Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (51 page)

 

FIGURE 41
.
Madama Butterfly
simulcast on screen outside the Met, September 25, 2006 (courtesy Corbis)

 

Seven countries, the United States aside, constituted the 2006–07 “The Met: Live in HD” network: Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The next year saw the inclusion of
Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. Venues at home and abroad grew each season until screens in spring 2013 numbered nineteen hundred spread over sixty-four countries on six continents; from the Homer Theatre in Homer, Alaska, to the Shanghai Grand in Shanghai, China, the Walter Reade only spitting distance from the Metropolitan itself, the Cairo Opera House, the Icaria in Barcelona, Spain, the CMAX in Devonport, Tasmania, the Teatro Nescafe de las Artes, Santiago, Chile, and the Roxy in Missoula, Montana. Gelb had signed exclusivity agreements with optimal venues everywhere, “preventing other opera companies from relaying their work on the same screens—hardly a collegiate move,” the
Guardian
observed wryly. Gelb’s response? “We don’t force movie theatres to take our movies; we don’t hold a gun to their heads. They could take the Royal Opera if they wanted to.” David Gockley was philosophical: “I think Peter, with his media background with Sony and some of the colleagues he worked with saw the light before any of the rest of us did.” Rival top-tier opera houses and festivals that attempted to get into the telecast act—La Scala, Covent Garden, and Salzburg, among others—settled principally for the transmission of previously recorded performances. Together with fellow newcomers to alternative content, ballet and theater, their product, often edgier than that of the Met, proved profitable to exhibitors on days and times otherwise fallow. And such became the popularity of the Met Saturday afternoon transmissions that many movie houses began to repeat the Met simulcasts as weekday “Encores.”

 

FIGURE 42
.
Peter Gelb, right, in production truck, simulcast of
Aïda
, Dec. 15, 2012 (© Marty Sohl)

 

The new medium provided the opera novice intimate contact with the forbidding art form, extracted from its inaccessible habitat, magnified, and subtitled, its ceremonial demystified by intermission interviews and shots of stagehands striking one set, erecting another. Satellite television preserved operagoing as a communal venture, collecting audiences to share the real time of performance in the Met’s red and gold hall. By the same token, shots of the in-house spectators, most of whom had spent five to ten times the price of a HD admission for their seat, made the sociological divide between the two audiences emphatically clear, one observed surrounded by patrician splendor, the other left to its observation in ordinary surroundings. Still, it was not uncommon for attendees miles and time zones distant from New York to applaud, to shout “bravo” along with the privileged few thousand at Lincoln Center.

The telecasts were not without warts. There were those who objected to the sacrifice of the full stage to close-ups that exposed the more hapless singers as they strained for high notes and high volume. Some were disconcerted by the abrupt transition from the enchantment of the stage to the frenzy of backstage interviews. There were vagaries of sound and image reproduction, occasional interruptions or distortions in the satellite transmission, and the unwelcome smell of popcorn. The irremediable grief was the amplified acoustic, the electronic mediation between singers trained to project their voices without intervention and listeners frustrated at the interference of sound engineers. On the technologically leveled playing field, performers swamped by the orchestra in the house came through loud and clear at the multiplex. Without question, “Live in HD” was not the same as being there, as the host of each telecast was duty bound to insist. Gelb himself made the point: “It’s like watching ‘Monday Night Football.’ You’re getting extra information and commentary, but there is still no replacement for the visceral thrill, excitement, and sound of being at the actual opera house.”
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The new productions of 2006–07 continued the drift away from the pictorialism ubiquitous in the years prior to the Volpe/Levine regime. Only
Il
Trittico
(April 20, 2007) could be counted, as Gelb described it, a “wedding-cake production.” The general manager shoehorned a
Madama Butterfly
of his own choosing into his first opening night (Sept. 25, 2006), reviving the Bing tradition of kicking off the season with a new production. This
Butterfly
could not have been more unlike its 1994 investiture. Michael Scott’s detailed Japanese house, leafy garden, and honest-to-goodness pond gave way to Michael Levine’s unadorned box, its high-polished floor sloping upstage, a mirror slanted above to reflect the action. Sliding screens defined and redefined the spaces, minimal props were brought in as needed. As critical as the décor was the staging of Anthony Minghella, Oscar-winning director of
The English Patient,
in his opera debut. Minghella and his wife and collaborator, choreographer Carolyn Choa, brushed an already stylized mise-en-scène with borrowings from Bunraku theater. Their most wondrous invention was Trouble, Butterfly’s son, a puppet artfully manipulated by three veiled puppeteers garbed in black. The patently artificial effigy of a Japanese-American boy in a sailor suit, fondled by his mother first in love and pride and then in grief, was infinitely more affecting than the flesh-and-blood prop conventionally carted about by Cio-Cio-San and her faithful Suzuki. Other details remain indelible: the entrance of Butterfly in a line of geishas appearing from below; the love duet in a garden of lanterns and bamboo stalks wielded by actor-dancers; the mimed opening of act 2, Pinkerton vanishing in the time it took for a screen to cover his exit, leaving behind an empty chair as a sign of his absence. Viewers would have been hard put to recall a more moving presentation of the opera or a more gorgeous series of stage pictures. With this sortie, Gelb kept his tricky promise: the Minghella/Levine
Butterfly
challenged the audience while shielding it from the “unpleasant artistic experiences” of regietheater commonly dubbed “Eurotrash.” As Alex Ross wrote joyfully of the coproduction with the English National Opera and the Lithuanian National Opera, “for the duration of the gala, there was no more fabulous place on earth, which is as it should be.”
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From the second night of the 2006–07 season to the start of 2009–10, the extent of Gelb’s responsibility either for new productions or for the selection of repertoire, directors, designers, and casts, necessarily made years in advance, is difficult to calculate. Tan Dun’s
The First Emperor
(Dec. 21, 2006) was a world premiere, and Richard Strauss’s
Die Ägyptische Helena
had last been heard at the Met in 1928. Fan Yue’s unit set for
The First Emperor,
a stage-filling staircase, bore the weight of Qin’s resolve to unify China. Film director Zhang Yimou was left minimal downstage space to block the sketchy
personal drama. The score called for the chant of a Beijing opera singer, the twang of the
zheng
(a Chinese zither), the thud and clank of various percussive surfaces, Tibetan singing bowls, and a giant bell stationed at the foot of the proscenium. Musical interest waned when the composer looked to the West: “The lyrical set pieces in
The First Emperor
are couched in a sickly sweet Americana idiom that sounds rather like watered-down Copland or Bernstein with a dash of Hollywood banality.” Sixty-seven-year-old Domingo, his middle range still warm and secure, had nothing to fear from a role tailored to his bari-tenorial register. Despite Tan Dun’s negative notices, spurred by Domingo’s stardom
The First Emperor
did very well at the box office through its two-season run.
Die Ägyptische Helena
(March 15, 2007) was a vehicle for Deborah Voigt. The soprano had lost some of the gleam and thrust that had made her an authoritative Straussian. But even in prime vocal form, she would have strained to win an audience for the opera’s riff on marriage and adultery, encumbered as it is by a ludicrous scenario. Director and designer David Fielding set the action (again!) “in a dream landscape . . . in the head of Aithra [the sorceress]. . . . It’s as if the opera is driven by her own psychosis or psychoanalysis.” Fielding’s surrealist take—skewed walls, crooked doors, a flat etched with the silhouette of a man running, Helena’s giant bed, the clash of business suits and classical gowns—was preferable to the exhausted alternative of cramming an irrational libretto into an ersatz depiction of an ancient civilization.
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FIGURE 43
.
Cristina Gallardo-Domâs as Cio-Cio-San with “Trouble” and puppeteer in
Madama Butterfly
, September 11, 2006 (© Ken Howard, 2006)

 

It was Gelb who brought in Bartlett Sher, fresh from his Tony-nominated
A Light in the Piazza,
for
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
(Nov. 10, 2006). Sher’s nimble staging of Rossini’s opera buffa put Michael Yeargan’s portable barbershop, moveable doors and orange trees, and floating balcony and staircase through their paces. The director and designer came up with an ingenious ramp that circled the pit, creating the intimacy wanted by comedy. Peter Mattei, Juan Diego Flórez, Diana Damrau, and the rest of the cast enacted the madcap goings-on with wit, and tossed off the fioritura with ease. For
Il Trittico
(April 20, 2007), Volpe had contracted Broadway heavy hitter and three-time Tony winner Jack O’Brien. But it was Gelb, heralding the advent of his era once again, who introduced O’Brien to the board on June 25, 2006. O’Brien bounced the ruses of
Gianni Schicchi
from thirteenth-century Italy to the Italian boom years of the 1950s, a perfect fit for the greedy tricksters tricked. Each of Douglas W. Schmidt’s realistic sets drew applause: the bedchamber of
Gianni Schicchi
that sank below stage, giving way to a sunny terrace overlooking Florence; the barge of
Il Tabarro
jutting downstage, framed by a row of factory buildings and the high arch of a bridge; the cobblestoned convent courtyard of
Suor Angelica
. Two stands of rotating risers replaced the routine of crumbling Grecian columns in the
Orfeo ed Euridice
(May 2, 2007) of director Mark Morris and set designer Allen Moyers. Orfeo’s pleated tunic gave way to couturier Isaac Mizrahi’s modish black, the winged Amore flew earthward in sneakers and spangled shirt, the dancers were turned out like twenty-somethings on a gambol in the park. Stacked in the bleachers were choristers costumed as Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Garbo, Honest Abe, Jackie O., Princess Di, and on and on, witness to the timelessness of the Orpheus myth. Morris’s playful choreography made its strongest effect in the happy finale. The run was dedicated to mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson who had been scheduled to play the lead. At her death in July 2006, the role passed to countertenor David Daniels.
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