The stories that had made headlines at the turn of the millennium had their denouements a few years into the new century. In 2004, it was clear that Levine’s time as the Met’s artistic czar was over. Volpe had predicted years earlier that Levine’s “level of involvement” would change: “By 2005–2006 it might be time to consider younger conductors and focus on strengthening our conducting staff.” In March 2004, Beverly Sills, chair of the board since 2002, made a public appeal for $150 million to endow the radio matinees for the next five years. Toll Brothers came to the rescue, guaranteeing a minimum of four years of support for broadcasts that cost $6 million per season. As to Vilar, although disgrace began with the 2002 revelations of his unsavory machinations, in the end the worst of his miseries was only indirectly related to his obsessive philanthropy. In May 2005, a month before his term on the Met board elapsed, he was jailed, accused of defrauding a client of $5 million. He had apparently spent some of his ill-gotten gains on overdue charitable commitments. Kirov music director Valery Gergiev put up $500,000 toward his friend’s $10 million bail, despite the unmet pledge of $14 million to the St. Petersburg company. In November 2008, the compulsive benefactor, on whose sumptuous apartment the IRS by now had a $23 million lien, was convicted on twelve counts related to securities fraud and money laundering. In 2010, he was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for his white-collar crimes, and in 2012 freed on $10 million bail pending appeal. In 2006, the Metropolitan once again announced receipt, this time actual receipt, of the largest individual gift in its history, $25 million. These unrestricted monies would fill the hole left by Vilar. In gratitude, and as if to expunge the past, on September 25, 2006, the Grand Tier was named the Mercedes T. Bass Grand Tier.18
PERESTROIKA
The US/USSR politico/operatic nexus threads through the Metropolitan archives beginning on August 10, 1921, with correspondence from a representative of the English Gramophone Company to Edward Ziegler. The subject was the plight of penniless Gramophone artist Fyodor Chaliapin. The Russian bass had been at the Met in 1907–08, the season before Giulio Gatti-Casazza took over; he had sung Mefistofele, Don Basilio, and Leporello. No Russian roles were available; in fact, no Russian opera had yet found its way to 39th Street. The Gramophone agent informed Ziegler that Chaliapin, hoping he would be granted permission to leave the soon-to-be Soviet Union, pleaded to be met in Riga with cash sufficient for travel to Western Europe. The suspected Bolshevik was unwelcome in Great Britain. Was there a chance he might be welcomed in the United States? Chaliapin did, in fact, sing Boris Godunov at the Met that year and remained with the company until 1928–29 as one of its major attractions. Between Chaliapin’s 1908 departure and his return in 1921, and for the ensuing decade, Gatti sought to bolster the Slavic wing of the repertoire. From 1909 to 1931, the Metropolitan premiered, in Italian, French, or German, Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1909), Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades (1910), Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1913), Borodin’s Prince Igor (1915), Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or (1918), Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (1920), Weis’s The Polish Jew (1921), Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snegurochka (1922), Janáček’s Jenufa (1924), Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol (1926), Rimsky’s Sadko (1930), Mussorgsky’s The Fair at Sorochintzy (1930), and Weinberger’s Schwanda (1931), thirteen in all, almost twice as many as the seven that would be premiered under Volpe’s second Slavic wave. Nearly 50 percent of the Slavic titles Gatti introduced returned after their initial runs. And of these, three, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, and Boris Godonov, would become firmly embedded in the core. Two more, The Bartered Bride and Jenufa, hover on the edge of the standard rep. His initiative can be counted a lasting success.19
In the 1930s and 1940s, Soviet/American relations continued to inject themselves into Metropolitan affairs, and then with increasing intensity at the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s. Mihály Székely, a Hungarian bass at the Met from 1947 to 1950, was barred by Budapest from returning to fulfill his 1950–51 contract. In the same season, Bing’s first, the United States refused admittance to the Bulgarian bass residing in Italy Boris Christoff for the opening night Don Carlo. Christoff would never sing at the Met. In 1951, Bing felt impelled to write to Eleanor Belmont in defense of director Margaret Webster, who had been accused of Communist sympathies; as far as Bing was concerned, Webster had not been cited as subversive by the government—and that was good enough for him. He would take neither “Red Channels nor any other publication as an official guide” (Nov. 7, 1951). On the death of Josef Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union made overtures to the West for cultural exchange. Two years later, Emil Gilels, David Oistrakh, and Leonid Kogan made historic appearances as the first Soviet artists to be heard in America in decades, and Porgy and Bess went to Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad. The next year, Isaac Stern and Jan Peerce performed in Russia. In 1958, the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement, in line with President Eisenhower’s policy of “People to People” exchange, was first signed. The Soviets grumbled that the United States had failed to invite their most prominent artists, hinting that they would be willing to send bass Ivan Petrov or baritone Pavel Lisitsian, or both, to the Met for the 1958–59 season. Lisitsian sang in a single Aïda on March 3, 1960; Galina Vishnevskaya played Aïda and Cio-Cio-San in fall 1961. The most consequential of the preperestroika breakthroughs came in the summer of 1975 when the Bolshoi brought six operas to New York and Washington. The authenticity of the performances, sung in the original by artists native to the culture, was a revelation. It was mezzo-soprano Elena Obraztsova who would have the most extensive Met career during the thaw; she sang thirty performances of Amneris, Dalila, Charlotte, Carmen, and Adalgisa from October 1976 through April 1979. Baritone Yuri Mazurok sang Germont and Onegin in 1978–79. In early 1980, Washington suspended talks surrounding the renewal of the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement as one response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In Moscow, there was fury over the recent defection of Bolshoi dancers Alexander Godunov and Leonid and Valentina Kozlov (Washington Post, Jan. 29, 1980).20
Only six years later, in a speech to the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev made perestroika a household word. It came to stand for the policy of economic, social, and political restructuring, as glasnost did for the opening to the outside, particularly to the West. Operaphiles would see in the breach of the Berlin Wall three years later, and in the collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe, “the most important development in the world of opera in the last several decades.” Perestroika released a “deluge of Russian opera” (Times, June 26, 1994), and Czech as well, that has yet to subside.21
Slavic Opera: 1990–2006
In the wake of the seismic geopolitical shifts of the late 1980s, the collaboration with the unstoppable Gergiev, and the tide of Eastern European singers, the map of the Met’s repertoire was once again redrawn. During the sixteen years of the Volpe era, six Gatti bequests were revived in new productions (The Queen of Spades, Eugene Onegin, Jenufa, Boris Godunov, The Bartered Bride, Le Rossignol) along with Khovanshchina, the single Slavic novelty introduced in the more than half-century that separated Gatti from Volpe. Seven Slavic premieres were on Volpe’s calendar: Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová and The Makropulos Case (in its first season given in English), Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Prokofiev’s The Gambler and War and Peace, and Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa. The Slavic project reached the impressive total of fourteen Russian and Czech works, and two more through 2012–13 under Peter Gelb, Janáček’s From the House of the Dead and Shostakovich’s The Nose, with more to come.
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, in the repertoire since its 1913 premiere and revived in 1990–91 in the Everding/Lee production, was the portal to the newly opened Eastern Europe. The first to step through was Kát’a Kabanová. With the Janáček work, Czech took its place among the company’s languages. The beleaguered Kát’a, tormented by her provincial existence and by guilt over her adulterous desire, was Gabriel
a Beňačková, whose success in the operas of her native country had eased their way into the world’s theaters. She had made her US debut as Kát’a in 1979 with the Opera Orchestra of New York in Carnegie Hall, and in the decade that followed she played the eponymous leads of Smetana’s Libuše, of Rusalka, and of Jenufa with the same group. At her Met debut, the Wall Street Journal went out on a long limb: “This is the most ravishing voice in the world.” Beňačková held the stage against the formidable Leonie Rysanek in the role of the monstrous mother-in-law, Kabanicha. Charles Mackerras, an influential proponent of Janáček, was in the pit. The team of director Jonathan Miller and designer Robert Israel set the piece in vaguely surreal exteriors that respected the modernity of the composer’s idiom without violating the nineteenth-century origins of the subject. Their sober concept came as a relief: “This relatively modest new production . . . reminds us of something so often smothered here by miles of drapes, overdressed extras and acres of sets. Music matters.” In its first run and two revivals, the public failed to give Kat’a Kabanová the following it deserves. Rusalka did decidedly better. Beňačková won all hearts with the water sprite’s apostrophe to the moon, by then familiar as a favorite showpiece of lyric sopranos. Schneider-Siemssen’s wooded glen and shimmering pond were marvels of illusion. By whetting the public’s appetite with few performances in any one season, and by capitalizing on Renée Fleming’s affection for the title part, the Met saw scalpers hawking tickets outside its doors in 1996–97; attendance held up well in 2003–04.22
TABLE 18 Chronology of Slavic Operas in the Metropolitan’s Repertoire, 1990–2014
In December 1992, Beňačková and Rysanek squared off once more in the first Czech-language iteration of the 1974 Jenufa. Just two weeks earlier, the 1957 Eugene Onegin, revived for the sixth go in its original language, was conducted by Seiji Ozawa in one of his two Met assignments; the other would be The Queen of Spades. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk introduced Met audiences to a third Russian manner, not Mussorgsky’s “national music dramas” nor Tchaikovsky’s “lyric scenes,” but Shostakovich’s biting, broadly comic, and racy social comment. The Graham Vick/Paul Brown production was a circus of theatrical effects, among them the delivery of a double bed by means of a forklift, a crushed red automobile that served as a coffin for the murdered husband, an airborne set of mourners, and a disco ball revolving over a wedding party, all in sync with the violent momentum of the score. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk carried with it the notoriety of its birth and infancy. The opera had had an enormous succès de scandale at its 1934 Leningrad premiere. It soon racked up an impressive total of outings in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Drawn by publicity that exploited its blatant sexuality, in February 1935 New Yorkers filled the rented Met for Artur Rodzinski and his Cleveland Orchestra staging. Stalin first saw the work at the Bolshoi the following year—and two days later a Pravda editorial, damning what it called the decadence of music and subject, effectively banned any further performances in the Soviet Union. A somewhat expurgated Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk resurfaced in Moscow in 1963 and made the rounds with the title Katerina Ismailova. The Met went back to Shostakovich’s original score and libretto.
Valery Gergiev led the Met’s 1995 new production of The Queen of Spades. On the recommendation of Domingo, he had made his debut in Otello in spring 1994. That same year, the agreement between his company, St. Petersburg’s Kirov, and New York’s Metropolitan was sealed: Volpe would give or lend the Kirov old productions, mostly Italian, and the Kirov would give the Met elements of its Russian shows in return. By then, Gergiev was a celebrity and he and Volpe had joined forces. Born in Moscow in 1953, Gergiev was raised in the Caucasus, within the borders of Georgia. He studied conducting at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and at twenty-three was the winner of the Karajan Competition. At twenty-five, as assistant conductor at the Kirov, Gergiev made his debut in War and Peace. A decade later, in 1988, he was appointed chief conductor and artistic director of the company and set about the task of introducing original versions of Russian operas redacted or outlawed by the Soviets. He signed a recording contract with Philips in 1989, a move designed to promote Russian opera and the Kirov worldwide and to rake in hard currency. In summer 1992, the Kirov Opera came to New York and played at the Met for the first time, presented by Satra Arts International. Boris Godunov, The Queen of Spades, and Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel met with unusual excitement. And Gergiev returned to Russia with the dollars that would help fund his ambitious program. For the Metropolitan’s The Queen of Spades, Gergiev had an outstanding cast headed by Ben Heppner. Karita Mattila was Lisa; her top notes shone in an aura reminiscent of the young Rysanek, who here played the old Countess to terrifying effect. In his debut as Yeletsky, Dmitri Hvorostovsky staked out his place as one of the company’s stars with silken tone, long-breathed legato, and handsome presence. Mark Thompson’s St. Petersburg was the site of entrapment and hallucination, framed by an unsettling canted interior proscenium. Elijah Moshinsky captured the work’s feverish pulse most memorably in the act 1 sexual encounter of Lisa and Gherman and in the Grand Guignol materialization of the Countess’s ghost in act 3.
The 1995–96 season also saw the Met premiere of The Makropolus Case, the last Slavic work to be introduced in English. The January 5 opening had hardly begun when it was halted by an event that blurred the divide between art and life. As the curtain rose on the set of a 1920s office, its filing cabinets reaching the full height of the stage, tenor Richard Versalle, playing the clerk Vitek and standing on a ladder to retrieve a document, sang the line “You can only live so long,” and then plunged ten feet to the floor, victim of a fatal heart attack. Destiny continued to plague The Makropulos Case when a blizzard caused the cancellation of the rescheduled opening a few days later. At last, on January 11, the public followed the protagonist, an eternally young 337-year-old diva, to the end of her spiritual journey. Jessye Norman had just the voice—pure, immense, deep—and the diva persona to sound the near-timelessness of Emilia Marty. Two monumental representations took the measure of the character: a sphinx that served as her throne in act 2 and, as backdrop to much of the action, her portrait, consumed by flames at the climax. The opera has taken root in three revivals in the original Czech, the latest in 2011–12.
When, at long last, the Met replaced its forty-year-old Eugene Onegin (March 13, 1997), the conductor was Antonio Pappano, soon to be named music director of Covent Garden. The Times was not alone in bashing the Robert Carsen/Michael Levine production: “So difficult was it to hear and see, one can only assume that a strategy of concealment was at work.” It was left to three revivals that featured Thomas Hampson and Solveig Kringelborn (2001), Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming (2007), and Hampson and Mattila (2009) to establish that this refitting was not a “concealment,” but a revelation. The 2007 telecast, led by Gergiev, is among the most warmly remembered of the HD series. Three undecorated walls confine the playing space. The action unfolds within minimalist borders, chairs and tables arranged in a square for the provincial cotillion, richer seating to distinguish the gathering of cosmopolitan society. During the “Letter Scene,” Tatiana, whose bedroom is delimited by no more than the outline of a swept floor, bursts forth from the implied interior of the chamber to express ecstatic longings in the sea of surrounding foliage. Carsen elides the intermission between the duel and the grand Petersburg ball of some years later: Tchaikovsky’s famous polonaise is heard, but not danced, while the stationary, world-weary Onegin is attended by a bevy of servants who dress him, buff his nails, and perfume his gloves. In the final scene, on a stage bare but for a single chair, Fleming and Hvorostovsky, both at their peak, sum up the drama in one anguished moment of connection before separating forever.23
While Gergiev was in New York preparing and performing the 1995–96 The Queen of Spades, the Mariinsky’s chief administrator and its choreographer were detained on charges of bribery, a situation the conductor was apparently expected to handle long-distance t
hrough his well-known political connections. The next year, 1996, Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, turned complete control of the Mariinsky opera and ballet over to Gergiev. The close association of Gergiev with the regime was founded on his friendship with Vladimir Putin dating from 1992, when Putin was first deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. A critic for the London Times ventured, “I don’t know of any case in musical history, except maybe for Wagner and mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, where a musician has been that close to a powerful ruler.” In reply to those who groused that he had devolved from musician to businessman and politician, Gergiev retorted, “There are artists who do not care who is in the government. A society like America, they don’t even have to know the name of the president if they are working in Hollywood. . . . If you run the Mariinsky and say you don’t care what is happening in the government, you are a liar.” Here is a sequel to the story. In summer 2013, on the heels of Russia’s new law criminalizing “propaganda on non-traditional sexual relations,” blowback from the sort of defense Gergiev made in 2009, and more specifically from his support of Putin’s 2012 reelection, brushed up against the Met. Gergiev would not comment on the homophobic statute. To calls that the Met dedicate to Russia’s LGBT community the 2013 opening night Eugene Onegin, with Gergiev in the pit and Anna Netrebko, also in the Putin camp, as Tatiana, Gelb responded, “We . . . stand behind all of our artists, regardless of whether or not they wish to publicly express their political opinions. As an institution, the Met deplores the suppression of equal rights here or abroad. But since our mission is artistic, it is not appropriate for our performances to be used by us for political purposes, no matter how noble or right the cause.”24
Grand Opera: The Story of the Met Page 40