As the Met turns 100, the face of opera is changing
In opera, the most passionate and passionately debated musical form, the myth of the golden age remains potent. If opera is primarily about singing—sheer, glorious vocalism over all other elements—then these may be parlous times. Where today is a real Aida on the order of Emmy Destinn, an echt Siegfried like Lauritz Melchior or a true Norma such as Rosa Ponselle? In the Arcadian past, there were giants on the earth. How can contemporary opera possibly compete with its starry past?
This Saturday, as the Metropolitan Opera turns 100 years old, it is wrestling with this question as never before. The centennial celebration, to be telecast live on PBS, is an extravagant affair lasting eight hours; offering a nonstop parade of stars (Domingo, Pavarotti, Milnes, Sutherland, Nilsson, Te Kanawa, among 90 others), it seems to be a ringing affirmation of the opera-as-vocalism theory. But the Met gala is more likely a capstone than a portent, for the very nature of opera is being changed by history and technology. The Met—which began life on Oct. 22, 1883, in a nondescript yellow brick building at Broadway and 39th Street in Manhattan, and has evolved into the leading opera company in the U.S. and one of the world's foremost—is being changed too. Consider the forces at work:
The Weight of History. The last new opera to enter the standard repertory was Puccini's Turandot in 1926. Certain later operas have enjoyed a succès d'estime, and some (like Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes) are even produced fairly often; but in general, the repertory of the past half-century has been a closed shop. Thus the Met has the Sisyphean task of producing and reproducing the same roster of familiar works. When the Met was young, many of today's warhorses were new; but now opera is in danger of becoming a dead art, remembering the past yet still condemned to repeat it.
The Rise of the Stage Director. All right, if there are no new works, then make old works new through flamboyant reinterpretation. The stage director, once a traffic cop, has become in effect a second librettist. These show doctors have made some startling alterations: Jonathan Miller updated Rigoletto as a '50s Mafia love story; Patrice Chereau set the Ring during the turbulence of the industrial revolution; Jean-Pierre Ponnelle WIDE WORLD played The Flying Dutchman as the phantasmagorical dream of one of its minor characters. Most radical of all is Peter Brook's La Tragédie de Carmen, first seen in Paris in 1981 and due to open in New York City this month. Brook's version is a rewriting of Bizet, the music cut, rescored and reordered with new characters added to the plot.