Yesterday and Today
What relevance does opera have for present-day audiences? How can lovers of the operatic art (and everyday working stiffs like us, for that matter) identify with the centuries old foibles of Carmen or Manon? What attributes do such characters have that mimic the troubles of modern life? What problems do they share that can either enlighten or expand upon the difficulties we face today? And finally, what life lessons do they offer that can make sense of our own turbulent times?
These are the challenges that opera companies everywhere are facing. But how are these challenges met? Over the past 30 some-odd years, the trend has been to present works in modern dress, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. While at first glance this may appear to address the “relevance” issue, little can be done to change the original setting or plot. Although a number of directors have tried (heaven help us) to do justice to this approach, many have failed in their attempts to make relevancy fashionable. And to be perfectly honest, updating an opera’s time period or performing it in contemporary outerwear only draws attention to the incongruities inherent in this bit of over-simplification.
If directors can do no more than put new clothes on old forms, how will opera itself survive into the new millennium? What future, if any, does the art form have? Everyone knows that opera, along with video games and big-budget movies, are the world’s most expensive diversion. With video games and movies, there is always a method of breaking even, if not an outright profit. But with opera, no such guarantees exist. In fact, opera has always been and forever will be a money-losing proposition. So why do people continue to indulge in its luxuries?
The answer is: for love of the form; for love of the singing; for love of the stagecraft; and for love of the music. Music can speak louder than words, although in opera words play an equal part in the overall atmosphere. Dress, sets, dance, wigs, costumes, back and front projections, digital recreations, offstage effects — whatever tickles a director’s fancy have all been utilized to make opera as relevant to our values as they were when these works were first produced.
The New Becomes the Old
The Metropolitan Opera — that formerly staid organization, a lumbering giant of the performing arts — has been producing works of late that, as noted in previous posts, have pushed open the sticky envelope of the traditionally ossified repertoire and dragged it, kicking and screaming, into the modern age.
Such rarely staged pieces as Shostakovich’s The Nose and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa and Iolanta, and Rossini’s La Donna del Lago, in addition to Met Opera premieres of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha, John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, as well as new works by Thomas Adès (The Tempest) and Nico Mulhy (Two Boys), and thoroughly reworked and/or re-imagined productions by Anthony Minghella of Madama Butterfly and François Girard’s Parsifal, have conspired to add luster to the company’s ranks, courtesy of General Manager Peter Gelb’s farsighted vision.
But not everything the Met churned out was a critical or financial success. Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, Luc Bondy’s hideous miscalculation of Tosca was an out-and-out disaster, and the highly anticipated Ring cycle by Robert Lepage, who earlier provided an acclaimed presentation of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, hit a brick wall with Wagner’s opus. You can’t win ‘em all, I always say. More recently, the new production of the perennial double bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (to be reviewed later this month) illustrated the good and bad facets of tinkering with time periods.
Two of the company’s earlier entries, i.e., Richard Eyre’s Franco-era version of Bizet’s Carmen from 2010, and Laurent Pelly’s boxy 2012 staging of Massenet’s Manon, epitomize the points I’ve been trying to make about what can or cannot be done via the Met’s modernization efforts. The Massenet work was heard in the live Saturday broadcast of March 21, while Bizet’s opera came first on March 7.
In Manon, we had a far superior cast than that of the premiere. When this production was new in 2012, Anna Netrebko sang the Marilyn Monroe-like Manon, with Piotr Beczała as Des Grieux and Paulo Szot as Lescaut. All three principals did their histrionic best within the clunkiness of Pelly’s bland sets. Vocally, Netrebko was off her best form, while Beczała’s essentially lyric instrument was severely over-extended. The latest cast, however, starred the robust-voiced German soprano Diana Damrau as Manon, the startlingly emotional Des Grieux of Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo, and Russell Braun as Lescaut, along with Nicolas Testé as Count Des Grieux, Christophe Mortagne as Guillot, the dependable Dwayne Croft as Brétigny, Mireille Asselin as Poussette, Cecelia Hall as Javotte, Maya Lahyani as Rosette, and Robert Pomakov as the Innkeeper. The Met orchestra was presided by Emmanuel Villaume.
The cast of Carmen featured knockout Latvian mezzo Elīna Garanča as the gypsy Carmen, soprano Ailyn Pérez as the girl back home Micaela, bass-baritone Gábor Bretz as sexy toreador Escamillo, bass Richard Bernstein as the officer Zuniga, and substituting for the originally announced Jonas Kaufmann as Carmen’s lover Don José was Korean tenor Yonghoon Lee. The conductor was Louis Langrée.
The Rain in Spain…
Bringing Spanish-style fascism and Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who makes a belated appearance in the Act IV promenade) into the picture of what is essentially a retelling of a love affair gone wrong, with a concentration on the gypsy girl Carmen who no man can fully possess, and her unstable beau, an army officer with homicidal tendencies, did little to enhance what is already a pretty tawdry tale.
In Prosper Mérimée’s novel, José has murdered Carmen out of jealousy. He relives the story in flashback from his prison cell. In the opera, we learn much about Don José’s past and his explosive nature (his having killed a man, for one) through extensive dialog passages that have traditionally been cut from Carmen, but which were reinstated at the Met almost 40 years ago.
For this production, we’ve reverted to the old Ernest Guiraud-composed recitatives, which today sound about as incompatible with Bizet’s splendid score as they did nearly two generations prior. Notwithstanding that observation, the cast turned in a most credible performance, especially the young tenor Lee. His powerful stage portrayal and melodious singing as Don José, with a beautifully executed “Flower Song” and extraordinarily impassioned last act duet, won the day. In my opinion, Lee salvaged the performance with his Corelli-like trumpet of a voice, all but erasing memories of the missing Kaufmann — not an easy thing to do in these surroundings. Lee was also scheduled to sing in the live broadcast of Verdi’s Don Carlo, a performance I did not want to miss.
Garança’s expertly played Carmen stressed the smaller, less showier aspects of the part, lingering over key phrases (a languorously delivered “Habañera” for one, an earthy-toned “Card Trio” for another) and basically toning down the overt displays of hip-swinging sexiness often associated with past exponents. I did miss the dark and dusky chest tones some Carmens have brought to the role. Still, my own thought is that Elīna’s voice is a shade too light for this assignment, at least on the radio; that she would sound more comfortable singing it in an auditorium not as large as the Met’s.
Ms. Pérez’s lyrically capable Micaela was warm and affecting, while Mr. Bretz’s fine toreador could have shown more personality than it did. As for the conductor, Langrée tore into the prelude as if he were in a race to finish the opera before it began. Speeding things along may exude a sense of urgency to the proceedings, but a more measured approach in the early going (where Bizet took his time to give us some marvelous local color) can set the scene or mood better than a faster clip. Just saying…
Leave it to the French
Getting down to Manon, we are looking at a work which, much like its predecessor Carmen, features extensive dialog underscored with snippets of music. Not exactly what was known as an opéra-comique, Massenet’s Manon (which premiered in 1884) is not exactly grand opera either but a carefully constructed combination of both forms.
Having an excellent grasp of the French language and style is but one of many demands required of artists willing to tackle this charming, subtle work. It’s less of an emotional roller-coaster ride than, say, Puccini’s own version of the same story, Manon Lescaut, written less than a decade later in 1893, but no less compelling emotionally. Incidentally, Carmen made its debut in 1875, a good nine years before Manon made its appearance. The basis for both operas rests on one thing and one thing only: the promise of illicit sex and its aftermath. How relevant is that? Young people in love, or in lust, with one another. It couldn’t get any better, now could it?
The story goes that Puccini, unencumbered by any personal attachment to France or to the French setting of the story, allowed his Manon Lescaut to die a miserable death in America. Addio! On the other hand, Massenet, that most quintessential of French souls, couldn’t bear to have his heroine expire on foreign soil. Going against the grain (and the novel’s intent), he insisted that Manon die in the arms of her lover, the Chevalier Des Grieux, without having boarded the ship for the New World. Ah, those sentimental French!
To make this opera come alive, the Met had a real barnstormer of a cast relive the parts of Manon and Des Grieux. As much as she tried, Diana Damrau could not completely convince me of her Gallic disposition. However, and this was key, her singing was above and beyond anything I’ve heard in this role. The coloratura displays, the sparks and fireworks she generated in the Cours la Reine sequence, along with a tender touch of melancholy in her farewell to her “petite table,” brought a tear to the eye.
She was superbly partnered by Grigolo, who gave one of the most impassioned performances of this young artist’s career as an incredibly enamored Des Grieux. While his “Ah fuyez, douce image” taxed him in the extreme, he kept up a steady flow of lyricism that carried him through to the end. At the moment of Manon’s death, Grigolo let out a painful howl of grief that touched the audience’s heartstrings, if going counter to what the composer would have wanted at this point: that is, a mood of aristocratic restraint amid sorrow for the girl’s untimely demise.
Russell Braun’s burly-textured Lescaut, Dwayne Croft’s excellent Brétigny and Nicolas Testé’s sonorous Count brought prestige to these singers. The others in the cast acquitted themselves nobly, and Villaume’s conducting was an exercise in how to perform a French piece with all the drive and fervor called for, without sacrificing the lyric line. The only thing missing for a truly successful outing was an intriguing visual representation to make it work as drama.
Having seen this production in the Live in HD series on television when it was new, I can vouch for its sheer ugliness and lack of a defining theme. Though the story is similar in many respects to Verdi’s La Traviata (good boy meets bad girl, they fall in love and live in sin, good boy’s father tries to break them up, complications ensue, both ultimately reunite in love, bad girl is forgiven, bad girl dies) — which, coincidentally or not, is also set in France — Pelly’s use of a red dress to distinguish Manon from the other women is far too reminiscent of Willy Decker’s concept for his deconstructed Traviata. Besides that, it was positively drained of color and insight.
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In this case, I found the production as a whole ineffective and derivative and not particularly inspiring. It was Regietheater at its worst, and that’s the best that I can say for it.
Copyright © 2015 by Josmar F. Lopes