A supportive, congratulatory note before I get to today’s topic: in this uniquely trying season, we must be grateful that our local opera company, the Metropolitan, has forged ahead with performances. There are more dark nights than usual, and reduced attendance at most of the lit ones (I have never seen the auditorium as sparsely occupied as at the Figaro discussed below), so the financial inroads must be painful. But the Met has persevered, and with a  professional and reassuring handling of the logistics forced upon it by the pandemic. It has taken as a given that opera must go on. As must the critic’s task of attempting to accurately record and honestly evaluate the events of the continuance. 

And a note to some concerned readers: a Turandot follow-up, acknowledging the thoughtful responses to my article on that work and taking advantage of materials kindly forwarded by one reader that will help me elaborate on the uncut version of the final scene, was intended as part of today’s post. I’ve decided, though, to look in on the second cast of the run a little later in the season—so it makes sense to amalgamate the follow-up with any remarks I may enter on that occasion. To the subject du jour:

Two cornerstone works returned to the Met’s repertory over the past month. One, Verdi’s Rigoletto, was a new production, and the other, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, a revival. Both were staged in a manner that most observers would probably classify as “conservative,” “harmless,” or even “traditional”—that is, neither is of a high-concept, overtly estranged sort. Neither is abstract. Neither denies narrative, or imposes another narrative in place of, or in addition to, the one indicated by the work’s verbal and musical text. Yet both displace the time (and one of them, the place) of the operas’ action, resulting in an ongoing alienation, a subversion of even the possibility of real belief and emotional investment that gnaws at the root of the works while leaving some sprouts and sprigs on view. Since I draw a line of principle between myself and such productions and find so few standing on my side of the line (so widespread is a mindless acceptance of these obvious assaults on artistic integrity), it sometimes seems futile to detail why this fresh example is objectionable, as is the next. However, there is always the potential for the latest specimen striking home with the odd person or persons, in addition to the value of bucking up the morale of any who see the point and find themselves marooned with me. So, I suppose it is incumbent on me to give these specifics some evaluation, insofar as a single viewing can support that.

Like a number of directors who have had an impact on the New York opera scene over the past half-century-plus, Bartlett Sher has come to opera from the mainstream American spoken theatre, where he has had a good measure of success with both musicals and plays. He has won a fistful of awards, and been the artistic director of important companies. By now he is also an old opera hand, and he and his frequent design partners (Michael Yeargan, sets,  Catherine Zuber, costumes, and  Donald Holder, lighting) certainly know what they’re doing together. So one recognizes that there is a variety of stage intelligence at work, the question being: is it the right variety? Is Sher’s kind of theatrical knowledge and experience, his way of arriving at insights on character action and concept, of value with masterworks of the 19th-Century operatic repertory? My own experience with his work has been rather sharply divided between the generally-happy-with-quibbles kind (the theatre productions I’ve seen—South Pacific, Golden Boy, Awake and Sing,) and the altogether miserable kind (the operatic ones—the catastrophic collaboration with Es Devlin on Otello, see the post of 1/18/19; Roméo et Juliette, see “Under the Bus: Roméo, Act 1,” 4/13/18; and Two Boys, which I discuss in Opera as Opera).