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The Big Bang at the Met
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16109 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1989 |
2,063 Words |
| Author
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Peter Lawrence
Peter Lawrence writes for a number of national publications
and is based in New York City. |
Ground was broken for the new Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center in 1962, and the house itself opened in 1966, at a cost of $46 million, with a disastrous production of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. Directed and designed by Franco Zeffirelli, it starred soprano Leontyne Price, "looking like a miniature pyramid herself," in the worlds of a wit of the day, and wearing more spangles than Elizabeth Taylor did as queen of the Nile.
The Met's first new production this year, after a calamitous cut-and-paste Il Trovatore opened the season, was on a similar theme: Handel's Caesar and Cleopatra, this time with the bell-voiced Kathleen Battle as Egypt's regent. The production of Handel's Baroque masterpiece had, actually, been borrowed form elsewhere, but what it served to point up was how inappropriate the house is, physically, for most opera beyond the large-scaled spectacle of, say, Wagner, Verdi, or Strauss.
When plans were under way for the 3,800-seat house, the board of directors demanded a horseshoe style, with the result that, as renegade opera director Peter Sellars jokes, only about ten singers in the world can fill its cavern. The Met is huge, a chandeliered barn, where a Baroque opera such as the Handel, which tends to employ smallish voices anyway, is as fitting as high tea on a football field.
What the Met tends to do best, given the near-miraculous facilities of its stage (five movable stages, actually), are the big old warhorses. Over the past several seasons it has mounted, under the musical direction of James Levine, a new production of Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed by Otto Schenk and designed by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen. (The entire cycle of operas was performed this spring.) All told, it is a "safe" Ring, without even the smallest comet of controversy orbiting it. Traditional in its thrust, it is meant to last the Met many years.
Schenk has been extremely astute in realizing that Wagner wrote music-dramas: that is, the music must carry the day. What Wagner asked for on the stage is sometimes well-nigh impossible--underwater maidens, horses flying through the air, and quite literally, the destruction of world (and its rebirth) at the conclusion of Gotterdammerung. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a tall order.
Storybook Quality
Schenk and Schneider-Siemssen have come through with a
...
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