Tosca: Set and Gesture

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In the years surrounding the advent of the twentieth century, when staging/direction became a hot topic in operatic debates, Tosca became the hottest item, at least at the Met, in the raucous tug-of-war between the traditionalists, at one extreme, and the devotees of European Regietheater, at the other. And when Peter Gelb kept his early promise to drive Franco Zeffirelli’s beloved dinosaur into extinction, the tug-of-war devolved into a pitched battle. Zeffirelli’s Tosca, newborn in 1985 and still kicking in 2006, was supplanted in 2009 by Swiss Luc Bondy’s severe riposte to his predecessor’s opulent decors and astounding scenic gestures. Bondy’s parry was drowned in boos that reverberated in furious notices. The noisy reception of those seated in the orchestra and the galleries, and even on Lincoln Center Plaza staring at the giant screen, could not be ignored. The audience was quick to exercise the prerogative of booing that is the signature privilege of operagoing (see our article, “Boo Who?” in the New York Times, September 26, 2009). 

The Tosca pendulum has swung once again. This year’s new production, directed by David McVicar (it can be seen “Live in HD” on January 27, 2018), returns to a conventional evocation of Roman sites and to the conventional gestures of the well-worn melodrama. Principal among the familiar trappings is, arguably, the knife with which Floria Tosca stabs Baron Scarpia to death, a moment fans await with anticipation at every performance. When and how will the soprano eye and wield her weapon?

No Tosca is better remembered at this riveting juncture than Maria Callas who, on November 25, 1956, performed the murderous act before an extraordinary public. Millions of spectators were witness to her gesture when she appeared live on U.S. network television. The Callas Tosca was so newsworthy that Ed Sullivan, host of the most popular variety show, allotted a full sixteen minutes to the Greek-American singer and Canadian baritone George London for the Act II duel-to-the-death of the antagonists. The video clip below preserves the crackling encounter of these two singing-actors, as compelling today as it was more than a half-century ago. Tosca has agreed to the police chief’s proposal to free her lover in exchange for sexual favors. To steady her nerves, she drinks a glass of wine; her hand grazes a knife; she understands what she must do; she hesitates, then plants the weapon in his heart. Callas is in her most incisive voice as Tosca hurls her fury at the dying Scarpia.

Eight years after the Ed Sullivan segment, in 1964, near the end of her operatic career, Callas sang Tosca in a Zeffirelli production mounted for her at London’s Royal Opera. Her baritone was longtime colleague Tito Gobbi. Here, again, are the final moments of the Tosca-Scarpia clash. The lascivious Scarpia, writing the deceptive safe-conduct pass for Tosca and her lover, eroticizes his quill pen. Callas has further refined her resolve to attack her nemesis. She sees the knife, stares fixedly at the blade, and at the last moment, she turns to deliver the fatal blow.

The power of these familiar bits of stagecraft, executed with so much conviction and originality by Callas, George London, and Gobbi, put to shame Luc Bondy’s directorial eccentricities: Scarpia kissing a statue of the Virgin on the mouth in Act I; three prostitutes ministering to Scarpia’s pleasures in Act II; Tosca remaining onstage at the end of Act II rather than making her stunning exit, in tandem with Puccini’s musical cues.

Due in large measure to the widely publicized feud between world-class divas Callas and Renata Tebaldi, opera in general and Tosca in particular enjoyed a high media profile in the late 1950s. The title role figured prominently in the repertoires of both stars. Tebaldi, costumed as Tosca, made the cover of Time (November 3, 1958) in celebration of her Met opening night in the Puccini work; Callas had her own Time cover (October 29, 1956) just prior to her New York debut.

We have chosen Tebaldi’s rendition of Tosca’s famous aria. “Vissi d’arte (I lived for art)” offers a contemplative interlude amidst of the unremitting tension of Act II. Why, the distraught heroine asks, has God so unjustly rewarded her devotion and good works? Among the legendary interpreters of Tosca was Maria Jeritza. She owed her 1922 meteoric ascension to New York stardom to a stunning invention: she sang “Vissi d’arte” face down on the stage floor. In 1975 it was Magda Olivero’s turn. She tracked the arc of the music: first bent backwards over a divan, she stood and reached her full height as the climactic phrase attained its peak, then fell to her knees as she begged for Scarpia’s mercy (see our posts of September 9 and September 16, 2014). Still, most sopranos rely on minimal gesture and let Puccini do his work. This is Tebaldi’s way. She intones the broad swaths of the composer’s melody with the famously warm timbre that serves the fervor of Tosca’s prayer. The clip that follows is drawn from a 1959 U.S. television program.

Don Giovanni on Contested Fields

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On October 22, 2016, the Metropolitan Opera will broadcast “Live in HD” its Saturday matinee performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The production that will be seen by audiences in the New York house and at the movies globally premiered in 2011. Nothing about this staging gives off the excitement director Michael Grandage has generated in the legitimate theater. The moveable curved wballs pierced by doors and windows are all too familiar. To complaints of timidity such as “this Don Giovanni almost makes you yearn for those new stagings where the creative team is booed on opening night” (Times, Oct. 15, 2011), Peter Gelb, Met general manager, shot back with some justification, “Don’t get me started on that. . . . I feel damned if I do, damned if I don’t.” (Guardian [London], Dec. 9, 2011).

Don Giovanni has been favored at the Met for many decades. Since 1929, Mozart's drama giocoso has been on the boards two of every three seasons on average. But that was not always the case. Between 1908 and 1929, the opera was absent from the company’s repertoire. Its revival was inauspicious. Disappointed in most of the singers and no doubt remembering the noble baritone of Antonio Scotti, the unrepentant libertine of the turn of the century, critics judged bass Ezio Pinza lacking in "the elegance, the grace, the adroitness, the magnetic charm that the successful Don possesses, and his voice is not sufficiently flexible for the music." And through the 1930s, music journalists carped about Pinza. It was not until 1941, when conducted by Bruno Walter, that he earned their unrestrained praise. Virgil Thomson found him, and four of the other principals, "irreproachable." Pinza, who took on the doublet and hose of Don Giovanni in more than sixty Met performances, is credited with establishing the opera's place in the core repertoire. Handsome, charismatic, possessing a beautiful and theatre-filling voice, he was the undisputed king of the bass repertoire for his more than twenty-year-long operatic career in New York.

The several commercial disks of Giovanni's short solos and his duet with Zerlina fail to show off Pinza at his best. The impact of his voice, the clarity of his diction, the evenness of his legato, and the finesse of his phrasing are displayed not in the mini-arias Mozart granted the legendary rake but in a recording of bravura pages consigned to the servant. "Madamina, il catalogo è questo," is Leporello's accounting of Giovanni's amorous conquests.

A particularly dramatic back-stage Met story linked Don Giovanni and Ezio Pinza in 1942. The celebrated bass was diligently fulfilling his Met contract when FBI agents showed up at his suburban New York door and placed him under arrest on the accusation of a fellow bass, Norman Cordon. Pinza had been a permanent resident in the U.S. since 1939 and lately married to an American. Among the charges leveled against him were that he was a personal friend of Il Duce (they had never met), that his nickname was Mussolini, that by changing tempos during Met broadcasts he had sent coded messages abroad, that he had a tortoise-shell ring in the shape of a swastika (it was an antique ring that bore an archaic symbol). While columnist Walter Winchell went on the attack with his signature malice, many others came to Pinza’s defense, including Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. So did anti-fascist Bruno Walter. At Pinza’s successful second hearing, colleagues testified that Cordon had bragged about informing on his famous competitor. After three month’s detention, Pinza was released. His return to the Met in 1942–1943 came on tour in Philadelphia where, as Don Giovanni, he had the pleasure of murdering Cordon’s Commendatore in a performance conducted by Walter.

Another Met backstory with national implications links Don Giovanni with the celebrated African-American soprano Leontyne Price. In the southern cities of its spring tour, the Met was caught up in the fight for civil rights that defined the decade. During the 1961 Atlanta run, two African-American holders of orchestra tickets were asked to sit elsewhere. They refused. Protests ensued. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined in a telegram to general manager Rudolf Bing denouncing the company’s acceptance of a discriminatory policy. The cable was cosigned by Martin Luther King, Jr. The following year, officially at least, the Atlanta audience was integrated. Atlanta was again a thorn in Bing’s side in 1964. The organizers had balked at the prospect of Price in the cast of Don Giovanni. Bing dashed off this memorandum to the president of the Metropolitan Opera Association: “Leontyne Price at the present time is one of the most valuable properties [an unfortunate choice of words] of the Metropolitan Opera and there is no doubt that taking her on tour next season, but skipping the whole Atlanta week would terribly upset her, would without question make her refuse the whole tour and might, indeed, jeopardize her whole relationship with the Metropolitan.” Price sang Donna Anna in Atlanta that spring.

Here, recorded (alas, with faulty sonics) at a live performance just a few years earlier, Price sings Anna’s exacting “Or sai chi l’onore,” swearing vengeance on Don Giovanni, who forced himself upon her and then killed her father. Few sopranos are successful in maintaining Anna’s rhythm and rage through the music’s craggy course. Price does so with scrupulous attention to note values, all the while pouring forth a glorious flood of tone.

Pinza proved that the basso cantante, the lyric bass, was a perfect fit for Don Giovanni. His successor at the Met, basso cantante Cesare Siepi, holds the company record for the role. In recent seasons, the brighter sound of the baritone has had its turn. Here is baritone Simon Keenlyside, the Met’s October 22 Don Giovanni, in a seductively lyric rendition of the Act II serenade.

Turandot Is 90: 1926-2016

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Giacomo Puccini’s posthumous Turandot (unfinished at the composer’s death in November 1924, with the final scene completed by Franco Alfano) was an event of national moment at its La Scala world premiere in April 1926. Prior to reaching the Met just seven months later, in November of that same year, it had been the subject of lively interest in the New York press. The then general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, filled the stage with stars, comprimarios, choristers, dancers, and supers reported to number between six hundred and seven hundred. Joseph Urban’s spectacular orientalist design, a pinnacle of decor, was just one of his fifty or so Met commissions, an oeuvre still unequaled.

Fifteen opening night curtain calls spoke eloquently of audience approbation. But most critics disagreed, some vehemently. The New York Times reviewer, Olin Downes, for one, embarked on the mission of striking the opera from the boards. He fulminated at every revival: “a whole resplendent operatic edifice, destined sooner or later to collapse like a house of cards, has been made of virtually nothing;” “Puccini had stopped creating when he wrote it, but had mastered the art of saying nothing exceedingly well; and in a final insult,” “there is only one work by a great composer of modern times that we think as bad, and that is the Egyptian Helen by Richard Strauss.” Downes and his colleagues notwithstanding, Turandot led the box office in 1926–27 and rang up receipts far above average the following season.

Following a run of twenty-seven performances between 1926 and 1930, Turandot was dropped, no doubt the victim of high production costs, hefty royalties, and the departure of the star soprano, Maria Jeritza, who had made the Chinese princess one of her signature roles. Here she is as Turandot, with Gatti-Casazza.

On the heels of the La Scala and Met premieres, Turandot made the rounds of the world’s great opera houses, and the tenor’s third act aria, “Nessun dorma (No one shall sleep)” quickly became an audience favorite. Calaf, the “Unknown Prince,” has bested Turandot in their riddle contest, but will renounce his prize, the princess herself, if she succeeds in discovering his name. At the climax of the aria, certain that he will prevail in their battle of wills, he exclaims “Vincerò.” Among the first to record “Nessun dorma” was Spanish tenor Antonio Cortis, moving in the dreamy opening section and thrilling in the concluding heroic outburst.

Turandot finally returned to the Met stage in 1961. The clarion voices of Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli would secure the opera’s place in the company’s canon for good. Here Corelli sings the Act I aria, “Non piangere Liù (Do not weep, Liù)” in a 1958 Italian television production. Calaf comforts the slave girl, Liù, who has accompanied his father into exile. Known for his stentorian top notes, Corelli exhibits the plangent tone and firm legato demanded by the piece.

The direction of the 1961 Turandot fell to Nathaniel Merrill. But the plaudits went to the delicate chinoiserie of Cecil Beaton’s long-ago Peking, with décor less grandiose than Puccini’s immense canvas had known in New York and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s.

Met audiences will see again this season (the “Live in HD” simulcast is scheduled for January 30, 2016) the Franco Zeffirelli mise-en-scène which is by now three decades old. No surprise here. A year after assuming the mantle of general manager, Peter Gelb told an interviewer: “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.” Gelb has held fast to his word. The lavish La Bohème and the massive Turandot live on.

It was back in 1987, and thanks to the philanthropy of Sybil Harrington, and to the particular fancy she took to Zeffirelli’s menageries, that general manager Joseph Volpe’s Met could take on the expense of the gigantic production. Harrington’s clout provided another opening for lamentations on the state of opera in New York. One critic groused that Zeffirelli’s La Bohème, Tosca, and Turandot, all underwritten by Harrington, had “turned the Metropolitan from house of art into tourist attraction, a nice conclusion, perhaps, to a bus tour including lunch at Mama Leone’s.” He may have been thinking of that moment during the Act 2 riddle scene when audiences gasped in amazement, and most reviewers in dismay, as the princess’s imperial backpack gushed multicolored streamers. Even without the soon-abolished streamers, Zeffirelli’s overstuffed palace stands in vivid contrast to Beaton’s elegant staircase, seen above.

Turandot enters to sing one of the most taxing arias in the soprano repertoire. “In questa reggia (In this palace)” is a narrative about her ancestor, Princess Luo-ling, who was captured and murdered by the enemy. Turandot swears vengeance on any man who sues for her hand. She will put to him three riddles; if he fails to solve them he forfeits his life. Joan Sutherland, who performed heavier roles before becoming a bel canto coloratura soprano, is Turandot in this studio recording. She never sang the part onstage. Sutherland recounts the story compellingly and surmounts the exacting, high-lying phrases with ease and power.

Pucccini’s music ends just after the death of Liù, the slave girl who takes her own life rather than reveal the name of the Unknown Prince. In a lyric outpouring, she predicts that the ice princess, too, will fall in love with Calaf. Mafalda Favero, who appeared only twice at the Met in the late 1930s, expresses the grief and resolve which Puccini invested in the last aria he was able to pen.

 

 

 

 

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.