Review: A Devastated Drone Pilot Opens the Met Opera’s Season

On a fall evening in 1883, the Metropolitan Opera opened its doors for the first time with a performance of “Faust,” the classic tale of a man who sells his soul to Mephistopheles to gain power and pleasure.

On Monday, 141 years later, another Met season began with Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded,” a bloodless new opera on that same old theme of making an ill-advised deal with the devil.

The same old theme, but with 21st-century trappings — a plot about advanced weapons technology; a libretto loaded with words unprintable in this newspaper — that are still unusual in the tradition-bound opera world, particularly on the Met’s most important night of the year. There is an assumption that operas on charged contemporary themes must be risky and important. “Grounded,” which doesn’t risk much, politically or musically, shows this isn’t so.

Its protagonist, Jess, is a hotshot fighter pilot who falls in love with a rancher she meets while on leave in Wyoming. When she gets pregnant, she is pulled out of her beloved F-16 cockpit, and out of combat in the Middle East. With a loyal husband and daughter, she is without the sense of freedom and mastery she had soaring through — and dropping bombs from — what she calls “the blue.”

A few years later, her old boss, the U.S. military, has a proposal: Would she apply her gifts to operating a missile-bearing Reaper drone, thousands of miles away from her targets? It’s much less glamorous than her former “Top Gun” life, but she’ll be able to go home and hug her child at the end of the day.