These Wagner and Puccini pieces are both big shows, and both presented in what we think of as a traditional style, i. e., in representational settings, at least nominally “in period,” and originally mounted by directors and designers who had earned high reputations by working on such operas in such ways (Franco Zeffirelli for Turandot, and the Otto Schenk/Günther Schneider-Siemssen team for Die Meistersinger). They thus share at least the negative virtue of sidestepping the sorts of directorial depredations noted above, so well represented by the video Tristans I recently considered (see Regie-Auteurs Gone Feral, 9/3/21). Meistersinger held the additional advantage of being a great canonical opera always worth one’s serious attention, returning to the repertory after a seven-year absence. (It is also the only work by Wagner offered by the Met this season.) As for the returns of beloved singers in major roles, there were none. But there was the interest attached to the casting of Eva (Lise Davidsen, so quickly ascending to star status and heard here previously only as Tchaikovsky’s Lisa) and of Pogner (Georg Zeppenfeld, whose singing I have admired live as King Marke and on CD as Sachs in the Salzburg Easter Festival performance under Christian Thielemann—see The Tristan Quadrangle: Montemezzi and Wagner, 4/16/18, and Die Meistersinger—One New, One Old, 1/17/21, respectively). Coincidentally, recordings of these two singers had just come to hand; I’ll touch on them below. In addition, there was the return to New York of conductor Antonio Pappano after years of well-regarded work in U. K. and Europe, and whom I hoped to hear under real-world conditions, as opposed to those of his recorded Otello (see Otello from Another Planet, 5/17/21).

The writing dilemmas of critics are not, I hope, high on anyone’s list of priorities. Nonetheless (and since you are already reading a piece of criticism), consider for a moment the problem of how to fairly approach an event that represents no outrageous misinterpretation or intentional aesthetic offense, or any lack of honest effort (no one’s not trying, by some measure or other), but which, by any standard applicable to a major international opera company, only momentarily transcends a minimal level of achievement. I don’t want the Metropolitan Opera to fail, or be forced to forsake its mission of reliably competent refreshment of operatic masterworks. I hope the empty seats fill in as the season progresses, and would never want to discourage anyone from becoming acquainted with the masterworks in live performance. Nor do I wish to lend any aid and comfort to the babblers who hold that the masterworks are “irrelevant,” or that only transgressive re-interpretations can save them from a terminal exhaustion. Yet: we are here beyond even the cases of the many “too lite” performances I’ve written about recently. We are in the regions of the Orfeo interment of two years back (see Thoughts on Orfeo, 11/22/19), but on a far greater scale, with a work more central to the repertory. This performance also conveyed an air of self-contentment, as if the bar for “trying” had been lowered to the height of showing up, staying laid back, and coming through the evening unruffled. So I see no alternative to reporting and evaluating as accurately as I can, from a standard based on my experience with the work.