Attila at the Met

When I heard that Ricardo Muti was making his Metropolitan Opera debut this month conducting Verdi's Attila, I was incredulous. Surely Mr. Muti, one of the leading conductors of our day, and no more a young man than music director James Levine, had held the baton at the Met before. But like Verdi's ninth opera, and just as surprisingly, Muti's current trip is his first.

The Met broadcast the opening performance online last night, but I'm waiting for the Saturday matinee to hear it for myself. Like most early Verdi, Attila is fairly obscure; I certainly don't own a recording and am fairly certain that I have heard it only in snatches. After having seen Ernani at the Lyric, however, I find myself at something of a loss to explain the early works' long residence in the broom closet of opera. If these works lack the full power and dramatic energy of Verdi's later masterpieces, they certainly stand as respectable late bel canto works. Of course, the standard repertory relegated much bel canto to truncated concert pieces for many years (Lammermoor, for instance, being whittled down to only the mad scene and some bare bookends), so perhaps the early Verdi was simply shuffled along.

Peter Gelb appears hell bent on securing his place as the Earl Warren of the operatic world. As the audience booed yet another production team off the stage, one wonders just how much re-education Mr. Gelb thinks we need. By George, those new opera audiences are out there somewhere and the Met is going to find them, and the rule of law, democracy, and nature of the judicial function good taste, tradition, and the well-established preferences of 100 years' worth of audiences will not stand in its way. Attila of the Apes* comes just as the company has announced the scrapping of Zeffirelli's Traviata. To assuage any hurt, the Met promises to bring us John Adams's Nixon in China. Well, I know that I certainly have spent my entire life looking forward to hearing a work depicting events that themselves occurred well after the thorough demise of classical music as a living art form, composed by a minimalist hack whose work product (music would be too indulgent) has more in common with phone tones than with Rossini.

The only solution to things like this is the pocketbook: stop buying tickets to this tripe. Once Mr. Gelb's revolution is complete, this will require not buying tickets to the Met at all. Stop writing them checks now and maybe, just maybe, it won't come to that. I won't be holding my breath.


* Granting that the designers set out to be unhistorical, permit me to complain about the costuming, entirely apart from the question of whether Italy is being invaded here by Huns or by kudzu. The fellow in the red miter is St. Leo the Great. But why is he wearing a miter in a non-liturgical setting? Why is he wearing white? Popes before St. Pius V wore red. And why is he carrying a pastoral staff made out of two-by-fours? If the costumers desire to be unhistorical and a-representational, so be it. Dress the pope and the Huns up as aliens, or Victorians, or deranged costume designers. But weird half-measures, especially ones so inexplicable and widespread as basic inability properly to represent clerical attire, are simply uncalled for.

New Met Season

The Met's broadcast season began this past weekend. I did not listen. They began with Il Trittico, which I must confess simply to not liking. Or, more precisely, I dislike Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica. I actually rather like Gianni Schicchi, in part because the story of probate fraud amuses me. All three are a bit, well, screechy and jumpy, but Schicchi seems to get the best of the lot.

Mercifully the radio disguises the ill effects of "updated" stagings. The Met season guide notes for Schicchi begin "Florence, 1959." Una momento, por favor. This is nonsense. While ten seconds of Google research indicates that it is still permissible under Italian law to make a will by dictation to a notary, this is simply nonsense. For one thing, under post-Napoleonic continental systems, it is not possible for a testator to disinherit direct descendants as drastically as Schicchi does. Furthermore, I simply refuse to believe that Italian public officials go around making pronouncements in Latin under the Italian Republic. And aren't some of Donati's bequests of things like cows? How many wealthy Florentines bequethed cows in the 1950s? The story is set in a particular time and place for a reason. Why do directors think they can change this part of the story? Why not turn the opera into a tragedy and have Rinuccio and Lauretta leap off the balcony at the end? That would be bold, edgy, attract new audiences to opera! Or, like most officious intermeddling, simply be uncalled for and uncivilized.

Il Trovatore at the Met

I listened with great pleasure to the Met's matinee broadcast of Il Trovatore two weeks ago. The production is a new one on loan from the Lyric. They've pushed the setting up to the 19th century; the feeling apparently was that the internal turmoil of late-medieval Spain is too obscure to make effective drama for an American audience and that the post-Napoleonic conflicts depicted by Goya would permit a more effective staging. While American audiences surely lack a thorough-going knowledge of the interal struggles that splintered Spain during the Reconquista, I doubt they possess a meaningfully greater grasp of the country's nineteenth-century civil wars.

The production set apparently featured large turntable-mounted facades and painted Goya-esque backdrops. The gimmick factor may just be the times (this season's fine Eugene Onegin production featured almost no scenary or props), but it may also have something to do with the Met's recent Trovatore-related mishaps. Several sources described the house's 1987 and 2000 productions as "disasters." This Trovatore did well in Chicago, and Gelb may have felt a solid combination of past results and gimmicks on a popular repertory piece was needed to exorcise the previous bad memories.

The matinee performance went quite well, at least aurally. The hilariously inept chicanery being perpetrated with La Sonnambula vindicate my skepticism of updated stagings, so I won't speak to what I didn't see. But I did have one quibble with the performance: Ferrando. Cound di Luna's chief henchman, his most memorable lines come in the first few minutes, with abbietta zingara, the background story to the opera's plot. I don't know whether Kwangchul Youn just doesn't have the voice for the piece or whether Gianandrea Noseda had the orchestra playing too loudly, but the pit drowned out the bass at several key points. Ferrando's voice should carry over the orchestra on the series of eighth notes at the end of each stanza (e.g. "la rea, la rea, discacciano ch'entrarvioso"), and it just wasn't there. I will continue to prefer my 1991 Met recording with James Morris as Ferrando and Placido Domingo in the titlel role.