Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (55 page)

“There’s nothing that defines an opera house more than new productions. There’s no new production that’s more significant or more important than
the ‘Ring’ cycle,” Peter Gelb asserts in the documentary he commissioned, Susan Froemke’s
Wagner’s Dream
(2012). The scale of “Der Ring des Nibelungen” tested the limits of his ambition. Each part of the tetralogy lays down its own gauntlet: the three swimming nixies of
Das Rheingold,
the seven equestrian warrior maidens of
Die Walküre, Siegfried
’s dragon, and the final conflagration of
Götterdämmerung
. Gelb turned to Lepage and Fillion who had brought off the floating sylphs and the ride to Hell of
La Damnation de Faust
. The team came up with a “tectonic” set, as Lepage called it, a beam almost as long as the width of the stage, supporting twenty-four massive planks that moved separately and together, rotated and tilted, functioned as floor, wall, and ceiling. Developed, constructed, and rehearsed over the span of two years in the director’s Québec studio, carrying a price tag of $16 million, give or take, the set was hyped as no other Met production since Conried’s 1903
Parsifal
. The immense “Machine” would reconfigure itself to represent river, forest, and mountaintop, and to reflect computerized projections of the imagery issuing from music and text. If Wagner was moved to build his Festspielhaus to the measure of his creation, and Conried to rebuild the 39th Street stage for his grandiose
Parsifal,
Gelb saw to buttressing the Lincoln Center stage for the ninety-thousand-pound apparatus to which he had given his repeated blessing.
³⁸

TABLE 20
.
Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 2006–07 to 2012–13

 

 

The playbill of the first “Ring” opera heard at the Met,
Die Walküre,
triumph of Leopold Damrosch’s 1884–85 season, reassured the public that “the stage settings, by Herr Wilhelm Hock, are after the original at Bayreuth.” Slavishly devoted to the Master’s blueprint, cognoscenti took exception to the slightest deviation ventured by the three subsequent reinvestitures through 1913–14—a curtain in place of a door, the scarcity or excess of foliage. Apart from a refitting of
Die Walküre
in 1935 attacked for minor infractions of the rule, the 1913–14 sets were trotted out for more than three decades. Lee Simonson’s perspectives of the Hudson Palisades in 1948 rankled purists. When Karajan and Schneider-Siemssen unveiled the first installment of their “Ring” in 1967, what little could be made out in the dimly lit décor proposed a reading that would have been legible to charter Wagnerites of the 1880s. And these same apostles would have been thrilled at the reverence paid to Wagner’s dictates in the late 1980s by Schenk and Schneider-Siemssen. Thanks to their edition, the Met became a Mecca for traditionalists infuriated by the heresies of regietheater.

The opening minutes of
Das Rheingold
(Sept. 27, 2010) promised a raft of imaginative applications of Lepage’s technology. The tops of the planks
undulated in imitation of the river; the Rhinemaidens rose from what had the appearance of bubbly depths. But then the “water” settled into a surface on which the mermaids were made to perch far too long. So it continued, unevenly: stunning and apposite effects—the god of fire walking backward up an incline, the acutely angled descent of Wotan and Loge into the Nibelheim on a twisted stairway—and dramatically inert stretches with the principals stranded on a narrow platform for the length of two entire scenes. A few prudent reviewers withheld judgment. Most took up sides, for (“worth its weight in gold,” “audience . . . spellbound”) and against (“[Lepage was just] playing with toys”).
Opera News
touched a painful nerve: “The current conventional wisdom is that the Met has abandoned the ‘park and bark’ school for operatic performance, but this
Rheingold
often seemed like its very embodiment.”
³⁹

 

FIGURE 46
.
Die Walküre
, act 3, “The Ride of the Valkyries,” 2011 (© Beth Bergman 2011, NYC)

 

Die Walküre
(April 22, 2011),
Siegfried
(Oct. 27, 2011), and
Götterdämmerung
(Jan. 27, 2012), unlike
Das Rheingold,
seesawed between felicitous and wrongheaded solutions. In a simulation of galloping steeds, the bobbing planks made surprisingly apt conveyances for the always problematic “Ride of the Valkyries.” The natural world came alive in projections of cascading streams and tangles of flora and fauna; through 3D animation, the Forest Bird, heretofore invisible, could at last flit among the branches. Lepage erred nowhere more glaringly than at the climax of
Walküre
where he chose to sacrifice the emotional crescendo of the farewell to yet more trickery. The sorrowful Wotan led Brünnhilde offstage only to reappear on high and lower her body double upside-down against the
tilted rock. By the finale of
Götterdämmerung,
the director seemed to have run out of ideas. The “Machine” and video illusions would, one might think, have been made to order for Siegfried’s funeral pyre, Brünnhilde’s immolation, the collapse of the hall of the Gibechungs, the river’s flood, the triumph of the Rhinemaidens, the drowning of Hagen, and the distant vision of Valhalla in flames. Lepage offered only a metal hobbyhorse for Grane, Brünnhilde’s brave mount, and toppling statues to mark the fall of the gods, gestures inadequate to the gigantic musical and dramatic conclusion of the composer’s sixteen-hour opus. Gelb could not have forgotten the stupendous cataclysm engineered with more conventional means by Schenk and Schneider-Siemssen. He had been executive producer for that 1990 unforgettable telecast.

Since the early 1950s, Wagner had had to subsist on a shallow pool of
hochdramatisch
sopranos and heldentenors. Given the times, Deborah Voigt was an adequate Brünnhilde. The originally scheduled Ben Heppner withdrew nearly a year before the premiere of
Siegfried
and was replaced by Gary Lehman, who withdrew, in turn, only days before the opening. It was up to Lehman’s cover, Jay Hunter Morris, to save the show. He assumed the role with aplomb and energy, and minus the heroic voice Wagner had in mind. The “Ring” standouts were Jonas Kaufmann, a lyric Siegmund; Bryn Terfel, a Wotan inhibited in
Rheingold
but towering in
Walküre
and
Siegfried;
Eric Owens, a wrathful yet vulnerable Alberich; and Stephanie Blythe, a Fricka tender beneath her moral outrage. The virtuoso orchestra, led first by Levine, and then by Luisi when the music director was obliged to cancel, was by itself worth the inflated ticket price.

Lepage argued that he had purged “layers and layers of socio-political stances,” had peeled away “all of that from the 20th century and [gone] back to the 19th century,” to the “poetical world, the mythological world” as they were first staged by Wagner himself in 1876 (
Times,
April 22, 2012). Gelb boasted, “Lepage may be the first director to execute what Wagner actually wanted to see onstage” (
Times,
April 4, 2012). It could be argued that in producing a computer-generated translation of Wagner’s intentions, Lepage had advanced a true version of the “Ring.” But the noisy hulk was more often hostile than friendly to poetry. The other claim, that Lepage had swept away tired high concept, whether Marxist, “Green,” abstract, archaic, or futuristic, foundered, as had poetry and mythology, under the weight of the immense set. The “Machine” itself was the concept, the tectonic object the message. Décor and staging had wrestled narrative and character to the ground: theatricality, Gelb’s watchword, had swallowed drama. Having rejected pictorialism, and
then concept as normally defined, this particular third way was unlikely to serve as template for future operatic design and direction.

The culminating episode of the “Ring” saga reached the readership of the
New York Times
on May 21, 2012, when the paper, whose masthead had long carried the Gelb family name, ran a story under the headline “Latest Met Aria: Bad Opera News is No News.” The “Ring” had made the rare and in this instance embarrassing leap from the Arts and Leisure section to the front page. F. Paul Driscoll, editor in chief of
Opera News,
had announced the previous day that with the June issue the publication would no longer review Met performances, “a policy prompted by the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative critiques.” Its coverage of other companies would continue. The previous month,
Opera News
had panned
Götterdämmerung
as “less an interpretation of the opera than a desultory series of tactics for dealing with its daunting challenges.” Asked by the
Times
to comment on the decision, Gelb pulled out this blistering sentence from a piece by features editor Brian Kellow in the May issue: “The public is becoming more dispirited each season by the pretentious and woefully misguided, misdirected productions foisted on them.” Gelb might as easily have pointed to pans of
Tosca
or
Armida
or
Faust
. To his mind, such acid criticism crossed the line between
Opera News
and its publisher, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, and by extension between the Guild and its parent Metropolitan Opera Company, a boundary Gelb had lately blurred by appointing one of his assistant general managers to the Guild directorship and by moving Guild education programs to the Met itself.
⁴⁰

Founded in 1936 and circulated year round to upward of one hundred thousand, among them Met contributors,
Opera News
had reviewed company performances since 1971–72, Bing’s final season. On May 22, in the wake of outrage that clotted the operatic internet and threats from subscribers to discontinue their memberships and halt their contributions, Gelb reversed himself on what he had first termed a determination made in concert with the magazine. The world perceived his action as censorship. Gelb did not. As late as March 2013, he argued, “My point was that the guild should stop publishing reviews of the Met altogether, which was not an act of censorship but what seemed to me like common sense under the circumstances. Why should the Met pay for a publication that’s writing negative reviews of Met productions?” His defense only compounded the fracture. It is hard to know whether the spring 2012 contretemps colored commentary in
Opera News
in 2012–13. Volume 77 was nothing if not judicious.
⁴¹

As to the “Machine,” it was dismantled in May 2013. Its parts were carted off to warehouses in New Jersey and upstate New York. First announced for revival in 2016 or 2017, the Lepage production, according to Gelb, would, in all likelihood, return in 2018–19, the postponement caused by “a certain amount of ‘Ring’ fatigue.”
⁴²

In 2012–13, attendance was down to 79 percent of capacity. The management put the onus on Sandy, the hurricane of October 2012, and on jacked-up ticket prices (
Times,
Feb. 27, 2013, Jan. 29, 2014). The Met announced that the increases would be rolled back by roughly 10 percent in 2013–14. The greater number of tickets sold would make up for the price cuts; “at least it better” was the way Gelb put it. The hard fact was that due, in part, to the hike in prices, in 2012–13, box office had yielded only 69 percent of its potential, over 10 percent less than in most of the previous decade. In late spring, the Met dissolved the last vestige of its resident ballet troupe; in the future, dancers would be hired show by show. The brunt of the blame for the company’s woes continued to fall on the number and kind of new productions, each costing $2 to $3 million, and the “Ring” much more. Extreme reinvestitures were subject to particular scrutiny, as they had been under Volpe. But their greater number under Gelb altered the equation. In the last four years of the previous administration, of sixteen new productions, only
Jenufa, La Juive, Mazeppa,
and
Salome
challenged the expected. In the first four years fairly ascribed entirely to Gelb, 2009–13, there were seven rereadings among his twenty-three new productions. And among these were the indisputably core
Les Contes d’Hoffmann, La Traviata, Faust, Rigoletto,
and
Parsifal
. It was not only the number of radical restagings that separated Gelb from Volpe; it was that Gelb’s rejection of convention tampered with operas well known and best loved. To this calculus we should also include the in-your-face refittings of
Tosca, Un Ballo in maschera,
and
Manon
.