The mood was festive, the audience large and enthusiastic, for the New Year’s Eve gap premiere of a rare new production of Umberto Giordano’s sweetly ridiculous potboiler “Fedora” at the Metropolitan Opera.
The soprano Sonya Yoncheva and the tenor Piotr Beczala, playing aristocrats locked in a series of betrayals and counter-betrayals, passionately loved and enraged; the conductor Marco Armiliato and the orchestra of the Met brought subdued softness from the pit; David McVicar’s staging was effervescent and handsome. Everyone had a good time.
But I couldn’t quiet a little voice of fear inside me. Not about the party scene on Saturday night, but about what it will be like when the Met tries to take its money from the new production and revive it, with much less marketing and press coverage and possibly a less star-studded cast. Who will be in the audience for that “Fedora” in a season or two or three?
The question is all the more pressing after coal arrived in the Met’s stockpile the day after Christmas, when the company announced that weak ticket sales and unruly donors as the pandemic continues would force it to loot its $30 million endowment — a full tenth of the value of the fund – and to cut 10 percent of planned performance next season.
As a silver lining, the Met simultaneously said it would immediately expand its presentations of contemporary operas, which have surpassed some of the classics.
But in reality, what sells in-house is what gets promotional resources and media attention: new productions, whether they’re brand new pieces or 125-year-old ones like “Fedora.” Without that kind of publicity, the turnout this fall has been particularly dire for revivals of masterpieces that are barely obscure, but not quite “Aida,” such as Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” and Verdi’s “Don Carlo.” This could very well be the fate of “Fedora” too, when it is brought back.
There’s a real audience for the Met, as sold-out runs of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” have proven. Just not so much for a mainstay of operatic passage: repertoire pieces hear as they develop, year after year, with different casts. It is, sadly, a shrinking group of people who want to see “La Traviata” subtly but unmistakably transform with each new Violetta – or “Fedora” with each new Fedora.
That’s why the 10 percent performance cut for next season is a harbinger of things to come. The long-term future of The Met could well be seasons with significantly fewer performances of significantly fewer titles, and a higher proportion of new stagings over recurring productions.
That model, which would bring the Met closer to an annual event like the Salzburger Festspiele from its repertory house tradition, could produce some strong artistic results. But the transition to it will entail a tumultuous rethinking of the company’s costs, and therefore labor contracts, as well as less bad-selling revivals like this season’s “Idomeneo,” “Peter Grimes,” and “Don Carlo” — all of which were excellent and all of which are integral to the Met’s responsibility for its art form.
Even if this “Fedora” is never revived, at least we’ll have had a sensitive, spirited performance of a work that last came to the Met in the 1996-97 season, when it was a vehicle for the great diva Mirella Freni’s full-production farewell from the company.
“Fedora” is about as opera as opera can get. The title character (Yoncheva) is a late 19th century Russian princess who vows revenge after her betrothed is shot dead. The plot, of course, thickens. It turns out that the murderer, Count Loris Ipanov (Beczala), did not commit the crime for political reasons, as everyone assumed. (The dark specter here, as in Dosteovsky’s “Demons” and the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski,” is nihilistic.) No, Fedora’s husband made up with Loris’ wife and sparked a jealous gunfight; once that is revealed, enmity between princess and count turns to lust.
This being a tearjerker, their brief idyll is shattered when her prematurely sent accusation letter inadvertently results in the deaths of Loris’ brother and mother, leading to his savage condemnation of Fedora and her hasty suicide from the poison she carries around in a cross . her neck. (Not you?)
The play on which this deadly serious farrago is based was written by Victorien Sardou, the reigning French master of theatrical sensation, who was also the source for Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ around the same time. Giordano, Puccini, and other Italian composers who came of age in the 1880s and 1990s have come to be known to posterity by the collective term “verismo,” a term that suggested a style of lush orchestral complexity and moment-to-moment emotional responsiveness. with arias and other numbers arising and disappearing organically rather than formally – at least compared to Italian opera as it came before – but with a melodic lushness that sets them apart from Wagner.
The bolder sibling of its better-known predecessor, Giordano’s ‘Andrea Chénier’, ‘Fedora’ isn’t a perfect piece. The roles other than Fedora and Loris are downright ungrateful. The cheerfulness with which Giordano opens acts two and three, for an all too obvious contrast to the intense drama to come, drags on for too long. There is an aria about Veuve Clicquot champagne and an aria about bicycles, both thin.
But for all its absurdity, the combination of Fedora and Loris can catch fire with dedicated singers. It goes without saying that this could be an opportunity for wild-eyed munching on landscapes. As fun as that may be, it’s to the credit of Yoncheva, Beczala, Armiliato and McVicar that there was a sense of class and dignity on Saturday.
Sometimes too much. For part of the opera, Yoncheva seemed a little, well, collected amidst all the crushing revelations; nothing really seemed to faze her. And her high register tended to lack not volume but richness, so her clamors at the climax weren’t exactly poignant.
But she had much more vocal presence here than in her pale turn as Élisabeth in Verdi’s “Don Carlos” (in French) at the Met last season. Her dark-hued, resinous, quivering vibrato-soprano has an inherent morbidity, ghostly in both Fedora’s longer lyrical lines and speech-like parlando. Even in small moments, she is superbly articulated: towards the end, she sees the unfolding tragedy and almost mutters to her friends, “Andate, andate pure” (“Go, just go”).
After warming up audibly with his short aria “Amor ti vieta”, long loved by tenors, Beczala sang with his usual classy enthusiasm. Among an expanding cast, the robust baritone Lucas Meachem (as diplomat De Siriex) and the bright soprano Rosa Feola (Countess Olga) did their best in boring supporting roles. Bryan Wagorn, a veteran of the Met’s music staff, had his turn as the Chopinesque pianist who plays at a party as Fedora and Loris confront each other.
Armiliato’s conducting was notable for bringing out the dynamic range of the score; much of this orchestral performance was subtle and delicate, rather than the blaring gore and guts that is still the verismo stereotype.
This is somehow McVicar’s 13th Met production since 2009, and its main concept is a straightforward logistical concept: Each of the three acts – the plot moves from St. Petersburg to Paris to the Swiss Alps – expands the grand, light-hearted set from (by Charles Edwards) a lot further up. As in McVicar’s staging of another Verismo-era work, Francesco Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur,” which premiered four years ago at the Met on New Year’s Eve, there is a suggestion of the blending of domestic and theatrical spaces. His most peculiar interpolation here is the pale figure of Fedora’s murdered fiancée, wandering and pursuing her; whatever.
The color scheme of the costumes (by Brigitte Reiffenstuel), largely black and white, sadly limits what should be a crushing palette range for Fedora’s dresses, though Yoncheva looked gorgeous in the form-fitting, heavy cuts.
In the first act, she wears a dramatic raven-colored dress with a tiara studded with diamonds. Diva entrances rarely get the old-fashioned reception at the Met these days, so hearing the crowd applaud when she first entered was delightful enough to quiet that little voice in my head about the company’s future for a moment. At least for the few seconds it took her to walk across the stage, cool and confident, basking in the ovation, it was New Year’s Eve, it was one of those works that warms the heart of every true opera lover, and everything was right with the world.
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Through January 28 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.