Opera: Two for the Road

The importing and exporting of opera companies is perhaps the most unlikely growth industry in the world today. Just moving an opera company across town is a money-losing proposition; to transport one across an ocean, lock, stock and spears, is to risk bankruptcy. Yet in 1975 the Metropolitan Opera flew to Japan, and both the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Bolshoi Opera visited the U.S. And now, beginning this week, two of Europe's most important opera companies will be mounting productions in the U.S. for the first time. Whatever the outcome of the new musical season, nothing is going to outshine the anticipation and excitement of such a gala double bill.

La Scala of Milan will start things off in Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center Opera House. Next evening the Paris Opera will open at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. Putting its best forte forward, La Scala will offer--what else?--three Italians named Rossini, Puccini and Verdi. Showing somewhat less of a nationalistic strain, Paris will borrow Verdi for a while, and also offer Mozart the Austrian and, just to avoid outrage back home, France's own Charles Gounod.

For many an opera buff the music is all well and good, but what really counts is the thrill of encountering a glamorous big-name conductor--such as Paris' Sir Georg Solti (who will conduct Le Nozze di Figaro and Otello) or La Scala's dashing Claudio Abbado (Macbeth, La Cenerentola, Simon Boccanegra). Or being present when an important artist breaks through into international stardom--as, say, Paris' dulcet-voiced soprano Margaret Price (the Countess in Figaro, Desdemona in Otello) may well do this time. Before La Scala and Paris wind up their two-week stands (Paris will then follow La Scala into the Kennedy Center), it should be quite a show--both in front of the footlights and backstage.

Backstage is, of course, the real heart of any opera company, and its denizens are often as well known as the stars. There, be it in Washington or New York, no one is going to occupy a more central or intriguing position than Rolf Liebermann, 65, the Swiss-born general director of the Paris Opera. In the space of only four years he has achieved what many thought impossible: he has turned the once floundering Paris Opera around and restored talk of la gloire.

Throughout its 300-year history, the Paris Opera has probably boasted more foibles than any other company--and, given the vicissitudes of the average opera company, that is saying a lot. Back in the 1770s, when it got ready to put on Gluck's landmark opera Orfeo and Euridice, 18th century male-chauvinist Parisians balked at having a male contralto play the hero, considering that an affront to their manhood; poor Gluck had to rewrite the part for tenor. In the 19th century, even a Wagner or a Verdi had to include a ballet in his opera or risk not getting it performed in Paris. In more recent times, the price of government subsidization included requirements that more than 50% of the repertory be French and that French singers be given priority. So mediocre did the Paris Opera become that former Enfant Terrible Pierre Boulez was led to say that it was "full of dust and dung."

When asked by the French government to take over the Paris Opera, Liebermann hesitated. After a lively and successful 14-year reign at the Hamburg State Opera, he was all set to go back to being a composer. The last thing he wanted to get involved in was a difficult political situation. "I knew that a foreigner at the head of such a cultural monument as the Paris Opera would raise hues and cries," he recalls. When he finally accepted, there was no storm at all, largely because Liebermann got what he wanted right at the outset: a completely free hand in repertory, casting and running of the house, as well as a big enough budget (currently $25 million) to make change possible.

Hollow Shell. Liebermann also got Solti to join him as his music adviser and, when not busy with the Chicago Symphony, star conductor. Their initial offering in March 1973 was a radiant Figaro, first performed at the Versailles palace and then moved back into the opera house. It was a triumph, and they are opening with it in New York. The key to Liebermann's success? "Charm," says Solti. "He can charm everyone, including myself." He adds that Liebermann has the taste of an established composer. Says Solti: "Liebermann knows exactly what is good and has the good fortune he can pay for it."

What Liebermann found when he arrived was a strike-ridden, hollow shell. There was, he recalls, "no repertory, no workshops, decrepit stage machinery and no rehearsal stage. The unions were highly politicized and the work schedule very relaxed." Today Liebermann still does not have adequate rehearsal space, but his backstage is improved (notably by a new computerized light-board), and the company is on a six-day work schedule. Morale is up and so are the box office receipts, with sellouts replacing the empty houses of the '60s.

Liebermann has been less adventurous with repertory than he was in Hamburg; he has had to be, given the need to build up the Paris Opera's repertory of standard works. Also, he concedes, "Paris audiences are more transient, and certainly more conservative." Nonetheless, French Mystical Composer Olivier Messiaen is busily at work on an opera for the 1979 season.

Liebermann begins each day at the opera at 10 a.m., after a 25-mile drive from his home in Pontchartrain, outside Paris. After a quick bout with the mail, he wanders off into the house to drop in on rehearsals, greeting violinists and stagehands as he goes. "Running an opera is like running a restaurant," he says. "If the boss is not there, the food gets bad and the service even worse." Liebermann's secretary, Annick Goulard, who worked for his predecessor, says her current boss almost never loses his temper. "It's not that he does not get mad. It's that he does not explode." One thing that makes him less than jolly is the frequent reshuffling of the French Cabinet. Says Liebermann: "If you are dependent on a government, you can never be sure about the future. Right now I am on my fifth Minister of Culture."

The unpredictability of the Paris Opera scene is as nothing compared with what is going on at La Scala, or Teatro alla Scala as it is officially known. Labor disputes, resignations and money shortages are as commonplace backstage as swordplay, death and "addios" onstage. Financially the past year was the worst La Scala has had in a century; as a result, the company's debt soared to $20 million. Disputes with La Scala's various unions are continuous--and have lately been spreading from such common matters as overtime to the normally sacrosanct area of artistic policy. "It's absurd," said the company's sovrintendente (general manager) Paolo Grassi last spring. "Can we direct a theater in which the shop stewards look for errors in the dialogue?"

At one point both Grassi and Abbado, then music director, handed in their resignations. When the unions calmed down, Grassi reconsidered. But Abbado is still playing poker with the authorities. And then there was the painful moment when the Italian government announced that La Scala's visit to the U.S., planned for two years as that country's salute to the American Bicentennial, was being canceled because of a nationwide economic crisis. Largely through the efforts of the Kennedy Center's executive director, Martin Feinstein, who, having sold out the run, quickly jumped off to Italy, the tour was restored. The Kennedy Center pledged more than $300,000 toward La Scala's tour budget. Another $325,000 was raised from two companies and a foundation, and the Italian government finally kicked in $1.1 million.

Consoling Thought. Despite those tribulations, the 1975-76 season at La Scala was artistically first-rate and Washington will be seeing the best of it. If Conductor Abbado feels any sense of disappointment, it is that Soprano Mirella Freni, a La Scala regular and the best Mimi in the business today, will not be singing Boheme in Washington, but Faust in New York--"simply because Paris booked her first." He consoles himself with the thought that New Orleans-born Shirley Verrett, best known for her mezzo roles at the Met, could well achieve a major career breakthrough singing the dramatic soprano part of Lady Macbeth under his baton. That will be only one of the things to anticipate from La Scala and the Paris Opera during their U.S. visits.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.