No More Business as Usual

By Michael Walsh

No one is going to pretend that the performance of Hector Berlioz's heroic opera Les Troyens (The Trojans), which has just opened the new Opera de la Bastille in Paris, is anything near the composer's gigantic vision. But for the moment that does not matter. What does matter is what the production represented: a triumph for Myung-Whun Chung, the Opera's untested 37-year-old Korean-American music director; a triumph for Pierre Berge, the man who hired Chung; a triumph for Carlos Ott, the unknown Canadian architect; a triumph for French President Francois Mitterrand; and, most important of all, a triumph for opera.

Practically from its conception, nearly a decade ago, the Bastille Opera has been plagued by controversy. It was one of those ideas that at first glance seemed both impossible and unnecessary. The opulent Palais Garnier, the Paris Opera's famed Second Empire quarters, was one of the world's most beautiful opera houses. The chosen site, a disused railroad station in then unfashionable eastern Paris, was deemed Nowhere by le Tout-Paris. And the cost of some $400 million, just about everybody said, could be better spent elsewhere.

Once the Uruguayan-born Ott's design was chosen by Mitterrand in late 1983 after an open competition, however, the sniping really started. There were whispers that Ott's utilitarian, curvilinear design had been selected by mistake. There was a revolving door of administrators. During a two-year conservative interregnum, the project was temporarily halted.

Finally, in August 1988, Berge, the dynamic president of Yves Saint Laurent, was appointed to run the project. Five months later, he set off the biggest flap of all when he unceremoniously fired Daniel Barenboim and shelved the conductor's programming plans. By May of last year, when Chung, plucked from | the obscurity of the Saarland Radio Orchestra in West Germany, was named Barenboim's surprise successor, the new administration had little more to offer than a notion that the house would open early this year, with something, sung by somebody or other. The stage seemed set for disaster.

There were times when the opening-night production, designed and directed in monumental style by Pier Luigi Pizzi, flirted dangerously with catastrophe. At one point, for example, materials fell from the overhead flies, causing the corpse of Hector to bring one hand protectively to his face. But the magnitude of the evening's triumph should not be underestimated. At a single stroke, it has made the reputation of Chung, up until now probably best known as the younger brother of violinist Kyung-Wha Chung. Against all odds, he assembled a cast whose only prominent members were sopranos Grace Bumbry (Cassandra) and Shirley Verrett (Dido) and drew from it a sensitive reading of Berlioz's sprawling score. Bumbry was in good voice; Verrett was not; and the other singers tended to be ciphers. But Chung welded them and a surprisingly good chorus together into a splendid ensemble.

Chung's success was emblematic of the larger triumph. At every step in the Bastille's history, it would have been much easier to do nothing rather than something. It would have been easier to leave the Opera in the Garnier, easier to leave the solid but dull Barenboim in place, easier to maintain the Paris Opera's reputation as the art form's great underachiever.

Easier but wrong. Because, as strange as the notion may seem to those who view opera as Dr. Johnson's "exotic and irrational entertainment," art matters. It matters in Czechoslovakia, where a playwright has become President; in East Germany, where a Leipzig conductor, Kurt Masur, was a spiritual leader of the peaceful revolution; in Lithuania, where a musicologist is seeking to lead his land out of the Soviet Union. And it matters in Paris, where the Socialist Mitterrand has undertaken a series of cultural public-works projects that have enhanced the quality of life in the world's most beautiful city.

Whether Berge fired Barenboim because the Bastille boss is a power-hungry egomaniac or a brilliant visionary who has entrusted the future of one of Europe's august cultural institutions to a young man for whom music is still an art and not just a job is irrelevant. The fact is, without offense to Barenboim (music director-designate of the Chicago Symphony), it was the best thing that could have happened. The Berge-Chung regime sends a signal that there can no longer be operatic business as usual in Paris. That big-league opera means something more than canary fancying; that it need not simply be a permanent source of employment for the same handful of singers, directors and designers, played to the same handful of connoisseurs and idle rich. That opera, in other words, deserves a meaningful, popular future as well as a glorious, aristocratic past. Two centuries after the French Revolution, the Bastille has not been conquered, but has conquered.