The Met continues to be grand opera at its grandest
NEW YORK— As the title of her literate autobiography, the French actress Simone Signoret declared, “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”
It is nevertheless inevitable for those of us who, half a century ago, on the evening of Sept. 16, 1966, found ourselves at Lincoln Center for the gala opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House.
Yes, as the recently anointed music critic of the Toronto Star, I was one of 4,000 or so patrons packed into what was then a state of the art facility for the presentation of opera.
Collectively, the Met’s main stage and three auxiliary stages embraced more than 25,000 square feet. Tons of machinery enabled a complete set to be changed in minutes. Technologically, the new house represented a quantum leap forward in theatrical possibilities from the old house at Broadway and 39th St. that had served the company since its founding in 1883.
Anyone who visits Wallace K. Harrison’s chandeliered, Romanesque-arched pleasure palace this season should take the trouble to seek out the extensive exhibition in the lower lobby documenting its opening and first season. Among the memories it brought back was the colour-drained face of the composer Samuel Barber, sitting across from me on the Grand Tier.
Like the rest of us, he had just heard the terrible grinding noise of bending steel, as the revolving turntable supporting a giant pyramid stopped turning and refused to budge for the rest of the performance of Antony and Cleopatra.
The pyramid was the centrepiece of the lavish Franco Zeffirelli production of Barber’s opera, receiving its world premiere that night. Its immovability was not a good omen. The opera, starring Leontyne Price and Justino Diaz, and conducted by Thomas Schippers, wound up receiving mixed reviews at best (mine among the more favourable). A new era for the Met had begun less than auspiciously.
The house itself was generally applauded and has continued to symbolize grand opera at its grandest. For example, I’ve seen Aida, Verdi’s salute to the grandeur of ancient Egypt, in other countries (including a five-elephant production in Toronto in what was then known as the SkyDome) and the Met’s Sonja Frisell staging (subject of an April 15 CBC radio broadcast) still sets the standard.
The same can be said of Zeffirelli’s staging of Puccini’s La Bohème (scheduled for a Jan. 14 broadcast), whose remarkable two-tier Act 2 scene of street life in wintery 19thcentury Paris prompted the late Lotfi Mansouri, former general director of the Canadian Opera Company, to tell Zeffirelli that no one has staged it better.
This Saturday afternoon’s broadcast of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel is actually what is known as an archive broadcast, taped Jan. 1, 2008 (the popular holiday entertainment isn’t part of the current season), with its own invitation to nostalgia since Humperdinck’s greatest hit was the first opera broadcast from the old Met in 1939.
The Met has learned much about radio and subsequently television transmission in the decades since that first broadcast, when the composer-critic Deems Taylor gave a play-by-play account of what was happening onstage during the performance and bushels of mail arrived calling for the removal of the jerk interrupting the music.
Today, the Met’s radio broadcasts reach millions of listeners around the world and so do its Live in HD telecasts, launched by current general manager Peter Gelb in December 2006 in 60 theatres in four countries and now seen in more than 2,000 theatres in 70 countries, including several Cineplex movie houses in the Toronto area.
One of the most anticipated broadcasts/HD telecasts of the current season takes place Jan. 7, a produc- tion of Verdi’s Nabucco conducted by the Met’s beloved music director emeritus, James Levine, and starring the superstar tenor-turned-baritone Placido Domingo.
I’ve seen Domingo in the role in both Saint Petersburg and Beijing and it has become one of the most successful of his legendary career’s twilight.
While in New York earlier this month, I also witnessed Anna Netrebko’s Met debut in the title role of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. Gelb describes the Russian singer as “opera’s most popular soprano” and with her combination of vocal and physical beauty it is easy to understand why. Incidentally, Netrebko is scheduled to appear in Toronto April 25 as part of The Ultimate Opera Gala, presented by the Canadian Opera Company and Show One Productions.
The Metropolitan Opera presents 26 productions each season, a number not even approached by its closest competitors, San Francisco Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago. Six of them are new this season, including the company’s first staging in several decades of Rossini’s William Tell, conducted by Fabio Luisi and starring one of Canada’s finest baritones, Gerald Finley. Not a candidate for HD transmission this season, Rossini’s last opera can be heard on a March 18 CBC radio broadcast.
A Canadian postscript: Yannick Nézet-Séguin has been appointed to succeed Levine as music director, taking up the position in 2020. Like the native Montrealer, I began listening to the famous Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts as a preteen. It’s a hard habit to kick.