I am open to Don Carlos, as opposed to Don Carlo. But this cast was no test of that, and for the most part would probably have done better in Italian, which might have forced them out into the house to marginally better effect. (One reason for the dominance of the Italian translation throughout the 20th Century was surely the much wider available selection of first-line Italian and Italian-cultured voices than of French.) The Chatelet recording, by virtue of being both a recording and more strongly cast, is better advocacy, but to my ear still infrequently an improvement on, or even a match for, the Italian translation. The opera was written for Meyerbeer singers; a strong Les Huguenots cast would also be a strong Don Carlos lineup, though the Met and the modern orchestra make up an acoustical challenge the Parisians of the Second Empire never faced. The final generation of that breed can be heard on acoustical recordings—the two 3-CD Meyerbeer on Records volumes from Marston are an excellent starting point for listening. The vocal clarity and power, technical acumen, and elocutionary address of many of those singers model the skills required.

Department of Beyond Silly: As one always intrigued by cumulative stats (this year, I was at the 900th Rigoletto!), I was surprised to find from the program that I was attending only the second performance of this work by the Metropolitan Opera. But it’s just a different language! By this token, folks attending this season’s repetitions of Eugene Onegin will presumably take count only of the Russian-language performances that began in the ’70s, and not those in, first, Italian, and then, English, that preceded them. The same would apply to other Russian operas, and we should have to subtract from our totals the English-language Bohèmes and Cosí fan tuttes of yesteryear, and the many other examples (including entire seasons in German or Italian) of operas performed in languages other than the ones they were written in. Next year, when Don Carlo is back as Don Carlo and in four acts, where may my calculation resume, and does each repetition now count for only 4/5ths of an opera? This is simply an effort to lend a spurious importance to an otherwise unremarkable occasion.

The production. This Don Carlos was directed by David McVicar, with a set by Charles Edwards and costumes by Brigitte Reifenstuel. They have discovered darkness in the work (!); ergo, the look of their show is unrelievedly Stygian. And cheap. Two elements are made to serve the eight scenes of this five-act grand opera. One is a pair of towering coffered walls that curve back toward a single opening at upstage center. The other is a shipment of plain coffin-like boxes (sarcophagi by Ikea) dumped about the stage. The outdoor scenes are the most seriously cheated. A few spindly trees only emphasize the unromantic coldness of this Fontainebleau forest. In Act II, Scene 2, designated in both stage directions and musical atmosphere as an opening-out from the spooky gloom of Charles V’s tomb to a scene of lush Spanish warmth^(I), the black-garbed ladies of the court resemble squatting crows scattered about the barren stage. The nadir is reached in the final two scenes of Act 3, whose original sequence would have called for the veil-changing scene and ballet, in the formal gardens and in daylight, followed by fading light and then nighttime, still in the gardens, with its mistaken-identity tryst and trio, and then to hot-sun daylight in the great plaza for the public spectacle of the auto-da-fè, with its tense personal encounters. The Garden Scene consisted of the coldest of moons and the stoney sarcophagi; while awaiting his presumed beloved, poor Polenzani was required to lie atop one of the boxes, as if it were a patch of greensward, only to quickly arise. The staging of the trio looked inept, but was doomed from the get-go by the design. The auto-da-fè was hopelessly cramped. A single jester cavorted with meaningless jerkings and twirlings at center stage (Movement Director, Leah Hausman) while the singing faces of the populace peeped through windows in the walls. (We saw this last ploy in Darko Tresnjak’s Samson et Dalila three years ago, too. It saves on having to move people about and create the impression of a multitude.) The Heavenly Voice emanated not from the stage world, but from just to my left, high in the auditorium, and sounded miked. The director’s rationale of a “claustrophobic imprisonment” in the church-state worldview is nothing more than a sophistical evasion. The scene looked tacky and sounded tinny.