For me, this is peak opera time in New York. Last Monday night I saw Verdi’s wonderful MacBeth, sandwiched between a Saturday performance of Rheingold and last night’s beautifully sung and acted Valkyrie. I’m halfway through the first cycle of the Met’s new production of the Ring, with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung still to come. Between the regular subscription and the Ring, it’s almost a total immersion in the greatest of spectacles and as always, my advice to those of you who don’t live close to New York is to find the nearest theater that offers opera HD simulcasts and go there immediately.
By the standards of real Wagner fans I am a neophyte and an amateur; this is only my second complete Ring. But I’m hopelessly hooked. The second time around I’m seeing new depths and complexities in the story and the characters. The tragedy of Wotan is more moving, and cuts closer to home. Brünnhilde’s sacrifice makes more emotional sense, and the psychological complexity of Wagner’s vision emerges in greater relief.
I have a friend who says that the Ring cycle is, in his view, the greatest single work of art ever composed. This time through, I’m beginning to see why.
The Met’s controversial new production hasn’t completely won me over. The cascading planks (some compare them to Popsicle sticks and some to piano keys) work in some scenes and misfire in others. There was an extraordinary blooper last night in the last act; as Wotan upbraids Brünnhilde and prepares to leave her forever, the Popsicle sticks rose up to form a pyramid of sorts behind them. A few minutes into the scene the Microsoft logo appeared on the planks for a couple of seconds, after which the image of a mountain was projected onto the planks — presumably it should have been there from the beginning. A large and not particularly compelling eye — more Barad Dur than Bayreuth — made its appearance onstage in the same act. The onset of spring in Act One was not very inspiring. For some perverse reason, the light on Wotan’s armor in the last act sent literally blinding and painful reflections out into the audience; there were times when I could not read the titles on the back of the chair in front of me because of the glare.
All told, a ragged show and one that fell very far below the Met’s usual standards. One hopes the rough edges will be smoothed away as the production settles in; if they can’t work the kinks out of this, the multimillion dollar production will be a huge embarrassment.
But the acting, the singing and the orchestra were close to flawless. The acting was particularly good; Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde managed to give a performance that was both intense and nuanced, and her acting — even when she wasn’t singing — helped the audience (or at least this particular audience member) to understand the relations between the characters more clearly than ever before. Stephanie Blythe’s Fricka brings home the essential moral truths that shape Wotan’s dilemma. Wotan himself (Bryn Terfel) is entirely convincing as the jaws of the terrible trap he has made for himself close in on him, forcing him first to kill a beloved son and then to turn his back on a cherished daughter.
Opera seems to have become much more effective as theater in recent years. This is partly because of casting; at the Met anyway more and more of the singers look the part. The ones who are supposed to be young and sexy frequently are. With the proliferation of training programs and the globalization of opera, there seem to be enough great voices emerging that leading opera companies don’t just have to comb the world for any singers who are up to the vocal demands of Wagnerian opera. They can assemble casts of great vocal prowess and talent who are also willing and able to act.
No more staring as two rotund, middle aged vocalists try to convince you they are star crossed lovers in their mid teens. Carmen, Violetta, Tosca, Brünnhilde: increasingly they light up and dominate the stage by the way they look and act, as well as by the way they sing.
And directors seem to be paying much more attention to the dramatic side of operatic performance these days. The era of “park and bark” stage direction, when opera was staged as a series of tableaux, is behind us. More often than not these days, scenes work dramatically; singers move better, show more emotion, interact with one another even as they sing.
The result is a spectacle that appeals much more directly to the emotions. Opera will, I suspect, become much more popular as it becomes better theater. It is the union of sublime music with compelling drama that makes this the greatest (non-liturgical) form of performance humanity has so far created. As that union is more fully realized on our stages, the circle of people who find opera enchanting will grow.
This does not mean we need kitschy staging or gimmicks. The fussy flying keyboard that is the backdrop and centerpiece of the Met’s new Ring has its moments, but last night’s performance was great in spite of rather than because of this multimillion dollar monument to directorial ambition. The acting and the singing made the story come alive. That is infinitely more important than the gimmicks directors seem to love — Rigoletto is going to be set, for example, in Brat Pack Las Vegas next year.
Opera actually needs less in the way of gimmicky sets and costumes than ever before. What is driving the new opera is very simple: thanks to those little screens on the seat backs that give you line by line readings of the libretto, the audience can now effortlessly follow the drama onstage. Those little text boxes have taken opera out of the museum and put it on the stage. They have turned opera into entertainment that people who don’t speak foreign languages and haven’t committed hours to mastering a libretto in advance can enjoy.
You don’t have to be a high end culture vulture anymore to have a fantastic time watching Verdi or Puccini. You just have to like a good show and people who enjoy Broadway are going to have much more fun at Lincoln Center than in the recent past.
And this means that if an opera is convincingly cast and intelligently acted — as well of course as being beautifully sung against the background of a great orchestra masterfully led — most of the repertoire will appeal to a surprising number of people.
The mania for “relevant” or shocking productions (mushroom clouds in Faust) is out of step with the new opera — though it thinks of itself as cutting edge. It represented an attempt to make opera entertaining — necessary perhaps in the age when park and bark singers playing parts for which they were not suited sang unintelligibly to one another. The drama was missing when the audience couldn’t follow the action in any close or meaningful way; gimmicky, shocking productions were attempts to import an excitement into an operatic experience that, for most of the audience and especially for the younger and inexperienced members of the audience, did not really work as drama.
Those little text boxes change all that, and they change it big time. Opera is no longer something you have to study in order to appreciate; you can walk into the concert hall, sit down for an opera that you have never heard of before, and be transported by the same combination of music and story that captured audiences a century ago in Italy and Germany.
If a director can get his or her cast to look the part and act well, and if the director has a compelling theatrical vision, the rest matters much less than it used to. The avant garde staginess of the last generation of opera now looks fussy rather than inspiring. It detracts from a drama that doesn’t need it; like a frame that is too elaborate and too big it makes a great painting harder to see. With the text boxes, the emphasis goes back to revealing the core of the drama by great acting. That is what matters now; we need high drama rather than high concept direction to make this genre flourish as never before.
All good things must come to an end; the Ring cycle ends this month and on May 12 the Met rings down the curtain on the current season with Billy Budd. But it is beginning to look as if the 21st century is going to be a golden age for opera. HD simulcasts are bringing new revenues not only to the Met but to great companies all over the world, great young voices are emerging, baroque opera is coming into its own, and those little text boxes (and simulcast subtitles) are turning opera from a remote and forbidding cultural monument into an enchanting and moving entertainment that all kinds of people can easily enjoy.
Both Verdi and Wagner were born in 1813; I plan to celebrate their joint bicentennial early and often.