Oh, dear, Personenregie. Within the space/place limitations just described, I thought Kaél did well with the mass scenes and groupings, which are of importance in this kind of work. But with respect to the principals, it was as if a full century’s worth of evolution in acting and acting-derived staging had not occurred. So the women, possessed of degrees of presence, a sense of personal contact with a partner, and mimetic skills, survived with honor, while Solomon posed in place, most often with arms folded across chest, and Assad, called upon for extremes of behavior with only a willingness and some energy, but not much in the way of stage instinct, to guide him, was sent staggering from one location to another just for the sake of changing the stage positions. There are good things to be found in the old rhetorics of the body and attention to the visual panorama, but these aren’t among them.

I was grateful for the opportunity to discover the life that is still in this work, and to be reminded—as I had been when the St. Petersburg National Opera came to town not too many years back—that if you have the forces to make it resound, the State/Koch Theatre is not a bad venue for large-scale opera. And speaking of that  . . .

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Heidi Waleson, the longtime opera critic for the Wall Street Journal, has published her recounting of the protracted death throes of the New York City Opera, which moved into this same theatre in 1966, and stayed until its self-banishment to scattered venues in 2011 (Mad Scenes and Exit Arias, Metropolitan Books, 2018). The subject is of automatic interest to those of us with intense, extended experience of the company’s work, and by extension to everyone concerned (and concern is called for) with the overall artistic and economic health of our artform.

Two-thirds of Waleson’s book is devoted to the last one-third of the NYCO’s 77-year lifespan—in other words, to its post-glory, down-and-up, hanging-in-there decades under three general directorships (Keene, Kellogg, Steel)—and its principal value lies in its clear, detailed sorting-out of the cascading series of well-intentioned miscalculations, boneheaded misadventures, and extraordinarily bad luck that brought this once-proud, seemingly indispensable enterprise to ground. While a fair amount of this material emerged piecemeal in press coverage over the years, Waleson’s research has added much to the inside story and pulled it all together into what is apt to remain easily the most complete and coherent resource on the subject.

What happened to the NYCO during these three final directorships? Beginning with the coup de grace, we had the doubtlessly intelligent but inexperienced, didn’t-know-what-he-didn’t-know George Steel, with his flabbergasting notions of fringe-interest works and productions bearing  a mainstream load, cockamamie promotional graphics, and (as Waleson discloses) flying-solo administrative style. Before that came the Gerard Mortier interregnum, with what nearly everyone except those most closely involved recognized as budgetary fantasies and Eurofish-out-of-water artistic schemes, and which in any case proved abortive. ^(I) And prior to that, we had the comparatively long (1996-2007) and, at least at first, sane administration of Paul Kellogg. He inherited an artistic and financial shambles. Christopher Keene’s administration had, on balance, gone downhill in both respects, and then it ended with his premature death, which left the company in shock. Kellogg brought the collective head up for a time—Waleson properly notes the improvements in rehearsal time, artists’ wages, and orchestral quality under George Manahan. Soon, though, he found himself entangled in what we could charitably call the unforeseen negative consequences of seemingly positive moves. I say “charitably” because the negative consequences weren’t unforeseen to everyone.