As we all deal with the grip of global mortal illness, with silence and absence, I’m going to try to sustain a small something of the nourishing presence of our art, and of the stimulation of critique. Today’s post was to be devoted to the Metropolitan Opera’s co-production time-share of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer. And its first few performances did in fact take place, but since I held tickets for the canceled one of March 18, I can’t write about that. I can, though, write about the nature of the work itself, and the views of it set forth by the production’s creators, principally its director, François Girard. And I can relate those to some of the important ones advanced by others, and those in turn to how they have been, or might yet be, realized in performance. While we anxiously await the return of living art, a combination of writings, recordings, and recollections may yield some useful thoughts.

Girard was responsible for one of the most widely lauded Met offerings of recent years, the Parsifal that had its premiere in 2013. I wrote extensively on that production in Parsifal Lite and the Afterlife (3/9/18, q.v.), wherein I argued that although the production was impressive for its skill, invention, and technical command, it had to be rejected for its auteuristic contradictions of the work’s given circumstances. On the basis of its success, Girard has been brought back for Holländer and, we are told, a near-future Lohengrin. That last would replace the Robert Wilson production, which was my “enough, already” kickoff point for Opera as Opera—so in prospect, Girard has plenty of upside to play with there.

In Zachary Woolfe’s preview article in The New York Times, the auteurial trope that emerges as central to Girard’s concept is a removal from reality. He observes that whereas Parsifal is set in a “world of unreality and we tried to pull it back to reality,” Holländer is the opposite, and must therefore take the reverse journey. This kind of thinking has become so common that its peculiarity is no longer recognized: whatever a work’s creator has stipulated as fundamental to its stage world (and after all, this is only Richard Wagner) must be contradicted—it’s the director’s solemn mission. But of course, Girard has his reasons, and as in most such cases, these have to do with bringing the work’s cultural assumptions, its Weltanschauung, more into agreement with our own. This is first so that audience members will not be troubled by sneakily enjoying, or even finding themselves endorsing, once-presumptive attitudes we claim to have transcended, and second so that the director and his collaborators cannot be held guilty by association with them. Betrayal of the work’s integrity does not figure on the ethical balance sheet.

If pulling Parsifal back to reality was Girard’s aim with that work, his shot group landed well wide of the target—that is to say, the realm he depicted was far weirder, more “unreal” than the one Wagner describes. Stage worlds don’t work that way. Once the mythical medieval Kingdom of the Grail is established, as is stipulated in the work, things seem “real” according to how closely character actions and events follow its laws, not ours. Now, for Holländer, which is set in a world of everyday reality, Girard finds it advisable to take it somewhere else. “When you play it too realistically,” he tells us, “you expose its simplicity or naïveté” (my italics). Further, according to Woolfe, there’s the “challengingly misogynistic” matter of “antiquated gender dynamics” (Daland promises Senta to the Dutchman for “some gold [he] is carrying”). So if we can whisk the whole piece off to another level of reality (“Senta’s fevered imagination,” for instance), we can designate the shady deal for assignment there. “It’s like in a dream,” says Anja Kampe, the production’s Senta, thus placing it in the now-hoary succession of re-writes (to which Holländer has been especially susceptible) that dispose of perceived embarrassments that way. Virtuality—film and projections—will help transport us there, and since Girard began as a film director, he knows how to handle them, as he demonstrated with his Parsifal. (I much enjoyed the only one of his films I’ve seen—which, come to think of it, was about an artist, Glenn Gould, who chose to distance himself from the reality of live performance and dwell in the secondary orality of the recording studio.) Near the end of his article, Woolfe states that “About Mr. Girard’s sensible symbolism and visual flair . . . no one takes serious issue.” On “visual flair:” right. On “sensible symbolism:” wrong. Read on.

Displacements and re-arrangements necessitated by the health crisis, including setting myself up to do some online teaching, have forced me to postpone publication of today’s post till Monday (April 6). Then, I’ll be discussing Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer—the work itself; some of the ideas about it set forth in François Girard’s production of it; a smattering of the production history that brought us to such ideas (hint: Otto Klemperer and the Kroll); and some of the singers who have essayed the opera’s juicy roles. 

Thanks for your patience, and stay safe and well, all.

C.L.O. 

Today’s post is devoted primarily to Marston’s release of Lotte Lehmann’s electrical recordings from 1927-33 (further to the label’s restoration of her earlier acousticals), with what I hope will be instructive comparisons to other versions of some selections. Those will afford us further assessment of Lise Davidsen, about whom I wrote anent her Met debut in The Queen of Spades (see the post of 1/3/20), and will include a glance at Pentatone’s “complete” Der Freischütz, on which she sings the role of Agathe. But first, I’ll take a few lines to respond to a smattering of inquiries about the Met’s offering of Handel’s Agrippina, still running as I write this. After all, I devoted considerable space to an “Agrippina Forecast” (see 6/28/19 for some thoughts on this entertaining early work, and on Handel and Me.) Why wouldn’t I follow up that up? It’s right in the neighborhood.

Well, I did think about it, just as I’m thinking now about the Giulio Cesare announced for next season, and for that matter, about everything operatic that isn’t part of what I see as my principal subject, which is the performability of the “standard repertory” canon, and about the best use of my available time, energy, and money. Having read quite a bit about David McVicar’s take on the opera, and having looked over its casting here, I thought, “This is going to be a production of the forced-relevance type, replete with sometimes amusing parallels of a sort that can always be found. It’ll be musically lively (Harry Bicket, cond.) and pretty consistently undersung by talented people who will knock themselves out to keep my eye titillated and my ear on background.” 

I was still contemplating springing for a ticket, though, right up until seeing the review by Zachary Woolfe (NYT, 2/8/20), whose lines I think I’ve learned to read between. It’s not that his review was unfavorable—on the contrary, it was enthusiastic for almost exactly 70% of its generous (by NYT allotment) length, the 30% remainder being the singing-and-knocking-themselves-out segment. It’s also not that this order and allotment was necessarily disproportionate. That’s how opera presents itself these days, exceptions being the exception. So Woolfe’s piece opens with a rejoinder to the notion that the Met is too big a house for Handel or other Baroque repertory. (“This Is Now Handel’s House,” runs the title, with a subhead reference, picked up from the text, to the Met’s “looming proscenium.”) The rest of the 70% is devoted to characterizing the work and the visual tone of the production, in terms that, with allowance for the kind of “selling review” language that always hints at someone hoping to sell himself on what he’s seeing and hearing, isn’t at all out of line with my predictions. Then comes the 30%. Even here, more attention is given to bodily energies than to singing. But we are told that Joyce di Donato’s voice (a slender, though agile, one for the title part) can grow “pinched and strident toward the top;” that Kate Lindsey’s (Nerone) is “sometimes overwhelmed in fast passages;” that Iestyn Davies’ (Ottone) is “perhaps lighter and blander than the female contralto Handel envisioned” (we can safely cut the “perhaps”); and that though Brenda Rae’s “highest notes pop into the theater . . . her voice [as Poppea] is otherwise narrow and sometimes nearly inaudible.” Further, that though the “general sense of vocal unease” seemed to settle in after intermission, “even then the cast didn’t fully meet the virtuosic and sensual demands of this music.”

That’s what the distinguished Algerian baritone Dinh Gilly said to his wife, Cécile, who was teaching a talented but raw young Australian soprano, Marjorie Lawrence, in her Paris studio, c. 1929. And indeed, the excellent American mezzo Gladys Swarthout, recalling her most admired colleagues, later observed that “There was a wild quality in her voice that electrified me.” A major compilation (the first I know of) of this important soprano’s work has recently been released, as has a six-CD set extending Marston’s survey of the recordings of Lotte Lehmann. We’ll get a running start on these recordings today, PLUS: a follow-up on Wozzeck and the problems of Sprechgesang, together with the bibliographical references promised last time, AND a professional Conductor’s Lament over the current state of musical interpretation.

On the Dec. 21, 1935 Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Wagner’s Lohengrin, there’s a riveting five minutes late in Act 2. The moment always has some shock effect, as Ortrud interrupts the wedding procession into the cathedral with her contemptuous dismissal of Elsa and denunciation of her Swan Knight groom, and Elsa rises to the defense. Given choral and orchestral forces of professional grade and soloists of some vocal presence, Wagner has seen to that. But even heard out of context, there’s a special excitement here, a flaming, vaulting thrust to Ortrud’s attack, a firm nobility and purity to Elsa’s response, and a propulsive urgency in the conducting. The Ortrud is Marjorie Lawrence, singing just three days after her Met debut as the Walkūre Brünnhilde; the Elsa is Lotte Lehmann; the conductor is Artur Bodanzky.

Lawrence and Lehman shared the Met stage only briefly. This Elsa/Ortrud pairing and one other, Brūnnhilde and Sieglinde in Die Walküre, account for their scattering of joint appearances. But I am led to consider them together through a coincidence of recording discoveries—a recent four-disc compilation of Lawrence’s work—nearly all live—in Desiree Records’ Great Australian Voices series (GAV 010, very kindly passed along to me by Richard Dyer) and the new  Lehmann package mentioned above, this one comprising her 1927-’33 Odeon electricals. (An earlier Marston release covered her acousticals from 1912 to 1926—see my posts Lotte Lehmann and the Bonding of the Registers, Parts 1 and 2, 9/29/17 and 10/13/17.) Lehmann’s career was long and her studio recordings many; she is known to, and appropriately revered by, all opera lovers of historical inclination. Lawrence’s career was severely curtailed by polio, and she made relatively few commercial recordings. Any subliminal public awareness of her is probably due primarily to the movie based on her autobiographical memoir, Interrupted Melody.^(I) For the short span allotted her, however, there can be no doubt that she was a dramatic soprano of the first rank. She was also a rather different kind of “dramatic soprano” than we grew accustomed to from her time forward, or than we have any example of today.

I make the score 15-0. I was going to put it in the books at 9-0, which in major league baseball is the score designated in the rare event that a team does not show up, or field a full complement of players, or, if it’s the home team, it or its fans commit some egregious infraction that does not allow the game to be completed. In those cases, a forfeit is declared, and one run per inning is assigned to the forfeitee—hence, 9-0. However, the Berg team, after long, hard practice, did suit up, take the field, and make every effort to compete. They just couldn’t score against the overwhelming Kentridge lineup. And since Wozzeck has not nine innings, but fifteen scenes, and since in Little League or certain other games fifteen runs is often the margin at which a “Mercy Rule” is invoked and the game terminated, 15-0 seems just and proper. Although the game was over almost before it began, I’ll file a report on it down below. First, though, I’m going to back up and look at some aspects of the opera itself and its performance history, particularly here in New York and in my lifetime—as it happens, two coeval chronicles.

New York and Wozzeck grew familiar, if not intimate, over a span of twelve months in the years 1951-52. True, there had been the American premiere under Stokowski with his Philadelphia Orchestra, in a production designed by Robert Edmond Jones, in 1931, and it had traveled to the old Metropolitan Opera House for a single performance. After that, nothing but concert fragments for twenty years, during which the opera, widely produced in Europe after its 1925 world premiere (Berlin Staatsoper, under Erich Kleiber) was choked off there by Nazi censorship—save for a brief run (remarkable, given the nature of the regime) at the Rome opera in 1942. That production had Tito Gobbi and the American soprano Dorothy Dow as Wozzeck and Marie, with Tullio Serafin conducting.^(I)

Then, in 1951, Wozzeck, presented in the New York Philharmonic’s subscription series, became the most audacious of the concert-opera projects Dmitri Mitropoulos undertook before leaving the orchestra for opera proper at the Met and elsewhere. Those performances also provided the materials for the first complete recording of the work, on the Columbia label. Exactly a year later Joseph Rosenstock, in his first season after taking over the musical directorship of the New York City Opera from Laszlo Halasz, led New York’s first run of theatrical performances, in English, directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky and sung by a cast that included Marko Rothmüller (also Covent Garden’s Wozzeck that same year) in the title role, Patricia Neway as Marie, and two of Mitropoulos’ principals, David Lloyd (Andres) and Ralph Herbert (The Doctor). These three performances sold well, and the opera was brought back for two more in the Fall ’52 season.^(II)

Not long ago, around the time of my post on Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Juilliard master classes, I was grousing to a friend about both them and another example of online vocological weirdness, in which a pedagogue in an influential academic position was attempting to instruct us in registrational and other laryngeal occurrences by means of a combination of  technological readings and demonstrations in falsetto. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” she answered, perhaps a little impatiently. “All that laryngoscope stuff has been going on for decades now, and I don’t think it’s affected the teaching of singing in any mainstream way. I can think of ten problems more important than that for young singers.” 

“All right,” said I, not one to leave a thrown gauntlet on the ground. “Where’s your list?”

My friend is herself a singer, still quite young, and while I am in touch daily with the world of young singers through my students and colleagues, she has been living in it. She’s an excellent singer and musician and, as you’ll see, smart and articulate. She’s been through respected academic programs, a residency as a young artist in a major European opera house, and in the years since, a representative mix of the performance, audition, day-job, and postgrad study options that young professionals find open to them here in New York. Not to get cute about it, I’ll call her Jane, as in Jane Doe, unoperatic as that may sound. It took her a while (Jane’s busy), but she has finally completed her list.

What I love about it, and find unusual, is that although Jane is personally involved with the aspirational struggles young singers endure, with all their emotional ups and downs, she is also able to step aside from that involvement and adopt an analytical perspective on it.

Naturally, I also love it because I agree with nearly all of it. And in that regard, I must emphasize that while Jane and I do of course exchange thoughts about singing and about performances (she attends the opera frequently), she is a decidedly independent thinker. She confesses that she doesn’t read my blog, and though she loyally ordered her copy of Opera as Opera, has read only sections from the early part of it. So these are very much her observations, which I shall present without comment from me. For my own take on many of her points, refer to Opera as Opera, particularly the chapters entitled “Singing,” “We Go to School,” and the Epilogue, and to my series of posts called “Before the First Lesson,” which are in the archive.

My review of the seasonal Met revival of Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades,” promised last time, follows Jane’s list. I give the list pride of place, because the issues it raises are more important for the future of our art than any single performance event, and this first post of a new year seems an ideal time to ponder them. Jane says:

So here’s “the list.” Each of these eight items could probably receive its own article-length exploration, but this is my rough attempt to get some reasonably succinct thoughts down in writing. These are what I believe to be the largest systemic issues affecting the talent pipeline and talent development of young singers, which—to the extent that one believes there has been an overall decline in the level of quality of operatic performances over the past half century or so—are among the likely contributing factors to that decline. There are, of course, plenty of exceptions, and I know of many singers who have combined world-class talent with painstaking work and their own unique humanity to achieve substantial and well-deserved career success. But as when speaking about any set of complex systemic issues, the effects of these macro-trends are seen in overall tendencies, at the population level, and don’t rule out the existence of truly excellent outliers (although they might make them rarer).

N. B.: Owing to a technical glitch, today’s post was originally published with the wrong time stamp, and in a form that did not include corrections made in the final draft. These have now been corrected. My apologies for the confusion.

I could have entered this post in my “MIA” series, following La Forza del destino, Faust, and, in a  way, Don Giovanni—operas not in the seasonal repertory, but beckoning for one reason or another. In this case, though, it is I who am missing in action. The recent event that beckoned most fetchingly was the first New York appearance of Teodor Currentzis with his Musica Aeterna forces from Perm (see the Don Giovanni posts, 6/22/18 and 7/6/18), offering several repetitions of Verdi’s Manzoni Requiem over at The Shed, and at only $40 per ticket. But the dates refused to fit, and to judge from reports of projections and of acoustics that required some electronic boosting, I would probably have found plenty in the way of impediment to satisfaction. Then too, I’d meant to catch one in the recent series of La Bohème performances at the Met. But the last one slipped by at a very intensive work time, so I was once again, wistfully, AWOL. I’d heard tell of some better Puccini singing from this year’s cast; also, that the third-act scrim had been removed, to some acoustical advantage. That had me musing on how much I’d always loved that third act, and how the scrim had played some role in that, and how unlikely it seemed that any piffling difference in the sound would make up for the loss in the vintage-theatre atmospheric effect. They waited till Zeffirelli was dead, I thought. It probably tore, and they just didn’t feel like mending it. And now that this Bohème is the last trace left (at least for us here in New York) of Zeffirelli near the top of his game, there are some things to say about his contribution, and of course about the singers and conductors he collaborated with. Fortunately, we can stay in touch with his Bohème and some of its singers, though at a remove, via video.

First, though, I cannot resist a small homage to the opera itself. It is now the single most standard piece of the standard repertory, the most popular of all operas. Sir Thomas Beecham, who heard a great deal about the performance of Puccini straight from that horse’s mouth, and who conducted one of the most highly regarded recordings of Bohème, observed: “If you were to ask nine operagoers out of ten, in any country of the world, whose operas they like best, as I have done, the answer would be Puccini—not Wagner or Mozart or Verdi—but Puccini. I think it is because he speaks to us personally, in a way we understand. This is the opinion of waiters, hotel managers, taxi drivers, bus conductors, anybody you like.”^(I) I do wonder if Sir Thomas really got around to a minimum of ten mundanely employed operagoers “in any country of the world,” but I don’t challenge his findings.

When the Metropolitan first mounted its present production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in 2007, I gave it a pass. I feared that this landmark work, so aesthetically fulfilling, dramatically gripping, and spiritually liberating if performed well, had already been dealt a mortal blow, at least locally, by the New York City Opera’s jab at it a few years earlier, directed by Martha Clarke and starring the falsettist Jochen Kowalski. Faced with the prospect of a fresh bout directed by the jokey choreographer Mark Morris, with another falsetto voice (David Daniels’) assigned to the passionate utterances of the title character, I didn’t really care to be witness to the knockout punch. And for reasons I can’t presently reconstruct, I missed an interim revival with Stephanie Blythe. This year, with the contralto Jamie Barton, whom I had not heard live, cast as Orfeo, I decided to give it a try.

This presentation was as close to a non-event as it is possible to come with the level of professional skill present at a major opera house. Still, it happened, and I was there (I saw the performance of Oct. 29). So, strictly for the record and before moving on to other things, this skeleton review:

Edition: 1762 unadorned, the hardest of all available choices to enliven—the most dependent on vivid music-making, riveting dramatic characterization, rapturous dancing, and evocative production.

Orchestra and conducting (Mark Wigglesworth, cond.): Underpowered for the house, bland and uncommitted, having neither the sharpness of attack and pungency of timbre of a good period ensemble nor the symphonic grandeur of a full, strongly led modern pit orchestra. Noticeably less present and alive than the similar grouping for Iphigénie en Tauride in 2007, under Louis Langrée.

Physical Production (Mark Morris, dir. & choreographer): Set (Allen Moyer, des.): For Acts 1 and 2 (the mourning, the descent, the Gates, Elysium—90 intermissionless minutes here), an ugly, multitiered metal structure that when deployed made more noise, relative to the music being played, than the notorious Lepage pile for Der Ring. On it: the chorus in seated rows, costumed in fancy period dress (Isaac Mizrahi, des.), as audience to what is “enacted” below. This audience said to include historically identifiable figures, but this not discernible from the front Balcony. Thus, the chorus of demons, shades, etc. not participants in the drama, though singing their assigned parts. A distancing device, a “perspective.” Below this, a semicircle of barren floor space. For Act 3 (the ascent, the reprieve and celebration), a slanting upward path on a stoney wall, with a barrier that conceals the performers’ bodies from waist down; then, as above.

Staging and “Personenregie“: A panto-choreo mélange of unremitting triviality. The members of the corps, dressed in contempo-cazh and tight little suits, scurry about, jump up and down, take movement-class lunges. Orfeo is given a few abstract signing gestures. Morris’s idiom was a somewhat better fit with Rameau’s Platée at the NYCO in 2000, when he at least had his own dancers to work with. But that opera is at best a moderately enjoyable piece of light entertainment, of about the same weight as, say, Anything Goes, but much older, and French, and with distinctly less memorable tunes.

There was once a syndicated tabloid columnist named Sidney Skolsky. He filled his two-or-three-times-weekly pieces with inside dope from the world of Hollywood, including certain items that didn’t necessarily elevate the personal reputations or professional judgment of some of its citizens, and always ended with “But don’t get me wrong—I love Hollywood.” Not wanting to be gotten wrong, and worried that some of you might take me for an anti-Porgy contrarian, I need to stipulate up front that I really do like Porgy and Bess, and I really am glad that the Metropolitan Opera has scored a badly needed smash hit with its new production of it. Yet, much as I like the opera I see and hear in my imagination, and enjoy many of its numbers along the way, it always somehow leaves me unfulfilled, sometimes even empty. On this occasion, it also had me feeling guilty, since the truth is that despite the presence of an abundance of talent and hard work, and commitment to putting the work over as a grand opera, I grew impatient and fidgety as the long evening unwound, and experienced some of that same emptiness at the close. So what I’m going to write here is not so much a review as a series of notes on Porgy and the production, mostly in a spirit of inquiry.

First, though, I must recommend to you the essay-review of the production by Joseph Horowitz in The American Scholar, along with his follow-ups in ArtsJournalBlogs, and the responses thereto. Horowitz is a great champion of the work, of Gershwin, and of the African-American seam in American music. His book “On My Way”: The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess” is the best source I know on the genesis of the opera. The posts referred to above include (or provide links to) video and audio segments of Ruby Elzy (the original Serena), Billie Holliday, Nina Simone, John W. Bubbles (original Sportin’ Life), and Lawrence Tibbett singing Porgy excerpts, as well as eloquent written comments by the bass-baritone Kevin Deas (a veteran of many Porgy performances) on the necessity of playing the part as a cripple, as envisioned by the creators. And since Horowitz had a better time with the Met performance than I did, his remarks provide an alternate view of that, as well.

1. In my youth (preadolescence into early 20s), I loved Porgy unreservedly. But that was because I got to know its major “highlights” (and what a succession of songs!) through their first-ever recordings, the album of 78s issued by RCA Victor soon after the opera’s premiere at the Alvin Theatre. Recorded at New York’s Liederkranz Hall in three sessions in October of 1935, the album starred Tibbett and the Met soprano Helen Jepson, with a studio orchestra and chorus led in two of the sessions by the premiere production’s conductor, Alexander Smallens, and in the third (matinee day at the Alvin?) by Nathaniel Shilkret, a veteran Gershwinian and frequent Victor studio conductor. Gershwin supervised the sessions and authorized the results. Tibbett and Jepson sang the solos of all the principals (Porgy, Jake, Sportin’ Life; and Bess, Clara, Serena, respectively). Since Tibbett remains to this day the most compelling singeractor America has produced; the rather underrated Jepson (see my post of 1/4/19, MIA: Gounod’s “Faust”) sang quite beautifully; and since I didn’t yet know the show well enough to see anything wrong with the procedure, I simply went with the emotional power and atmosphere of the records, and took them for Porgy.

Owing to an unusual pileup of teaching obligations, I have re-scheduled today’s post, “Notes on Porgy,” to Sunday, Nov. 3. It examines the Gershwins’ and Heywards’ unique work, its problems of form and the controversies that often accompany it, in the light of the Metropolitan Opera’s ambitious new production. Apologies for the delay.

C.L.O.