought that it “bombed on just about every level.” Only the Wall Street Journal gave a thumbs up. With caveats about the lighting and the male dancers who mimed Alfio’s horses, we thought the show compelling in its abstraction, particularly as it transformed the lengthy genre scenes of village life into comments on the opera’s social/sexual politics.

For Pagliacci, McVicar and Smith moved the action forward from 1865 to 1950 and from Calabria to Sicily. We are alerted that the two operas take place in the same southern Italian town square by the imposing stone walls that enclose both narratives. There, the unity ends.

As it happened, the square, neon lights, and stalled truck of the McVicar/Smith Pagliacci turned out to be more naturalistic than Zeffirelli’s rocky outcroppings, stunted tree, and big sky. 

Pagliacci, Metropolitan Opera, 2015; Patricia Racette, George Gagnidze

The new version added a three-man vaudeville team. The intervention of the trio into the prologue (one of several inventions) violated the expository, deeply human and complex import of the baritone’s aria. While the press, in general, was amused by the antics, for us the slapstick of the play-within-a-play went too far in making the critical contrast between farce and melodrama. For this post, we have chosen two clips that demonstrate the power of music and text when the performer rather than the production is the primary site of meaning.

Lawrence Tibbett sings “Si può?” (If I may)” in this scene from Metropolitan (1935), the fifth of six feature films he made between 1930 and 1937. Tibbett, who had a successful career in Hollywood simultaneously with his Met stardom, is captured here at his extraordinary prime, reaching out to the audience with gestures as subtly inflected as his phrasing and the colors of his voice. The charisma of the singer and the purpose of the character are perfectly joined.

Giovanni Martinelli sings “Vesti la giubba” in this 1926 Vitaphone short. The aria is forever associated with Enrico Caruso, the tenor who holds the Met record for performances of Pagliacci. Martinelli became the company’s Canio after Caruso’s premature death. As you will hear, he favors an unusually slow tempo. Sustaining astonishing tension with astonishing vocal energy, the tenor gives the tragic density of the short piece its full due. 

First Night and Other Fausts

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As we look forward to the September 22 opening of the Metropolitan’s 2014-15 season, we take a moment to look back on the very first of the Met’s opening nights. The account that follows is drawn from our forthcoming book, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (University of California Press).

October 22, 1883

The confusion outside the new opera house on opening night, and the commotion within, delayed the prelude to Charles Gounod’s Faust. As one wag put it, no one seemed to mind except "a few ultra musical people in the gallery." On the sidewalk out front, scalpers hawked parquet seats at $12 and $15 each and places in the balcony at $8. Overeager takers apparently failed to notice that as late as 7:30, $5 balcony tickets were still on sale at the box office. "It comes high but we must have it," read the caption under Puck's lampoon of the rush for pricey tickets. Ushers in evening dress escorted patrons to their seats. The three tiers of boxes and the parquet were filled, the balcony nearly sold out. Only the $3-a-pop uppermost section, the "family circle," so renamed to repel roués accustomed to appropriating it for themselves, showed empty seats. When the prelude was over and the curtain rose on the old philosopher's study, the audience finally fell silent.

The lease of the house to theatrical manager Henry E. Abbey came with the board's charge that he assemble a company for the Met's first season. The “Italian” of his "Grand Italian Opera" meant that French and German works would be sung in Italian. That was no surprise. Years later, in evoking an 1870s Faust at the Academy of Music with Christine Nilsson, the Marguerite of the 1883 Met opening, Edith Wharton took a jab at this practice: "An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences."

  

Alas, the performance that launched the theatre on 39^th Street and Broadway disappointed critics and public. The high point of the evening was the interruption of the garden scene to mark Nilsson's proprietary relationship to the role. Presented with a sash of golden leaves in a velvet case, "first holding the box down so that the audience obtained a view of its contents, she placed it upon the chair in front of the casket, and kneeling repeated the [aria]." But for the Times reviewer, who took note of the soprano's wonted acting and musical expressivity, the "Jewel Song" "was scarcely rendered with the requisite buoyancy and brilliancy." The Faust, Italo Campanini, arguably the world's leading tenor, had been Italy's first Lohengrin, London's first Don José, and New York's first Radamès. That night, his "old-time sweetness" was intermittent and his "old-time manly ring" suffered "the evidences of labor" (Tribune). The reception of the principals might have been more sympathetic had the architects gotten their way in situating the orchestra. Borrowing from Bayreuth, they had sunk the pit below the level of the parquet. But the conductor objected to the near invisibility to which he had been relegated. The pit was raised, putting maestro and orchestra in full view, obstructing the stage picture for many and, of greater import still, undoing the balance of voices and instruments. The orchestra descended to the intended plane two weeks later, and there, with sporadic minor adjustments, it stayed.

(Readers of this post can access the entire first chapter of Grand Opera, devoted to the inaugural season, by going to http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520250338)

Since that fabled and flawed night in fall 1883, there have been many fabulous performances of the opera that lent the Met the sobriquet “Faustspielhaus.” Faust stands eighth in the tally of titles presented by the company. The opera’s enduring popularity is as much a tribute to Gounod’s elegant and tuneful score as it is to the opportunities it has offered singers, beginning with Nilsson and Campanini. The hedonist Faust, the betrayed Marguerite, the nefarious Méphistophélès, and the stalwart Valentin have been favored vehicles for the likes of legendary tenors Jean de Reszke and Jussi Björling,  sopranos Emma Calvé and Nellie Melba, basses Fyodor Chaliapin and Ezio Pinza, baritones Antonio Scotti and Robert Merrill. 

We have chosen as our earliest example a 1910 extract from the Garden scene. Faust is on the verge of seducing the innocent Marguerite. Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar, one of the most potent box-office pairings in Met history, capture both the characters’ expression of eternal love and their barely contained passion.

Valentin was the second role undertaken by Lawrence Tibbett in his debut season, 1923-24; success and renown came to him in 1925, full-fledged stardom in the 1930s. He kept Faust in his repertoire until 1934, the year he recorded “Avant de quitter ces lieux.” In this aria, Valentin, about to go off to war, commends his sister to divine protection. With exemplary style and restraint, Tibbett fills out the broad arc of the melody that conveys the character’s simple faith.

A lyric soprano with coloratura fluency, a great French stylist, Victoria de los Angeles bowed at the Met in 1951 as Marguerite; she sang this role with the company more often than any other and is featured in two commercial recordings of the complete opera. Her warm voice projects all the ebullience of the young woman, dazzled by the chest of bracelets and necklaces she finds in her garden, a gift from the young man who is about to win her heart.

Bulgarian bass Nicolai Ghiaurov made his sensational Met debut as Méphistophélès in 1965. He sang it only eight times, and more’s the pity. Here he is in a 1979 Lyric Opera of Chicago video of the Devil’s serenade, an ironic take on the love scene Faust and Marguerite have just enacted. Ghiaurov envelops the sardonic mockery in his plush timbre.

In 2011, Jonas Kaufmann assumed the title role in the Met’s latest investiture of Faust. He managed to respect the late-Romanticism of the piece in the face of a production keyed to a horrific, post-Hiroshima atomic nightmare. In Zurich, in 2004, he lovingly addressed Marguerite’s humble dwelling in gracefully shaped. long legato phrases, reaching the climactic high C at mezzo forte which he then diminished to piano. A remarkable feat.

Future posts will focus on the Met program in the upcoming season, beginning with Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, the opening night fare.