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      Review: A Soprano’s Sound Floods the Met in ‘Ariadne’

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      Lise Davidsen unleashed rare grandeur of tone throughout her range in the title role of Strauss’s opera.“Did you see ‘Ariadne’ last night?” a friend wrote to me on Wednesday. “If you were in Brooklyn, you still may have heard it.”I had seen it, and I knew immediately that by “it” he meant “her”: the soprano Lise Davidsen, who as the title character of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” filled the mighty Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday in a way few singers can.Unleashing floods throughout her range, from gleaming, solar high notes to brooding depths, Davidsen offered a nearly supernatural turn in a role out of Greek legend. The radiating, shimmering, ever so slightly metallic overtones that halo her voice make her sound arrestingly powerful and visceral. You feel it as almost physical presence — pressing against your chest, raising the hairs on the back of your neck. Given Strauss’s paring down of his orchestra in “Ariadne” to chamber size, this is the rare occasion when the woman onstage sounds grander at her peak than the forces in the pit do at theirs.It was one of the brilliant ideas of this composer and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, to hold their leading lady largely in reserve in a backstage prologue depicting her as an unnamed Prima Donna taking part in the preparations for a nobleman’s evening entertainment. Things turn chaotic when word comes down: Because of time constraints, the somber drama in which she is to star will not play back to back, but simultaneously, with a troupe of clowns. A collision — and union — of hilarity and sublimity ensues.Brenda Rae, left, as Zerbinetta and Isabel Leonard as Composer in “Ariadne” at the Metropolitan Opera.Marty Sohl/Met OperaThe unleashing of an Ariadne in the opera proper is always a thrill for being so tantalizingly delayed — all the more so with Davidsen, 35, a soft-spoken, witty, even daffy presence in the prologue, suddenly endowed with a queenly stature that she fills and overflows. In the role that first brought her international notice a few years ago, she comes off as timeless without losing her youthfulness, penetrating even at more intimate volume than full cry.The conductor Marek Janowski also charted the transition from a lively sound in the prologue to a suaver, more sumptuous one, moving with nimble energy throughout. The baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle was a vigorous, characterful Music Master; the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, a delicate, subtly rending Composer.It was too bad that as Zerbinetta, the clowns’ ringleader, the soprano Brenda Rae made less of an impression. Rae performs with charming vivacity, and the part — a kind of Straussian Ado Annie — is more congenial for her than was Poppea in Handel’s “Agrippina” at the Met in 2020. But she still sounded pale. Zerbinetta’s quick-witted coloratura should hold its own next to Ariadne’s spacious majesty, admittedly a next-to-impossible task on Tuesday.Davidsen’s voice still seemed to be ringing in the theater the following evening, when another soprano, Aleksandra Kurzak, offered a more modest performance, in her role debut as Puccini’s Tosca.At the Met on Wednesday, the soprano Aleksandra Kurzak sang the title role in Puccini’s “Tosca” for the first time.Ken Howard/Met OperaFlirtatious and spirited in the first act, Kurzak found her instrument pressed to, and past, its limits in the high — eventually homicidal — drama of the second. Her real-life husband, the tenor Roberto Alagna, sounded sometimes fresh and sometimes worn as Tosca’s passionate lover, Cavaradossi. Bringing out piquant details all over, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, luxuriated in the score — a bit too rhapsodically, as momentum kept slackening.This “Tosca,” entertaining even if imperfect, was an opera. The “Ariadne,” thanks to Davidsen, was an enactment of all that opera can do to us and our bodies, how helplessly in thrall to the human voice we can be.Davidsen has already been exciting at the Met in Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” and Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” But her singing is so lavish in its scale that it can swamp even semi-realistic plots. It seems ideal for Wagner’s more mythic works, and thrives in Ariadne’s opulent stylization; here is a role Davidsen was truly born for.Ariadne auf NaxosThrough March 17 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan. And “Tosca” continues there through March 12; metopera.org. More

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      Anna Netrebko, Diva With Putin Ties, Is Out at the Metropolitan Opera

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      The Met said she would not appear for two seasons, and possibly more, after declining to comply with its demand that she repudiate her public support for Putin.Anna Netrebko, the superstar Russian soprano, will no longer appear at the Metropolitan Opera this season or next after failing to comply with the company’s demand that she distance herself from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as he wages war on Ukraine.The end of Ms. Netrebko’s engagements, which the Met announced on Thursday, came after the opera company, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said it would no longer hire artists who support Mr. Putin. While Ms. Netrebko has in recent days issued statements critical of the war, she has remained silent on the Russian president, whose re-election she has in the past endorsed.“It is a great artistic loss for the Met and for opera,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in a statement. “Anna is one of the greatest singers in Met history, but with Putin killing innocent victims in Ukraine there was no way forward.”Ms. Netrebko did not immediately respond to a request for comment through her representatives.While the announcement on Thursday encompassed only two seasons, Mr. Gelb said in an interview on Thursday that it seemed unlikely Ms. Netrebko would ever come back to sing with the company.“It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which she will return to the Met,” he said.Ms. Netrebko’s break with the Met, where she has sung nearly 200 performances over the past 20 years and became the reigning prima donna, was a stunning turnaround for one of the world’s biggest opera stars. She has expressed support for Mr. Putin at times over the years, and in 2014 she was photographed holding a flag used by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine.Her departure from America’s largest performing arts institution came amid a broader backlash against some Russian artists for their ties to Mr. Putin — one that has raised difficult questions about how far arts organizations should go in requiring public declarations from artists.Earlier this week, Valery Gergiev, the star Russian maestro who has long been closely associated with Mr. Putin, was removed from his post as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic after he refused to denounce the invasion of Ukraine.Mr. Gergiev has publicly supported Mr. Putin, including with concerts at home and abroad. In 2008 he led a concert in South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia, and in 2016 led another in Palmyra in Syria, after it was retaken by Syrian and Russian forces. His international performances have all but dried up since Russia invaded Ukraine.As criticism of Ms. Netrebko’s ties to Mr. Putin grew, she abruptly canceled appearances at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Zurich Opera and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany. Her public statements have alternated between condemning the war and saying it was wrong to ask Russian artists to denounce their government.On Tuesday, Ms. Netrebko posted a picture on Instagram of herself with Mr. Gergiev, smiling after a concert. Then, in a separate post, she wrote: “As I have said, I am opposed to this senseless war of aggression and I am calling on Russia to end this war right now, to save all of us. We need peace right now.” Both posts were later deleted.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 5Anna Netrebko. More

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      Valery Gergiev and Anna Netrebko's Putin Ties Threaten Their Careers

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      The Russian conductor Valery Gergiev and the diva Anna Netrebko have lost engagements because of their ties to Putin, as geopolitics and music collide once again.A conductor, perceived to be aligned with the opposition in wartime, pushed from his podium in disgrace.Another, two decades later, offered a prestigious position, only to withdraw under pressure after protests of his ties to a despised foreign regime.The first, Karl Muck, a German-Swiss maestro, led the Boston Symphony Orchestra until he was arrested and interned, in what is now widely viewed as a shameful example of anti-German hysteria at the start of World War I.The profound musical legacy of the second — Wilhelm Furtwängler, who never joined the Nazi Party but was essentially its court conductor, dooming his appointment to the New York Philharmonic — still struggles to emerge from his association with Hitler.How will we think of Valery Gergiev a century from now?One of the world’s leading conductors, he has in just the last week lost a series of engagements and positions, including as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic, for not disavowing the war in Ukraine being waged by his longtime friend and ally, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.The swift unraveling of his international career — and the decision of Anna Netrebko, a Russian diva who is one of the biggest stars in opera, to withdraw from performances amid renewed attention to her own ties to Mr. Putin — raises a host of difficult questions.What is the point at which cultural exchange — always a blur between being a humanizing balm and a tool of propaganda, a co-opting of music’s supposed neutrality — becomes unbearable? What is sufficient distance from authoritarian leadership?And what is sufficient disavowal, particularly in a context when speaking up could threaten the safety of artists or their families?Mr. Gergiev, with his quasi-governmental role as general and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, is closer to Furtwängler than to Muck. He has endorsed Mr. Putin in the past and promoted his policies with concerts in Russia and abroad. But when he has spoken — he has remained silent through this latest firestorm — he has tended to sound like Furtwängler, who longed to focus only on scores and said, “My job is music.”The legacy of the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler has been tainted by his association with Hitler.Teldec“Am not politician, but exponent of German music, which belongs to all humanity regardless of politics,” Furtwängler wrote in 1936, in clipped telegram style, withdrawing under pressure from the New York Philharmonic post.Classical music likes to think of itself this way: floating serenely above politics, in a realm of beauty and unity. Its repertory — so much of it composed in the distant past — seems insulated from present-day conflicts. What can Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony do except good?But politics and music — a field in which Russian performers have long been stars — have swiftly collided since the invasion of Ukraine. The Mariinsky Orchestra’s tours have been canceled. On Sunday, the Metropolitan Opera announced that it would no longer engage with performers or other organizations that have voiced support for Mr. Putin. Presenters in the United States, Germany, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands have announced the cancellations of performances by some artists who support Mr. Putin.Ms. Netrebko had engagements at the Bavarian State Opera canceled, and then announced that she planned to “step back from performing for the time being,” withdrawing from her upcoming dates at the Zurich Opera.The Russian diva Anna Netrebko and Mr. Gergiev appeared together with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2018.Lisi Niesner/ReutersThe artistic director in Zurich, Andreas Homoki, noted some of the complexities, welcoming a statement that Ms. Netrebko made opposing the war but suggesting that her failure to condemn Mr. Putin put her at odds with the opera house’s position. But Mr. Homoki took pains to note that his company did not “consider it appropriate to judge the decisions and actions of citizens of repressive regimes based on the perspective of those living in a Western European democracy.”In her first public statement on the war, in an Instagram post Saturday morning, Ms. Netrebko — who has long been criticized for her ties to Mr. Putin, and was photographed in 2014 holding a flag used by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine — initially seemed to be issuing the kind of statement that had been lacking from Mr. Gergiev.“First of all: I am opposed to this war.” So far, so good.“I am Russian and I love my country,” Ms. Netrebko went on, “but I have many friends in Ukraine and the pain and suffering right now breaks my heart. I want this war to end and for people to be able to live in peace.”Though she conspicuously didn’t mention Mr. Putin, Ms. Netrebko’s words were simple and tender, a needle — love of her country and empathy for another — seemingly threaded.But unfortunately for those of us who have cherished her as a performer, there was more. In the next slide, she added that “forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right.”“I am not a political person,” she wrote, echoing the Furtwängler perspective. “I am not an expert in politics. I am an artist and my purpose is to unite people across political divides.”She then added to her Instagram story, alongside heart and praying-hands emojis, a text that used an expletive in reference to her Western critics, and said they were “as evil as blind aggressors.”So much for threading the needle. And a series of posts over the following days, which were later deleted, only muddied the waters further.What could have smoothed over criticism instead inflamed it. The politically outspoken pianist Igor Levit, who was born in Russia, did not mention Ms. Netrebko by name in his own Instagram post on Sunday morning, but wrote, “Being a musician does not free you from being a citizen, from taking responsibility, from being a grown-up.”“PS,” he added: “And never, never bring up music and your being a musician as an excuse. Do not insult art.”Ms. Netrebko performs at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2014.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThe Met, where Ms. Netrebko is scheduled to star in Puccini’s “Turandot” this spring, seemed to have her in mind — along with a producing partnership with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow — when it made its announcement on Sunday.“While we believe strongly in the warm friendship and cultural exchange that has long existed between the artists and artistic institutions of Russia and the United States,” the company’s general manager, Peter Gelb, said in a video statement, “we can no longer engage with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him.”It’s true: Ms. Netrebko is not a politician, expert or otherwise. In this she is unlike Mr. Gergiev, who has repeatedly and explicitly worked as a government propagandist, leading battlefield concerts in South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia, in 2008, and in Palmyra after that Syrian site was retaken by Syrian and Russian forces in 2016. In Ossetia, he even led Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony, completed during the German siege of that city in World War II and as charged a musical memorial as there is to Russian suffering.Mr. Gergiev conducting in Palmyra, after the ancient city was retaken by Syrian and Russian forces in 2016.Olga Balashova/Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, via Associated PressBut Ms. Netrebko is certainly a political actor — the kind of “political person” she denies being. Again and again in the past, she has voiced her political opinions, publicly if vaguely. (She said that she had been caught off-guard when she was handed the separatist flag in that 2014 photograph with a separatist leader, which was taken after she gave him a donation for a theater in a region controlled by separatists; that donation, she claimed at the time, was “not about politics.”)Ms. Netrebko can hold whichever flag she wants, of course. But she should not be surprised that there are consequences. In January 2015, after her Met performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Iolanta” under Mr. Gergiev’s baton, a protester climbed onto the stage during her curtain call and unfurled a banner that called them “active contributors to Putin’s war against Ukraine.”The Met, which opened a performance this week with the Ukrainian national anthem, has left vague the way it intends to police its new test. But I hope the company will look at the existing record rather than requiring new, public words from artists who may have legitimate reasons of safety to remain silent about Mr. Putin and his actions. Eliciting — coercing, some might say — affirmative statements hardly seems the right way to oppose authoritarianism.Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4A city is captured. More

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      Review: ‘Don Carlos’ Finally Brings French Verdi to the Met

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the sprawling masterpiece, which is being presented by the company for the first time in its original language.Wait, I know I’ve seen this opera before, you may have been thinking as you opened your program at Lincoln Center on Monday evening. It’s the one with the prince in love with his stepmother, right? And his jerk of a father, and that big duet with his friend, and the Spanish Inquisition?But there it was, in black and white: “The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Don Carlos.’”Rarely has a single letter been as significant as that final “s.” The opera that audiences here have seen — the one that has been staged at the Met more than 200 times — is “Don Carlo,” its libretto in Italian. The performance on Monday, though, was being given in the work’s original French.In either language, it is Verdi’s largest, shadowiest masterpiece — and particularly somber on Monday, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continued and the evening opened with the audience rising in silence for a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem by the Met’s chorus and orchestra. Center stage was Vladyslav Buialskyi, a young Ukrainian bass-baritone making his company debut in a tiny role, his hand on his heart.This is, after all, an opera that opens with the characters longing for an end to fierce hostilities between two neighboring nations, their civilians suffering the privations caused by the territorial delusions of a tiny few at the top. The geopolitical battles fueling the plot’s private agonies seemed more vivid than usual as David McVicar’s new production was unveiled.A new production, sure, but a Met premiere? That’s dubious, since almost all of the music will be familiar to anyone who’s heard “Don Carlo” there over the past four decades.But it is nevertheless a milestone for the company to be finally performing the work in the language in which it premiered, at the Paris Opera in 1867. Verdi worked with inspired diligence to shape his musical lines to metrical rhythms subtly different from Italian. For this adaptation of Schiller’s freely ahistorical play, set at the 16th-century Spanish court of Philip II, he painted the sprawling canvas of French grand opera in his own brooding colors.Alas, “Don Carlos” was a mixed success in France, and Verdi continued to revise it over the next two decades, as it premiered and was revived in Italy. (And since this was a time when librettos were commonly translated into the language of the audience, it was performed in Italian, as “Don Carlo.”) The eventual result was a smorgasbord of versions, from which opera companies can now freely take elements.But as Will Crutchfield recently wrote in The New York Times, those versions boil down to essentially two: “The first is the one premiered in Paris, plus or minus some pieces added or cut before and after. The second is the recomposed score premiered in Milan in 1884, with or without restoration of the 1867 Act I — set in France and introducing the vexed love of Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois.”Yoncheva, center left, hand in hand with Etienne Dupuis as Rodrigue in the spectacular auto-da-fé scene that places “Don Carlos” in the French grand opera tradition.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met has more or less done the 1884 version since a landmark production there in 1950 reintroduced the opera to the standard repertory after decades of neglect. The piece had circulated largely in Italian, and was done in New York exclusively in that language. The big news came in 1979, when a new Met staging restored that 1867 Act I. Hence the five-act form in which “Don Carlo” — with tweaks here and there — has been presented ever since.And always in Italian. When Yannick Nézet-Séguin led a new production in 2010, it was in Italian, and when that production was revived, it was in Italian — even as major houses around the world had broken with that tradition.But Nézet-Séguin suggested that he wanted to conduct the piece in French. Now, as the company’s music director, he has made it so. It speaks to his passion for the score that this is the first opera in his still-young Met career for which he is leading a third run, and his conception of it — long-breathed, patient, light-textured — embodies the vast elegance of French grand opera.Those qualities are crucial in supporting a triumphant turn in the title role by Matthew Polenzani, singing Carlos for the first time in either language. Polenzani is not the swaggering, trumpeting Franco Corelli-style tenor generally associated with the part — though he rises, stylishly, to fiery intensity — but rather a vocalist of refinement, inwardness and melancholy.And throughout the work French conveys all of that better than Italian. The classic duet of brotherhood between Carlos and his friend, Rodrigue, the Marquis of Posa, is a loudspeaker announcement in Italian, as “Dio che nell’alma infondere.” In French, as “Dieu, tu semas dans nos âmes,” it feels far more intimate, a cocooned moment on which the audience spies. Particularly in this performance, with the smooth-toned, seductive baritone Etienne Dupuis as a Rodrigue uniquely able to draw close to him the hapless, isolated Carlos.As Élisabeth, who is betrothed to Carlos before being married to his father as part of the peace settlement between France and Spain, the soprano Sonya Yoncheva lacks tonal richness, but her slender, focused voice penetrates, and it fits her interpretation of the character as coolly dignified, even chilly, enough to endure the sacrifices she has made.The mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, her high notes blazing and her chest voice booming, with just a slight loss of ease in between, sings with generosity and acts with liveliness as the princess Eboli, whose unrequited love for Carlos inspires her vengeance, then her contrition. As the implacable Grand Inquisitor, the bass-baritone John Relyea has stony authority.Jamie Barton as the vengeful then contrite princess Eboli.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDupuis, standing, with Eric Owens as King Philippe ll, the tyrannical but melancholy ruler of Spain in the opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe only weak link is the bass-baritone Eric Owens as King Philippe, his voice dry and colorless, his face and presence inexpressive, problems that also dogged his recent Met performances in “Porgy and Bess.” He renders one of the most nuanced characters in opera — a man of tremendous power, vulnerability, anger and confusion — a cipher.The silky, articulate bass Matthew Rose is luxury casting as the monk who — stick with me — might actually be Charles V, Philippe’s father, who is (at least presumably) recently dead. Why isn’t Rose singing Philippe?This is the safe, dependable McVicar’s 11th Met production, with two more (“Medea” and “Fedora”) to come next season. His “Don Carlos” is spare, straightforward, largely traditional and largely neutral, dominated by grimly rough, curved, looming stone walls pocked with semicircular openings, as if the characters — costumed in richly embroidered black — were wandering through a catacomb.I wish McVicar and Nézet-Séguin had restored the first act’s opening section, performed at the Met from 1979 to 2006, which shows Élisabeth among the suffering people of France. It deepens the conflict she faces not long after, when she is forced to decide between her duty to them — the marriage to Philippe that will end the war — and her love for Carlos.At least that crucial first act is here. There is a case to be made for doing the opera in Italian, as it will be when this staging is revived next season. But that revival will also revert, for the first time since the early 1970s, to the four-act version, a dismal decision that the Met should reconsider.Carlos’s physical distance from Élisabeth is contrasted with his closeness to Rodrigue throughout the performance in David McVicar’s staging.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMcVicar does offer a few welcome idiosyncrasies. An acrobatic jester figure, his face painted skull-white, restores to the auto-da-fé scene some of its intended spookiness. And, after contrasting Carlos’s physical distance from Élisabeth with his closeness to Rodrigue all evening, McVicar ends the opera with the dying Carlos being greeted by his already dead friend, who lowers the prince to the stage in what feels very close to implying posthumous, well, union.The scoring of that moment is the most obvious of the handful of ways in which this performance diverges from how the opera has been heard at the Met since at least the 1950s. The 1884 ending, a fortissimo blast over which Élisabeth’s voice soars, has red-meat appeal, particularly if your soprano has a boffo high B.But that is otherwise an all-too-thrilling conclusion to a bitter, ambivalent opera that ends better in the 1867 version’s sober quiet, with monks softly chanting about Charles V being reduced to mere dust. It is the sound of history drifting on, past any and all human lives, played and sung here with the delicacy and gravity that made this a special night for Nézet-Séguin and his company.Don CarlosThrough March 26 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Metropolitan Opera Says It Will Cut Ties With Pro-Putin Artists

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      The decision comes as arts institutions seek to distance themselves from some Russian performers amid the invasion of Ukraine.The Metropolitan Opera said on Sunday that it would no longer engage with performers or other institutions that have voiced support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, becoming the latest cultural organization to seek to distance itself from some Russian artists amid Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said that the Met, which has long employed Russians as top singers and has a producing partnership with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, had an obligation to show support for the people of Ukraine.“While we believe strongly in the warm friendship and cultural exchange that has long existed between the artists and artistic institutions of Russia and the United States,” Mr. Gelb said in a video statement, “we can no longer engage with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him.”Mr. Gelb added that the policy would be in effect “until the invasion and killing has been stopped, order has been restored, and restitutions have been made.”The Met’s decision could affect artists like the superstar soprano Anna Netrebko, who has ties to Mr. Putin and was once pictured holding a flag used by some Russian-backed separatist groups in Ukraine. Ms. Netrebko is scheduled to appear at the Met in Puccini’s “Turandot” beginning on April 30.Ms. Netrebko has tried to distance herself from the invasion, posting a statement on Saturday on Instagram saying she was “opposed to this war.” She added a note of defiance, writing that “forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right.”It was unclear if her statement would satisfy the Met’s new test.The company’s decision will also likely mean the end of its collaboration with the Bolshoi, including on a new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” that is scheduled for next season. The Met was relying on the Bolshoi for the staging’s sets and costumes, but now it might have to change course.“We’re scrambling, but I think we’ll have no choice but to physically build our own sets and costumes,” Mr. Gelb said in an interview on Sunday evening.He added that he was saddened that the Bolshoi partnership, which began five years ago, would likely come to an end — at least for the moment.“It’s terrible that artistic relationships, at least temporarily, are the collateral damage of these actions by Putin,” he said.Understand Russia’s Attack on UkraineCard 1 of 7What is at the root of this invasion? More

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      ‘Don Carlo’ or ‘Don Carlos’? Verdi Comes to the Met in French

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      On Monday, the company performs the much-revised masterpiece for the first time in its original language.For the first 80 or so years of its life, Verdi’s “Don Carlos” was a problem opera on the margins of the repertory. Audiences saw it only sporadically; almost everyone who wrote about it described an uneven “transitional” work, a troubled experiment on the eve of the composer’s final masterpieces: “Aida,” “Otello” and “Falstaff.”Today, this sprawling, packed epic — based on the tumults of 16th-century Spain under Philip II as filtered through two different plays — is part of every opera lover’s basic nutrition. The Metropolitan Opera has a lot to do with that: In 1950, Rudolf Bing made the bold choice to revive the work for the opening night of his first season as general manager. The Met was the first house in the world to make “Don Carlos” standard repertory.And yet the company has never performed its original words. That changes on Monday, when Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads a new David McVicar staging of the opera, sung at last to the French libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle. What took so long?The answer starts with the opera’s complex history. Paris, when Verdi went there in 1866 with his nearly finished score, was Europe’s cultural capital, and required the longest, grandest operas. Verdi — accustomed to writing three-hour works and now given the chance at a four-and-a-half-hour extravaganza — overshot the mark. The general rehearsal on Feb. 24, 1867, clocked in at five hours, 13 minutes.The general rehearsal for the premiere of “Don Carlos” in Paris in 1867 lasted more than five hours, forcing cuts to be made under pressure.Sepia Times/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesBut performance start times were inflexible at 7:30 p.m., and the last trains for the suburbs left at 12:35 a.m. People needed time to get to the station. This meant a lot of cutting under pressure.One legacy of Napoleon’s civil service reforms: Parisian functionaries were trained never to throw away a piece of paper. So when scholars got serious about “Don Carlos” a century later, they could reconstruct that cut music from handwritten orchestra parts, draft librettos, rehearsal reports and the like. (Andrew Porter, the longtime music critic of The New Yorker, was the unofficial leader of this brigade.)Some of that music is significant and beautiful, and has been restored in some modern productions. But in his time, Verdi went in the opposite direction: cutting still more music, tweaking some of it and eventually producing a thorough (and much shorter) revision. The upshot: five or even more iterations of “Don Carlos” for performers to choose among today, and infinite chances for confusion in discussing them.Simplification may help: There are essentially two versions. The first is the one premiered in Paris, plus or minus some pieces added or cut before and after. The second is the recomposed score premiered in Milan in 1884, with or without restoration of the 1867 Act I — set in France and introducing the vexed love of Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois. The Met is including Act I, as it has done since 1979. For the other acts, it plans on a mixture: mostly the revisions of 1884, but with selected restorations from 1867. For instance, the opera is set to end with a quiet reprise of the monks’ chant, which was changed in 1884 to a fortissimo outburst.It has to be emphasized, because many still assume otherwise: All these versions are in French. There is no Italian version of “Don Carlos,” only an Italian translation, just as there was for “Carmen” or “Mignon” when those were done at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. In that era, the idea of opera as drama was taken seriously, and intelligibility was essential.Jussi Bjorling and Delia Rigal starred when the Met opened its 1950-51 season with a landmark production of the opera.Sedge LeBlang/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesThe only exception: Italians singing in Italian were heard everywhere, just as today American pop music is enjoyed worldwide in English. That’s why the Met opened its doors with Gounod’s “Faust” in Italian and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” had its London premiere in Italian. But why did “Don Carlos” hang on so long beyond those as a quasi-Italian work? Because it was not a hit in Paris, and vanished from the repertory there within two years. Verdi hoped to relaunch it with his revision, but it was not wanted; Paris had fallen in love with “Aida” in the meantime. At La Scala, “Don Carlos” was more successful. It stayed at the fringes of the Italian repertory, and spread exclusively from there.Translations, though necessary in a world that wanted to understand what was being sung, are never as good as original texts; it’s just too hard to find words that convey the right thought and fit the notes decently and elegantly. The “Don Carlos” translation (by Achille de Lauzières, supplemented by Angelo Zanardini for the 1884 revisions) has the further problem of sounding ornate and old-fashioned compared with the French.Porter used to make this point by juxtaposing Élisabeth’s reminiscence of Fontainebleau, “mon coeur est plein de votre image,” with Elisabetta’s “ver voi schiude il pensiero i vanni.” The French he translated as “my heart is full of your image”; the Italian, as something like “t’ward thee my thought unfurls its pinions.” An open-and-shut case for the superiority of the original.Or is it? The same type of comparison could make us prefer the French text of “La Traviata,” and nobody wants to hear that argument, because it wouldn’t be “the original.” What we see here is not so much the problem of translation as the fact that Italian libretto-writing in the 1860s still followed a highly inflected poetic code built over centuries, while French texts had become simpler and more straightforward — more modern, if you like. The translators could easily have written “pieno ho il cor dell’immagin vostra.” It fits the poetic meter, and is also faithful to the French; it just isn’t the way they wanted to write. (Yet.)Jonas Kaufmann sang Don Carlos when the Paris Opera performed the work in French in 2017.Agathe Poupeney/Paris Opera BalletAnd there is another undiscussed problem, having to do with the way meter shapes melody. The technical details would take too long to explain, but it’s obvious at a glance that the rhythms of “Grow old along with me” and “Do not go gentle into that good night” are not going to generate the same kind of tune. Verdi had a lifetime of experience imagining melodies for lines of seven, eight or 10 syllables — but not nine syllables, which traditional Italian poetry did not use, and French did.A very clear example comes in that somber chant of the monks, heard at the beginning of Act II and recalled in the last act. The instrumental statements make perfectly clear what Verdi thought the rhythm was, and the Italian translation — supplied in “ottonario” (eight-syllable) meter — allows it to be sung that way. But in the original French an extra syllable has to be tucked in, irregularly and somewhat awkwardly, in every second bar. The same problem affects the tenor aria, and again the translators provide the familiar verse-form from Verdi’s comfort zone, instead of the “novenario” he had to set in Paris.This, however, is devil’s advocacy. Yes, the opera is better overall in French — but it is a subtle superiority. It shows up not in obvious “gotcha” errors, but in the accumulation of many moments when the dramatic situation is precise in the original and fuzzy in the translation, where the phrases breathe naturally as Verdi wrote them and have to be rearranged or interrupted in Italian. It probably affects the singers more than the listeners, but the cumulative impact can be profound.An example: King Philip and the Grand Inquisitor are discussing, with exquisite caution, the inflammatory behavior of Philip’s son Carlos. What punishment for his rebellion? asks the priest. “Tout — ou rien,” replies the king: “all — or nothing.” In Italian, to preserve those three lonely notes, he answers instead “mezzo estrem” (“extreme measures”). He means the choice between putting his own son to death or allowing him to flee. God himself, observes the holy man, once chose the former.It is all chilling in either language. But the Italian is blunt, and the French is sharp. Multiply that by a hundred, and you have more than reason enough for the Met’s big change after a century of translation. It’s time.Will Crutchfield, the artistic director of Teatro Nuovo, has conducted “Don Carlos” in both Italian and French. More

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      It’s the Highest-Profile Challenge of an Earnest Tenor’s Career

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      Matthew Polenzani, a Met Opera stalwart known more for sweetness than swagger, stars in a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”Matthew Polenzani wanted to make something clear: He just isn’t a powerhouse tenor like Mario Del Monaco or Franco Corelli, two 20th-century greats.“If you’re looking for an animal, Corellian or Del Monaconian sound — yeah, then you hired the wrong person,” Polenzani said in an interview at the Metropolitan Opera during a break in rehearsals for Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” in which he is singing the title role for the first time.“It’s completely valid to get swept away by that,” he added. “But that’s not who I am, and that’s OK. I do what I do.”What Polenzani, 53, does is bring warm, vibrant sound, keen intelligence, fine musicianship and subtle feeling for style to a wide range of repertory: lyric Mozart roles, florid bel canto star turns, fervent Verdi and Puccini characters, and some weightier challenges, like the protagonist of Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.” He has been a Met mainstay since his 2001 breakthrough at the house singing Lindoro in Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri,” racking up hundreds of performances with the company, and next season he will star on opening night alongside Sondra Radvanovsky in the Met’s first production of Cherubini’s “Medea.”Some writers and opera fans find him lacking in that classic swaggering, charismatic, even animalistic tenorial tone and presence. “Though he has the vocal goods, he doesn’t have the requisite spark,” the critic Anne Midgette wrote when Polenzani sang Nemorino in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” at the Met in 2012.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview that those who mistake Polenzani’s “lack of external flamboyance” for lack of presence miss the point.“Matthew has rock-solid artistry, and the most limpid, beautiful voice,” Gelb said.Polenzani in rehearsal for “Don Carlos,” which is being performed at the Met for the first time in its original five-act French version.Diana Markosian for The New York TimesBut it’s certainly true that the title role in “Don Carlos” — which is being performed, starting Monday, for the first time at the Met in its original five-act French version — is not usually sung by singers who describe themselves, as Polenzani does, as lyric tenors. So the expectations are enormous as Polenzani takes on Carlos, in perhaps the highest-profile production of his long Met career.In the interview, he admitted feeling pressure at tackling the daunting assignment — a complex character, loosely based on the historical 16th-century heir to the throne of Philip II of Spain.“I can honestly say I wouldn’t have minded singing it once somewhere else, without this spotlight,” Polenzani said, adding: “I’ve resisted setting myself in one category, though, because the breadth of my career has been wide in terms of the repertory I’ve sung. You can have a valid argument for any part you want to sing, if it’s in your soul.”And he praised his colleagues, including the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is conducting, as well as the orchestra and chorus; a cast that also includes Sonya Yoncheva, Étienne Dupuis, Jamie Barton and Eric Owens; and the production’s director, David McVicar, who will also stage “Medea” next season.At its 1867 premiere in Paris, the five-act “Don Carlos,” adapted from a play by Schiller, was deemed too long. Verdi reluctantly agreed, and oversaw a number of revisions, as well as an Italian translation as “Don Carlo.” For decades, in the most sweeping intervention, the work’s first act was often cut, and the four remaining acts usually given in Italian.In 2010 at the Met, Nézet-Séguin led the five-act version (in Italian). Ever since, he has been angling to present the French “Don Carlos” at the house. As the plans for this new staging formed, Nézet-Séguin thought of Polenzani for the title role, even though he had never sung it, in either language.“Matthew Polenzani is one of the greatest tenors of our time,” Nézet-Séguin wrote in an email. “Matthew was perfect for Don Carlos because it’s a role of infinite nuance and subtlety, with such a varied range of emotion and expression, which would play exactly to Matthew’s qualities.”In 2012, Polenzani opened the Met’s season as the humble Nemorino in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn his youth Polenzani never imagined becoming an opera singer, let alone a star tenor at the Met. He grew up in Wilmette, Ill., the son of music-loving parents. (Rose Polenzani, his sister, is a folk singer and songwriter.) Polenzani appeared in some high school musicals and fronted a pickup band called Empty Pockets.He got a scholarship to Eastern Illinois University to study music education, aiming to teach high school. It was “a cornfield with a university in its center,” he said. “I was nowhere artistically.” A master class with the bass-baritone Alan Held, who sang often at the Met, got him thinking about opera. With the support of his teachers he entered the graduate program at the Yale School of Music, and took an extra year there.“It’s lucky I stayed,” he said: He met Rosa Maria Pascarella, a mezzo-soprano, who became his wife. He was accepted into the young artist program at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and from then on steadily progressed in a career that has included regular appearances with the world’s major houses.Since his Met debut in 1997 he has sung 41 roles there, though quite a few were smaller parts during his yeoman years. But Polenzani has been crucial in several significant new productions, starring as Tamino when Julie Taymor’s staging of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” was introduced in 2004, and as Alfredo when Willy Decker’s surreal take on Verdi’s “La Traviata” arrived at the house on New Year’s Eve in 2010. He starred in another New Year’s gala in 2012, the Met premiere of Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda.”A highlight came in 2017 when, in a revival of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s boldly stylized production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” Polenzani made the title role his own, blending virile heft with Mozartean elegance, and delivering a fearless account of the impassioned aria “Fuor del mar.”He now lives just north of New York City, in Pelham, with his wife and three sons, having survived tragedy: the loss, on Christmas Eve 2005, of their first child, Alessandra, who was 16 months old. For a long time after, Polenzani said, “trying to figure out why you have to get out of bed is the first battle.”“You are walking in a tunnel,” he said, “it’s endless black, and you can’t see your hand in front of your face.”Polenzani (in purple shirt) was acclaimed for his appearance as Nadir in Bizet’s “Les Pêcheurs de Perles.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow his family is thriving. One of the most charming moments of the Met’s At-Home Gala, early in the pandemic in April 2020, came when Polenzani, accompanying himself at the piano, sang a sweet-toned, wistful account of “Danny Boy.” At the end, you could hear his family cheering upstairs.“Don Carlos,” he said, comes at “a good time for me in my career. The part is not exactly heavier or more dramatic than others I’ve sung,” though, he added, “it’s certainly longer, especially in this version.”There is a “certain air of refinement to the French version,” he said, that suits him vocally. “It’s a little raucous, less raw, which is not to say less emotional — quite the opposite.”Also, he said, “The way we’re looking at it, Carlos is an antihero.” The crisis the character goes through begins in that often-cut first act, set in Fontainebleau, France, when Carlos meets the woman he is supposed to marry as part of a peace treaty: Elisabeth of Valois, the daughter of the French king. They quickly fall in love, but then word arrives that the Spanish king, Carlos’s father, has decided to marry her instead. Their vexed relationship energizes the tragic political epic that follows.“What we miss without the Fontainebleau act,” Polenzani said, “is the moment of falling in love,” adding, “If we don’t see them fall in love — and this is true of so many operas, like ‘Bohème’ and ‘Traviata’ — then we don’t care so much if it doesn’t work out in the end.”McVicar has emphasized Carlos’s similarities to Hamlet, and the emotional damage that has resulted from his broken relationship with Elisabeth and his unloving father. This nuanced take on the character is in keeping with Polenzani’s usual approach, in which he plumbs characters for their internal motivations and complexities.What most distinguishes his portrayals goes hand in hand with his modest yet superb vocal artistry: the earnestness and authenticity that he exudes onstage. Earnestness is difficult to learn or feign; it is a quality that a performer — or a person, for that matter — simply has.“I don’t think about it ever,” Polenzani said. “What I think about is trying to be as firmly in whichever character’s shoes I’m in.”“I work at being earnest in that way,” he added. “I want to be as honest as I can be.”This came through poignantly in the Met’s production of Bizet’s “Les Pêcheurs de Perles,” which opened at the Met on New Year’s Eve in 2015. As the humble fisherman Nadir, Polenzani sang the aria “Je crois entendre encore” like an enraptured young man recalling an impossible love.He shaped the gently rising phrases with sublime sadness and tender radiance, capping the final one with a ravishing pianissimo high C that few tenors — past or present — could match. Talk about stage presence and inhabiting the moment in opera: The ovation was tremendous. More

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      The Met Opera Never Missed a Curtain. It Hopes Audiences Rebound.

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      On Saturday evening, if all goes as planned, the Metropolitan Opera will celebrate a milestone: reaching a long-planned midwinter break without having had to cancel a single performance, even as the pandemic created havoc backstage.As the Omicron variant spread through the city in December and January, the virus upended the Met’s operations, with at least 400 singers, orchestra players, stagehands, costume designers, dancers, actors and other employees testing positive, according to a snapshot of cases provided by the Met on Friday.But there are encouraging signs that at the opera house, as in the city, the recent surge has peaked and cases are falling dramatically again.During the first week of January, as cases were reaching new heights in New York, more than 100 employees at the Met tested positive, including six solo singers and five members of the children’s chorus. By last week, the total number of positive cases among the Met’s large roster of employees had fallen to 22, about the same number as in early December, and there have been eight positive tests so far this week.Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said that during the worst days of Omicron, he worried the company might run out of personnel and be unable to perform. But the Met’s strict safety protocols, which included vaccine and mask mandates and regular testing, provided some assurance, he said, that nobody would become seriously ill.“I knew that if we could just keep bringing in reserves, as well as getting people back to work as soon as they had cleared the quarantine period, we would be able to keep performing,” Gelb said. “Our struggle to keep the Met up and running in the face of Covid became a unifying force for the entire company as we battled a common enemy.”The Met never missed a downbeat or a curtain, even as the Omicron variant wreaked havoc across the performing arts — resulting in the cancellation of scores of Broadway shows, concerts and dance performances.The virus has taken a toll on attendance this winter, across the performing arts.On Broadway, just 62 percent of seats were occupied the week that ended Jan. 9; in the comparable week in the January before the pandemic, 94 percent of seats were filled. Last week, after many of the weakest shows closed and others reduced their prices, 75 percent of all seats were filled but overall box office grosses were down.At the Met, where 77 percent of seats were filled the week of Dec. 18, attendance dropped precipitously as the virus surged, bottoming out at 44 percent in mid-January, before beginning to rise again.Now the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, will have some time to ride out the next phase of the pandemic: It is about to take a long-scheduled break from performing for much of February, before returning on Feb. 28 with a starry new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”Putting on opera in a pandemic is not easy: The soprano Rosa Feola, right, wore a mask as she was fitted for a costume for “Rigoletto” designed by Catherine Zuber, left.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe company decided back in 2018 to institute a midseason break, long before the coronavirus emerged. The idea was to stop performing in the middle of winter, when sales are generally weakest, and to add more performances in the late spring, moving the end of the opera season to early June from May. The first midwinter break was supposed to take effect in the 2020-21 season — the season lost to the coronavirus.Now — as the recent surge in cases has left performing arts organizations facing alarmingly low attendance — the Met will have nearly a month off.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 5Omicron in retreat. More