Trouble Along the Nile

By Michael Walsh

Anyone who wonders what is wrong with American opera in general and the Metropolitan Opera in particular need look no further than Manhattan's Lincoln Center, where the Met last week uncrated its elephantine new production of Verdi's Aida. Can the nation's leading opera house really be serious about offering this animated comic book as art? While not a disaster on the order of last season's catastrophic Il Trovatore, the new Aida represents all that ails the company these days.

When the biggest hand of an operatic evening is not for the singers -- Leona Mitchell as the eponymous Ethiopian slave girl, Placido Domingo as her hapless Egyptian lover Radames -- but for towering sets and slick stage machinery, then the era of content-free opera is at hand. Under the artistic direction of James Levine and departing general manager Bruce Crawford, the Met has ( suffered from a hardening of its arteries, offering up one lumbering spectacle after another without much apparent thought as to whether they make artistic sense.

Consider the casting of Aida. Mitchell is a fine American singer still some years away from attaining the heft and bravura that her role requires. Italian mezzo Fiorenza Cossotto, as the vengeful princess Amneris, is past her prime at 53 (she made her Met debut in the same part 20 years ago). And the omnipresent Domingo serves up his familiar blend of pathos and bathos without seeming to care where one stops and the other starts. It is a fatal -- but typical -- blend of age and inexperience that even Levine's elegant conducting cannot ameliorate.

Originally, the Met entrusted Aida's direction and design to Franco Zeffirelli, who recreated the city of Paris in the 1981 La Boheme and put the Forbidden City on the stage with his 1987 Turandot. When Zeffirelli's designs turned out to be too big and expensive, Gianni Quaranta, Zeffirelli's set decorator on several films, was engaged instead. Quaranta has conjured up a storybook Nile replete with towering statues, colorful friezes and a couple of skittish horses to pull Radames' chariot during the Triumphal March. Employing the two-tiered hydraulic stage lift a la Franco, Quaranta triggered the evening's longest ovation by gratuitously transforming Amneris' private chambers into a huge public square. Such technical sleight of hand was novel when first used back in 1966 in Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, but by now it has become a cliche. But then, cliches are also the penchant of director Sonja Frisell, who allows Cossotto to vamp around the stage like a refugee from a Cecil B. DeMille epic.

The problem is that no one is in charge, and not just of Aida. Crawford, the former chairman of BBDO International, who became general manager just three years ago, stunned the opera world last month when he announced he would return to his first love, the ad game, in April. Levine, 45, has been at the Met practically since puberty and lately has been making valedictory noises; it is no secret that he wishes to expand his European activities and that Herbert von Karajan's twin jobs as head of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Salzburg Festival would suit him just fine. The Met, already scrambling for a new general manager, could eventually be shopping for a new music director as well.

But it will take more than a change at the top to restore the company's tarnished luster. It will take a change of heart. What the Met needs is fewer circuses and more bread. It is an old theater adage that you can't hum the scenery. If only the Temple of Ptha could sing.