Latest Opera as Opera news: the book has received additional significant attention from UK, in the form of a fine thought piece by Richard Fairman in The Financial Times. (If you Google “Financial Times Opera as Opera Osborne” you’ll get to it; the print version should be out this weekend.) And we’ve gotten two new notable stateside reviews as well, by Kenneth Meltzer in Fanfare and by George Loomis in Musical America. While Fairman focuses primarily on the problem of new creation (i.e., repertory renewal), with frequent reference to the book’s arguments, Meltzer and Loomis present substantial overviews of the book as a whole. We’re expecting further additions to Opera as Opera‘s extraordinary critical response. To today’s post:

 There’s been a slight change of plan. I intended this post to be devoted primarily to the new production of Adriana Lecouvreur, starring La Netrebko, with some passing attention paid to Otello, whose revival did not seem to merit extended discussion. And as a performance, so it did not. But though I’d read and heard about this mounting when it was new, I had not anticipated that two of its aspects would strike me as representative enough of the circumambient wrongheadedness to be worth taking up in some depth. So rather than cheat Adriana, which proved worthy of note in a happier sense, I’ll save it for next time.

The Otello had its premiere last season, with the same cast of principals save for the title role (Aleksandrs Antonenko then, Stuart Skelton now). The main advance attraction this year was the house debut of Gustavo Dudamel, the still-young Venezuelan conductor with the appealing up-by-the-Sistema-bootstraps life story and the many plaudits accorded his energy and vision out in Los Angeles. I was also curious about Skelton, whose Siegmund I had heard on the Naxos Walküre recording (see the post of Feb. 23, 2018), and whose Tristan here I had heard spoken of respectfully.

Dudamel certainly put a charge into the opening Storm Scene—been a while since we’ve heard that kind of disciplined aggression—and he secured a high level of execution throughout. As the evening progressed, though, I didn’t detect a strong grip on scenic structure, or on the score’s overall dramatic arc. Big moments (the Act III finale the prime example) were impressive once they arrived, but there wasn’t enough definition or sustainment to the episodes in between to give these climaxes the sound of inevitability. I finally came away with the impression of a significant musical talent not yet plugged in to stage/pit dynamics, and not terribly familiar with Italian operatic style in general. Lacking the old European opera house training ground, we need a Sistema for opera.

Skelton had canceled the season premiere performance a few nights previously, and at the intermission, when it was already clear that he was in difficulty, it was announced that though suffering from a cold, he had agreed to finish the performance. Even allowing a reasonable illness discount, however, and factoring in the impression of his recorded Siegmund, this doesn’t sound like an Otello voice. It is moderate in size, lacking in a clear ring anywhere in the range, and consistently closed off above A at the top. In a cautiously sung Act 1 duet and at the beginning of “Dio mi potevi,” he made some nice effects at lower dynamics, and he never stopped trying to sustain the line. But the voice’s structure did not hold against the reach and stress of the role. His physical representation, too, did not reach out boldly and urgently. This was the second consecutive performance I’ve seen at the Met (following Marcelo Alvarez in Il Tabarro) wherein a leading tenor role has been painfully worked through by a singer evidently not well equipped for it and pronounced ill to boot, yet management has either not had an adequate cover prepared or has been reluctant to call on him.

Last year (see the posts of Jan. 12 and 27, 2018), I wrote a lookback article on La Forza del destino. It had to be a lookback piece because the production of Forza scheduled for the Met season of 2017-18 had been canceled. More recently (June 22 and July 6, 2018), my discussion of Don Giovanni had a Then-and-Now theme, but the Now aspect was represented not by live performance, but by audio and video recordings, which seemed to me more promising material for comparative discussion. Such choices are forced upon us with increasing frequency if we wish to find plausible representation for assessing the merits of opera’s canonical masterworks.

In the instance of Gounod’s Faust, the proximate excuse for writing about it at all is the release, on the Immortal Peformances label, of the 1937 Met broadcast of the work. This performance has had no previous circulation, and doesn’t even appear in Paul Jackson’s Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met, which has set the bar for inclusiveness—though more material keeps surfacing, as with the present issue. The ’37 Faust might appear redundant in prospect, since its three principals (Helen Jepson, Richard Crooks, Ezio Pinza) are also those of the broadcast of 1940, a mere three years along. But as I confirmed for myself in the Don Giovanni explorations, as splendid as Pinza was in 1942, he was more splendid yet in ’37, with just that extra touch of vibrancy and alacrity in this richest of Italian basso cantante voices. And I was willing to wager that the blandishing tenor of Crooks would sound that much fresher in ’37, as well.  So I had the Then of my Then-and-Now.

But after a half-hearted search through the descriptions (and a few clips) of recent CD and DVD performances, I realized that when it comes to Faust, there isn’t any Now now. It’s not in the Met’s repertory this season or rumored for the next, and I sometimes doubt that New York shall ever see it again—the Met’s record with it (an individual performance here and there aside) has been unrelievedly awful for nearly a half-century, and it’s beyond the resources of even the most intrepid and/or foolhardy of our many smaller enterprises. Its decline in popularity and critical standing has been the sharpest of any opera I can think of over the past century, particularly since WW2.^(I) Should we, then, I wondered, just let it slip quietly from view, as recent efforts and attitudes would indicate is the best course? No! Faust is a beautiful and powerful work, whose emotional charge (when adequately conveyed) keeps it relevant by definition, emotional experience being the first honest measure of operatic relevance. But in view of everything I’ve already written about Faust recordings^(II), I realized that in search of advocacy, I’d need to go backward, not forward, from 1937.