Has there ever been a season of the Metropolitan Opera like the one that just ended? Where the stuff on stage—the murderous brides, mystic pharaohs, and yearning stepsons—felt so anticlimactic? Over the past eight months, amid labor struggles, a recurring pandemic, and a war, it’s been like the real drama was just getting the doors open. Once that was accomplished, what followed was almost beside the point.
Or, to be more precise, what followed was like the icing on the cake. Rarely did it feel so good to be at the gilded Met, did opera—whatever one think of a particular work, singer, or production—seem such a gift. A tidal wave of gratitude was felt throughout the season, which ended on Saturday night with Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”
You could feel it in the explosive ovation that greeted a virtuoso step-dance sequence in Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”, opening the season as a double milestone: the first production since the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, and the first work at the Met by a black composer since its founding in 1883.
You could feel it in the roaring curtain calls at the revival of ‘Akhnates’, proving once again that Philip Glass’s idiom was as warmly received by the Met audience as Mozart’s or Puccini’s.
About this time a year ago, it looked like the big fight would return after a canceled 2020-21 season. Anger was in the air: The Met unions were furious with the company’s CEO, Peter Gelb, for insisting that unpaid leave was the only way to survive the long lockdown. The situation became so bitter that it seemed possible that a strike or lockout would keep the Met closed after its scheduled opening night.
But the promise to come back after 18 months proved too strong to resist, and unions and management – tentatively – came to terms. No one who attended the outdoor performances of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony over Labor Day weekend, or, especially, returning indoors for Verdi’s Requiem on the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, will forget the relief and joy of the Met. . making live music again in Lincoln Center.
The first months of the season had an air of triumph. There was the sold-out success of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”; a series of ambitious revivals, including the Met’s first performances of the brooding original version of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Wagner’s six-hour Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the longest opera in his repertoire; and Matthew Aucoin’s recent ‘Eurydice’, in which a sprawling orchestra thrashed Sarah Ruhl’s captivating version of the Orpheus myth.
Then the rise of the Omicron variant in the late fall began to claim performances, festivals and concerts. The Vienna State Opera was closed for almost a week. But the Met nodded, bolstered its already strict health protocols, and plunged into a wide pool of covers to fill in ailing performers. With any luck, it stayed open all winter — and another surge in cases this spring.
Broadway shows were always canceled at the last minute or closed altogether, but the Met, America’s largest performing arts institution, never did. That will be Gelb’s legacy from this difficult period, along with the historic “Fire” and the relentless stance he took after the invasion of Ukraine when he declared that the Met would cut ties with artists President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia supported. That ultimatum had one singer in mind: Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, the company’s leading diva, who criticized the war but kept silent about Putin. In a coup, Gelb replaced her as Puccini’s Turandot with Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, who drove the public wild when she wrapped herself in a Ukrainian flag to make her bow.
Gelb’s Netrebko decision was not widely acclaimed, and other major opera houses now seem inclined to welcome her back and classify her as just a prominent Russian, not a hardcore Putinist. But within the Met, the moral clarity of the war proved to be a unifying force: During the benefit concert for Ukraine, some players in the orchestra even applauded Gelb, their nemesis during the grueling leave, when he declared from the stage that they were “soldiers.” of music.”
Somewhere in the midst of politics and the virus was opera. Under the focused direction of Sebastian Weigle, “Boris Godunov” was memorably grim in the concentrated form Mussorgsky gave it for a hodgepodge of revisions; “Meistersinger”, extended enough that it really seems to convey a whole world, was relaxed and sunny and softly comedic led by Antonio Pappano.
Simon Stone’s tech-savvy staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia,” amid the slump of a contemporary post-industrial American city, failed to translate the bold concept into a convincing portrayal of its pathetically suffering title character. The Met’s current resident director, David McVicar, offered up a gray old-fashioned production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”
Davidsen, in Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos”, a mythical creation of an overflowing tone, also engulfed her soprano soprano on Eve in “Meistersinger” and Chrysothemis in Strauss’ “Elektra”, her voice almost palpable on your skin. The mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard brought silvery elegance to Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” and the composer in “Ariadne”.
There were sympathetic soprano turns from Ailyn Pérez as a fiery soloist in the September 11 Requiem and a girlish Tatiana in “Eugene Onegin”, Eleonora Buratto as a reserved Madama Butterfly and Elena Stikhina as a kind Tosca – as well as Sonya Yoncheva, in a solo recital of shadowy sensibility.
While Blanchard’s score moved comfortably between bars, college parties, and fraught, tender nocturnes, “Fire” was rather rambunctious as a drama, the individual sequences obvious, but the wider conflicts that obsess the characters. (It was telling that the most dazzling sequences in this opera were Camille A. Brown’s dances.)
Perhaps the most notable of this season’s offerings were the three – count them – works from the past five years: ‘Fire’, ‘Eurydice’ and Brett Dean’s ‘Hamlet’, which set to swirling music Matthew Jocelyn’s moodily distilled version of Shakespeare. The Met hasn’t had that many recent operas in its one-year lineup since the early 1930s, even if that number is only remarkable in the context of the obstinately retrospective opera world.
Not too long ago, the idea of three contemporary operas in a Met season would have been ridiculous. This was largely because James Levine, the company’s longtime music director,—while expanding the repertoire significantly and presiding over a handful of premieres—was not prioritizing new work.
But his successor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, agrees with Gelb that contemporary operas are crucial, both artistically and in expanding the company’s audience. And Nézet-Séguin puts his money where his mouth is: he conducted both “Fire” and “Eurydice”, directing Kevin Put’s “The Hours” in the fall and Blanchard’s “Champion” next spring. (However, the early months of this season have been an exhausting workload coupled with his duties as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s musical director: he dropped out of a run of “Le Nozze di Figaro” to take a four-week sabbatical around the new year.)
The ongoing transition from the Levine era was evident not only in the repertoire, but also in the sound of the orchestra — which was noticeably lighter and smoother in three works closely associated with Levine: “Meistersinger”; Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress”, directed by Susanna Mälkki; and “Don Carlos,” which Nézet-Séguin first brought to the Met in original French.
This change is for better and worse. The ensemble played these pieces with firmer transparency and perhaps more varied colors; Nézet-Séguin’s textures in ‘Don Carlos’, fluffier than Levine’s, felt like a piece with the elegant nasality of French. In “Hamlet”, conducted by Nicholas Carter, the orchestra was furious. But a certain grandeur is now missing, more often than not: the weight of Levine’s ‘Meistersinger’ prelude, for example, and the cheerful, straightforward bombast of Baba the Turk’s entrance in his renditions of ‘The Rake’s Progress’.
Even a frequent opera-goer or critic cannot see everything or everyone. I missed a new, family-friendly summary of Massenet’s fairy dust ‘Cendrillon’. And after opening a new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” on New Year’s Eve, baritone Quinn Kelsey — acclaimed in the title role — got Covid-19 and missed a few performances, including the one I attended. But I got to see his credible replacement: the baritone Michael Chioldi, who finally landed his first major role at the Met after years as a stalwart of the New York opera scene.
That was one of four opera house performances I saw in one weekend in early January, during the first Omicron wave. Such a marathon was an extraordinary exclamation point for the Met’s achievement of just keeping the lights on.
It was not enough to taste opera after a year and a half of fasting. I wanted to gargle.