Monday, Feb. 06, 1995

OPERATIC ARISTOCRACY

By Martha Duffy

Sometimes the best and most lavish show on Broadway is some 15 blocks north of the theater district, at the Metropolitan Opera House. It is one of the few places in the world that can offer truly grand productions of an art that thrives on bravura and artifice. This season the Met has two such extravaganzas, new productions of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. Both look real enough to step into. Butterfly's fragile cottage is guarded by a line of sentinel iris standing in an authentic Japanese garden. The walls and ceiling of the doge's council chamber in Boccanegra, which opened Jan. 19, are frescoed in Renaissance magnificence. Both settings are opulent backdrops for the crimes of the heart and of political passion on which the works turn.

Both are also the inspiration of the same person, Giancarlo del Monaco, one of the busiest directors around. Del Monaco, 51, is opera royalty: his father Mario was a thrilling, heroic tenor of the 1950s. Giancarlo speaks-or more often shouts-five languages. He knows all the operas, even works like Fedora and Francesca da Rimini, by heart because he spent his childhood in the wings. He also knows the stress points; when his father sang, his mother used to stand behind the boy with her hand on his shoulder; when the hard parts came, her grip tightened.

This utter fluency in the art may account for Del Monaco's range. As a young director in small German cities like Ulm and Dortmund, he was radical; he set a Butterfly in Saigon (long before Miss Saigon) and a Forza del Destino in Spain during the Civil War. But he is best known for productions that are traditional in concept, modern in their psychological astuteness and, occasionally, rude in their action. At the climax of the love duet in the Met's Butterfly, Pinkerton begins stripping his bride, who throws back her head in ecstasy. On opening night, the sequence was loudly booed by another member of opera's aristocracy, former diva Licia Albanese, who in Mario's day played Butterfly as an elegant geisha. Albanese "looks at the opera from the moral viewpoint of the '40s," shrugs Del Monaco. "But Pinkerton was an ugly American who was drunk and excited."

For 14 years Del Monaco has worked closely with American set and costume designer Michael Scott, both in Bonn, where Del Monaco is artistic director, and on the international circuit. Boccanegra is a triumph of that partnership. The first act's set, again a house and a garden, is closely modeled on Petrarch's villa outside Padua, a mellow, roseate brick with a graceful staircase. To gaze at it is to be transported to the vivid politics of 14th century Genoa.

To Del Monaco, the country and the opera house are often decisive when he chooses his approach. "I am a different director in Europe from America," he says. Especially in Germany, land of state subsidies and a public that may have seen 50 versions of Figaro, he may go the experimental route. In Bonn in April, for instance, he will produce a Manon Lescaut inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. In the U.S., where opera must pay for itself, companies can rarely afford productions that may be one-year sensations. When Met general manager Joseph Volpe ordered up Butterfly, he wanted a show that could be admired for as long as its predecessor lasted-36 years.

An enthusiastic, excitable man, Del Monaco is a hands-on operative with his casts. At a piano rehearsal for Boccanegra, a chorister who stepped in front of the hero received a genial tongue lashing. The hapless soprano assigned to cover for Kiri Te Kanawa should she get sick had a bad day, going left when she should have gone right, up the stairs when she belonged on the ground, picking a prop flower off cue. At the beginning of the glorious duet in which the heroine learns that Boccanegra is her father, she began playfully fingering his shirt. For the umpteenth time, Del Monaco charged down the aisle. "Stop! Stop, stop, stop!" he yelled. "What are you doing? You look like you want to screw him. Stay away!"

Del Monaco had to throw Boccanegra together in eight days-the chronically overbooked Placido Domingo was late in starting rehearsals; Vladimir Chernov, the Boccanegra, was silenced by flu; and Cheryl Studer, who was to sing Boccanegra's daughter, canceled. In a remarkable piece of last-minute luck, the Met was able to sign Te Kanawa. On opening night the ensemble came through under conductor James Levine's eloquent direction. Only the massive council-chamber scene looked tentative. Viva grand opera that is grand!