An event announcement for those in the New York area: on the afternoon and evening of Saturday, Dec. 2, I will be participating in a program sponsored by Teatro Nuovo to celebrate the 100th birthday of Maria Callas. It will include recollections by a few of us who saw her perform, some hands-on work with young singers to demonstrate the teaching of bel canto techniques, and much else, concluding with a concert of selections from operas Callas might have sung, but didn’t get around to. Program details and ticket info here.

And a preliminary note about today’s post: because of unanticipated tech troubles that must be addressed immediately, I have broken it into two parts, of which this is the first. The second, assessing the Met’s current revival itself, will follow next week. Thanks for your patience. 

Giuseppe Verdi’s mature, taut and compact, full-blooded, and in some ways uncharacteristic Un Ballo in maschera has made a furtive re-entrance into the Met’s repertory after an eleven-year absence. “Furtive” on three counts: first, the company is not promoting standard-repertory revivals. Following the practice of the last three seasons  and the one to come, this one opened with a contemporary American opera, Jake Heggie’s well-traveled Dead Man Walking, and the banner over the entrance to the house proclaimed that work’s title although it was alternating with performances of Verdi’s Nabucco and Requiem, plus the now-customary twice-weekly dark nights. As of my visit to Ballo (Oct. 24th), the banner read “The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” amid performances of Ballo and Bohème. Advertising policy has followed suit. Second, our lonely mainstream sentinel and bell-ringer, The New York Times, has fallen right into line. Until quite recently, the first seasonal performances of repertory operas occasioned dedicated reviews, not always prominent but reasonably attentive to performance and production, perhaps with a dollop of house history, hinting at a dim awareness of the reasons for the work’s admittance to the canon. But this fall, Zachary Wolfe’s thoughts on the Bohème and Ballo revivals have been conflated into a “Critic’s Notebook” item on the bottom quarter of the Arts section’s fifth page (see the NYT, 10/24/23). That seems to be the new SOP. And third, nothing in this production of Ballo, brought back after an eleven-year absence, bespoke serious, or even respectful, engagement with the opera, and little in the performance rose above the level of an expectable professionalism. The response of the audience, which was larger than those of some post-pandemic standard-rep performances but still significantly subpar, was low-key.

I am sure that to most of my readers, the story of the adaptation by Somma and Verdi of Scribe’s libretto for Auber’s Gustave III, ou le bal masqué; of the vexing disputes with managements and censors attendant on the new opera’s birth; of the change of setting from the historically grounded Stockholm in the year 1792 to colonial Boston (hence, necessarily twenty years or more earlier); and of the recent trend back towards the Swedish setting, is familiar at least in outline.^(I) So I won’t tread that worn-in pathway here. Still, some of the detours and way stations along the way may bear exploration. Though I can agree with Budden when he calls the opera’s central performance issue “the chiaroscuro of the score,” I can’t acquiesce in his dismissal of the setting as “a subsidiary problem . . . to which there is no obvious solution.” Certainly it’s true that Verdi assimilated all elements into a thoroughly Italian opera; that a hot performance can reduce the setting to a matter of comparatively minor importance; and that when Piave wrote to Verdi “So they want other people to judge whether your music, written for one libretto, can be adapted to another?”, he was referring to many changes proposed by the Papal Censor, not only that of the setting. But I think of Verdi, who wanted everything in his operas to serve a common dramatic purpose and who was keenly sensitive to the atmospheric color (the famous tinta) of each of them, working on his score, which, let’s keep in mind, he had completed before the censoring difficulties arose. And as he worked, as he envisioned each scene and character, the characters’ actions, desires, and emotions and exactly how, in what manner, the actions would be carried out and the desires and emotions expressed, he has to have had in his mind’s ear and eye two worlds that strongly marked what he wrote. One was French—not only the world of Scribe, of opéra comique and of Parisian flavors and conventions in general, but of the “real-life” court of Louis XIV, with which, for all his Enlightened outlook, Gustavus had been much taken and whose brilliance and sophistication trailed behind him to his lavish Stockholm court. The other was, obviously, Swedish, and that has to have included the feel of the scenario’s interior and exterior settings (the palace’s reception room and ballroom, Ulrica’s conjuration room, the bleak field of execution, the light and climate of that city of the North and the looks and ways of its people as Verdi imagined them. The French ingredient is acknowledged and studied for its influences on the score, while the Swedish is more often simply noted as a superficial aspect of the opera’s theatricality. But can we suppose that the music (and I think especially of that of the second act) would have been the same had the composer visualized a Spanish or Italian setting? I can’t. I think the North is in there, in a texture not quite that of any other Verdi opera. As Budden himself puts it, “Mediterranean sunlight is harmful to the plot.”

Fellow devotees: owing to work pressure, the post originally scheduled for today, Nov. 3, is re-scheduled for Mon., Nov. 6. I am writing about Verdi’s Un Ballo in maschera—in part about the current revival of this wonderful opera at the Met, and in part about the work’s unique nature and standing in the Verdi canon, and about a particular aspect of that (its northerly tint) as imagined in performance.

CLO 

My determination to have an uninterrupted summer hiatus from writing about opera’s weal and woe has held fast this year. But the time has come to greet a new season, and so to welcome fellow devotees back to some of my thoughts on what’s happening with and to our artform. Over the summer, the thoughts—and exchanges about them with friends and colleagues—have been of troubling varieties, mostly concerned with the ways in which the decline of opera’s standing has manifested itself, and at an accelerating pace. I did attend one event, though, that was enjoyable in itself and that offered a suggestion of one promising way forward, though not without trailing behind it a reminder of one of the trouble spots. I’ll get to that presently.

I’ve devoted a fair amount of my hiatus time to the gathering of materials (“my papers,” to give them their properly dignified name) for archiving purposes—a large task, and part of the yet larger one we call “putting our affairs in order.” I’d started this a while back by assembling all the unpublished writing I had done in the period (1968-1980) when my work was centered on the development and expansion of opera in our country. This had included the many field evaluations of opera companies I’d submitted for foundation and federal funding sources, speeches made at conferences and opera-celebrative occasions, and articles I’d written in the house organs of the service organizations (Affiliate Artists and The National Opera Institute) on whose boards I had served. This summer, I collated the 90-some columns I wrote for London’s Financial Times between 1962 and 1969, when I was that newspaper’s New York music (but mostly opera) critic. It was a wonderful time to have that job—the time, in fact, of opera’s greatest flourishing in New York. The lengths of seasons, number of performances, and rates of attendance reached levels they had never attained before, and which would be sustained for only a few years thereafter before the long erosion set in. Those seven years saw the successive openings of the major halls at Lincoln Center, which in operatic terms meant the Metropolitan’s final seasons in the old house and its removal to the new one, and the corresponding migration of the New York City Opera from the City Center to the (then) New York State Theater, as well as the first summer visits of major foreign companies (the Hamburg State Opera, the Rome Opera) to the new opera house, and the New York stands of the short-lived touring Metropolitan Opera National Company. Not coincidentally, this flourishing extended to the classical division of the commercial recording industry, whose symbiosis with the live performance institutions, though not without its negative aspects, was for thirty or so years a promotional party time.

And artistically, those years corresponded almost exactly with the final wave of greatvoiced singers, the last years when it was possible for the major international companies, among which the Metropolitan had for three-quarters of a century maintained a position of prima inter pares when it came to singing, to assemble satisfying casts for the masterworks of the 19th and early 20th centuries. At times, these singers were guided by master conductors of a breed that has gone extinct, though in a house of full-season true “rolling rep” (rotating operas and casts six nights a week, two shows on Saturday), a knowledgeable routine on the parts of conductors and players was the night-to-night aspiration, by no means always met. Finally, it was a time when we in the U. S. could still expect that, whatever the failings or stylistic peculiarities (or the tradition-bound slovenliness, the lazy “received wisdom”) of a particular production or performance might be, the point of stage direction and design was to transmit the manifest content of the given work—that is, its story and characters, in their time and place. Thus, all discussion and argumentation, including that of professional criticism, could proceed on the basis of how well that transmission was perceived to have gone, its vocal and orchestral achievements, visual style, narrative emphasis, and presentation of character action being the foci of attention. Intellectual interpretation—the analysis of meaning, of the work’s relation to social, historical, or cultural issues—and/or ideologies of same—could be left to the disciplines of academic criticism, where, however, they were not much taken up in relation to their only means of transference, performance. The notion that the revisionist or adversarial varieties of such critique might be incorporated into performance itself would have been considered daft.

In the final weeks of the 2022-2023 season of the Metropolitan Opera, the company brought us new productions of two Mozart masterpieces, Die Zauberflöte and Don Giovanni. The former was directed and choreographed by Simon McBurney; the latter was directed by Ivo van Hove. Both were conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann. ^(I) Both were auteurial—that is, determined by direction that not only defines the style of the performance and the integration of its elements, but places the director in the position of co-author, if not primary author, as in the movies. Both were highly skilled in terms of theatrical technique. Yet there was a significant difference between them. The Giovanni is merely another exhibit in the already crowded museum of curiosities that seek “timelessness” in contemporaneity and “universality” in an easy recognizability not of life as we live it, but of life as depicted in our onscreen culture. It makes use of all the devices that pretend to bring work and audience closer but that in reality, step by step, detach the one from the other. It would have seemed audacious fifty years ago, and modernish at twenty-five years’ distance. Now it is just another effort of one recently modish sort. But though it presses on the artform’s boundaries, it can still be called an interpretation of the opera, the dramma giocoso called Don Giovanni, with a coherence of its own if we grant its dubious premises.

The Zauberflöte is something else altogether. It is not an interpretation of the opera, the Singspiel called Die Zauberflöte. It is a mixed-media event in low-comedy entertainment mode, predominantly visual, which purloins Mozart’s score for its musical elements. It excises the work’s spine, installing in its place a series of rapidly sequenced playpen episodes, each of which serves to wipe away the previous one, as with 30-second spot commercials crammed into a programming break. There is no coherence even if we grant the premise, since the premise itself is one of incoherence, of forgetting the preceding 30 seconds for the sake of the present 30 seconds, of jettisoning the old work for the new. This Zauberflöte can be called an opera only in the sense that the descendants of Duchamps’ urinal, any of the readymade objets selected by an artist and submitted for exhibition, can be called art—i. e., if it’s performed in an opera house, it must be an opera. But I don’t accept that definition, and since I am an opera critic, I cannot review this event in the normal way, and will not be describing the production in any detail. If you have not yet heard about its many moves and devices (the projections, the visual artist, the Foley artist, the tramping down the aisles and between the rows of seats, etc., etc.), you can easily learn about them from reviews and promotional pieces. I think it will be more productive to discuss aspects of the work itself while offering some observations on the theatrical and musical gestures the event makes to exploit the work while sidestepping it—including the singing, where that fills in at the margins.

With my apologies for the extra day’s delay:

Two of the most luminous stars in the constellation of interwar Wagnerian singers, soprano Frida Leider and baritone Herbert Janssen, have recently been given significant recorded attention. We (especially we Americans, I suspect) tend to think of them as belonging to successive though overlapping generations, inasmuch as Leider last sang here in 1934 and was obliged to curtail her operatic activities on the eve of WW2, whereas Janssen sang on into the 1950s, based at the Metropolitan. But they were born only four years apart (Leider in 1888, Janssen in 1892—not 1895, as given in at least one source) and in their prime singing years crossed paths repeatedly, principally in Berlin and London. Both would easily dominate their respective vocal categories today. Leider is, at least nominally, the center of attention on an Immortal Performances release that, in that label’s fashion, incorporates as much as can be stitched together of her Isolde, built up from surviving portions of a Met broadcast of March, 1933 (thus, the earliest “live” Leider we have), filled in with stretches from an unpublished broadcast of 1936, with these sources restored as much as possible and other materials (studio recordings) sequenced in and sonically matched to them where feasible. Janssen’s case is much less complicated: he is the subject of a six-CD set from Marston that contains a wealth of his recorded work in both opera and Lieder, most of it in-studio but some broadcast-derived, from 1927 to 1947.

Leider made her debut as Venus at Halle in 1915, and thus at the relatively late age of 27. She rather beat her way through the bushes in houses (Rostock, Königsberg) where rehearsal and production standards were by her own account deplorable but where she did, from the start, sing leading roles, until landing at the Hamburg Staatsoper (1920), where her artistic identity seems to have jelled. After a guest Isolde in Berlin, she joined the Staatsoper there in 1923, remaining as a principal soprano until 1938. Her international breakthrough came in 1924 with a Ring cycle under Bruno Walter at Covent Garden, whereto she was to return, a great favorite with audiences and critics, until (again) 1938. She first sang at the Bayreuth Festival in 1928, and then from 1933 to, yes, 1938. During these years she made guest appearances at La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, and other leading European houses as well as the Colon; in the U. S., she sang four seasons (1928-32) in Chicago and, frustratingly, only two (1932-34) at the Metropolitan. It was a great career, but—as with so many singers of that time, including Janssen—one much influenced and limited by the twin catastrophes of the Third Reich and the Great Depression. Her operatic appearances ceased in 1938, when her Jewish husband (Rudolf Deman, who had been concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic) was forced to flee to Switzerland for the duration.

Leider recorded extensively, starting with Grammophon/Polydor acousticals in her Hamburg and early Berlin days, and after 1927 with electricals for HMV/RCA Victor. In terms of repertoire, the recordings reflect her stage career quite faithfully, with liberal sprinklings of Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini in amongst her Wagner and other German offerings in the early years, narrowing to almost exclusively Wagnerian selections later. She did a number of acoustical/electrical remakes, e. g., the Fidelio aria and Donna Anna’s vengeance aria, first in German, then in Italian—these were roles that, along with the Marschallin and Rachel in La Juive, she retained as late as her Chicago seasons. During WW2, though operatically inactive, she made some Lieder recordings with the distinguished accompanist Michael Raucheisen.

˜ ˜ ˜

All singers we would grade as superior strive for a sustained legato, elasticity of movement, control of dynamics, etc., and since these attributes were first declared aesthetically necessary by Italian pedagogues, all good singing in the Western classical tradition can be broadly termed “Italian.” Yet if I had to choose one characteristic that might set off Leider’s voice and singing from those of other great Wagnerian sopranos, it would probably be an especially Italianate quality of tone and of guidance, specifically with respect to vibrato. Among Wagnerian sopranos of whom recorded evidence provides a reasonable basis for comparison ^(I), perhaps Leider’s contemporary Helene Wildbrunn (b. 1892) is the most closely comparable. Her voice was evidently more massive than Leider’s (her records, good late acousticals from the same years as Leider’s earliest ones, give us strong hints of that), and more substantial in the low range (she’d begun as a contralto). But we also hear much of the same continuity of firm positional engagement on the line, and of distinctly vibrated tone, that we hear in Leider’s singing. Still, any comparison of the two will disclose a more consistent sense of “riding the vibrato” (as if the aliveness of the tone were itself impelling the line forward), along with a greater pliancy in the shaping of phrases, in Leider’s singing. Though both instruments are of heavy calibration and both under excellent technical control, we’d say that of the two, Leider’s makes the more lyrical  impression. And if we listen alternately to Leider and her great immediate successor Kirsten Flagstad—whose voice was marked by such a unique ease of voluminosity, and certainly did not lack in continuity of legato—I think we’d hear Leider’s as the livelier sound, more eager to arrive at its destination, irrespective of tempo.

The post scheduled for today, Friday, May 19, has been rescheduled for Monday, May 22. It concerns the art of two great Wagnerians, soprano Frida Leider (particularly her Isolde, as revealed by Immortal Performances’ reconstruction of her singing of that role from broadcast and studio sources, 1928-1936) and baritone Herbert Janssen, who is the subject of a six-CD release from Marston, also from a variety of live and studio performances,1927-1947. My apologies for the delay.

CLO  

First, a corrective note: A. J. Klein has kindly written to note that in the Lohengrin performance I characterized as complete except for the usually cut extension to “In fernem Land“—“unless I missed a cut”—I did indeed miss one: the entire Act 3 passage beginning with Lohengrin’s “O, Elsa! Was hast du mir angethan!” through the extended ensemble that follows and Lohengrin’s prediction of victory over “the Eastern hordes.” It’s not an uncommon excision—marked “VI–DE” in my vocal score—but Mr. Klein is entirely right that the passage is both musically and dramatically significant, and belongs in the opera. My thanks to him, and my apologies for succumbing to daze.    

I promised in Part 1 of this article to give attention to the Met broadcast of Dec. 21, 1935. It is one of three prewar transmissions from that source that are worth hearing, especially in relation to what it is possible to hear today. One is the performance I referred to in Part 1, in which Rethberg is the Elsa. That’s from January of 1940, and Rethberg’s colleagues are Kerstin Thorborg, Lauritz Melchior, Julius Huehn, Emmanuel List, and Leonard Warren (as The Herald), under Erich Leinsdorf. Another is from March of 1937, when Flagstad sang Elsa, Karin Branzell Ortrud, René Maison Lohengrin, Huehn (again) Telramund, and Ludwig Hofmann the King, with Maurice Abravanel conducting. I’ll allude to them for the things that seem special about them. The 1935 cast: Lotte Lehmann, Marjorie Lawrence, Melchior, Friedrich Schorr, and List, under Artur Bodanzky. I’ll focus on it despite some serious flaws (and the least satisfactory sound of the three), because when it’s special, it’s the most special of all.

Let me get the complaints out of the way first. From the moment Bodanzky arrived in New York in 1915 to assume leadership of the Metropolitan’s German wing (there was such a thing then), he declared his intention to cut anything that seemed to bore his audience. He must have been acutely aware that he was now conducting for an American audience, and perhaps that New York’s demographics had been shifting away from the proportions that had not long before made all-German-language seasons feasible. So he adopted a policy of significant redactions in the works under his jurisdiction, and these remained in effect until his death in 1939. It may also be that starting in the ’30s the Saturday matinees, from which the broadcasts emanate, were cut more heavily than other performances because of the evening performances to follow. In any event, in the Lohengrins I’m speaking of, Scenes 3 and 4 of Act 2 are ground into hash, and Scene 3 of Act 3 (the opera’s finale) cuts to the chase in an all-too-literal sense. While in many important passages (e.g., the Prelude, the first two scenes of Act 2, and the scene I’m about to examine) his leadership has a definition of musical profile and tautness of dramatic tension that few others equal, in others (the aforementioned Act 2 sequences, or the maniacal sprint through the Act 3 Prelude) one feels a lack of patience with the formalities of the score, so that the music does not unfold with the necessary sense of inevitability. The choral work is scrappy and poorly conveyed by the recording. Cuts and conducting taken together, does the opera still play? Yes, but we are cheated of its full impact. Vocally, too, there are disappointments. List has just the right sort of voice for Heinrich—a roomy true bass, impressive at both ends—but with everything between, except for the few softer, solicitous phrases, afflicted with shakiness. In Act 1, we are at points made painfully aware that the great Schorr’s time with this high-lying role has really elapsed. (Fortunately, he somehow pulls things together for the big Act 2 scene with Ortrud.) Finally, Melchior, distantly positioned, does not sound comfortable at the outset. Relative to what we hear today, these are First-World problems, but important, nonetheless.

Luckily, the crucial two-character scenes come across much better on this broadcast than the congested choral ones, and receive the most caring treatment. Important as the first two of Act 2 are (Ortrud/Telramund, Elsa/Ortrud), The Bridal Chamber Scene marks the opera’s turning point, the juncture at which what is most often taken as its central theme, “trust,” meets its moment of tragic failure. And splendid as the nearly complete Melchior/Bettendorf studio recording cited in Part 1 is, the combination of Lehmann, Melchior, and Bodanzky in live performance transcends it (or any other I know) by a substantial margin. Before I talk about why, I’m going to take a few moments with the scene itself. Structurally, it breaks down into five parts, plus a postlude, crafted by the creator into a throughwritten scene of cumulatively quickened pace and heightened emotional tension. But to trace its psychological progression, we must start with the characters’ state of mind at the outset.

Dear devotees: the above-titled post, scheduled for today, Apr. 14, will be published tomorrow, Sat., Apr. 15. Thanks for your patience.

CLO

I will have a couple of sad notes to append to today’s article, but first a cheerier one: Joseph Horowitz, author of the recent award-winning Dvořak’s Prophecy and The Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music and many other books, is now publishing a novel, The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. The sojourn (1907-1911) of Gustav Mahler and his ever-intriguing wife Alma in New York, first with the Metropolitan and then with the re-organizing Philharmonic, has  been given relatively slight attention by his biographers. So a book dedicated to this period, so crucial in the history of both organizations and so close to the end for Mahler himself, is self-recommending to opera and classical music devotees—all the more so for providing a close-in view of the intimate life of this extraordinary couple. The Marriage is being published in late April by Blackwater Press, and can be pre-ordered here. 

The first thing to be recorded about the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin is that it replaces the one designed and directed by Robert Wilson in 1998, which in any case had not been in the repertory for 17 years. That effort was abstract, emotionally cold, executed in a glacially slow-motion mimetic style and governed by a theory of the “separation of elements” (above all, of music from action) that was specifically and intentionally anti-Wagnerian, and occasionally beautiful, though for the most part in ways unrelated to the opera. At the time, it was the longest step the company had yet taken in the direction of postmodern, auteurial, eye-over-ear production. I wrote about it, about Wilson’s aesthetic, and about a species of companion piece called Bob (we might think of it as a comic intermezzo to the opera seria called Lohengrin) at length in Opera as Opera, to which I refer any interested parties.

The new Lohengrin is directed by François Girard, with the collaboration of a design team headed by Tim Yip (set and costumes), and is conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. I will get to it, and to thoughts about the work itself, in “Lohengrin, Part 2: Production,” next week. But first, in line with my insistence that just because most contemporary productions stand opera’s natural balance of elements (between ear and eye, action and environment) on its head doesn’t mean I have to follow suit, let me give due attention first to performance. In experienced time, as distinct from clock time, this was the longest Lohengrin I’ve ever seen or heard. This had nothing to do with redactions or restorations. Unless some cut slipped past me amid other distractions, the score was rendered complete except for the extension to “In fernem Land,” wherein Lohengrin explains Gottfried’s enchantment and his own selection in Grail Land to answer the call from Elsa, and the choral responses. This is musically one of the score’s lesser passages, and it clogs up the progression from the Narrative to the climax, for which reasons Wagner decided it should be eliminated. Nearly all productions, and even most recordings, have followed his advice.

Nor was the experienced duration due to the tempos chosen by the conductor. In fact, throughout Act 1 I was hopeful that this might be the best of N-S’s readings I’d yet heard.  In the Prelude there were places I wished had been given more definition, as with the ascending violins over a pp tremolando in Bar 15 (the violins are in eight parts here), marked as phrased staccati and later echoed in Lohengrin’s Act 3 Narrative to the words “um neu zu stärken seine Wunderkraft” (“to strengthen afresh its [the Grail’s] miraculous power”—referring to the Heavenly Dove’s yearly descent). N-S glided through this as if to tamp that thought down, and indeed the strings were, in terms of sonority, the weakest element throughout the evening. Still, the Vorspiel was at least sweetly played, and gathered climactic force where needed. The action started at a decent clip, if without any real sense of a mustering forth, and throughout the act all that trumpet work, onstage and in the pit, was crisp, the short punctuating chords under the Herald’s proclamations precise, and things in general swang along nicely right through the finale. So far, so good in the bright, smoothed, high-center-of-gravity Late Modern manner, to which the only antidotes we have had in this century in big German scores have come from Christian Thielemann and Daniele Gatti. From there on, however, the pit fell into a swoon, if not a coma. The problem was signaled with the ominous opening phrases of Act 2, where those groaning cello and low woodwind depths had nary a hint of their wonted grating buzz and the subsequent build-up into the Ortrud/Telramund scene had none of the brooding tension, the anguish, it must have. And so it went to the end: nothing wrong with the tempos, and nothing technically wrong with the playing, either, save that it lacked the essential quality of an operatic orchestra, that of suspenseful dramatic action, and therefore of meaningful engagement with the singers, under whose work there was not the web of thematic development and summoning of atmosphere needed to establish an interactive sonic environment. Then, two or three times, we got a great obliterative blast from the brass, far out of the proportions otherwise observed. At this point, we have heard enough of N-S to realize that this is his predilection, and that the longer he remains the shaper of the Met orchestra, choosing new players and grooming the lot, the more that predilection will prove determinative. The soundstage came to life periodically through the work of the chorus (Donald Palumbo, Chorus Master), whose excellent balance among choirs, exactitude of rhythm and attack, and sheer numerical sufficiency provided what grandeur there was to be had.

A confluence of life events has compelled me to re-schedule the post originally announced for today to Friday, April 7. I will be discussing Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin—its new production by the Metropolitan Opera, the performance led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and of course the masterwork itself, especially in the light of the interpretation proposed by it director, François Girard. My apologies for the delay.

C. L. O.