Toward a New Golden Age

By Michael Walsh

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 succes 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 Tragedie 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.

The Dearth of Great Voices. The Met complains that it cannot properly ast Aida any more, and has not staged a satisfactory Ring in years. But longing for a vanished golden age obscures the fact that there are singers today who can compete with their heroic forebears: the Met gala boasts more than a dozen, singing alongside such potential future stars as Kathleen Battle and Leona Mitchell. Further, the days when the Met had unquestioned call on the major voices are gone. The competition from the great European houses and the other American companies is too great. As a result, the ideal of ensemble opera is once again fashionable, prizing drama as well as vocal display.

Radio, Television--and Now Subtitles. For 43 years, the Saturday-afternoon Met performances have been broadcast nationwide, bringing opera to millions. But TV is an even more potent medium, transmitting the spectacle along with the music to an even wider audience. Television has also proved a boon to intelligibility with its running subtitles. Now titles have crept into the opera house, projected on a screen, where they promise to settle the argument between those who favor hearing works in the original and those who want to hear them in the vernacular. The removal of the language barrier will likely increase attendance as audiences discover that opera is not as forbidding to the neophyte as once supposed.

All these developments are having an impact on the Met. Television is already a major factor, and only snobbism will delay the subtitling innovation. Like conductors everywhere, Music Director James Levine would prefer to cast star voices at each performance but knows he cannot always get them. Accordingly, Levine has, largely successfully, adopted the ensemble concept, taking advantage of the fact that singers generally look and act better than they used to.

As perhaps the world's most conservative major opera house, the Met has resisted the kind of directorial innovation (or excess, depending on one's view) that marks its European colleagues, to its loss. Ponnelle's willful, brilliant Dutchman was resoundingly booed when it was imported in 1979 and has not been seen since. But the Met does employ stage directors with strong, if more conventional, ideas: Otto Schenk, for example, who was responsible for last year's sparkling The Tales of Hoffmann. And, slowly, the company is recognizing that there is opera after Puccini: besides Peter Grimes this year, the repertory includes Poulenc, Weill, Stravinsky and Riccardo Zandonai's verismo potboiler, Francesco da Rimini. In addition, the Met has commissioned new works from Composers John Corigliano and Jacob Druckman.

As for the often remarked upon lack of great voices, that may be more a function of nostalgia than fact. There were great singers in the Met's past, there are still today, and there will be tomorrow. But they will no longer be the whole show. Verdi, who always prized drama above mere warbling, and Wagner, who attempted a synthesis of the arts, would be pleased. So should opera fans, who ought to realize that they may be sitting on the threshold of a new golden age. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.