Dear devotees,

The post scheduled for today, March 9, will be published on Monday, March 11. With apologies for the delay,

CLO

We have recently (on Dec. 2) celebrated the 100th birthday of Maria Callas. For an artist so long departed (she died in 1977, and her last performances of a complete role were in 1965), there’s been a remarkable amount of attention paid. Warner (now the curator of both the EMI and Cetra catalogues) has released a 131-CD box that purportedly contains every known scrap of her recorded legacy. There’s a new documentary covering her Paris debut (1958) and the events surrounding it. Opera devoted the entire feature-article section of its December issue (seven articles) to her, and followed up with two more contributions in January. There was even a two-page spread in the heavily popcult-oriented Sunday New York Times and, more predictably, a festive smorgasbord of events and exhibitions in Athens, sponsored by Greek National Opera. On a more modest scale, there was also a full-day discussion, workshop, and concert event  here in New York under the sponsorship of Teatro Nuovo, in which I had the pleasure of participating as a member of the severely attrited cohort who saw and heard Callas in live performance with at least nominally adult eyes and ears.

There is just cause for celebration. Maria Callas was a great artist, and an enormously influential one. Michael Scott, in his artistic biography of her, ^(I)calls her “one of the three greatest opera singers of this [the 20th] century,” the other two being Caruso and Chaliapin. I’m not sure I’d rate her above all other contenders—where would that leave Lauritz Melchior, for one?—and so much depends on what each of us values most highly in singing—but she certainly belongs at that level of consideration. There cannot be much argument about her influence, except to note that it was confined to the operatic sphere. She did not, in addition to her operatic triumphs, elevate a folk-derived song genre, as did both Caruso and Chaliapin, or dominate an art song literature, as did Fischer-Dieskau, or penetrate down into music of the entertainment culture, in the manner of a Tauber or Tibbett, and by that means broaden appreciation of the classical voice. I think we are also entitled to assume that, in opera’s midcentury scramble to expand its repertory in the absence of viable new candidates, some restoration of the so-called “bel canto” part of it, and of the singing practices associated with that, was bound to take place. But of her status as primary catalyst, the single artist without whom such restoration would not have happened so quickly, embraced so much, or endured so well, there’s really no doubt. In my judgment, the restoration has not been without its underside, with respect both to operas deemed repertory-worthy and the direction some voices (beginning with Callas’ own) have been taken. But that, along with an evaluation of net gain or loss, is an argument for another time, and in any event is hardly Maria’s fault.

Callas’ unique artistic identity had three commonly attributed aspects: first, that she wedded the power and color of the best late-E-19 soprano voices with the agility and precision of embellishment of earlier styles (or, as I like to put it, the prismatic voice with the ornamental one), thus uniting two schools of technique and expression that had come to seem mutually exclusive; second, that she infused this vocality with a sense of dramatic purpose that rang true to a modern ear, and so relieved those older styles of the burden of seeming only aesthetic; and third, that this sense of dramatic purpose was also evident in her onstage physical presence and behavior (commonly referred to as “acting”), and fused with that element in her singing to create an unusually compelling unity of interpretive intent and effect. I believe those observations are accurate, though sometimes overly valorized. But what struck me upon first hearing her recorded voice, several years before seeing her, was a beckoning in its timbre that sounded ancient and modern at once, as if she were channeling something bygone, drawing us back toward it, yet also making it immediate to us. The something was embedded in the voice because it was embedded in her, and at her best she brought it forth directly, almost guilelessly, all the hard work involved notwithstanding. One of my fellow panelists at the birthday event, Peter Mark, observed that nearly all the masterpieces of 19th-Century opera are tragedies, and that Callas’ voice was uniquely suited to them because of a tragic quality in the tone itself. That’s getting close to the nature of her genius. With the advantage of hindsight, and staying for a moment with romantic notions about the sort of artist she represented on the highest plane: Maurice Maeterlinck—writing, if I recall aright, of the early passing of a brother—spoke of a certain look that marks those who are destined to die young, and Ernest Hemingway, writing of men in battle, of a particular smell that signals the same fate. If there is such a thing as a shade of the singing voice that sends that message to those attuned to it, it was there in the voice of Maria Callas. And that essence was there to the end, instantly recognizable even when the executional skills were severely compromised.

On Tuesday, Feb. 20, I’ll be delivering a talk, with a Q&A opportunity afterward, to the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA and UK. As always with this knowledgeable and devoted audience, the subject will be singing. Last year, I spoke about vocal poise—the balances of registration, breath, and resonance—as exemplified in the singing of Jussi Björling.

This time, the topic will be broader. I’ll be trying to trace what’s happened to the classical voice over the past century, influenced by fundamental shifts in how we communicate and listen and by parallel shifts in how opera is produced, and to define where the kind of singing we love stands in today’s virtualized culture. I’ll touch on some recent findings in our understanding of all this, and venture a few suggestions for how to address the problems it presents.

The registration deadline for this event is Feb. 19. For further details, see the Society’s website, here. 

And a reminder: Next post: Callas: An  Assessment, Fri., March 2.

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Herewith my thoughts on the subject of this season’s revival of Tannhäuser. Readers with an interest in the topic will be edified by the series of three (comparatively brief) articles Joseph Horowitz has posted on his own artsjournal blog. (It happens that he attended the same performance as I). As you’ll see, some of his observations are congruent with mine—in fact, he cites my article of last week on the matter of contemporary attempts to renew the repertory, which he kindly reposted. But he writes from a different angle, and extends his remarks to other Wagner stagings that in his view productively addressed the role of “Regie.” You can access all three here.

The least we can say of Richard Wagner is that he is Shakespeare’s only rival (or Shakespeare his) as greatest creator for the Western stage since antiquity. And a proof of his greatness is that an opera generally considered one of the weaker works of his maturity can register a measure of its soul-stirring power in a performance as emaciated as that of December 12, 2023 at the Metropolitan Opera. More remarkable yet is that the work did not need to overcome serious auteurial revisionism, or “concept,” to salvage what remains it could. For this was a revival of a thoroughly romantic-representational Schenck/Schneider-Siemssen production dating from 1977, which we may evaluate on the basis of how well it advocates for the work on its own terms, rather than on the merits of a corrective imposture. Thus, the event pitilessly illumines a state of performance that lends every apparent justification for the most hostile misrepresentations (or simple neglect) of the canon.

Tannhäuser completes our recent-season minitour of Wagner’s pre-Ring Romantic tales of the artist/sinner and his sufficiently-loyal-or-not co-protagonist. The other two, Der Fliegende Holländer and Lohengrin, were directed, along with Parsifal, by François Girard. Those productions have been discussed in previous posts, as has the thematically related case of Die Meistersinger. It’s a little ironic that of the pre-Ring trio,Tannhäuser should be brought before the public not at all à la mode, for it is the baldest of the three in its presumably outdated messaging. In it, the identity of the artist is not cloaked in parable, as in Lohengrin. Nor is the sinner’s blasphemous deed committed long before the start of the action, as in Holländer. Moreover, the specifically religious nature of the heroine’s sacrifice is openly declared. No parsing is required—it’s all right in front of us, in forceful, colorful, immediately apprehended music and action. The stage world’s level of reality is similar to Lohengrin‘s: a superimposition of legend onto date-stamped historical events populated by their actual participants, and of Christian piety onto the persistent presence of older, “pagan” practices. In Tannhäuser, the Christian/pagan agon focuses specifically on the sexual component of love: that’s the grotto of Venus herself, literally underground, that our hero has been dallying in at rise, and that’s a shrine to the Virgin, not a station of the cross, that Tannhäuser finds himself beneath after his cry of “Mein Heil ruht in Maria!”, and to which Elisabeth later prays. In this corner, the Cult of Venus, and in this, the Cult of the Virgin.

This year, the Metropolitan Opera is mounting six productions, among a total of eighteen, of new or recent works. Two are carried over from previous seasons; the other four are company premieres. None originates in Europe—five are by American composers (two of them black) and one by a Mexican composer. For a comparable example of attention to the contemporary in the company’s history, we would have to return to the first decades of the last century, when Puccini, Strauss, and assorted verists and post-Wagnerians were of the time, and it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that a new curiosity might turn out to be a repertory-worthy item. As for an equivalent American representation in a season’s offerings, there is no precedent. In those days of a century and more ago, the Met could lean on an audience in which large contingents of first- and second-generation Europeans, most prominently German and Italian, but all still marked by the great influence of 19th-Century Parisian grand opera, helped to fill in the old-money ranks. Opera had long been a high-class component of their home cultures, and while they naturally responded most readily to their native stories and sounds, they were also well accustomed to the interpenetration of repertories, and were assimilated into the broader European assumption of the virtues of opera and classical music. There was no perceived necessity to cater to one ethnicity or another, since opera went with the territory for all.

That assumption settled in for a good long run, and after 140 years^(I) is still the only plausible argument for the existence of a full-scale, full-season repertory opera company in an American city. It did not settle deeply enough, however, to turn opera and classical music into “public goods” in any but indirect ways; nor has it resulted in the creation of anything resembling a native American repertory that might lay the foundation for such a status. With the last influx of European emigrés now two to three generations behind us and the attentions of the rich increasingly drawn elsewhere, it has weakened, perhaps fatally. The canonical repertory is foundering, for reasons that are discussed here in post after post. So the company’s current management has undertaken a program of artificial insemination in place of what was once natural conception—hence the ethnocultural distribution noted above, to which we can add a sexual identity element, as well. This is not a program of audience integration (the management cannot be so unobservant as to suppose that will happen, except at the outermost fringe), but of audience fragmentation, in perfect synchronization with the oft-remarked silo-ing of group identities in our society as a whole. It happens that I have worked in a silo. It is not so bad in the fall, when you’re up at the top near the fresh-air source, and the silage is fresh and relatively dry. But through the winter you work your way down toward the floor, and by spring you are pitching forkfuls of sopping, matted, deeply marinated muck into baskets for trolleying back up to the top, dripping as they go, and the stench is asphyxiating. Moral: the good stuff is right near the top. Also: some silos are near-empty to begin with.   

Last week, I wrote about certain aspects of Verdi’s Un Ballo in maschera—its close-to-the-unities compactness and the northerliness of its tinta as distinct from that of other proximate Verdi operas. And I discussed a Berlin radio performance of 1938 starring the Danish tenor Helge Roswaenge, along with some of the other singers and conductors who might have given us performances of the work bringing that aspect of its aesthetic to the fore. These thoughts were occasioned by Ballo’s return to the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera, but time ran out before I could address that event. My assessment herewith.

The Met’s production is a revival. As my regular readers know, I try to give revivals good attention, since—for all our interest in new operas and new productions—it is upon them that the survival of a repertory company ultimately depends. This one was one introduced eleven years ago, conducted then by Fabio Luisi and directed by David Alden with a design team of Paul Steinberg (set), Brigitte Reiffenstuel (costumes), Adam Silverman (lights), and Maxine Braham (choreography). Since no Assistant Director is credited with the re-staging, I assume that D. Alden was present this year to guide the re-installment of his interpretation. His brother Christopher was more prominent than David on the New York scene some years back (early on, there was also fraternal co-direction), so D. Alden’s work was not familiar to me when this production was new except secondhand, via European-based commentary. That commentary, though, had led me to watch the video of his Munich Festival production of Tannhäuser, and then to give that more-than-cursory attention in Opera as Opera. ^(I) There, in a chapter on revisionist Regietheater as of the time of writing, I gave Alden credit for a more complex and courageous approach to Wagner than Robert Wilson’s with Lohengrin. “He faces the work,” I acknowledged, “and from a certain P.O.V., digs into it.” I also quoted bits of his philosophy of production, which he describes as emanating from his own inner emotional life. “I can’t really direct something until I feel that what I have to say personally I can say through this piece.” I coined a term, “auteurial subjectivity,” to describe this sort of thinking about theatrical direction, and asked, as I have many times before and since, “. . . why is it we are supposed to accept the director’s inner emotional life in place of the field defined by the work’s creator(s), not to mention the huge philosophical assumption  . . . that the world itself is but a projection of that life . . . ?”

Much as I disagreed with Alden’s Fichtean notion of his role as director (and much as I was pleased to learn that Christian Thielemann had refused to conduct a revival of this Tannhäuser, an almost unique stand on artistic principle by a contemporary conductor), I did not dismiss him out of hand. The confession of inner emotional life on display in Tannhäuser was misplaced and often off-putting, but it was not that of an immature fanboy—a fanboy not of opera, at that, but of the silly side of the Hollywood of the 1930s and ’40s. That’s what this Ballo is. I had seen it in its first season, and while my memory is often all too sharp at retaining an unwelcome production’s look and vibe, a long-dormant forgetfulness faculty had mercifully snapped to and expunged it utterly, save for the pretty image of Icarus’ flight on the forecurtain. I recalled fragments of the individual performances, but nothing of the staging. I had taken notes, though, and while in what follows I will add a few observations from the event of 10/24/23 [in the brackets], the freshest overall response will come from those of 11/27/12. They don’t make elegant writing, but they do convey the unvarnished reaction. Lightly edited for clarity of syntax and punctuation:

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.