Last fall, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic when he talked to the Times about the production history of Nico Muhly’s opera “Two Boys,” which had its première at the English National Opera last June and is scheduled for the 2013-14 season at the Met. “London was really the equivalent of doing something out of town,” Gelb said, implying that the E.N.O. is to the Met as smaller theatres are to Broadway—places where new work is tried out before it is ready for the big time. There were clucks of disapproval from Londoners, who don’t see themselves as minor leaguers. Gelb later explained to Opera magazine that he had been speaking “partly in jest.”
Gelb’s words rang particularly false because the quality of operatic programming and production in New York has lately plummeted, to the point where the city may no longer qualify as a pace-setting opera capital. The Met still puts on big, starry shows, with hundreds of gifted people laboring behind the scenes to bring them to life. But one staging after another has failed to catch fire, and the most ambitious undertaking of the Gelb era, Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s “Ring,” is a very damp squib. New York City Opera, meanwhile, has teetered on the edge of extinction, its board and management accused of hard-heartedness and ineptitude. Last month, having been priced out of Lincoln Center, the company decamped to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to present “La Traviata” and Rufus Wainwright’s “Prima Donna.” Neither show felt like a turnaround.
The operatic news is being made elsewhere. Both London companies, Covent Garden and the E.N.O., have offered contemporary pieces on contemporary themes. European houses from Bayreuth on down grapple with Wagner in serious terms. The San Francisco Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, and the Minnesota Opera pay more heed to American work. New York has yet to see Messiaen’s “Saint Francis,” Birtwistle’s “Gawain,” Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin,” and a dozen other modern masterpieces. The city has, in truth, seldom been on the front lines of operatic art, but it now seems almost peripheral—even “out of town.”
“Götterdämmerung,” the final installment of Lepage’s “Ring,” arrived in January, rounding out what must be considered a historic achievement. Pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history. Many millions of dollars have been spent to create a gargantuan scenic machine of creakily moving planks, which have overshadowed the singers, even cowed them, without yielding especially impressive images. When Lepage was announced as the director of this “Ring,” his Wagner credentials were questioned, but he was at least expected to provide some high-tech razzle-dazzle, along the lines of his work with Ex Machina and Cirque du Soleil. “Rheingold” had its striking moments, such as Wotan and Loge’s journey down to Nibelheim, with acrobats seen in overhead perspective. Since then, wonders have been few. The Met’s previous “Ring,” the picturesque Otto Schenk staging, lingers more vividly in the memory. As for the psychological depths of the “Ring” story, Lepage’s clumsy comic-book approach suffers in comparison with many Hollywood superhero movies, never mind the visions of Wieland Wagner and Patrice Chéreau.
Undaunted by criticism, Lepage saved the worst for last. In the final scene of “Götterdämmerung,” as Brünnhilde delivers her monologue of world-redeeming love, we see Siegfried’s funeral pyre being assembled in the background: logs are piled up, the body is set in place, and it is festooned with multicolored streamers, evidently left over from a Maypole dance. Then Brünnhilde calls for her horse, Grane, and a puppet animal with a bouncing head is brought onstage, looking, in the words of the critic James Jorden, like “nothing so much as a mechanical bull in a country-western bar.” And when Valhalla burns, the heads of statues representing the gods explode. Yes, they explode! As this amateur-hour Ragnarök unfolded, I heard around me sounds suggestive of suppressed giggles, and fought the urge to make noises of my own. But my main impulse was to bury my face in my hands. It’s an embarrassment that this catastrophically vapid spectacle is what New York will be offering to the world when the Wagner bicentennial arrives next year.
When I criticize Met shows these days, I sometimes receive letters protesting that they look better in the company’s Live in HD transmissions, which have found large audiences around the world. In the case of the “Götterdämmerung” finale, I can imagine that tasteful cross-cutting made more sense of the scene. The night I was there, Katarina Dalayman was giving a fairly forceful performance as Brünnhilde—substantial in volume, dark in color, a bit edgy on top—but she was undermined by the business going on around her. I wonder whether it is almost unfair to review new Met stagings from the point of view of one sitting in the house, since they now seem designed more for the camera operators. And there is the looming problem. If opera fails as live theatre, people will stop coming, and cinema receipts will never make up the difference.
Fabio Luisi, the Met’s new principal conductor, did not save the evening in musical terms. He cut a deft figure on the podium, leading in lucid and propulsive style. There were fine touches in this “Götterdämmerung,” notably in the diaphanous music that follows Hagen’s Watch, in Act I. Much of the rest, however, was routine; the orchestra does not play as sumptuously for him as it did for James Levine. The final scene was disconcertingly businesslike, and the blissful closing theme in the violins, rendered without much of a crescendo and with an oddly abrupt fade at the end, came across as trivial. Luisi has said that he wishes to dispense with “heavy German tradition,” but he seems also to have discarded Wagner’s term Ausdrucksvoll—“full of expression.”
The best moments came from the deep-voiced villains: Hans-Peter König’s Hagen, implacable behind a treacherously convivial façade; Eric Owens’s Alberich, passionate in hate. Owens has been the great discovery of this “Ring,” singing the first Wagner of his career, and Gelb deserves credit for promoting him. Gelb has also done well by the surging bel-canto soprano Angela Meade, building a revival of “Ernani” around her. Other casting choices have been more dubious, but singing at the Met remains at a generally high level. The chief defect is theatrical: despite Gelb’s promises of modernization, stagings are less sure-footed, less cohesive, than they were in the Joseph Volpe era—no golden age, to be sure.
Now that Levine is on prolonged medical leave, the major decisions are falling to Gelb, with erratic results. Opera is, of course, a perilous business, and even the finest managers have dozens of flops. Yet Gelb has stubbornly defended Lepage, and invited him back to direct Thomas Adès’s “The Tempest” next fall. In an editorial for the Huffington Post, Gelb wrote, “Because our ‘Ring’ is revolutionary, not everyone supports it.” Whether or not he believes that preposterous statement, he is acting more like a publicist than like a leader. As Anthony Tommasini stated in the Times, the Met needs a vigorous artistic presence on its staff if it is to halt its slide.
The decline of City Opera has been swifter and sadder. The critic Fred Cohn, in recounting the sorry tale for Opera News, assigns a substantial portion of the blame to the investment banker Susan Baker, who became the chairman of the board in 2004, and presided over a string of oblivious decisions. A big-spending European impresario was hired; a hugely expensive renovation forced the cancellation of an entire season; the impresario never showed up; and the company became a gaunt ghost of its former self. In five years, City Opera has gone from presenting more than a hundred performances a season to presenting sixteen. George Steel, who became general manager and artistic director in 2009, has yet to revivify the company; his seasons have been jumbled and befuddling.
Wainwright’s “Prima Donna,” which had its première at the Manchester International Festival in 2009, tells of Régine Saint Laurent, an aging soprano who cancels a planned comeback and chooses to retire with her memories. It is several notches above the efforts of Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, and other pop stars who have dabbled in composition: the lyrical passages manifest an individual harmonic style, rich in added tones and unexpected shifts. With the assistance of the composer Bryan Senti, Wainwright has devised an effective orchestral palette, leaning on Massenet, Debussy, and Puccini. The vocal writing is sometimes indulgent—why must a sweetly folkish aria for Régine’s maid end on a shrill high E?—but the lead role made a natural fit for the warm-voiced soprano Melody Moore, who led the cast at City Opera.
What stymies “Prima Donna” is the static, stylized plot, which requires a more resourceful score than the songlike set pieces and pastiche exercises that Wainwright supplies. When Régine experiences her crisis of confidence, the orchestra devolves into an iPod-shuffle hurly-burly, complete with deafening progressions out of “Salome.” The libretto, a French-language creation credited to Wainwright and Bernadette Colomine, aims for high camp but too often sounds wooden. (“This is the last album I’ll ever sign” isn’t quite “It’s the pictures that got small.”) Still, the work has its charms, and ends winningly, with a buoyantly wistful aria that should have set the tone for the whole.
Such a feast of nostalgia, wrapped in celebrity hype, hardly serves to differentiate City Opera from the Met. (In fact, Wainwright’s piece was originally intended for the Met; Gelb rejected it, ostensibly because of the French libretto.) The “Traviata,” a Jonathan Miller production borrowed from the Glimmerglass Festival, looked anemic compared with the Met’s current staging of the opera, a visually bold though emotionally frigid affair, directed by Willy Decker. So far, City Opera shows little evidence of being rejuvenated.
This has been the most dispiriting opera season since I began reviewing music in New York, twenty years ago. Although the economic crisis has taken its toll, the problem is less a lack of money than a lack of intellectual vitality. Both the Met and City Opera are committing the supreme operatic sin: they are thinking small. ♦