The Lost Season, December 2020-January 2021: Die Zauberflöte

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New Year’s Eve 2020 promised a gala audience the first night of a new production of Die Zauberflöte and a celebrated conductor in just his second engagement at the Met. The very popular Mozart opera was not to be the abridged English-language version typically offered during the holiday season but the full-length version in German. The director, making his Met debut, was to be Simon McBurney whose staging had premiered in Amsterdam. And the conductor, perhaps today’s most renowned maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and lately announced also as the next music director of the Paris Opéra. The New Year’s patrons would have enjoyed a particularly good view of “The Dude,” as McBurney’s design called for a raised pit.

Although Die Zauberflöte stands high in the list of operas most often performed in the Met’s history—20^th in rank, just after Tristan und Isolde—the company presented this title only sporadically between 1900 and 1942 when, foregrounding the appeal to a young audience and long sections of spoken dialogue, the text was given in English as The Magic Flute. Conductor Bruno Walter lent his prestige and his affinity for Mozart to the project. The fairy tale opera has maintained its place in the Met’s core repertoire since then. Walter led the next new production in 1956. The original German text, not heard since 1926, returned with the highly acclaimed Marc Chagall décor first seen in the opening season at Lincoln Center, 1966-67, conducted by Josef Krips. General manager Joseph Volpe cancelled the production announced for 1991, pleading insufficient time for preparation and borrowed instead David Hockney’s sets commissioned by San Francisco. Audiences and critics adored Julie Taymor’s puppets and masks and George Tsypin’s kinetic, fantastic world in 2004.

The first Zauberflöte excerpt in this post is drawn from a 1966 Berlin concert performance. The Tamino, Fritz Wunderlich, died in a tragic accident just weeks before his scheduled Met debut that very year. His technical and stylistic perfection, along with an exceptionally beautiful timbre, positioned Wunderlich as the foremost Mozart tenor of the post-war generation. In the aria, “Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön (This Image Is Enchantingly Lovely),” Tamino falls in love with Pamina while gazing at her portrait.

In Act II, the evil Queen of the Night beseeches her daughter, Pamina, to murder the virtuous high priest, Sarastro, who presides over a peaceful brotherhood of worshippers. Her daunting aria, “Der Hölle Rache (Hell’s Vengeance),” demands the agility and extended high range of the coloratura soprano (four F’s above high C) and the power of a dramatic soprano. Cristina Deutekom, in a 1971 TV movie, exhibits that rare combination.

Sarastro voices his benevolence in a serene hymn to his temple, “O Isis und Osiris (O Isis and Osiris).” The customary province of the deep bass, the basso profundo, René Pape’s more lyric basso cantante executes the long phrases in an unbroken stream of sound. This 2006 recording is conducted by Claudio Abbado.

The despairing Pamina, believing that Tamino no longer loves her, contemplates suicide in the doleful “Ach, ich fühl's (Ah, I can feel it).” Here, in a performance from the 1956 Salzburg festival, Elisabeth Grümmer, a Mozart-Strauss specialist who sang all too rarely in the United States, spins out the aria in a seamless legato that plumbs the character’s infinite sadness.

 

Parsifal: Succès de Scandale

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The year was 1903, the inaugural season of the Met’s new general manager. And the flamboyant Heinrich Conried was dead set on making a splash. What better way than to issue an extraordinary prospectus announcing the company premiere of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1882)?  And what would set off a bigger firestorm than a Christmas eve opening?  Cries of foul and shame emanated from musical, legal,and religious quarters on both sides of the Atlantic, originating at Wahnfried, the home of Cosima, Wagner’s widow, and finally descending on New York. Cosima’s imprecations, befitting her vocation as keeper of the flame, were fueled by the contention that the Metropolitan’s proposed staging was an outrageous violation of copyright law. Her attorneys went to work, arguing that the Met should be enjoined from producing the opera. The moral argument went like this: that playing Wagner’s Bühnenfestspiel (stage-consecrating festival drama) on an ordinary operatic platform was an act of heresy.

The New York Protestant establishment took the attack further, charging that the work itself was sacrilegious. From influential pulpits clergy held that the flower maidens were nothing other than a “red light legion,” the representation of the “Lord’s Supper” an “amusement for the sake of gain.”

The Parsifal case was ultimately dismissed on this simple legal finding: that the copyright did not extend to the United States. By the time the judge rendered his decision, preparations for Parsifal were well along. Most astounding had been the advance ticket sales, reputedly the greatest ever seen in New York. Weeks before the opening, the American Journal reported melodramatically, “Women Faint amid Crush for Seats to Parsifal. Many of Them Took Places in Line before Daylight and Were Too Weak to Reach the Window When It Was Opened.” Mail orders flooded in so thick and fast that their processing required a room of its own. Against odds of all sorts, Conried had brought off an operatic coup as memorable as any in the Metropolitan annals.

The premiere began at the unlikely hour of five o’clock. The doors were shut at the start of the prelude and, exceptionally, no one arrived late. A hush was reported to envelop the auditorium at the end of the almost two-hour-long act 1, in imitation of Bayreuth’s reverent response to the consecration of the Holy Grail, a practice that persisted at the Met well into the twentieth century.

Many returned in evening clothes for the second act, the flower maidens, Kundry’s attempted seduction of Parsifal, the spear arrested in midair, and the collapse of the castle of Klingsor, the reprobate knight. The audience erupted into a seven-minute ovation at the dramatic climax of Act 2. Similar receptions have greeted productions of Parsifal since. Here, for example, in a clip from a 1993 Berlin performance, is the overwhelming Kundry of Waltraud Meier, with Poul Elming.

Act 3 reverts to the ceremonial timelessness of the opening act. Here are the final minutes of the sublime “Good Friday” scene in which Parsifal, returning from his years of wandering, no longer “the guileless fool,” is baptized by Gurnemanz. The passage is drawn from a Berlin performance conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Gurnemanz is sung by bass John Tomlinson.

Note: We provide a full account of the Met’s 1903 Parsifal in our book, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met. On February 17, 2018, this season’s Met Parsifal can be heard both streaming and on the radio.

The Met’s 2009 Les Contes d’Hoffmann: Versions .1, .2, .3

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The production of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann that the “Live in HD” audience will see on January 31, 2015 dates back to December 2009. It was, in fact, one of several high-concept rereadings unveiled between the winters of 2009 and 2010. Together with the others, Verdi’s Attila and La Traviata, Hoffmann fueled the debate around stagings that has raged since Peter Gelb took over the company in 2006. 

The director of the 2009 production was Broadway’s Bartlett Sher; it was designed by Michael Yeargan.  The concept, as Sher explained it, was that E. T. A. Hoffmann, the author of the three short stories on which the libretto is based, and an analog for Franz Kafka, was, like the Prague-born, German-speaking  novelist and the Cologne-born, French-speaking composer, a Jew, an outsider. For the most part, the concept failed to emerge with purpose from a flood of disordered detail. To the derby hats of 1920s Mittel-Europa, for example, Sher added Federico Fellini grotesques, clowns, and prostitutes. What the interpretation did allow, as Variety put it, was “a clever staging of the prologue’s Kleinzach number, in which chorus boys turn the tavern’s tablecloths into prayer shawls. It’s a gesture Hoffmann repeats at opera’s end when he returns alone and lonely to his typewriter to crank out more poetry. Otherwise, Sher doesn’t get much mileage out of the concept.” The director conceded that his vision had not come together as he had hoped, that he had not had “enough time to . . . get [it] right.”  He had been under pressure from an administration strapped for money and time. 

The 2009 reception of Les Contes d’Hoffmann was further compromised by principals who, for one reason or another, walked back their commitments. Anna Netrebko, who was to play all four of the poet’s loves, Olympia, Giulietta, Antonia, and Stella (a non-singing role), sang only Antonia. (We should add that few sopranos in the Met’s long history have taken on all four parts, most notably Joan Sutherland.) René Pape decided to forego the opera’s four villains altogether. The Hoffmann was to be Rolando Villazón; he suffered a vocal crisis and was replaced by the affecting Joseph Calleja.

But for the cast changes, what follows is an approximation of what the first night audiences would have heard.

In the opera’s prologue, Hoffmann, disillusioned and dissolute, muses about his love life as he entertains his drinking buddies with the tale of a pathetic court jester, the dwarf Kleinzach. In this 2011 Munich performance, the irrepressible Villazón is back in astonishing form after vocal cord surgery.

1

The most familiar music of Les Contes d’Hoffmann is heard at the start of the Venitian act. The courtesan Giulietta and Hoffmann’s friend Nicklausse (a trouser role) sing the sinuous melody of a barcarolle. Netrebko, who dropped the low-lying role of Giulietta at the Met, here joins with mezzo Elina Garanca in a smoothly executed recording of the duet.

  

The devilish Dappertutto addresses the diamond through whose glitter he will enlist Giulietta in his evil plot to steal Hoffmann’s reflection. In a key lower than that of the usual baritone register, Pape rolls out his velvety bass and even manages the several high notes without undue stress.

Sher’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann made its first return in 2010. Notices were more positive: “What a difference a season makes. . . . The tales were told with greater success; the staging maneuvers seemed better focused. More important, most of the new singers were good, and one [Giuseppe Filianoti, the Hoffmann] was spectacular.” (Martin Bernheimer, Financial Times) 

In the 2015 edition, the title role goes to one of the Met’s recent stars, Vittorio Grigolo; the four villains will be played by Thomas Hampson, and the loves of Hoffmann by Erin Morley, Christine Rice, and Hibla Gerzmava. Whether the “high-concept staging” comes through with yet more conviction--and is therefore more convincing--remains to be seen.