The Lost Season, April-May 2021: Il Pirata

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In the final two months of the lost season, April and May 2021, audiences were deprived of the company premiere of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking starring Joyce DiDonato, Susan Graham, Etienne Dupuis, and Latonia Moore, and three important revivals: Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten with Nina Stemme, Elza van den Heever, Michael Volle, and Klaus Florian Vogt; Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd with Matthew Polenzani and Joshua Hopkins; and Vincenzo Bellini’s Il Pirata, with Diana Damrau, Javier Camarena, and Christopher Maltman. For the present post we have chosen to focus on Bellini’s opera, not heard at the Met since 2002-2003.

Il Pirata had its highly successful world premiere at Milan’s La Scala in 1827, launching Bellini’s career as a major composer for the lyric stage. Neglected in the early 20^th century, Il Pirata found a champion in Maria Callas who first sang Imogene at La Scala in 1958, then in a New York concert performance in 1959, now available on CD. Imogene became a congenial role for sopranos, notable among these Montserrat Caballé and Renée Fleming, with the range and the bel canto technique to meet its virtuosic demands. The Met’s first Pirata was mounted for Fleming in 2002; Marcello Giordani was Gualtiero, the pirate, and Dwayne Croft, the husband. Had Covid not intervened, the 2021 revival would have featured Diana Damrau, Javier Camarena, and Christopher Maltman.

We learn from the back story that, years before, Gualtiero and Imogene had been in love. Against her will, Imogene had been forced to marry Ernesto, Duke of Caldora. Thereupon, Gualtiero, the Duke’s rival, took to piracy. The opera reunites the three protagonists, the distraught wife, the jealous husband, the disconsolate lover.

We have chosen two excerpts that feature Maria Callas. The first is drawn from the Act II duet, “Tu mi apristi in cor ferita (You opened my wounded heart).” The furious Ernesto exacts from his wife the confession that she had, indeed, loved Gualtiero who, at this point, was falsely reported drowned. At the same time, Imogene rejects the accusation that she had been unfaithful to her husband. Constantino Ego is the baritone in this live 1959 Carnegie Hall performance.

Imogene’s mad scene is the opera’s conclusion. Delirious, she has a vision of her husband, now dead, together with their son. She is shocked by a fanfare announcing Gualtiero’s death sentence. Her frenzy grows as she imagines the scaffold being readied for his hanging. This excerpt is drawn from a 1959 concert in Hamburg. We are privileged to hear Callas’s masterful fusion of Imogene’s state of mind with Bellini’s elegant phrases while we see her face and hands convey the depth of the character’s anguish.

Post script: During the florid cabaletta of the final scene Imogene repeats the phrase “Il palco funesto (the fatal scaffold).” The word “palco” has a very different meaning in the context of the theater where it signifies a box. At the 1958 La Scala revival of Il Pirata, Callas, who was feuding with Antonio Ghiringhelli, the company’s intendant, pointed at Ghiringhelli’s box as she hurled the words “palco funesto” in his direction.

 

 

 

 

 

The Met in the Time of Pandemic: The Lost Season, June-September 2020, Aïda

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The summer of 2020 began with the disheartening announcement that the Met had cancelled the fall season. The company hoped to reopen on New Year’s Eve, a full seven months away. On September 23, the pandemic raging unabated, the administration had no choice but to cancel the spring 2021 season as well. The theater would be dark for another painful year.

 

Between June 1 and the end of September the Met continued to make news. Tragically, a second musician, assistant conductor Joel Revzen, had succumbed to the virus. His orchestra colleagues, furloughed since the end of March, had had to make major personal adjustments to compensate for the suspension of their $190K average salary. For its part, management anticipated a loss of revenue amounting to $100 million by the end of the year. And, to make matters worse, the Met was ineligible for the government loan program due to the magnitude of its payroll. 

 

The success of the daily streaming of titles from its archive and subsequent donations from thousands of grateful new contributors on lockdown led to the launching of a series of digital concerts at the nominal fee of $20 each. Unlike the earlier free recitals and the gala that were shot as amateur videos (see our post of April 16, 2012, https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7211323416075256950/3307619185363703156), this new series, originating from sites proximate to the artists’ homes, was professionally recorded. The first of the seventy-five-minute performances featured Jonas Kaufmann, the Baroque library of a Bavarian abbey serving as background. He was followed by Renée Fleming, Anna Netrebko, and nine other Met stars in standard arias from the operatic repertoire.

On September 20, one day before the lost season of 2020-2021 had been scheduled to open with Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda, a New York Times headline read, “The Met Opera Fired James Levine Citing Sexual Misconduct.” According to this report, the company, which had dismissed Levine in March 2018, settled with its former music director emeritus for $3.5 million. So ended what the Times called “one of the highest-profile, messiest feuds in the Met’s nearly 140-year history.”  

The night of September 21, 2020 would have have been the twelfth time Aïda opened a Met season. And in terms of titles most often programmed by the Met since its 1883 founding, Aïda ranks second after La Bohème. Verdi’s grandest opera was to have a new staging and a renowned cast: Anna Netrebko, Anita Rachvelishvili, Piotr Beczala, and Ludovic Tézier, conducted by Levine’s successor as music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Here are the selections we have chosen for this post, three magnificent duets, all performed in the 1960s, one of opera’s most fabulous eras.

The first is the Amonasro/Aïda duet. The claims of patriotism, patriarchy, and paternity come together in the Act III confrontation between the Ethiopian king and his daughter. Amonasro evokes their home, accuses Aïda of disloyalty to fatherland and father and, after a struggle, exacts the promise to betray her beloved Radamès, leader of the Egyptian troops. In a commercial recording conducted by Herbert von Karajan, Renata Tebaldi and Cornell MacNeil are brilliant adversaries in this epic conflict between duty and love.

Amneris's great scene is Act IV, Scene 1. She pleads for the life of Radames with the unyielding high priest, Ramfis. The power and timbre of Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr are to the measure of the despairing Egyptian princess. In this commercial recording conducted by Georg Solti, Giorgio Tozzi is Ramfis.

In the opera’s final scene, Radamès has been condemned to death and Aïda joins him in the tomb that closes in on their last moments. In the love duet “O terra addio (Farewell, O Earth)” they look ahead to the Heaven that awaits them and back on the vale of tears they are leaving behind. In this excerpt, drawn from a live performance, both principals float ethereal high pianissimi. Verdi specialist Carlo Bergonzi was a frequent Met Radamès; Aïda is Leyla Gencer whose long international itinerary did not include a stop at the Metropolitan, alas. Their stock gestures, troublesome on video, would not have distracted the audience seated in the vast space of Verona’s Roman arena unduly. At the very end we see and hear mezzo Fiorenza Cossotto as Amneris.

 

A Not-so Merry Widow

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The new production of Franz Lehár’s frothy The Merry Widow opened (how could it have been otherwise?) on the occasion of the Met’s 2014 New Year’s Eve gala. Lehár’s operetta will be broadcast next Saturday “Live in HD” on approximately 2,000 screens in sixty-seven countries, including more than 800 in the U.S. and an ever increasing number across the globe. Thousands upon thousands of spectators internationally, and the 3,800 or so in the house at Lincoln Center, will see and hear the Austro-Hungarian composer’s 1905 triumph, premiered at the much smaller Theater an der Wien, then with a capacity of 1,230 seats. Directed and choreographed by Broadway’s Susan Stroman, with sets designed by Julian Crouch and costumes by William Ivey Long, this is only the second investiture of Lehár’s popular work in the company’s more than 130-year history. 

 

Opposition to operetta at the huge Met began during the short, flamboyant, roiling regime of Heinrich Conried, general manager from 1903 to 1908, and continues to this day. Conried’s two boldest strokes were, without a doubt, the 1903 first staging of Wagner’s Parsifal outside of Bayreuth and, in 1907, the U.S. premiere of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Less provocative, although still bold, was Conried’s programming of Johann Strauss’s operetta, Die Fledermaus; the next year, he persisted with Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron). The argument against the genre in Conried’s time was two-pronged. Operettas, no matter how charming, even brilliant, had no place at the Met: their dialogue was lost in the vast reaches of the auditorium; their scores were scaled for intimate theatres. One hundred ten years later, in his review of the 2014 gala, the New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini sang the same refrain: that despite amplification, the Met is no place for spoken dialogue (“The house is a cavernous place for a genre that relies on dialogue”). In her Wall Street Journal notice, Heidi Waleson agreed (“Operetta, with its long stretches of spoken dialogue, remains an uneasy fit for this big theater and its artists, who are more comfortable projecting emotion and character through song”).

The performance we attended on January 9 bore out the judgment that the Met is inhospitable to the many yards of dialogue and to the musical canvas of The Merry Widow. The cast, for the most part, struggled in vain to put the show over. The very talented Broadway star Kelli O’Hara, in her Met debut role, was easily a match for veteran opera hands Renée Fleming and Nathan Gunn, both of whom were challenged by the modest vocal demands of the music, and for her duet partner, tenor Alek Shrader, whose voice invariably faded as he climbed into the upper register. It may well be that, thanks to the microphone and the close-up lens, the “Live in HD” audience will have the aural and visual advantage over the in-house public. As for the choreography and decor, they came to life only in a witty can-can, and in the scene change from Hanna’s garden to the interior of Maxim’s. This last deserved and received the biggest hand of the evening.

The new Merry Widow was intended as a flattering "twilight-of-career" vehicle for Fleming who has announced that she is tapering off her operatic engagements. The Met’s first Merry Widow (2000) was mounted as a farewell for beloved mezzo Frederica von Stade. But before von Stade there had been another pretender to the role of the wealthy widow from the mythical country of Pontevedro. Joan Sutherland was the first to press the Met for the part of Hanna. To her displeasure, she was denied. She got her revenge by withdrawing from the Met from 1978 to 1982. Here is “la Stupenda” as she makes her entrance in a 1979 Sydney performance.

Hanna’s haunting “Viljalied” suited the silky legato and gleaming top notes of Viennese Hilde Güden. Her many operetta recordings document that she was to the manner born.

In a 2004 Zurich production, Piotr Beczala and Ute Gfere sing the Act II Camille-Valencienne duet. Beczala shows off the timbre and style that have brought him to Met stardom.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Erich Kunz offer an irresistible case for the sentiment and erotic power of “The Merry Widow Waltz.” This excerpt is drawn from the nearly complete recording that helped launch Angel records in 1953.