Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (42 page)

If the star singers of the 1950s found the American road less appealing than had their elders, from the point of view of management the tour remained a necessity. Bing was categorical: “The tour is the Metropolitan’s economic basis for existence: if we have no tour the Metropolitan will close because we will not have the funds to support ourselves. If we continue to tell the important tour cities that they cannot have the distinguished artists who have such outstanding success in New York, they will decline to accept our tours.” The particular “distinguished” artist he had in mind was Renata Tebaldi, whose fee he sweetened by a then munificent $500 per performance. Tebaldi’s Violetta and Tosca were the drawing cards of the 1957 tour. The following spring, the casts were as good as, and sometimes better than, those in New York:
Aïda
and
Madama Butterfly
with Antonietta Stella and Carlo Bergonzi;
Don Giovanni
with George London, Eleanor Steber, and Cesare Valletti; and
Otello
with Mario Del Monaco, Leonard Warren, and Zinka Milanov. Nonetheless, that very season, the ranks of first-tier traveling artists were perilously thin. The company had had no choice but to announce at the outset two tenor comprimarios in principal roles, Giulio Gari as Turiddu, and Charles Anthony as Almaviva. It was downhill from there.
³²

Twenty years later, the
Times
plumbed the sorry depths to which the tour had descended (June 13, 1976). In many cities, the auditoriums were cavernous
civic centers or hockey rinks whose acoustics required amplification, whose tiny pits forced reduced orchestras, and whose pitiful stages were inadequate to the scenery. To avoid paying overtime, scores were hacked:
Carmen
sometimes lost the children’s chorus and the orchestral entr’actes,
Meistersinger
a quarter of its music. Too often, management pulled a bait and switch whereby stars listed in the initial announcements were replaced by dimmer lights. Levine himself decried the look and sound of the shows: “The Met used to depend a lot on painted sets. Now our style is so complex that we find it hard to adapt productions to the theatre stages and orchestra pits now available to us. The lack of resonance from concrete floors in the pit, for example . . . changes drastically what we can accomplish” (
Times,
Jan. 17, 1982). From Crawford’s perspective, the problem was the repertoire, the
Peter Grimes,
the
Francesca da Rimini,
the
Rinaldo
for which he blamed Levine: “If you had deliberately set out to sabotage the tour [of 1984], you couldn’t have done a better job.”
³³

Once a cash cow, the tour had become a cash leech, a $1-million-a-year drag on the budget. In 1986, only Boston, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Minneapolis booked the woeful final sampler. If it is unfair to compare Atlanta’s Santuzza and Turiddu, Nicole Lorange and Vladimir Popov, to their 1919 counterparts, Ponselle and Caruso, as recently as 1970 the leads of
Cavalleria rusticana
had been the high-powered Fiorenza Cossotto and Plácido Domingo. The national tour went out with a whimper. At its last matinée performance, in Minneapolis on May 31, 1986, neither the Roméo, comprimario Jon Garrison, nor the Juliette, Monique Baudoin, had ever sung their roles at the Met. In fact, Baudoin had never sung any role at all at the Met. Later that June, she came as close as she ever would to Lincoln Center when the company presented Gounod’s opera in the Great Meadow of Central Park.

By the end of 1986–87, it was bruited about that Crawford had invaded the artistic realm. Not only had he taken to auditioning singers, but it was he who succeeded in enticing the revered and elusive conductor Carlos Kleiber to the Met. At about that time, Levine had asked to be relieved of some administrative duties so that he might concentrate more fully on the music. He continued to corner new productions. Wagner, Mozart, most of Verdi, and the two modernist works,
Bluebeard’s Castle
and
Erwartung,
were his.
Among the guests, only Kleiber enjoyed prestige equal or superior to Levine’s. Richard Bonynge was something of a regular as conductor of his wife, Joan Sutherland. Marek Janowski, Manuel Rosenthal, and Charles Dutoit had only brief Met careers. But despite the repeated riff on
Damn Yankees,
“Whatever Jimmy wants, Jimmy gets,” with Crawford’s growing influence it was plainly no longer “Jimmy’s show” alone (
Times,
July 23, 1987; Sept. 22, 1985).

In March 1987, the auditorium was named for Sibyl Harrington. The announcement came during one of Zilkha’s onstage corporate dinners. Harrington’s generosity had come with the caveat that she would support productions in the grandest manner only. To Dexter’s disgust, the horse and wolfhounds on which she insisted had been front and center in the Fontainebleau scene of his
Don Carlo;
and to Zeffirelli’s glee, she took a special fancy to his recurrent menageries. Harrington’s clout provided another opening for lamentations on the state of opera in New York. “Serious opera fans have received the dedication as a defiant Bronx cheer,” griped one critic. Zeffirelli’s
La Bohème, Tosca,
and
Turandot,
all underwritten by Harrington, had “turned the Metropolitan from house of art into tourist attraction, a nice conclusion, perhaps, to a bus tour including lunch at Mama Leone’s” (
Times,
Nov. 12, 1987).
³⁴

For four consecutive seasons, in its pursuit of black ink, the Met channeled the Zeffirelli/Harrington aesthetic. From 1982 to 1986, the company had mounted fourteen new productions, seven of them premieres or revivals of operas long absent. Among the eighteen new productions of 1986–90, there were only two premieres,
Giulio Cesare
and
Erwartung,
and no resurrections. Instead, the “Ring,”
Aïda, La Traviata,
and other chestnuts acquired the look of luxury. The promise of an expanded repertoire made by Levine and Dexter in the mid-1970s, honored for a decade, was deferred indefinitely. The critics bristled when the company retracted its commission for a new work by Jacob Druckman and canceled a Levine pet project, Schoenberg’s
Moses und Aron:
“For box-office reasons, the company has been pulling in its horns ever since James Levine and Bruce Crawford took charge as artistic director and general manager”; “The general manager conceded that it was now company policy to concentrate on popular operas that could fill the Met’s 3,800-seat theatre.”
³⁵

For 1986–87, Schenk and Schneider-Siemssen were entrusted with two highly visible projects, the first installment of their “Ring” and
Die Fledermaus
(Dec. 4). Schneider-Siemssen designed a far more naturalistic tetralogy than the one he had contrived for Karajan a decade earlier. Bucking
the doctrine of abstraction in vogue since the first postwar Bayreuth festival, 1951, the Met
Die Walküre
(Sept. 22) opted for faithful adherence to Wagner’s scenic and dramatic instructions. Levine took command of the Wagnerian marathon for the first time; Behrens was a gripping Brünnhilde; James Morris established himself as the Wotan of his generation. But where were the heldentenors? During the first years of the run, none of the Siegmunds approached the Vickers standard; worse still, none of the Siegfrieds came close to passable. Schenk, who found the Rhine more salubrious than Bad Ischl, the waters of
Fledermaus,
drowned the operetta in age-old Viennese shtick. The lyrics were restored to the original German for the first time since 1905. Although the premiere was an off night for everyone (“about halfway through the first act . . . it became painfully clear that the most generous approach to the remainder of the evening would be to look for bright spots amid the gloom”), the New Year’s Eve telecast captures Te Kanawa, the Rosalinde, back in form in a lush “Csárdás.” Despite the dwindling box office of subsequent seasons, the Eisensteins and their fellow bon vivants would cavort in their revolving ballroom in nine revivals through 2006.
³⁶

Zeffirelli’s immense
Turandot
(March 12, 1987) was even more overstuffed than his
La Bohème
or
Tosca
. The audience gasped in amazement, and many critics in dismay, during the act 2 riddle scene when the princess’s imperial backpack gushed multicolored streamers.
Opera News
raised the specter of the opera itself getting “lost in the shuffle” when “the machinery works better than ever.” In the April 4 telecast, Marton’s icy princess is frequently strident, Domingo sacrifices the unknown prince’s dreamy tenderness to the role’s heroic outbursts, and Mitchell is a rich-toned Liù. The intimacy of Verdi’s
La Traviata
(Oct. 16, 1989) was smothered under Zeffirelli’s hyperbole. The Met’s hi-tech stage held out the temptation of re-creating the effects that his 1982 motion picture reduction of the opera owed to camera and editing. He invented action for the two preludes, upstaging as great a conductor as Carlos Kleiber. For
Don Giovanni
(March 22, 1990), with a backward glance at Rococo stagecraft and the canny manipulation of sliding panels and trompe-l’oeil backdrops, Zeffirelli eschewed his customary realism. First-night critics were divided. In the engrossing video, Ramey’s forceful Giovanni heads a strong cast; the Elvira, Karita Mattila, in her debut role, displays the bloom and energy audiences would cherish through sixteen seasons and counting. When Zeffirelli’s design for
Aïda
was rejected as exorbitant, the commission went to Sonja Frisell and Gianni Quaranta; the management was after Zeffirelli’s manner, not his pricetag. Frisell and Quaranta’s still-extant
spectacle (Dec. 8, 1988)—its monumental statues framing the opening scene, the colossi of act 2 so tall that they exceeded the height of the proscenium—leaves us to wonder at the scale of Zeffirelli’s proposal. Ponnelle’s “elephantine”
Manon
(Feb. 6, 1987), tested in Vienna and Munich, sported a two-level, four-chamber gambling den, a Cours-la-Reine tightrope walker, and a final scene sited in a garbage dump—a window, said Andrew Porter, into the designer-director’s opinion of the work.
³⁷

In
Il Trovatore
(Nov. 12, 1987), a plethora of wandering columns became the object of hilarity; the staging obliged the cast to fight off an unfriendly acoustical environment, and at least one flight of stairs too many. Designer Rolf Langenfass described his
Faust
(Feb. 1, 1990) as “almost like a
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
town.” German cinematic expressionism may have fit the subject, but it clashed with Gounod’s graceful score. This would be the one Met credit of Broadway director Harold Prince.
Giulio Cesare,
the company’s third Handel offering, was probably the weakest of all the new productions between 1986 and 1990. The direction and décor, imported from the English National Opera, would have better been embargoed. One critic wrote, “John Pascoe’s sets strained for exotic gilded effect, but on the whole reminded one of the lobby décor of a Grand Hyatt hotel.” Kathleen Battle, the Cleopatra, exquisite as always, had become overly cautious, and not much voice or temperament crossed the footlights. This
Giulio Cesare
would return with some frequency; with Handelians Stephanie Blythe, David Daniels, and Ruth Ann Swenson, it would make a persuasive argument for the Baroque’s place in the Met’s repertoire.
³⁸

Two twentieth-century rarities and one core rereading were beneficiaries of the most intriguing treatments of the Crawford-Levine years.
Bluebeard’s Castle
(in English) and
Erwartung
shared not only a heavy dose of pre–World War I angst but the same set. Both would have profited from the direction of Peter Sellars, originally slotted for the productions. For Martin Bernheimer, the result was “all very chic and very silly. The claptrap could even be funny if it weren’t such an affront to Bartók’s brooding, decaying romanticism and Schoenberg’s febrile, ecstatic expressionism.” Bartók’s tonality and the snatches of melodic contour he fashioned for the mysterious Bluebeard and the inquisitive Judith played to the strengths of Ramey’s granitic bass and Norman’s deep soprano. The liquid flow of Norman’s voice was impeded by the sprechstimme of Schoenberg’s monodrama. Low box office may well have dissuaded the management from repeating these seminal works. Jürgen Rose’s provocative
Salome
(Feb. 20, 1989) gave Herod a palace all aslant, with
much of the staging relegated to a repellent basement floor. The eclectic costumes and décor evoked not Biblical Palestine, but the seamy decadence of Gotham. Eva Marton made no secret of her aversion to Salome’s frilly prom dress.
³⁹

Compounding disappointment over new productions was the decreasing presence of top-flight stars. Second casts were especially weak. Erich Leinsdorf minced no words: “Let’s face it, it is today absolutely a fact that even for roles that are not difficult, there are at best two or three first-rate singers in the world” (
Times,
Nov. 12, 1987). Defections persisted: Maria Ewing walked out when the
Carmen
telecast went to Agnes Baltsa, Renato Bruson canceled his Macbeth when the falling dollar cut into his fee, Eva Marton (his Lady Macbeth) found the replacement Thanes of Cawdor beneath her dignity. Already displeased with the
Salome
production and costume, and furious over the assignment of Hildegard Behrens to the telecast “Ring,” Marton stayed away for eight seasons. Still, many were happy to be at the Met. Carlo Bergonzi at sixty-three remained a mellifluous Nemorino, and Alfredo Kraus was ever astonishing as an eternally youthful Roméo, Werther, and Hoffmann. Mirella Freni was admired for her brave move to the Russian repertoire. After a seven-season hiatus, Teresa Stratas returned to take on all three heroines of
Il Trittico
. As for newcomers, Dawn Upshaw and Hei-Kyung Hong graduated from Barbarina to Susanna in
Le Nozze di Figaro
(Hong eventually to the Countess), Heidi Grant Murphy from a Servant in
Die Frau ohne Schatten
to the
Rosenkavalier
Sophie, and Dwayne Croft from Fiorello to Figaro in
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
. Among those who debuted as principal artists—June Anderson, Jerry Hadley, Thomas Hampson, Richard Leach, Waltraud Meier, Cheryl Studer, Sharon Sweet, Carol Vaness, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Dolora Zajick—some were infrequent visitors, many came back often, a few to leave their mark on the company. In 2012–13, Hampson added Iago to his long list of roles and Zajick repeated her classic Azucena and Amneris. But the number of estimable singers who joined the Met in the 1980s was inadequate to the demands of the bread-and-butter titles. At the end of the decade, Levine felt impelled to state the obvious: “Our problem is in what used to be mainstream 19th-century repertory. I don’t mean to say that you can’t get a great performance; you can and you do. But you sometimes don’t.” Crawford followed suit: “You can sell out
Madama Butterfly
and
Tosca
every single night, but try naming the ladies that can do a good Butterfly—you won’t even get to five fingers on your hand” (
Times,
Jan. 22, 1989). Even with its excellent acoustics, the auditorium
overwhelmed many voices appreciated in European houses, most of them half the size of the Met.