Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (40 page)

The remaining stagings, all subject to Dexter’s oversight, redecorated the familiar. Only Frederica von Stade’s Cherubino stood out in a middle-of-the-road
Le Nozze di Figaro
(Nov. 20, 1975), revived just once.
Manon Lescaut
(March 17, 1980) wallowed in naturalism, while its lovers, Scotto and Domingo, disported themselves in erotic play, defying the Met’s then prudish standard of decency. More to the point, as Dexter groused, director Gian Carlo Menotti allowed them “to indulge in every acting cliché that has been used since Thespis.” Undistinguished sets, borrowed from Chicago as a stopgap for the tattered 1951
La Bohème
, appeared on home screens across the country in the introductory “Live from the Met” telecast (Feb. 23, 1977). Three new productions took a step or two beyond mere redecoration.
Un Ballo in maschera
(Feb. 4, 1980) was staged by Elijah Moshinsky; he credited Dexter with the idea of setting the action in colonial Boston at the outbreak of the American Revolution, and not in the late seventeenth-century, as specified in the libretto. Peter Wexler designed boxy, minimalist sets; Peter J. Hall modeled costumes on the portraits of John Singleton Copley. The reception of the cast headed by Pavarotti was ecstatic, of the production’s historico-political reading mixed. There was much to admire in the new
Lohengrin
(Nov. 14, 1976): the rough river bank, the monumental castle, the acting, and Levine’s conducting, which one reviewer called his “finest hour.”
Tannhäuser
(Dec. 22, 1977) respected the composer’s scenic and narrative markings to a degree rare in contemporary stagings; exacting Wagnerite Andrew Porter called it “a 20th-century landmark.” For the stupendous finale of act 2, Schneider-Siemssen’s tiered oval set, Schenk’s dynamic blocking, and Levine’s command of Wagner’s arching ensemble joined in a protracted moment of tension that those who were present have not forgotten. Equally memorable, but for the wrong reason, was yet another San Francisco export,
Der Fliegende Holländer
(March 3, 1979), designed and directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. Its premiere set off a volley of jeers and boos from New
York’s normally respectful audience. Ponnelle wrapped the action within the dream of a minor character, the Steersman. José Van Dam, the beleaguered protagonist, was alone able to free himself from the convoluted apparatus.
¹⁵

TABLE 16
Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1975–76 to 1979–80

 

 

Between 1975 and 1980, the remapping of the repertoire progressed much as Levine had forecast. He added four twentieth-century European masterworks to the company’s standard rep. The reintroduction of neglected works succeeded as well, witness the persistence of
I Puritani
and
Il Trittico. Die Entführung auf dem Serail
paved the way for the lesser-known Mozart operas.

A tragic augury ushered in the blighted 1980–81 season. On July 23, the young freelance violinist Helen Hagnes disappeared during the intermission of a Berlin Ballet performance. She was found the next morning at the bottom of an air shaft. The trial of the twenty-one-year-old Met stagehand Craig Crimmins, the tabloids’ “phantom of the Metropolitan Opera,” ended in a guilty verdict on the charge of attempted rape and murder. In September 1981, he was sentenced to twenty years to life in prison. The lurid story kept the Met in the news for the many weeks of the investigation and court proceedings, and the fact that the accused was a company employee drinking on the job made the publicity that much more damaging.

Again in the news that summer were angry talks between the Met and the orchestra. As management increased its offer, the sticking point remained the maximum number of performances to which the musicians were obligated each week. And here neither side would budge. The players asserted that “the demands on their artistry were so heavy that many of them suffered from severe physical and psychological problems,” to which Levine, professing “sympathy for the players’ feeling,” equivocated, “we all would love for some of the pressure to be taken off our schedules. But all work has a certain amount of pressure attached to it” (
Times,
July 20, 1980). Negotiations were declared failed on the September 2 deadline and rehearsals were suspended. Taplin told the board repeatedly that giving in on the four-performance week would mean “a return to ‘red ink.’ ” (Sept. 12, 1980). Opening night was canceled. To the subsequent threat of junking the entire season, the union responded, “It’s the classic story of the boy who cried wolf” (
Times,
Sept. 24). This was, after all, the third time in five years that Bliss had issued the same
ultimatum. But the Met was not bluffing. On September 30, the season was canceled. The players found themselves caught between wealthy patrons who held that instrumentalists were overpaid as it was for fewer than sixteen hours of work per week and stagehands who considered the musicians spoiled rotten by the cushy terms of their employment, particularly as contrasted with their own. Bliss and company feared that a prolonged delay or, worse, the cancellation of the season would result in the same loss of subscriptions that had followed on the 1969 postponement. Eleven years later, the 16 percent drop had not been fully recovered. Talks resumed in early October at the urging of President Carter. At this point, Volpe, now director of operations, entered the labor fray once again. He later quoted Bliss as saying, “If we don’t get this dispute settled in a week or two, we’ll just close the place down and start another company from scratch.” And himself as responding, “Tony, you can’t do that. You don’t have that right. . . . The Met doesn’t belong to you and the board. It belongs to everyone who works here and the public who loves and pays for opera.” Volpe was instrumental in brokering the four-year deal that included hiring subs for the uncovered services, a frugal solution acceptable to both Bliss and Levine, and annual pay hikes of 8 to 9 percent. Players and choristers conceded four free rehearsal hours in exchange for the four-performance week. The two-month delay deprived operaphiles of the pleasure of hearing Caballé’s Turandot put the three riddles to Pavarotti’s Calaf and of
The Queen of Spades
scheduled for Domingo and Anna Tomowa-Sintow.
¹⁶

The “broken” season opened at last on December 10 with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” played and sung by the pacified orchestra and chorus in plain view on the stage, Marilyn Horne and Judith Blegen the soloists. On January 15, the administrative shake-up long in the works was made official: Bliss became general manager in title as well as fact. Dexter’s demotion to “production adviser” was sealed. In William Rockefeller’s words, he would “continue to stage new productions, oversee the revivals of his old ones, and advise on dramatic matters. He is relieved of administrative duties that will be assumed by the technical department he created.” Phoebe Berkowitz was named executive stage director. Three assistant managers were also appointed, Volpe for operations, Marilyn Shapiro for development and public affairs, and Joan Ingpen for artistic administration, a position she had held at Covent Garden and at the Paris Opéra. Levine seemed content: “We have the right structure now. John’s [Dexter] work is necessary, but decisions were harder to make. Tony doesn’t veto things on artistic grounds. If he and I don’t agree on a production, we don’t do it” (
Times,
Jan. 17, 1982).

The first of Dexter’s stagings as production adviser was
Parade,
a triptych of Eric Satie’s ballet, Poulenc’s
Les Mamelles de Tirésias,
and Maurice Ravel’s
L’Enfant et les sortilèges
. The
Times
waxed hyperbolic over Dexter’s program of a modernist ballet and two rare, astringent operas: “Every so often, and sometimes none too soon, something happens at the opera to justify its existence and restore faith in its present and future.” The collaboration between painter David Hockney and veteran conductor Manuel Rosenthal (student and friend of Ravel) was a happy one. Dramatic and visual motifs laid bare the World War I origins of the three works: the 1917 premieres of Satie’s ballet and of the Apollinaire play on which Poulenc based his opera and the start of Ravel’s engagement with
L’Enfant et les sortilèges
. The run sold out. The other new production of the season, originally tagged for Dexter, eventually staged by Colin Graham and designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch, turned out to be a routine
La Traviata
(March 17, 1981).
¹⁷

La Bohème
was the splashiest of the five new productions of 1981–82. The 1948 tweaking of the garret aside, in its first half-century at the Met, Puccini’s opera had been clothed in the same anonymous, utilitarian décors entrusted to staff directors who were there to remind principals and chorus of the standard blocking. When in 1952, at long last,
La Bohème
earned a new production, it was again on a modest scale. So it came as a surprise when Zeffirelli’s
La Bohème
burst forth as one of the biggest spectacles ever mounted at the Met, the touchstone for the megaproductions that were to become the company’s norm. The first-night audience roared for close to a minute when the curtain rose on act 2. The street corner occupied by a neighborhood establishment with an awning and a few tables had bulged into a three-level Parisian intersection, jammed with 280 Christmas revelers, a myriad of façades, a wide staircase, a ground-level café, and a terrace above. The toy-seller Parpignol had a pony cart, Musetta and her aged suitor a horse-drawn cab. At the climax, what seemed like all Paris was on parade. Some of Zeffirelli’s inventions had strong narrative purpose. The little balcony off the garret was just right for private moments: Rodolfo’s longing for Mimì, Colline’s “addio” to his overcoat. The upstage area of act 3 provided a plausible vantage from which Mimì could overhear Rodolfo’s agonizing forecast of her impending death. But more often, the size and complexity of the designs distanced spectators from the characters. For John Rockwell the sets were made-to-order “for people who come wanting to applaud the
scenery.” Zeffirelli responded by calling Rockwell a “jerk.” He proclaimed his own production “one of the most beautiful, honest, successful” in Met history. The décor was certainly beautiful, and if success is measured by longevity, Zeffirelli’s boast was prescient: the lofty garret, the melancholy customs gate, and especially the riotous street scene continue to draw cheers more than thirty years and more than four hundred performances later. As for an honest representation of Puccini’s “vie de bohème,” that is another matter.
¹⁸

 

FIGURE 35
.
La Bohème
, act 2, 1981 (James Heffernan; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

With
La Bohème,
Dexter’s battle for modern stagings was lost. Two years later, he was still licking his wounds: “Leave it to Franco to celebrate the 19th century—it’s easy. The 20th is bloody difficult.” Less than a fortnight before the opening of the Puccini sensation, Dexter, once again collaborating with Hockney, had laid down a final challenge to the literal, expensive, overblown
style he loathed.
Stravinsky
(Dec. 3, 1981) was another modernist triptych: a ballet,
Le Sacre du printemps,
and two vocal works, the opera-ballet-pantomime
Le Rossignol
(in Russian) and the opera-oratorio
Oedipus Rex
(in Latin). This time, unlike
Parade,
the three components of the omnibus were mismatched. Even Andrew Porter, who thought
Stravinsky
“a big, serious achievement” and “a landmark in New York’s operatic history,” found it “exhausting.” The choreography of Jean-Pierre Bonnefous did little for
Le Sacre du printemps
and Dexter’s treatment of
Oedipus Rex
was largely static. Levine’s direction of the difficult scores and Hockney’s enchanting chinoiserie for
Le Rossignol
garnered what praise there was. Among the remaining new productions of 1981–82, only Hayden Griffin’s elegant sliding panels for
Così fan tutte
(Jan. 29) mined the less-is-more Dexter-Hockney vein. John Cox’s
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
(Feb. 15) banished comic shtick, losing a good bit of the comic along the way; décor and staging took a backseat to the virtuosity of Horne’s Rosina. The new
Les Contes d’Hoffmann
(March 8) gave Zeffirelli a run for his money. Schenk and Schneider-Siemssen’s extravagant weave of the realistic and the fantastic attracted the highest average capacity of the season. Spalanzani’s laboratory, animated by the body parts of airborne automata, gave the audience entrée into Hoffmann’s delusions; the Venetian campo reeked with the decadence of Giulietta and Dappertutto; Antonia’s bourgeois sitting room dissolved into the nightmarish realm of Dr. Miracle. Conductor Riccardo Chailly’s excellent debut promised a company career more extensive than just eight performances of Offenbach’s opera.
¹⁹

In the course of rehearsals for the new, well-appointed
Arabella
(Feb. 10, 1983), finally in German, Kathleen Battle went to war with Kiri Te Kanawa. This would be neither the first nor the last of her run-ins with colleagues. But when the two sopranos wafted the high-lying legato of Strauss’s sublime duet for two loving sisters, the public heard nothing but harmony.
Idomeneo,
the sole novelty of 1982–83 and the first of Mozart’s neglected operas premiered by Levine, was notable also for the casting of Pavarotti. In this unaccustomed repertoire, the tenor simplified the role’s elaborate fioritura, all the while manifesting scrupulous musicianship and exemplary diction. Ponnelle enlivened the stately conventions of eighteenth-century opera seria through a canny pattern of entrances and exits to and from his Piranesi-inspired, multileveled unit set.
Idomeneo
drew large audiences as long as Pavarotti led the cast.
Macbeth
(Nov. 18, 1982) set off one of the most boisterous outbursts in memory. Peter Hall and John Bury had had the ingenious notion of returning
Macbeth
to the theater practice of Verdi’s youth, with flying witches and
a giant cauldron from which emerged a nearly nude Hecate and effigies of the apparitions. Levine conducted Verdi’s complete 1865 Paris revision of his 1847 score; it included a ballet danced by sylphs in tutus as Macbeth lay dying. The public saw it as Gothic gone amok; they responded with laughter, boos, and a few altercations. The
Times
was unequivocal: “The worst new production to struggle onto the Metropolitan Opera’s stage in modern history”; Porter’s minority report took pains to acknowledge the “serious-minded, ambitious attempt to discover what the composer was about and to present his meanings vividly” without skirting the errors of execution and the miscasting of Scotto as Lady Macbeth. The
Macbeth
fiasco spelled a halt to productions that strayed too far from the beaten path. During the third and last revival of the Hall/Bury show, the Macbeth curse struck again. On January 23, 1988, the Saturday matinée was suspended at the second act intermission by the suicide of Bantcho Bantchevsky, an eighty-two-year-old Bulgarian singing coach and Met habitué, who jumped eighty feet to his death from the family circle.
²⁰