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      Review: Lise Davidsen Shines, and Evolves, in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’

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      The radiant young soprano returned to the Metropolitan Opera to star as the Marschallin in a revival of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”When the luminous soprano Lise Davidsen released her first solo album several years ago, she faced criticism over her repertoire.Chiefly, that while she was just in her early 30s she had chosen to record Strauss’s autumnal “Four Last Songs.” In an interview then, her characteristic geniality gave way to exasperation. “It pisses me off a little bit that you have to be a certain age to feel certain feelings,” she said. “Teenagers have all those feelings, and more, in a day.”With more measured calm, she added: “But I do believe that I’m entitled to take on those feelings, to take on the difficulties in life. That’s our job in opera.”She challenged doubters again on Monday when Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” returned to the Metropolitan Opera with Davidsen, 36, making her role debut as the Marschallin — a character more typically portrayed by seasoned grandes dames. So much so that this production, by Robert Carsen, opened in 2017 as a vehicle for Renée Fleming’s farewell to the role.Never mind that in the libretto, the Marschallin is in her early 30s. Or that Fleming was around Davidsen’s age when she first sang the part at Houston Grand Opera. But as Davidsen said of the “Four Last Songs,” a performer has every right to a role if she can persuasively “take on those feelings,” not to mention the notes. And Davidsen can, on both fronts.Davidsen excels in repertoire — mostly Wagner and Strauss — somewhere between the achingly human and the otherworldly: the saintly Elisabeth in “Tannhäuser,” the mythical title character in “Ariadne auf Naxos,” the forlorn Sieglinde in “Die Walküre.” The Marschallin, however, is entirely earthbound. In conflict with neither God nor the gods, she is simply staring down middle age and the inevitability of change.That said, the Marschallin is a woman of stature: influential, composed and well connected. Davidsen captures this naturally, exuding confidence more than wisdom, and behaving with discretion in public while reserving playfulness for the intimacy of her bedroom.When we meet the Marschallin, she has just spent the night with her 17-year-old lover, Octavian; over the course of the first act, her amorous bliss gives way to solemnity as she explains that their affair has an expiration date — “today or tomorrow, or the day after next.” When Fleming sang that line, it was with the authority of experience. But where her Marschallin looked back, Davidsen’s seems to look forward; she’s keeping it together while aware of the anxiety that sets in whenever she looks in the mirror.Throughout, Davidsen alternates between conversational restraint — enunciating each syllable of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s talky libretto with penetrating focus — and white-hot radiance. Her terms of endearment for Octavian emerge like a rising sun. And in the final trio, her sustained high A on the word “glücklich” (“happy”) soars and crescendos to a glowing benediction for her lover’s new life with Sophie.“Der Rosenkavalier” is an ensemble opera in which it can be difficult to call anyone a protagonist, but Davidsen’s Marschallin leaves the stage the most evolved. Among the lines that landed freshly on Monday was her last. With Sophie’s father, Faninal, she passes by the happy new couple. He sings, “Young people are always the same”; and she responds, “Yes, yes,” with a D sharp falling nearly an octave below to an E, as if sighing.On Monday, that moment was a reminder that while the opera often seems like the story of two generations, it is more like a tale of three: Octavian’s, the Marschallin’s and Faninal’s. With that “yes, yes,” Davidsen’s Marschallin suddenly matures, shedding the anxiety of wrinkles and lovers lost to enter the next phase of her life.Also remarkable on Monday was the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey, singing the role of Octavian at the Met for the first time. She made even bigger the mighty yet smooth sound, as well as the tireless energy and dramatic skill, that she brought to her performances last year in a “Rosenkavalier” at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. With a cherubic face she looked every bit the part of a young lover, and, with a touch of careless manspreading while lighting a cigarette, very much a boy.The baritone Brian Mulligan made a role debut, as well, as Faninal, with commanding ease and entertaining comedic instinct. And veterans of the production returned: the soprano Erin Morley, still a bright, elegant presence as Sophie; and the bass Günther Groissböck, still a dangerously handsome Baron Ochs, though more strained in this revival, his gravely low notes and declamatory articulation characterful but not always assured.Under Simone Young’s baton, the Met Orchestra improved as the evening progressed. The opening, a kind of pornography in music, was romantic where it should have been ecstatic, and a Mozartean interlude in the first act wasn’t scaled back to match the style; the dreamily glinting rose motif was more legato than lustrous. But Young effectively conjured the romping chaos of Ochs’s cohort in the second act, along with his famous waltz and the darker, “Salome”-like dancing rhythms of the third act.Carsen’s production remains the textbook-perfect staging of modern Met history: elegant and satisfyingly grand, smart but not daring. His major intervention — moving the opera’s setting from the 18th century to the year in which it premiered, 1911, from the cusp of revolutionary Europe to the brink of World War I — also remains eerily evocative.The Marschallin’s bedroom is covered in large canvases: portraits of great men, scenes from battle and court. It seems as though the walls can barely support the weight of history. In the first act, her life is saturated at a tipping point of decadence; a parade of visitors and excess — needy orphans, salespeople with the latest fashions, an attention-hungry tenor — overwhelm her, the score and the stage. By the end, the set opens up around Octavian and Sophie as they rejoice in their future together, revealing a line of soldiers charging into battle, and stumbling as they die.When the production opened in 2017, its depiction of a society blissfully unaware of the transformation ahead recalled the recent, surprise election of President Donald J. Trump. Since then, it has been redolent of much else in our time of too-muchness: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate disaster.If Carsen’s “Rosenkavalier” has staying power, it is because of this chameleonic resonance. As the Marschallin well knows, the only constant, in a forward-spinning world, is change.Der RosenkavalierThrough April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Met Opera Ordered to Pay Anna Netrebko $200,000 for Canceled Performances

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      The company cut ties with the star Russian soprano for her refusal to denounce Vladimir Putin after the invasion of Ukraine. An arbitrator said it must pay her under the terms of her contract.The Metropolitan Opera has been ordered by an arbitrator to pay the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko more than $200,000 for performances it canceled last year after she declined to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.The arbitrator, in a decision issued last month that has not been previously reported, ruled that the Met should compensate Netrebko for 13 canceled performances — including appearances in “Don Carlo” this season and “La Forza del Destino” and “Andrea Chénier” next season — because of a contractual agreement known as “pay or play,” which requires institutions to pay performers even if they later decide not to engage them.The Met had argued that Netrebko, one of opera’s biggest stars, was not entitled to payment because of her refusal to comply with the company’s demand after the invasion of Ukraine that she denounce Putin, which it said had violated the company’s conduct clause. Netrebko had endorsed Putin for president in 2012 and had spoken glowingly of him before the invasion.The arbitrator, Howard C. Edelman, found that “there is no doubt she was a Putin supporter, as she had a right to be.” But he added that aligning with Putin was “certainly not moral turpitude or worthy, in and of itself, of actionable misconduct.”Netrebko had been seeking an additional $400,000 in fees for engagements in coming seasons that had been discussed but not formally agreed to, including leading roles in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” and “Tosca,” as well as Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” Netrebko earned the Met’s current fee for top artists of about $15,000 a performance.But the arbitrator found that Netrebko was not entitled to fees for those performances because the contracts had not been executed. In addition, he imposed a penalty of nearly $30,000 on Netrebko for making “highly inappropriate” statements after the invasion, including sharing a text on social media that used an expletive to refer to her Western critics, whom she called “as evil as blind aggressors.”In addition to endorsing Putin, Netrebko has occasionally lent support to his policies. When in 2014 she donated to an opera house in Donetsk, a war-torn city in Ukraine controlled by Russian separatists, she was photographed holding a separatist flag.The Met did not comment on the specifics of the ruling but defended its decision to cancel Netrebko’s performances.“Although our contracts are ‘pay or play,’ we didn’t think it was morally right to pay Netrebko anything considering her close association with Putin,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview.He added: “It’s an artistic loss for the Met not having her singing here. But there’s no way that either the Met or the majority of its audience would tolerate her presence.”Netrebko’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Sam Wheeler, the national executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, the union that represented Netrebko, praised the decision, saying it would help protect the rights of artists seeking compensation for canceled engagements.“‘Pay-or-play’ is the bedrock of our collective bargaining agreements across the country, and we will always defend ‘pay-or-play’ provisions to the fullest extent possible,” he said in a statement.Netrebko, a major star and box office draw, still has a relatively busy performing schedule, though she continues to face protests and calls that she be banned from the global stage. A planned concert this month in Taiwan was canceled at the last minute because of concerns about her connections to Putin. She is set to perform a recital at La Scala, in Milan, on Sunday, and will return there this summer for a production of “Macbeth.” Her engagements next season include a concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus, and appearances at the Salzburg Easter Festival in Austria.Facing a series of cancellations in the West last year, she sought to distance herself from Putin, issuing a statement saying that she had met the president only a few times and that she was not “allied with any leader of Russia.” She also canceled her appearances in Russia. But she has avoided directly criticizing Putin or addressing her record of support for him.Separately, the Met announced on Friday that it was firing Netrebko’s husband, the tenor Yusif Eyvazov, from a production of “Tosca” set to open on March 30. Eyvazov, who had been engaged to play the role of the painter Cavaradossi in six performances, will be replaced by Matthew Polenzani. Rehearsals for the production are to begin on Monday.Gelb said that he had hoped Eyvazov would withdraw from the production but that he had decided to fire him primarily because of comments he made last year criticizing the soprano Angel Blue, who withdrew from a production of “Aida” at the Arena di Verona after photos of Netrebko and other artists performing there in dark makeup circulated on social media.Gelb also said that Eyvazov’s association with Netrebko was problematic and that he did not want to disrespect the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, who will sing the role of Tosca in four performances.Eyvazov’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment; the Met said he would be compensated for the canceled “Tosca” performances. More

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      A Tenor’s Secrets to ‘Lohengrin’: Golf and a Blunt Spouse

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      Piotr Beczala, known as a charismatic singer of Italian operas, is challenging notions of what a Wagner voice should sound like.Piotr Beczala, tan from a recent trip to Mexico and hungry for a roast beef sandwich, walked offstage after the first act of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday night and bounded for his dressing room.It was intermission, and Beczala, the tenor in the title role, was preparing for one of the evening’s biggest challenges: maintaining his voice and energy during his character’s 90-minute break between the first and second acts.“You have to keep the attitude; you have to keep the tension,” he said. “You have to do something, or else you will lose it all.”Standing by a piano in his dressing room, he sang bits from other operas, including Puccini’s “Turandot,” which he will perform in Zurich this summer. He practiced passages from “Lohengrin,” working through some of its lowest notes. In between, he took time to clear his mind, playing golf on his iPad (a course in St. Andrews, Scotland) and showing off photos of the dinner he had cooked a few hours earlier (Parmesan-crusted chicken with a side of Russian salad).During a 90-minute break between Beczala’s appearances in the opera’s first and second acts, he passes the time by practicing and playing golf on an iPad.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOn Saturday, “Lohengrin” will be broadcast to movie theaters around the world as part of the Met’s Live in HD series. Inside Beczala’s dressing room on Tuesday, a makeup artist expressed concern that his tan would give him a reddish glow onscreen. Beczala replied that he planned to watch a recording of Tuesday’s performance with the former opera singer Katarzyna Bak-Beczala, his wife, to get feedback.“Routine is deadly,” he said as he flipped through the “Lohengrin” score. “Each performance has to feel completely new.”Beczala, 56, a charismatic singer from Poland with a boyish personality, has long been known for the Italian repertory, making his name in roles like Rodolfo in “La Bohème” and Edgardo in “Lucia di Lammermoor.”But in recent years, he has worked to establish himself as a skilled Wagnerian, too, starting with Lohengrin, an otherworldly knight who comes to the rescue of a virtuous duchess in medieval Brabant. With a lyrical voice trained in bel canto style, he is challenging notions of what a Wagner voice should sound like.François Girard, who directs the Met’s production, said that Beczala brought fresh energy to the role.“I’ve seen singers in their dressing rooms after Wagner performances and you want to call the ambulance,” he said. “Piotr is fresh like a rose, and you feel he’s ready for a double.”His Wagner performances have won accolades, so much so that his calendar is now packed with “Lohengrin” engagements. After his 10-show run at the Met, which concludes in early April, he will sing the role a dozen more times this year in Vienna and Paris.There is already talk of bringing him back to the Met for a Wagnerian feat: performing “Parsifal,” the composer’s last opera, alongside “Lohengrin” (Girard has staged both works at the Met, treating his production of “Lohengrin” as a sequel to his “Parsifal”).Beczala has mixed feelings, intrigued by the challenge of Wagner but also nervous about losing touch with favorites like “Il Trovatore” and “Aida.”Beczala’s performance in “Lohengrin” has been praised, including in The New York Times for its “uncanny serenity and dignity.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m still fighting against the idea of singing more Wagner because it’s dangerous,” he said. “I worry I will sing only Wagner. And I want to sing other music as well. Balance is very important.”Born in Czechowice-Dziedzice, Poland, about 70 miles west of Krakow, Beczala did not receive musical training as a child; he sang only in church. His father worked in the fabric industry, and his mother was a tailor. When he was a teenager, however, a teacher suggested that he take voice lessons.While attending a music academy in Vienna, he worked shifts as a construction worker, digging holes and tearing down walls. One day, while he was laying floors at a discothèque, he saw a man singing on the street for money. Sensing an opportunity, he positioned himself on a corner near the Vienna State Opera and belted staples like “La donna è mobile,” from Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”“I drank a beer, cleaned the dust from my throat and started singing,” he said. He used his earnings to buy standing-room tickets at the opera.He met his wife while singing in a chorus. She later gave up her career to focus on promoting and coaching him. She attends most of his performances, sitting in a variety of seats and taking detailed notes.“I not only help Piotr from the musical side, but also provide psychological support,” she said in a 2020 interview with a Polish news outlet. “Artists are very sensitive people. I know that because I’m an artist, too.”Earlier in his career, Beczala performed as a company member at the Zurich Opera, and won acclaim for performances as Alfredo in “La Traviata” and Tamino in “The Magic Flute.” His international career quickly took off, and in 2006, he made his Met debut as the Duke of Mantua in “Rigoletto.”The idea of trying Wagner came in 2012, when the conductor Christian Thielemann suggested he consider singing “Lohengrin.” They met the following year at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, where Thielemann was conducting, to see how Beczala sounded from the stage. Beczala then debuted the role in 2016, alongside the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and under Thielemann’s baton at the Semperoper Dresden, where he is the chief conductor.The relationship between Beczala and Netrebko, once his friend and frequent collaborator, has become strained since Russia invaded Ukraine last year. Netrebko was originally set to star alongside Beczala in the Met’s “Lohengrin.” But she withdrew from the production and, since the war began, has been canceled at the Met and faced other professional setbacks because of her association with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Beczala, an early critic of the war who has canceled his Russian engagements, said he had not spoken with Netrebko since the invasion. He said that she did not do enough to oppose it and distance herself from Putin. “I like Anna really as an artist and a colleague,” he said, “but she made mistakes.”In the future, Beczala could take on the feat of performing Lohengrin alongside another Wagner hero, Parsifal.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesBeczala has been in New York since December, when he opened a new production of Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora,” singing the role of the murderous Count Loris. He was a week late to rehearsals for “Lohengrin” because of “Fedora,” which closed in January, but his colleagues said he seemed at ease with the role.“He came in, and it was just a breath of fresh air,” said the soprano Tamara Wilson, who plays Elsa, the role originally planned for Netrebko. “He’s the most calm, relaxed person ever.”Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times praised his “uncanny serenity and dignity,” writing, “Beczala performs the Wagner role — pure, precise and often treacherously exposed — with total security and elegance.”Beczala said that he has tried to emphasize the character’s identity as an outsider.“Normally you think you can make this character more interesting by making him more human,” he said. “But it doesn’t help. You have to be, as Lohengrin, outside of this community. You have to be almost like a god, a strange being.”After his long break on Tuesday, Beczala was in the wings at the Met, preparing to go onstage. He jumped up and down, rubbed his palms together and cupped his hands over his mouth, and breathed in and out.As the chorus sang, he smiled. “This is such great music,” he said.Then, after adjusting the sleeves of his white shirt and the ring on his finger, he headed onstage. More

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      Review: Verdi’s Falstaff Is Back at the Met, Enlarging His Kingdom

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      Michael Volle puts his noble voice to delightfully undignified use as the title character in Robert Carsen’s still fresh production of “Falstaff.”There’s a lot of fat-shaming in Verdi’s “Falstaff,” but the opera has never really been a candidate for revision or cancellation, probably because the victim of those insults refuses to see himself as one. Eloquent and self-aggrandizing, Falstaff proudly identifies with his stature.“This is my kingdom,” he proclaims, patting his belly, “I will enlarge it.”On Sunday, in the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Robert Carsen’s winning production, the baritone Michael Volle delivered the line in a room at the Garter Inn surrounded by butler’s carts spilling over with ravaged plates and wine-stained tablecloths. Falstaff’s kingdom — as within, so without. Such sly touches litter Carsen’s production set in the 1950s. A decade after its company premiere, it still looks fresh and earns the kind of enthusiastic laughter rarely heard in an opera house.Beyond the appealing visuals — the yellow-chartreuse kitchen cabinets and flattering cinched-waist dresses — Carsen has provided opportunities for profundity. His lighting design with Peter Van Praet, in particular, offers clues — the raw naturalism for Falstaff’s pessimistic aria “L’onore! Ladri!” or the dusky sunset for Falstaff’s humbled reflections at the top of Act III.Volle’s Falstaff leans into those subtleties. In his most recent Met assignments — as a futilely disempowered Wotan in the “Ring” cycle and a salt-of-the-earth Hans Sachs in “Die Meistersinger” — Volle has shown himself to be a Wagnerian of long, graceful focus. As Falstaff, he puts the noble grain of his voice to deliciously undignified use. This booming, endlessly interesting antihero comports himself as an entitled, well-bred gentleman who has tired of wearing dirty long johns and waiting for the universe to right his fortunes. His solution: some Tinder Swindler-style manipulations with two well-to-do married women.Expounding a personal philosophy of honor and its uselessness in “L’onore! Ladri!” Volle sang with professorial authority, his voice emerging as if from a deep well. His smug “Va, vecchio John” flowed with syrupy self-satisfaction. When he waxed poetic about his salad days as the page of the Duke of Norfolk, his voice turned light, proud and assured — grandiloquent, yes, but also creditable.The conductor Daniele Rustioni matched Volle’s conception, leading the orchestra in a rousing, confidently shaped performance. Verdi goes for deep sarcasm in his masterfully comic score — when the men make fools of themselves in bombastic monologues, the orchestration only intensifies — and there was nothing cutesy in Rustioni’s account of it. When the brasses trilled, they belly laughed. The bassoons galumphed; the strings ennobled passages of sincerity; and the horns had it both ways, sometimes jocular, sometimes expressive.The opera’s female characters, never taking themselves — or the threat posed by badly behaved men — too seriously, often sing in ensembles rather than solos. Even so, Ailyn Pérez provided warm, elegant leadership as Alice with a glowing lyric soprano. Her rise as one of the Met’s leading ladies has been a pleasure of this season. The contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, clearly having a ball onstage as Mistress Quickly, received exit applause for her uproarious scene with Falstaff, in which she flashed some leg and flaunted a lot of plumpy tone. The mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano was a mettlesome Meg, and as Nannetta, Hera Hyesang Park revealed a soprano as limpid as fresh water, even if a few top notes sounded hard and unsteady.As Ford, Christopher Maltman sang with a toughened baritone. Bogdan Volkov’s Fenton was sweetness itself.The relentless patter of Verdi’s vocal writing against a full, busy orchestra presents distinctive challenges. The women anchored the double vocal quartet of Act I when the men started to rush the tempo, but otherwise, ensemble singing was admirably tight. The final fugue had astonishing transparency — Lemieux’s pitched guffaws cut through effortlessly — and Carsen’s staging neatly introduced each new voice as it joined the increasingly dense musical texture on a crowded stage.Act III begins in a lonelier way — with Volle’s Falstaff crumpled in a small corner of a vast, empty space, where he is drying off and licking his wounds after being dumped unceremoniously in the Thames. A kindly waiter gives him a cup of warm wine, and he sings its praises with quietly arresting beauty. In that moment, the Wagnerian in Volle poked through, turning the humanity of Falstaff’s humbling into something sublime.FalstaffThrough April 1 at the Metropolitan Opera; www.metopera.org. More

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      ‘Norma’ and ‘La Traviata’ Return to the Met Opera

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      Sonya Yoncheva doesn’t fill out the long lines of “Norma” at the Met, while Angel Blue is a warm, sincere Violetta in “La Traviata.”“An irresistible force drags me here,” a character says of the man she loves in Bellini’s “Norma,” which was revived at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday with the soprano Sonya Yoncheva in the title role. “The breeze echoes with his dear voice.”Every opera, of course, wants the voices in it to be irresistible forces, echoing in our minds; that is the point of the art form. But in the bel canto works of the early 19th century — of which “Norma,” from 1831, is a lasting masterpiece — vocal quality is more than a want. It’s a need.Particularly in the monumental title role. Norma is a descendant of Medea, a character who opened the Met’s season in Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 opera. Both are women wronged by their lovers and contemplating the murder of their children; both are figures of immense, mystical stature. And in both works, the drama lies in the breaking down of their authority: the revelation of an archetype, a myth, a goddess who is also a woman.In bel canto works like “Norma,” the protagonist’s grandeur, the heights from which she falls, are established by the soprano’s vocal technique, by the long, confident musical lines she spins. Bellini’s orchestra is subtle and sensitive, but austere enough that this opera’s stakes are purely vocal. If the score isn’t sung beautifully, it’s not simply bad — it’s almost nonexistent, which is the case in the Met’s drab revival.Over the past decade, Yoncheva has risen from a series of last-minute fill-ins to solo recitals on the Met’s stage and starring roles in new productions, including Umberto Giordano’s 1898 potboiler “Fedora” this past New Year’s Eve. But even for an established leading lady, Norma, which Yoncheva first sang in London seven years ago, is a daring proposition.As this druid high priestess, caught in a forbidden love triangle with a Roman soldier and a fellow priestess, Yoncheva can be forceful in declamation — the singing that’s more like speechifying. And she’s long been able to convey the sense of a character thinking as she sings.But crucial to this score, as to all bel canto, are the seemingly endless, time-defying lines that, on the revival’s opening night, she struggled to sustain, with an unsettled vibrato and big, gulping breaths breaking up core arias like “Casta diva.” Without powerful, poised, flexible singing — “beauty of tone and correct emission,” as Lilli Lehmann, a great Norma, put it — we feel none of the necessary awe for the character. So her fall from grace and the opera she dominates both lose their meaning. While Yoncheva doesn’t betray Bellini’s score, she doesn’t fill its sails, either, and the boat stagnates.The result is a kind of pencil sketch of “Norma” — not imprecise, but colorless. Yoncheva has coloratura agility, retained from her early days as a Baroque specialist, and isolated high notes pop out clearly. But when those notes are the climaxes of arching lines, they’re thin. She is spirited and scrupulous, and her voice is not ugly, but it’s inadequate for this music.The soprano Sonya Yoncheva comes to the Met’s latest revival of “Norma” after rising from a series of last-minute fill-ins to solo recitals on the Met’s stage and star turns in new productions.Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaShe neither loses control nor takes real command. And it’s not just strength you can’t convey if you’re not vocally in command as Norma; it’s weakness, too. Yoncheva spends much of the time blandly moping around, small-scale on this soaring canvas.With Maurizio Benini conducting briskly on Tuesday, the rest of the cast, too, lacked the suggestion of the epic. The wayward Roman warrior Pollione is the second big part in a much-anticipated Met season for the acclaimed tenor Michael Spyres, and the second disappointment. There’s a tarnished-bronze, baritonal nobility to Spyres’s voice, but strain in reaching the high register, and a kind of fogged wooliness just below.As Adalgisa, who unwittingly becomes Norma’s romantic rival, the mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova makes the warmest outpourings of sound onstage, and her classic duets with Norma are neatly done. The bass-baritone Christian Van Horn presses out muscular tone as Oroveso, Norma’s father. In the small role of Clotilde, Norma’s aide, the soprano Brittany Olivia Logan sings with creamy urgency.The sighing “ba-dum, ba-dum” motif in the prelude to Act II anticipates Verdi’s “La Traviata,” which premiered just 22 years after “Norma” and mines that same motif for the same pathos. But by midcentury, operatic orchestral music had increased in density and complexity, and had begun to develop into a character in its own right. And “Traviata,” which returned to the Met on Saturday afternoon, is a far more naturalistic melodrama than the carefully antique, stylized “Norma.”So, unlike “Norma,” “La Traviata” makes its impact — it breaks your heart — pretty much no matter what. (By Giordano and Puccini’s time, 40 or 50 years later, operas were even more indestructible.) Which is not to say that “Traviata” can’t be derailed by its star. Or that it doesn’t bloom with an excellent one, like the soprano Angel Blue, who took on the role of Violetta at the Met on Saturday.The tricky curlicues and fast lines of the first act are sometimes not quite secure for her, and in “Sempre libera,” which brings down the Act I curtain, she exudes vague contentedness rather than bigger, riskier feelings. But even in those opening scenes, she is a warm presence — warm vocally, too, but with a quickly vibrating shimmer to her tone that keeps the sound buoyant and refreshing.There is no cynicism or hardness to her conception of the role, just the woundedness of a quick-smiling woman who has trusted too easily. Blue’s Violetta is always human-size, even in full, rich cry in her confrontation with Germont, the bourgeois father seeking to tear his son away from a liaison that threatens the family.She shows restraint in the third act, not milking the music for extra emotion. Her “Addio del passato” was brisk and bleak; her “Gran dio,” angry rather than pleading. The irrepressible Nadine Sierra and the scorched-earth Ermonelo Jaho offered accomplished Violettas at the Met earlier this season, but the sweet, sincere Blue — who lets the tragedy patiently unfold — may be my favorite.The tenor Dmytro Popov is an earnest, ringing Alfredo; as his father, the disapproving Germont, the baritone Artur Rucinski sometimes forces his seductive tone. In tiny parts, Megan Marino is a sprightly Flora, and, over 600 performances into his Met career, Dwayne Croft (here Baron Douphol) still brings a hearty voice and dramatic investment every time he steps onstage.Michael Mayer’s vulgar production drags down the opera. In the first act, Alfredo warns Violetta, “The way you’re living will kill you,” which makes no sense if, as here, the opening scene has all the demimonde danger of a Hamptons garden party. And, in this period setting, the visibly contemporary labels on the bottles of bubbly come across as yet more lazy summer-stock falsity in a staging full of it.But the show is surprisingly bearable with Blue’s tender honesty at its center. More

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      Review: A Blunt New ‘Lohengrin’ at the Met Stars a Shining Knight

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      The tenor Piotr Beczala sings with uncanny serenity and command in the title role of Wagner’s opera, directed by François Girard with little subtlety.Directors love Wagner’s operas, which infuse the suggestive sketchiness of parables into clearly conceived plots and characters. They offer both strong bones and flexibility.“Lohengrin,” about an anxious and divided society into which arrives a figure with magical powers and secrets, has recently been placed in settings as varied as a laboratory, a classroom and a neo-fascist town square.And, on Sunday at the Metropolitan Opera, in a dark, blunt mixture of pre-modern and post-apocalyptic elements. Directed by François Girard, the production suffers from a facile children’s-theater color scheme, but boasts a shining musical performance from the orchestra and the two leading singers.At the Met in 1998, Robert Wilson distilled “Lohengrin” into a vision of hovering bars of light and glacially shifting gestures. The opening night audience, used to hyper-naturalistic Wagner productions, rebelled with a storm of boos. But 25 years later, the Wilson staging seems like an ahead-of-its-time landmark, a harbinger of how the company’s dramatic range would broaden.Among the highlights of this new era has been Girard’s staging, from 2013, of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” Set on a stark hillside among a group of men in white button-ups and black pants, this was a take on the opera’s protectors of the Holy Grail as a contemporary cult over which planets loomed and orbited in projections.Those cosmic projections have returned in Girard’s “Lohengrin,” with a kind of catastrophic heavenly explosion depicted during the orchestral prelude. The action that follows begins under a blasted wall that hangs at an angle over the stage, a huge hole open to a view of morphing stars and galaxies.The people who enter are dressed in early medieval robes and heavy jewels; a pagan throne is formed from tree roots. But the wall is made of reinforced concrete, and Lohengrin, the mystical knight who soon arrives to avenge the honor of a woman accused of killing her brother, is wearing the spare modern-day outfit of the Grail defenders in Girard’s “Parsifal.”The connection makes some sense: As we learn at the end of “Lohengrin,” when its title character’s secrets are revealed, Lohengrin is Parsifal’s son. But Girard’s nod to his “Parsifal” doesn’t do his new production any favors. While that “Parsifal” was revelatory in imagining the opera’s climax as the integration of women into the Grail cult, this “Lohengrin” isn’t interested in fresh interpretations. No one will mistake it for a landmark in Met history.Instead, Girard’s “Lohengrin,” which brings the opera back to the company after 17 years, is an emphatic, serviceable, basically conservative framework for the piece. Thankfully, some superb singers fill the frame. Most important, almost floating through the staging with uncanny serenity and dignity, is Piotr Beczala in the title role.Beczala, who has appeared at the Met mostly in French and Italian classics, was an impressive Lohengrin.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis square-jawed, always stylish tenor is best known at the Met for playing dashing men in French and Italian classics, like the Duke in “Rigoletto,” Rodolfo in “La Bohème” and, this winter, the ardent Loris in “Fedora.” But the clearest precursor to his melancholy Lohengrin is his Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” who sings with wintry loneliness as he prepares to duel and die.Beczala performs the Wagner role — pure, precise and often treacherously exposed — with total security and elegance. The soft passages have fairy-tale delicacy; his outpourings, a robust plangency reminiscent of his more extroverted roles. But this Lohengrin, even at his most passionate, has the proper coolness of an otherworldly figure. He is human, but not entirely.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.There is also an intriguing coolness when we meet Tamara Wilson’s unjustly accused Elsa, a glassy sheen to her tone as icy-blond as her hair. But while Beczala’s Lohengrin maintains his reserve, Wilson’s voice gradually warms, gently molten in their love duet and palpably angry in confrontation.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, conducts this grand score with a sure sense for the elasticity of pace that makes Wagner’s scenes breathe. He led the orchestra on Sunday in broad expansions before focusing it back into tumbling momentum. The shimmering start of the prelude to Act I was fragile without being wispy, building with lyrical flow to a stirring climax.There are onstage trumpets in this opera, and extra brass forces in the balconies. But Nézet-Séguin kept the textures light; even at its mightiest, the sound was never stolid.Tamara Wilson as Elsa with Beczala.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesChanging shirts between the acts, from black to red to white, he also underlined the already obvious play with color that is all too central to the staging. The choristers manipulate complicated sets of magnets in their robes to reveal red, green or white linings, depending on the dramatic needs of the moment. (The sets and costumes were designed by Tim Yip, an Academy Award winner for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”; the gloomy lighting, by David Finn; the interstellar projections, by Peter Flaherty.)Green symbolizes King Heinrich, who has arrived in Brabant (around Antwerp in present-day Belgium) with his followers to rally the people there to join him in fighting off a coming invasion from the east. Red is the color of the native Brabantians, who are under the sinister influence of Friedrich von Telramund and his wife, the sorceress Ortrud. And white evokes the innocence and purity of Elsa, to whose aid Lohengrin has come.Fine, if rather on the nose. But the endless flashings of the different linings on the beat of musical flourishes — and the visible struggles that some choristers on Sunday had with the magnets — grew tiresome.And must every Met production now have bits of choreographed slinking and twirling? Here, credited to Serge Bennathan, were lightly dancing attendants with lanterns, heads-thrown-back courtiers, whirling nobles and laughably in-time marching. It was all of a piece with a production that’s straightforward to the point of eye-roll overstatement.As Ortrud, the soprano Christine Goerke was perhaps the performer closest to the mood of the staging: She’s unsubtle, if effective, constantly wringing her hands and gripping her necklaces. Girard strands her alone, making over-the-top witchy gestures, for almost the whole of the Act III prelude. We get it: She’s evil!Goerke’s voice has vigor, but rich phrases alternate with sour, snarled ones; some high notes shiver, while some just miss the mark. The bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin, an imposing presence, sounded weary and out of tune as Telramund. I found myself wishing that the baritone Brian Mulligan, who sang the Herald with unusually vivid intensity, had that larger part instead. The bass Günther Groissböck was a forceful Heinrich.Wilson and, top, Christine Goerke. The choristers manipulate their robes to reveal red, green or white linings, depending on the dramatic needs of the moment.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met’s chorus, in one of the most difficult works in its repertory, was both stentorian and evocative: In the awe-struck passage after Lohengrin introduces himself, its ethereal singing was almost more felt than heard. Only in some of the most complex counterpoint could the sound have been crisper, the words sharper.Girard’s staging is more lucid than his murky take on Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” which will be revived at the Met this spring. It does, at least, convey the urgency of the march toward war that gives the opera its stakes. And this production will always be an unintentional memorial to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Conceived as a co-production of the Bolshoi Theater and the Met, it premiered at the Bolshoi in Moscow on Feb. 24, 2022, the day of the invasion. Soon it became clear that sharing the production would be impossible, and that the sets would have to be rebuilt from scratch, adding over $1 million to the show’s cost.“Lohengrin” is an opera with war on its mind. But King Heinrich and his call to defend Germany against invaders don’t make for an easy parallel with the besieged Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.That is because Heinrich’s story was taken up — by Wagner and, later, by the Nazis — as a symbol of pan-Germanic nationalism, with all its darkness and xenophobia. That is the context in which a few opera companies have changed a word in Lohengrin’s final line, when he declares, at the magical return of Elsa’s brother, that the people’s “Führer,” or leader, has arrived.To further avoid the associations of this savior figure with Hitler, many directors offer a comment in how they depict the brother. Is there something ominous about him? Something redemptive? Anything?Girard, though, has a very Aryan-looking, blond young man in flowing, angelic white come down the stairs, a final odd bit of naïveté in this “Lohengrin,” a production that ends up being too simplistic for a complex moment and a complex opera.LohengrinContinues through April 1 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Classical Music to See and Hear in Spring 2023

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      This spring, Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director, conducts the big deal symphony, the Met Opera stages Terence Blanchard’s “Champion”; and in Chicago, Riccardo Muti says farewell.It was a hint about as subtle as a siren when the New York Philharmonic announced its current season a year ago: Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would be coming to New York as a guest in May 2023 to lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.One of the repertory’s most sprawling and profound works, Mahler’s Ninth has been played by the Philharmonic almost exclusively under the batons of its music directors. It’s not an assignment the orchestra gives rising hotshots or conductors it sees once a decade. It’s the kind of musically knotty, deeply emotional score you want led by the artists closest to you.That was just one of many suggestions that Dudamel, 42, would, before too long, join the ranks of New York music directors, a group that has included eminences like Mahler, Toscanini, Bernstein and Boulez. And so it came to pass: Earlier this month, the Philharmonic said that he would succeed Jaap van Zweden in the position, for a five-year term beginning — because of classical music’s oddly glacial planning cycles — in the 2026-27 season.But before all that comes Mahler’s Ninth, which Dudamel has convincingly, with tenderness and naturally unfolding intensity, recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The three New York performances, May 19-21, were already sure to be well attended, given the famous conductor and the beloved piece. Now, since the concerts will be Dudamel’s first appearances on the Philharmonic’s podium since the announcement, these will be some of the hottest tickets in town this spring.When Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021–22 season, in a run that sold out several performances, it was a landmark: the first time the company had put on the work of a Black composer. Now Blanchard’s earlier opera, “Champion,” from 2013, is coming to the house, beginning April 10.As in “Fire,” themes of identity, sexuality and the negotiation of traumatic memories dominate. “Champion” tells the true story of the closeted gay boxer Emile Griffith, who knocked out his opponent, Benny Paret, during a 1962 title bout; Paret never recovered consciousness and died 10 days later. At the Met, two bass-baritones share the role of Griffith: Ryan Speedo Green plays him as a young athlete in his prime, and Eric Owens, as an aging man looking back on his complicated past.A scene from Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” in James Robinson’s production at Opera Theater of Saint Louis.Ken Howard/Opera Theatre of Saint LouisIn the wake of the box-office success of “Fire,” the Met — which has been struggling with ticket sales and said in December that it would withdraw $30 million from its endowment to cover costs — rushed “Champion” into production, part of a coming burst of contemporary operas aimed at broadening the audience. The staging reunites members of the team that helped make “Fire” vivid: the director James Robinson, the choreographer Camille A. Brown — the step dance routine that she conceived for “Fire” stopped the show — and the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Three veterans, Latonia Moore, Stephanie Blythe and Paul Groves, round out the cast.It is unusual for the Met (or any company) to unveil two new productions of Mozart operas back to back. And even rarer for both to be led by one conductor: in this case, Nathalie Stutzmann, a former mezzo-soprano turned maestro making her Met debut on the podium for “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte.”Replacing a dreary, unilluminating Michael Grandage production on May 5, the new “Giovanni” is an import from the Paris Opera, where the much-discussed Dutch director Ivo van Hove and his colleagues put onstage what Joshua Barone described in The New York Times as “a de Chirico-like set populated by handsomely dressed people in a state of sexy desperation.” (It can hardly help but be an improvement on the Grandage.)Stutzmann, who started at the Atlanta Symphony this season — the only female music director leading one of the 25 largest American orchestras — conducts a promising cast, including Peter Mattei, a star in the title role at the Met for the past 20 years, as well as Adam Plachetka, Federica Lombardi, Ana María Martínez, Ying Fang and Ben Bliss.The situation with “Die Zauberflöte,” opening on May 19, is slightly complicated. The Met is planning to retain its existing production — which the director Julie Taymor and the designer George Tsypin filled with plexiglass and fanciful puppets — in its abridged, English-language, family-friendly form as “The Magic Flute,” now a holiday-season tradition.Performed in full and in German, the new-to-the-company “Die Zauberflöte,” a much-traveled staging directed by Simon McBurney, has the orchestra spilling over onto risers placed onstage and contemporary-style costumes. Stutzmann’s cast here includes Erin Morley, Lawrence Brownlee, Thomas Oliemans, Kathryn Lewek and Stephen Milling.Dudamel’s appointment is perhaps the biggest news in music this season: a new beginning. But the other crucial conductor move in America this spring signals the end of an era.Riccardo Muti is bringing his 13 years leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to a close in June.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesAt 81, Riccardo Muti — a fixture on the country’s major podiums since the 1970s and the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra during the ’80s — is bringing to a close a 13-year tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with performances of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25.Despite being an experienced Beethoven interpreter and a specialist in huge choral works, Muti stayed away from the notoriously thorny “Missa Solemnis” for decades, until he led it — with radiant dignity and grandeur — at the Salzburg Festival in 2021.“I always felt too small,” he said in an interview last year on Chicago radio, “never I felt ready to perform this huge monument, because it’s so deep, so vast.” Muti and other great conductors are not known for this kind of humility or patience, so these performances will be the fruit of uncommonly many years of study and thought.Given that the Chicago Symphony has not yet appointed his replacement, Muti will remain a crucial presence next season, and possibly beyond. But this “Missa Solemnis” — with the chorus coached by a distinguished guest, Donald Palumbo, the chorus master at the Met — is nevertheless sure to be a love fest between a superb orchestra and a conductor it has revered. More

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      How a Production of Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin' Changed the Met Opera

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      Robert Wilson’s staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” opened to a wall of boos in 1998. But it brought new theatrical possibilities to the Met.Huge bars of light, floating down from the flies. Singers almost like statues, their gestures shifting at a glacial pace.When Robert Wilson’s slow, spare, luminous production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” opened at the Metropolitan Opera in 1998, it was a shocking break with the house’s prevailing aesthetic. While there had been some progressive stagings there, the elaborate, old-fashioned naturalism of Franco Zeffirelli and Otto Schenk reigned, particularly in the standard repertory.Wilson and his production, with its nearly nonexistent set and precisely calibrated, dreamlike movements, were greeted by a storm of boos on opening night. But this “Lohengrin,” so radical for the Met at the time, anticipated today’s broader range of directorial approaches there — like Willy Decker’s starkly symbolic “La Traviata” and Simon Stone’s contemporary-America “Lucia di Lammermoor.”On Feb. 26, the Met will introduce a new “Lohengrin,” directed by François Girard. The Wilson production, having not been revived since 2006, never quite got its due — or the kind of farewell justified by its impact on the company’s artistic trajectory. Here, interviews with some of the artists, technicians and administrators involved, excerpted and edited, tell the story of a watershed event.ROBERT WILSON In 1976, we had produced “Einstein on the Beach” at the Met on a night they were dark. It was a huge success, and the Met was interested because they got an audience they never had before. So they asked me, “Would you like to direct something?” They suggested “Aida” or “Madama Butterfly.” I said no, I want to do, with Ella Fitzgerald, the first jazz opera. So, the Met didn’t work out. Then, about 10 years later, Alexander Pereira became the director of the Zurich Opera, and he asked me to do “Lohengrin” as his opening production, and he got the Met on board.GREGORY KELLER (former Met staff director and one of Wilson’s assistants on the staging) In the ’80s, the voice was really king, especially at the Met. There was a lot of park-and-bark opera. Most directors were trying to bring in Stanislavski: “Who, what, when, where, why?” “What am I doing in this scene?” The questions a traditional director and actor talk about. And Bob completely breaks with that. He approaches things from an external point of view, with formal, classical, crystalline choreography. He’s fascinated by Eastern theatrical forms, Kabuki and Noh, and those formal, visual, artistic concerns were what he was bringing into the opera world.KIRT BURCROFF (then a new Met electrician) I’m not sure anyone, when we started, knew how we were going to pull it off. I’ve always thought the shows that look the simplest from out front are usually the hardest. And it was pretty sparse out there for “Lohengrin.”JOSEPH VOLPE (then the Met’s general manager) I was there for “Einstein”; I was on the Met’s technical staff at the time. And when I became general manager, there was always a desire to have Bob do something. I remember we had lunch, and he was so specific about every scene; on a napkin he could draw out every scene. He went through the entire opera over lunch. And everything that is called for in “Lohengrin” is there. It’s not there in the way most people would expect it. But it’s all there.WILSON I worked on it with Annette Michelson, the critic. And she said, “Read this.” It was Baudelaire, from after he saw Wagner’s “Tannhaüser”: “I’ve witnessed a spectacle of time, space and light that I have never experienced before.” So that was the key. Then I looked at the original pen-and-ink drawings, and actually, spatially, I did exactly what Wagner did. His first act had a big oak tree over here; I brought in a vertical bar of light that descended. It’s starting with a wider space and zooming into a marriage that doesn’t work, and then back out.The tenor Ben Heppner, who sang the title role in the production, with members of the men’s chorus (who wore stiff and heavy neck-to-ankle tunics) in the background.Metropolitan OperaKELLER I got to work with Bob on “The Magic Flute” at the Paris Opera in 1991. And one of the other Met assistants, Robin Guarino, had worked with him on “Hamletmachine” at N.Y.U. So we both knew the way he worked, and could shepherd him and get a product onstage he would be happy with. He had two of us he could trust.DEBORAH VOIGT (soprano who sang Elsa in the opening run) I had a bit of experience with Bob: I had covered Jessye Norman as Gluck’s Alceste at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1990. We covers were brought in for weeks before the principals. They lined us all on one side of the room and had us walk to the other side, telling us we had two minutes to do it — not a second longer or shorter. And we spent the next six weeks choreographing “Alceste,” and memorizing Bob’s style of movement. I learned what it was like to have his choreography imprinted on my body, and Debbie Voigt’s way of moving and using my body stripped away. That gave me a head start that some of my colleagues did not have.In September 1991, Wilson’s version of “Lohengrin” premiered in Zurich.BEN HEPPNER (tenor who sang the title role in the Met’s “Lohengrin”) I got a call from my Swiss agent, who asked me if I would be willing to jump in for “Lohengrin” in Zurich. I said OK, and if they can send me the video, I’ll try to learn the staging a bit. And my 7-year-old son was so bored; he had nothing else to do, and said: “Dad, I watched it and I’ll tell you what to do. First of all, there’s no sword fight in Act II” — he knew “Lohengrin” pretty well by this point — “and when you move, you’re like a robot, the way you move your arms. And oh yeah, Dad, when you walk, you have to walk like there’s something stuck in the crack of your bum.” With this in mind, I put on the tape, and, son of a gun, if he wasn’t right about everything.KELLER Giuseppe Frigoni, the one who really honed the movement vocabulary, had created all these different moves for the chorus in Zurich. They had someone offstage prompting the chorus for those gestures, and at the Met, we wanted to cue the chorus seamlessly and silently. So with Joe Clark, the technical director, we devised these machines, like in a bakery, the “now serving 98” machines. We put these two big number machines on the edge of the pit so the audience couldn’t see them. And we devised a numerical system to cue the men and an alphabetical system for the women.WILSON It wasn’t all the Met people’s cup of tea. But they had committed. And, actually, Joe Volpe didn’t really understand it, but he was a smart guy; he knew that some of the people who had supported “Einstein” were some of the wealthiest people around. And they said James Levine was going to conduct. I was a big admirer of Levine’s. He had a deep interior sense.RAYMOND HUGHES (then the Met’s chorus master) Wilson saw his artistic concept all the way through the piece. It was about light and darkness. It was not monotonous, but it was black and white.JANE KLAVITER (prompter for the original run) I remember he never raised his voice, and he was totally personable. But he didn’t joke at all; he was very austere. I remember him wearing black. I don’t remember him smiling much.HEPPNER Each character had a resting position. For Lohengrin, it was the arms to the sides but not relaxed straight down; the fingers were together and the thumbs pointed slightly forward. And each character had his or her own set of arm movements, I would say maybe five or six.VOIGT I have always used my body and moving it as the impetus to get air moving and as a means of support, and with Bob you are having to really stand still, and that’s really difficult. Then Elsa’s entrance is so static, and the music is so still, that it’s extra difficult. It’s musically challenging unto itself — and, by the way, don’t move. His style is “Kabuki Position No. 2” moving into “Kabuki Position No. 10,” and you have five minutes to do it.HEPPNER Your arms were never to be relaxed; he wanted isometric tension there. I said, “You understand, if I do that, that tension will climb into my chest and throat, and by the second act you’ll be looking for a new Lohengrin.” He sort of didn’t have an answer for that. He also asked that I not have any facial expression. I said, “If I don’t have an expression, it will sound expressionless.” That also wasn’t his favorite.VOIGT I remember one of the first rehearsals, and Bob said to Ben, “OK, I want you to sing that line to Debbie but look into the house.” And Ben said, “But Debbie’s behind me.” And Bob said, “Yes, I know, but I want you to look out there, and look at your hand when you do it.” His stylized way of expression took a long time to understand and to accept. I had to learn that I had to find meaning in it myself. He was not going to spoon-feed that to us.KELLER I know both Debbie and Ben struggled. Bob gives you the choreographic form, and it’s your job to fill in what I call the Stanislavski part. It was challenging, but eventually we got there. They understood they had an enormous amount of freedom to fill up that form.WILSON The singers were struggling, and it was not Jimmy’s cup of tea. But the mood was not negative.KELLER Everybody felt really committed. It was hard and intense, but it wasn’t fascistic or terrifying.HUGHES What I loved was that the chorus could just stand and sing. They had those numbers projected down by the prompter’s box. Like, 3 meant you hold your shield up; 2 meant you hold your sword up. This was an arrangement that made them sound fantastic. “Lohengrin” had not been done at the Met since 1986, and it’s one of the biggest chorus operas of all time. So we worked really hard.“His stylized way of expression took a long time to understand and to accept,” said Deborah Voigt (right, as Elsa, with Heppner). “I had to learn that I had to find meaning in it myself.”Metropolitan OperaVOIGT Bob did get it; he understood that it was difficult. He respected when you really put yourself into it. It was difficult, but I was also finding it very interesting.WILSON It was just another world for them. There’s no training for what I do.BURCROFF That show brought in the modern era of opera here. We still haven’t done anything like it. Because we’re a repertory theater, we use a lot of the same lights in every opera — especially in those days. But very little about that “Lohengrin” utilized any of our repertory equipment. All of it was custom built. And all those light boxes that flew in from the sides, and popped up from the floor, putting those up and taking them down every day was a monumental task because of the size. Some of the boxes were 60 feet long. The swan was our first foray into automation. It was literally driven by one of our stagehands with a joystick, sending it across the stage and hoping it wouldn’t go into the orchestra pit.KELLER On the back scrim there were constant minuscule lighting changes, so your brain was always getting stimulated.WILSON My problem with Levine was he was so inconsistent with timing. For the prelude, I had these light cues that are so complicated and they’re on a computer, and you can’t change them, but he would vary three or four minutes sometimes in the timing. But we had a good rapport; he had a dialogue with everybody.HUGHES The Kabuki influence, the very stylized acting that he coaxed out, was absolutely convincing, particularly at the beginning, when Lohengrin and Elsa are still rather one-dimensional characters. I found it riveting when she sang “Einsam in trüben Tagen” and she was slowly — very, very, very slowly — walking across the stage. It lent Elsa such a lonesome dignity.KLAVITER The challenge was that the singers couldn’t turn their heads; they weren’t supposed to move. That made it harder for them to see me in the prompter’s box. A lot of prompting is eye contact.KURT PHINNEY (Met chorus tenor) The costumes were rather rigid, I think with the idea of giving a kind of hardened look. They were difficult to bend or move in, but we weren’t permitted to do much of that anyway. I think one chorister wanted to put a portable chair under his costume so that he could sit unobserved, some mechanism that he could find a posture of rest somehow.HEPPNER You have to have fun with these things. If people I knew were coming, I told them to wait for a specific moment, and at that point I would slowly move my fingers into the Spock gesture from “Star Trek.” I didn’t take it as seriously as some people did.At the curtain calls on opening night, March 9, 1998, the cast was cheered. The production team, not so much.WILSON My god. Never in my entire life, 57 years working in the theater, have I had such a hostile reception. I was told the Wagner Society had organized it. And it was violent.HEPPNER The noise seemed like it actually moved the velvet curtain.MATTHEW POLENZANI (star tenor who back then played the tiny part of a noble) It’s the loudest noise I’ve ever heard.KELLER We were all really shocked at the provincial attitude of the New York audience.The reaction was much calmer when the staging was revived that fall. Levine once again conducted, and cast changes included a new Elsa: Karita Mattila.KELLER We were very happy it was going to come back. It was an expensive production. The light boxes, the remote-controlled pieces. In the men’s chorus, each singer had a neck-to-ankle tunic, and it was all boned, with hundreds of nylon bone inserts. I think we also made the enormous graphite spears.VOLPE It took the revival for people to fully understand the production. I think that the singers became much more comfortable with the stage direction, and I think Bob became much more comfortable with the singers.KARITA MATTILA It was the first time — I think the only time — that I have actually gone to the administration. I went to [the assistant general manager] Sally Billinghurst’s office and told her, “I’m not sure I can do this.” And she gave me a good talk, just encouraged me to try and make it work, don’t do anything yet, just give yourself a little time. And I needed some pantyhose, so I went to Saks Fifth Avenue, and I noticed that a man was following me. I went to the cashier, and I was really nervous; I felt he was quite close, and I turned. And before I said anything, he said, “Excuse me, are you Karita Mattila?” “Yes?” “Oh, me and my wife, we are so looking forward to seeing you in ‘Lohengrin.’” It was such a wonderful lesson for me, a reminder to never let down your audience for some personal reason. If it is a challenge to understand, take the challenge. And after that incident at Saks, I was back, with a different attitude. There was no way now that I would want to give up.KELLER By then, we knew how to rehearse it better, how much time everything would take. And we loosened up. We didn’t loosen up the vocabulary. But if Karita said, “I can’t do this gesture now, I’m singing,” we’d say, “OK, do it a bar later.” We were true to what Bob wanted, but we listened to what the singers had to do. And he loved it: “Do the gesture here, do the gesture there; I don’t care.”Karita Mattila, who took over the role of Elsa when the production was revived, told the Met’s administration, “I’m not sure I can do this.”Winnie Klotz/Metropolitan OperaMATTILA I thought I might be doing things differently than some others. And I wondered what Bob Wilson would say. I remember when he came to the first stage rehearsal, I felt a little bit defiant or defensive before he said anything to me. I was going to defend my changes. But to my surprise he was very, very encouraging: “You have understood this perfectly.” I actually felt quite good in the end with the production. I felt like a poet, not a senseless puppy.The production was brought back a final time in 2006, starring Mattila and Heppner, and with the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt making his Met debut as Lohengrin in the final two performances. It was Volpe’s swan song; Peter Gelb took over as general manager that summer.PETER GELB I don’t know if Bob was part of the rehearsals for the revival that season. I was told at the time that the singers were not necessarily embracing his stylized movement the way he planned it.WILSON I was supposed to do “Lohengrin” again. This was some years ago. I don’t know what happened. But Peter Gelb and I talked about doing it.KELLER Robin Guarino had left the Met; I was the last man standing from the old production. They asked me to build a schedule for how many chorus sessions it would require, and their eyes got quite wide. There were probably 10 people left in the chorus who had done the show, so it would have been a lot of time to teach them the gestures, and X amount of time rehearsing in the costumes. At that point, the administration determined it would be as expensive to do a new production.GELB I planned to bring it back, without having first checked on what condition it was in. And I discovered from our technical department that it was in very bad condition physically. All our scenery is packed into these shipping containers in a lot in Newark, and over the years the “Lohengrin” had suffered the ravages of time. Especially the large fluorescent light boxes; they had partially disintegrated. The production would have had to be completely rebuilt, and we didn’t have the time or the budget for that.Twenty-five years after the production’s premiere, it’s possible to see its effects on the company.VOLPE Bob brought the Met along; because of Bob, we were in a different place. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but for me it was a wonderful production. It was time for the Met, and it was time for me, to produce something forward-looking, something different. I believe in opera, in traditional opera. But in a way, this was traditional. Everything that was supposed to be there was there; it was just a different way of presenting it.KELLER For me it was a really seminal experience at the Met. It was kind of the intersection of what I wanted to do as a youth — wild, crazy avant-garde theater — and traditional opera. The Met was trying to be avant-garde, and I think they succeeded, and Bob really wanted to have a show at the Met. This production meant a lot to him, and it meant a lot to help him get his vision done on this grand scale, and have it come off so seamlessly. I think it was a crossroads for the Met, that yes, there’s an audience for this. I would take the 1 train home, and there would be people saying they loved it, people saying they hated it. How much of a reaction can you get out of an audience these days?BURCROFF We didn’t know at the time that it was a crystal ball into the future. You think of the Zeffirelli “Bohème” and “Turandot,” when we’re bringing wagons full of scenery on and offstage. “Lohengrin” was one static set. And that became more the norm for us. Rarely do we open the curtain on Act II and it’s a completely different set. “Lohengrin” was really about the lighting. Before that, at the Met, it was about great scenery. “Lohengrin” was about the singers and the lights, and that’s more the norm now.GELB In a period that was generally known for its theatrical blandness, Wilson, who has been one of the great theater directors, really stood out. His “Lohengrin” was an early indication of theatrical possibilities that the traditional, core Met audience had not experienced.WILSON If I go to the opera tonight, if I really want to hear the music, I close my eyes and I hear much better. So can I keep my eyes open, and what I see can help me hear the music better than when my eyes are closed? That’s simply it. My responsibility as a director is, can I create a space where I can hear music? More