The Gay Mohican Solution! In our new, improved Don Carlos, as our hero flounders toward the back, up over the upstage rim of the deck comes, with purposeful stride, the shade not of the great emperor, but of the freshly deceased Uncas/Rodrigue! While the others, understandably thunderstruck, stand aside, he follows up on the many huggies of earlier scenes by slowly and tenderly lowering himself down onto his buddy’s body. The offstage monks again murmur faintly. Curtain.

In other words, the production has simply rewritten the close of this opera to make a theme, dear to the wishful sublimations of a part of the audience but not written in by the opera’s creators, and counter to their sensibilities, the determinative message of their masterwork. In this case, it’s to push a gay agenda, or signal virtuous support for it. But in principle that doesn’t matter—it could be on behalf of any cause, any plea for approbation, any private fantasy of the auteur’s. According to my code of artistic ethics, that is inexcusable.

As I mentioned earlier, the fine playing of the Met’s orchestra is of necessity held to a low simmer by Nézet-Séguin. His reading ties the work up in a neat, tidy package whose frequent cheerfulness is altogether out of whack with the proclaimed darkness of the production—the three bars of heavily accented allegro giusto that launch “O don fatal,” for instance, sounded like prancey animated cartoon music.

˜ ˜ ˜

The Strauss/von Hofmannsthal Ariadne auf Naxos returned to the repertory this season in a revival of the production directed by Elijah Moshinsky and designed by Michael Yeargan, first seen in 1993. I attended the last performance of this run, on March 17.

This was an evening filled with events ancillary to the performance itself. Ordinarily, these would be more things in the Beneath Notice category. But they are very much parts of the audience experience and, thus, the vibe in the auditorium. And a day or two later, a colleague uncharacteristically wrote me with a vexed accounting of most of these same events, confirming that they had not been beneath notice. So I’ll give you a quick rundown of them before assessing the proceedings onstage and in the pit. Before curtain’s rise, the Met spokesman charged with reminding us of the house’s mask policy (good!) mumbled something about a cast replacement, the name of neither role nor artist being discernible. I did pick up the syllable “-ist,” and so surmised that someone other than Isabel Leonard was going to be singing the soul-nourishing music of the Komponist (might have been simpler to just say “Composer”). That was soon apparent, but I did not recognize the replacement by look or sound. As the Prologue, predominantly conversational and replete with the situational gags periodically landed by the Haushofmeister, went forward, many of its lines and a few of its lovelier musical moments were obliterated by the ongoing tittering and giggling of the large complement of young, mostly female people who filled in much of the territory behind and above us, in the Family Circle. They were reacting to the surtitles, of course, usually just ahead of or slightly behind whatever was being said or sung.