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      An Opera’s Riverboat Journey Brings the Rainforest Onboard

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      Mary Zimmerman, known for a dreamy approach to theater, stages the Metropolitan Opera’s company premiere of “Florencia en el Amazonas.”There really was no reason for Mary Zimmerman to get stuck while directing her new production of “Florencia en el Amazonas,” which premieres on Thursday at the Metropolitan Opera.The staging is her sixth for the Met, and at first glance, the work looked to be square in her wheelhouse. Her storytelling often has a dreamlike quality, and here was an opera suffused with poetic oneirism and the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez: the tale of a diva traveling incognito on an Amazonian riverboat ostensibly to perform in Manaus, a city nestled deep in the rainforest, but really to try to reunite with her missing lover and muse, the butterfly hunter Cristóbal.Yet when time came to start conceptualizing her production, Zimmerman found herself stalling. The fit was maybe too perfect.“I’m quite a bit overidentified with Florencia,” Zimmerman said after a recent rehearsal. “I am single, and I kind of lost the great love of my life because I couldn’t stop doing theater, and I couldn’t be smaller than I was. A lot of us performers and artists with broken hearts, partly everything we put on is for that person, whether they’re going to see it or not.”Zimmerman eventually got over her bout of director’s block, to mount a milestone for the Met: Daniel Catán’s work, with a libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, is the company’s first by a Mexican composer. A vehicle for the soprano Ailyn Pérez, the production will also be conducted by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.“Florencia” is almost entirely set on the boat, and most productions, starting with Francesca Zambello’s premiere staging at Houston Grand Opera in 1996, have made the ship a scenic centerpiece. But Zimmerman turned her gaze outward. “I wanted to emphasize the natural world and the outdoors,” she said. At the Met, the focus will be on what the passengers see during their journey rather than on their mode of transportation.Gabriella Reyes, center, in rehearsal for the production, in which the costumes are inspired by the Amazon River and the surrounding rainforest.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat shift of emphasis is in accordance with Catán’s score, Nézet-Séguin said. “I’ve never been in the Amazon, but any forest you first go in, it just looks like a bunch of trees and leaves the same color, then you spend a few minutes, open your eyes and there’s a million details,” he added. “I feel like this piece is this way.”Amazonian flora and fauna were a fruitful source of inspiration for the creative team, especially the costume designer Ana Kuzmanic: Even the striking outfits and headpieces that symbolize the spread of cholera were drawn from the opera’s setting. “We discovered there’s this type of bird in the Amazon called the harpy eagle, so that’s what they’re based on,” Zimmerman said. “Originally, they were just like straight-up Venetian masks, but then we made them more like the animal.”The costumes also represent physical elements like the ever-present water, at one point with the summoning of figures representing waves. “I honestly feel the blue waves are the best water costuming I’ve ever seen,” Zimmerman said. “Because representing water onstage, other than using water, is hard. It’s changeable, it’s moving all the time.” (She should know: Her breakthrough came in 2001 with a Tony Award-winning staging of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” that involved an actual pool. She also tackled opera’s most famous pond with “Rusalka” at the Met in 2017.)To Zimmerman’s delight, Catán’s score even includes musical interludes in which she could let her imagination run free. “My favorite is the three-and-a-half-minute one, which I call ‘night into day,’ or we sometimes call it ‘the creature ballet,’” she said of a scene that involves a bottle containing wedding rings. “We just love watching it and working on it.”For Nézet-Séguin, the playfulness and fluidity of Zimmerman’s staging feel like an answer to Catán’s score. “The orchestration is very inventive,” he said. “It’s, of course, evoking the nature with the birds and the noise of the forest, but it’s also very well developed in terms of adopting the general flow of the piece, which is never static. I feel like he’s so good at suggesting a constant wave, like a river or like the ocean, or any body of water, that’s never stopping.” (Catán, who died in 2011, embraced a neo-Romantic style and often has been compared to Puccini.)“Florencia sort of finds her true identity by shedding her famous identity,” Zimmerman said, “and there’s a kind of dissolution into the natural world.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJust as the landscapes change over the course of Florencia’s trip, so do the travelers — the discoveries are as emotional as they are visual. “So much is transforming and changing throughout the opera,” Zimmerman said. “Florencia sort of finds her true identity by shedding her famous identity, and there’s a kind of dissolution into the natural world, I think.”Pérez also described the opera’s journey as more than physical. “It almost becomes a subplot of a much more spiritual and community story, with a sense of humor and a sense that the destination is about enjoying the journey,” she said, “reflecting on choices and choosing love and viewing death as a rebirth into another life.”In a sense, working on “Florencia” has also meant a trip back to Pérez’s own roots. The Met hasn’t presented a Spanish-language opera in nearly a century, and Pérez, born in Chicago to Mexican immigrants, is thrilled to finally sing in the language she spoke at home as a child. “It’s not even the Castilian Spanish of Spain but Mexican Spanish, Latin American Spanish,” she said, “so I don’t have to be corrected over how I say my words for the first time in my life.”That feeling of connection, both to one’s self and to the surrounding world, makes “Florencia” a fitting addition to the Met’s efforts at greater inclusivity in recent years. For Nézet-Séguin, it’s important “to have alternative possibilities on our stage, alternating moods or ways of thinking about life,” he said. “And clearly this opera has a lot of humor, sometimes a little dry humor, sometimes more playful, and I see the production is adapting to this very much.”Zimmerman is definitely on board, so to speak, with that view. “You want to support and lift and entertain the audience,” she said. “My motto is: Never a dull moment, and always be blossoming.” More

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      The Met Opera Puts On a Malcolm X Marathon

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      For 18 hours on a rainy Sunday this Halloween weekend, the Metropolitan Opera House was visited by the ghost of Malcolm X.Words made famous by the Black nationalist leader and civil rights figure in his classic autobiography, dictated to Alex Haley and posthumously published in 1965, could be heard echoing throughout the soaring lobby of the Lincoln Center theater. It was a welcomed haunting, conjured by the Met in conjunction with a new production of Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which premieres on Friday.Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter.Text from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”From 6 a.m. until a little after midnight, a starry lineup of Malcolm surrogates — including his daughter Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson and the actor Leslie Odom Jr. — read from the autobiography continuously and in its roughly 500-page entirety.“I didn’t think that they would do it,” said the director and playwright Robert O’Hara, who staged “Slave Play” and is at the helm’s of the Met’s production. He proposed the reading to the company’s leadership as a way to build word of mouth for the opera. “It’s amazing just to have the words in this space, and for the Met to open its doors and let people come.”Top row, from left, Maurio Hines, Anthony Davis and Christopher Davis, April Matthis. Second row, from left, Courtney B. Vance, Robert O’Hara, Bill Haley Jr. Third row, from left, Leah Hawkins and Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Makeda Hampton, Liesl Tommy.The event was free to attend, and an estimated 680 people cumulatively made their way to the lobby’s Grand Tier balcony, up the undulating, red-carpeted steps and around the low-hanging starburst chandeliers. At 10 a.m., about 100 people sat or stood around a small stage with a black backdrop set up in front of the building’s floor-to-ceiling windows.Marcia Sells, the Met’s chief diversity officer, said that Sunday was the first time the space had been used for a free event.“To all these people who are coming in here, to the speakers, to even the Black staff members who have worked here for a long time,” Sells said, “this represents the Met saying, ‘Yes, you really are included.’”Thompson, who plays a young Malcolm X in the opera.Shabazz’s Kaaba pendant.Around 10:30, the actor Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” brought a resounding musicality to an early chapter in which Malcolm details his inauspicious early years as a small-time drug dealer and hustler in Harlem known as Detroit Red.The actor Courtney B. Vance, of “The People v. O.J. Simpson” and “The Preacher’s Wife,” followed, drawing big laughs with a rousing rendition of a scene in which Malcolm X escapes the World War II draft by feigning madness at the induction office.“The educated folks had Martin Luther King, but the folks on the street — Malcolm had them,” Vance said in an interview after his reading. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to talk about him and what he stood for and to maybe make people go, Hmm, I want to learn more.”The Met’s event was free to attend, and brought in an estimated 680 people throughout the day.Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” preparing for his reading on Sunday.More than 70 speakers appeared, including Bill Haley, Alex Haley’s grandson; David C. Banks, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; and Liesl Tommy, the director of the Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect.”Around 2:30 p.m., Shabazz movingly channeled her father, and received a standing ovation, for a section that recounted his intellectual awakening while confined at Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, spurred by a trove of history and philosophy texts.“It’s a great way to tell my father’s story and to reach different audiences,” she said in an interview. “It’s as relevant now as it was then. We’re still living with the same challenges.”Readers on deck: Sunday’s event included appearances by more than 70 participants.Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, a member of the theater company Elevator Repair Service, watching Shabazz speak.“X” premiered at New York City Opera in 1986. This revival, which first ran in Detroit in 2021, was conceived by O’Hara as an Afrofuturist fable in which the title character is an archetypical Everyman who transcends time and space. The Met’s production stars the baritone Will Liverman, who opened the Met’s 2021-22 season in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first presentation of a work by a Black composer in its history; Kazem Abdullah will conduct Davis’s score, which was revised for Detroit and changed further for the Met.Davis said that the aim, then and now, was to present a challenge to opera as an art form, in the spirit of Malcolm himself.“I wanted to help transform opera into a truly American form, one that reflects African American musical traditions,” he said. “Not only can opera play an important role in music today, it can make statements about who we are and what’s going on in the world.” More

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      Review: An Opera About Drones Brings a Pilot’s War Home

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      Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded,” which Washington National Opera premiered on Saturday, is headed to the Metropolitan Opera next year.The young mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo has a wide grin, haunted eyes and a mellow, confident voice that flashes with lean anxiety. In tone and presence, she’s driven, intense, wry. Onstage she’s unsentimental — and unsettled.She is, in other words, perfectly cast as a swaggering fighter pilot turned dissociating drone operator in “Grounded,” which Washington National Opera premiered on Saturday at the Kennedy Center.“Grounded,” which will open the Metropolitan Opera’s season next fall, originated as a one-woman play a decade ago, when the ethics of drone warfare were at the center of national attention. Written by George Brant, the play traveled widely, and had an Off Broadway run featuring Anne Hathaway, who at one point was planning to star in a film adaptation.But opera swept in first. The Tony Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori, known for intelligently audience-pleasing musicals like “Fun Home” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” took on the project through the Met’s commissioning program.Tesori and Brant expanded the piece, giving the anonymous pilot a name (Jess) and giving voice to other characters, including Jess’s beleaguered husband and the cacophonous “kill chain” of commanders she hears over her headset. Washington National Opera was eventually brought on as a kind of out-of-town tryout for Michael Mayer’s production.This led to some unwelcome news coverage earlier this year, when Washington announced its season — sponsored by the military contractor General Dynamics, a longtime company donor. The headlines wrote themselves: A drone maker was paying for a “killer drone opera.”The production, directed by Michael Mayer, with set design by Mimi Lien, is dominated by LED screens.Scott SuchmanThe company put out a statement insisting that benefactors had no role in the work’s creation. But it was still a little surprising to hear Timothy O’Leary, the general director in Washington, thank General Dynamics, alongside other major givers, from the stage at the Kennedy Center before the performance on Saturday.The opera begins in Iraq, where Jess is doing her best “Top Gun” impression as a hotshot F-16 pilot. (The F-16 was developed by General Dynamics.) The quietly ominous rumble at the start of Tesori’s score gives way to a chorus of fliers whose stentorian march morphs into a neo-Baroque fugue.The Middle East is suggested by rustling rainsticks, part of a big, varied percussion section, and some modal harmonies; Jess’s voice soars as she sings of “the solitude, the freedom, the peace” she finds in the sky. Tesori’s lyrical ease and eclecticism, the fluidity with which she blends, blurs and moves between styles, are impressively on display, guided with a sure hand by the conductor Daniela Candillari.On leave with her squadron in Wyoming — the pretext for some whispers of swaying cowboy hoedown music — Jess falls in love with a rancher, Eric, and gets pregnant. (The brief duet when she returns to let him know, her profane apologies melting into shared happiness, is perhaps the most charmingly natural moment in the piece.)Her pregnancy, and the birth of their daughter, takes her out of her beloved cockpit. When she wants to return to the skies, she is instead assigned to drone duty — appropriately enough in Las Vegas, the capital of American not-quite-reality.However demeaning for a onetime star pilot, the job will let Jess go home at night, and she is promised by her commander that “the threat of death has been removed” — a mantra taken up by Washington National Opera’s excellent chorus with grim fervor. The Trainer (Frederick Ballentine, his tenor frighteningly shining) describes the Reaper drone’s capabilities and exorbitant cost in a worshipful call-and-response, religious-style chant.Tesori smartly conjures the uncertainty with which Jess begins to learn her new task, with an orchestral landscape of eerie, jittery spareness. Missile explosions happen with uncanny, anesthetized sweetness, a soft choral “boom.”The assurances that this will be “war with all the benefits of home” go awry, of course, as Jess’s professional and domestic lives begin to collapse together. On a trip to the mall with her daughter, she grows paranoid that they’re being surveilled by cameras, just as her Reaper spies on its targets. A double, Also Jess (the forbiddingly pure-voiced soprano Teresa Perrotta), emerges for duets of slippery dissonance as the tension ratchets up.Ratchets up, but not enough. The impact of “Grounded” is surprisingly unexplosive. This may be because Tesori is at heart a composer of normality — even (or especially) when abnormal things are happening, like the accelerated-aging disease at the center of “Kimberly Akimbo.”D’Angelo as Jess, the fighter pilot turned drone operator.Scott SuchmanHer 2003 masterpiece, “Caroline, or Change,” was a perfect marriage of her music with a text, by Tony Kushner, that steadily maintained its reserve amid heartbreak. Her previous opera, “Blue” (2019), about police violence, emanated a sad, wounded dignity. Tesori is at her best mining emotion from this dignified reserve — from the everyday.But “Grounded” is more surreal — and eventually psychotic — material, and Tesori and Brant don’t pursue Jess’s dissolving mental state with the relentlessness, economy or extremity of, say, Berg’s “Wozzeck.” While it’s understandable that the Met would want a single-actor play expanded into something more traditionally grand, the bagginess is palpable in the transition from an 80-minute monologue to a two-and-a-half-hour opera.Eric, for one thing, remains a cipher. His arias feel more like the result of post-workshop notes — “flesh out Jess’s husband” — than emotional imperative or importance to the plot. While the tenor Joseph Dennis is affable in the role, his chemistry with D’Angelo is nil. Besides the messianic Trainer, the stylized characters of the drone operation — the Commander; Jess’s teenage partner, the Sensor; and the “kill chain,” amplified over loudspeakers from offstage — are insufficiently vivid.And while Jess’s ambivalence and troubles are clearly depicted, the storytelling, especially in the second act, is too busy to build the necessary claustrophobia, despite D’Angelo’s talent and earnest commitment. “Grounded” should come as a sobering shock, with the laser-guided horror of a Tomahawk, but for all the touches of churning darkness in the music, it’s oddly gentle.In Mayer’s swiftly shifting if not quite elegant staging, much of Mimi Lien’s set is dominated by LED screens. The projections have been designed by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson, who did similar work on the triptych “Proximity,” which premiered earlier this year at Lyric Opera of Chicago.On the screens, in impressive high definition, we see blue skies rushing past, nighttime mountains, a sonogram, the grayish desert landscape observed from above by the Reaper drone’s pitiless eye. And we see the Reaper stretched across the stage, as rivetingly chilly as an empire vessel in “Star Wars.” On our first encounter with it, there’s even a shiver of sinister John Williams in Tesori’s score.Yet it is a little pat to describe “Grounded” — as Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, did in an interview in May with The New York Times — as an “antiwar opera.” It is not exactly that, even if it culminates (spoiler alert) in Jess intentionally crashing the $17 million Reaper because she hallucinates that her target’s daughter is her own.The opera implies that old-fashioned fighter piloting is nobler, and better for soldiers’ mental health, than the video-game-style drone deployment that has expanded the battlefield to encompass, potentially, all of us. Darkly, given the state of global affairs lately, the piece seems to say that war is OK; there are just better and worse — more and less authentic — ways of waging it.GroundedThrough Nov. 13 at the Kennedy Center; kennedy-center.org. More

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      At the Met, a Refurbished ‘Bohème’ and an Art Deco ‘Ballo’

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      A gift from a board member recently paid for the company to rebuild sets for Franco Zeffirelli’s deathless 1981 production of Puccini’s classic.If you go to “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera this season and are convinced that the big snowdrift in Act III looks a little fresher than usual, you’re not hallucinating.A million-dollar gift from a board member recently paid for the company to rebuild some of the sets for Franco Zeffirelli’s deathless 1981 production of Puccini’s classic, and the snow that dominates a wintry scene on the outskirts of Paris was one of the targets. It now looks more newly fallen — though the seam between the set piece and the stage floor was gapingly obvious from the orchestra level on Saturday evening.Some whiter snow was the news of this “Bohème” — alongside an unusually assertive, stylish Schaunard from the young baritone Sean Michael Plumb, in a small part that often fades into Zeffirelli’s teeming backgrounds.Federica Lombardi’s focused soprano created a Mimì more forthright, even indignant, than the norm, making her fatal Act IV more tender by comparison. The bass-baritone Christian Van Horn sang a soberly resonant “Vecchia zimmara,” and the soprano Olga Kulchynska was a bright Musetta. As Rodolfo, the veteran tenor Matthew Polenzani pushed his voice out at climaxes but otherwise often sounded faded, and a few hairs flat.The sets for David Alden’s 2012 Met staging of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” have not been rebuilt — but, only 11 years old, they sometimes seemed shakily resistant to being moved when the opera was revived on Friday.Quinn Kelsey, front left, as Renato and Liv Redpath as Oscar in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” at the Met.Ken Howard/Met OperaHere, the cast was the exciting part, at least by the end of the evening. The performance seemed to settle in as it went on, with the tenor Charles Castronovo’s tone as Gustavo — pale for much of the opera — finally taking on more color, fullness and freedom.And after an uncertain beginning, the soprano Angela Meade delivered a memorable Amelia. Her sound is essentially cool, but it got fuller and more inflamed as the weird, tragic plot developed, ending up lean yet glowing, like a red-hot poker.One singer required no warming up: the baritone Quinn Kelsey, who seems ever more a pillar of the Met, particularly in Verdi. “Ballo” is the story of a Swedish king, Gustavo, who is in love with Amelia, the wife of his closest friend — and Kelsey plays Renato, the agonized friend who goes from Gustavo’s confidant to his assassin.His presence hulking and brooding, Kelsey has that most special of operatic attributes: an instantly recognizable voice, capacious and moody, with a smoky, slightly nasal, sneering, sinister edge but also a fundamental seductive smoothness and nuanced eloquence.His and Meade’s back-to-back arias in the third act — her plea “Morrò, ma prima in grazia” into his wounded “Eri tu” — were together the musical highlight on Friday. The mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova sang Ulrica with steady power, and the soprano Liv Redpath sounded lucid and gentle as the sprightly page Oscar. Carlo Rizzi, one of the Met’s often underappreciated maestros in the Italian repertoire, conducted both “Ballo” (with steady drive) and “Bohème” (with sumptuous clarity).“Ballo,” which premiered in 1859, is from the period after Verdi’s canonical trio of “Rigoletto,” “Il Trovatore” and “La Traviata,” and before his late-stage epics “Don Carlos” and “Aida.” In this middle period — think also of “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” and “La Forza del Destino,” which the Met is presenting in a new production this winter — he experimented with shades of emotional ambiguity and sometimes jarring juxtapositions of tone.In “Ballo,” he combined elements of Italianate melodrama and champagne-bubbly French high spirits in a mixture that can be excitingly volatile. Alden’s staging is a kind of stylized, largely grayscale Art Deco explosion, with a degree of strange excess intended to echo the piece’s own — like a Busby Berkeley production number at the end of the first scene, complete with dancing waiters; and, in Act II, a conspirator frantically hurling himself against a wall.With severely raked sets, sickly floodlighting and surreal touches like skull masks and angel wings, Alden suggests that much of the opera is Gustavo’s fever dream, or fantasy. But the eerie elegance of some moments diffuses elsewhere into some awkwardness, with the chorus milling around. When it premiered, the production seemed like its many ideas hadn’t yet gelled. They still haven’t. More

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      Drone Warfare Comes to Washington Opera Stage in ‘Grounded’

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      Wearing combat boots and a U.S. Air Force flight suit, the mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo took her place onstage one recent morning and began to sing about war.“I break down the airfields, the refineries, the consulates and factories,” she sang inside a rehearsal studio in Washington. “I return them to desert, to particles.”D’Angelo was preparing to star in “Grounded,” a new work about drone warfare, composed by Jeanine Tesori and with a libretto by George Brant, that will premiere at Washington National Opera on Saturday, ahead of a run at the Metropolitan Opera in New York next season.On that morning, she was learning how to move around the set in the role of Jess, an F-16 pilot reassigned to drone duty because of an unexpected pregnancy. Because, as with any opera, rehearsals for “Grounded” have been full of the usual considerations about props, musical cues and choreography.But this process has also been anguished and emotional. The opera offers an unvarnished look at the psychological toll of drone warfare, and its themes have taken on fresh relevance amid the escalating violence of the Israel-Hamas war.Tesori, left, and Michael Mayer, the production’s director.Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times“For everyone in the room, it has been intense,” D’Angelo said in an interview between rehearsals. “There are moments of beauty and calm and serenity. And then, total chaos.”Because of its war themes, “Grounded,” adapted from Brant’s play of the same name, has already drawn scrutiny. In the spring, anger erupted after Washington National Opera listed the presenting sponsor of the production as General Dynamics, the military contractor.Critics accused the opera company of serving as a mouthpiece for the defense industry. The house later clarified, saying that General Dynamics had helped underwrite the entire season, not just “Grounded,” and that the corporation had no say over the programming or its contents.Tesori said that the scrutiny had been unexpected, but that she was hopeful audiences would look beyond politics. She noted that she and Brant started working on the opera in 2014, long before they knew where it would premiere or who would be among the sponsors.“Every impulse, every note of this, is done from two writers who are trying to birth this work, and they don’t know what hospital they’re in,” she said. “I think it’s really clear now, and that’s great.”Ahead of the premiere, Washington National Opera is working to promote discussion about the themes of “Grounded” with service members, veterans and their families, inviting them for talks and performances.Timothy O’Leary, the company’s general director, said that it was important to provide context to members of the military and the defense industry. “Grounded” raises questions about the morality of remote warfare and explores its toll on the mental health of service members.“It’s one thing to read about these issues in a newspaper, but to walk in the shoes of somebody on the front lines wrestling with these questions of moral responsibility and life and death — that’s an entirely different experience,” he said. “The stage has always been part of how we understand the costs of war, both to warriors and to the innocent.”“Grounded” premiered as a one-woman play in 2013 and had an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater in 2015, in a production starring Anne Hathaway. After seeing the play, the Met’s leaders, including Peter Gelb, its general manager, and Paul Cremo, its dramaturg, commissioned the opera adaptation.A rehearsal for “Grounded,” which will open the Metropolitan Opera’s season next year.They turned to Tesori, a celebrated composer who has won Tony Awards for the musicals “Kimberly Akimbo” and “Fun Home,” and has written operas like “Blue,” about a Harlem family struck by tragedy.Gelb described Tesori as “one of the most gifted composers around,” and said he expected “Grounded” would resonate.“It’s something,” he added, “that people can understand, given the events in which we live today.”At Washington National Opera, Tesori and Brant have been joined by the theater director Michael Mayer and the conductor Daniela Candillari. Mimi Lien designed a kaleidoscopic set with nearly 400 LED panels that display live video and visual effects.This version of “Grounded” is Brant’s first libretto. He reworked the play for the opera stage, adding characters such as Jess’s husband, Eric (the tenor Joseph Dennis); a commander (the bass Morris Robinson); a trainer (the tenor Frederick Ballentine); and a male chorus that, at times, is called the Drone Squadron.“It was important to be sure that these new characters had full dimension and full agency,” Brant said. “And that required new language.”D’Angelo, and Joseph Dennis, who sings a role created for the opera adaptation of Brant’s play.Melissa Lyttle for The New York TimesIn 2016, Brant and Tesori visited the Met, whose stage was set for Puccini’s “La Bohème,” and had the actress Kelly McAndrew perform excerpts from the play to give a sense of how its material would land in the opera house.“It was really then that we all started to get excited because we saw the potential, and we saw what this one character looked like in the space of that vast canvas,” Brant said. “She belonged there, and there was a place for her there.”Tesori spent about 10 months at her home on Long Island working on the score. She was drawn to the idea of writing for a female lead character. “She is the subject, not the object,” Tesori said. “And her launch is not romantic love; it’s something else.”She was a fan of D’Angelo and wrote the opera with her in mind, attending her voice lessons to get a sense of her sound. Tesori also reviewed testimonials of drone operators and pilots. She came away feeling that the psychological damage of remote warfare was “as great, if not greater, because you can’t see it.”“I feel ashamed that I didn’t know anything,” she said. “I think maybe because, what do you do with the information once you’ve seen it?”The Met tends to try out new operas in other cities before putting them on its own stage; it enlisted Washington National Opera for the premiere. (“Grounded” will open the Met’s 2024-25 season, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director.)Preparations for the opera were going smoothly until the spring, when Washington National Opera’s 2023-24 season was announced and questions about the role of General Dynamics — a major sponsor of the opera company since 1997, with a senior vice president on its board — began to spread on social media.A think tank that advocates military restraint labeled “Grounded” a “killer drone opera.” New York magazine gave the opera a “despicable” rating on its Approval Matrix, describing it as “the drone-bombing opera ‘Grounded,’ sponsored by General Dynamics.” RT, a state-owned Russian news outlet, said the work showed the strength of the American military-industrial complex.The team of “Grounded” preparing for the premiere this weekend, which follows criticism over the Washington National Opera’s relationship with General Dynamics, the season’s sponsor.Melissa Lyttle for The New York TimesThe creative team behind “Grounded” grew disturbed by how the opera was being portrayed. It worked behind the scenes to push the Washington National Opera to make it clear that General Dynamics had nothing to do with its work. The company eventually issued a statement that said, “For the sake of clarity, no sponsor or supporter of W.N.O. had any involvement in the creation of ‘Grounded’ or in the contents of its libretto.” But it stopped short of cutting ties with General Dynamics; the company is still listed as a “W.N.O. season sponsor” on promotional materials for “Grounded.”Brant said that he was not aware that General Dynamics was a supporter of Washington National Opera until criticism began to circulate. He said he was pleased by the opera house’s statement.“It was important to know that the sponsor had absolutely no involvement,” he said. “I’m happy that it’s been resolved the way that it has.”Tesori, who was deep in composition when the controversy arose, said she felt that it was important for the company to explain the wall between artists and benefactors. “It had to be clarified,” she said. “It got clarified, and then here we are.”At the rehearsal in Washington, Tesori, Brant and Mayer worked with the cast to plot stage directions, as well as refine the music and libretto.Mayer said that the opera had more to say than its commentary on war. It also addresses, he added, the “increasing dehumanization of the population as the screens start to take over all aspects of our lives.”Mayer said that “Grounded” represents the “increasing dehumanization of the population as the screens start to take over all aspects of our lives.”Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times“It brings into focus how precious genuine connection is, and how tenuous it is,” he said. “It reverberates beyond just a story about warfare.”D’Angelo, who has been preparing for the role of Jess since 2020, said that the opera captured her character’s inner struggle. By day, Jess takes part in drone missions from a trailer in Las Vegas; by night, she returns to her family.“You can understand this rhythm and how disorienting it must be,” she said. “You get just the tiniest little hint of what a person in her situation, her mental state, must be experiencing.”As Tesori walked out of the rehearsal room, she said that she felt the work was finally coming to life, but that she did not yet have the words to describe it.“It’s a feeling of discovery,” she said. “Eventually a piece speaks to you — like a kid, it begins to tell you what it needs.”“There’s no way of knowing,” she added, “until you’re in the room.” More

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      North Carolina Radio Station Won’t Ban Met Opera Broadcasts After All

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      The station, which had called the Met’s newer operas unsuitable because of their “difficult music” and “adult themes and harsh language,” reversed course.The music director of a nonprofit North Carolina classical radio station said on Thursday that the station would reverse course and air several contemporary operas being performed by the Metropolitan Opera this season that the station had originally said were unsuitable for broadcast, citing their “adult themes and harsh language.”“It was a very hard decision,” Emily Moss, the music director of WCPE, a nonprofit station based in Wake Forest, said in an interview. “It’s been a hard day and a hard week.”The reversal came after the station faced widespread criticism.The Met, the nation’s leading opera company, has been staging more contemporary work in recent seasons as part of a push to attract new and more diverse audiences; the company has found that these newer works draw more first-time ticket buyers than the classics do.But Deborah S. Proctor, the general manager of WCPE, took issue with new works planned for the current season in a survey she sent to listeners on Aug. 31.“This coming season, the Metropolitan Opera has chosen several operas which are written in a nonclassical music style, have adult themes and language, and are in English,” she wrote. “I feel they aren’t suitable for broadcast on our station.”In the survey, Proctor cited her problems with several of the Met’s offerings this season.She described the violence in Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” the death row opera that opened the season. She cited the “non-Biblical” sources of the libretto of John Adams’s “El Niño,” and the suicidal themes in Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which is based on the Michael Cunningham novel and the Oscar-winning film it inspired. She wrote that “Florencia en el Amazona,” by the Mexican composer Daniel Catán, was “simply outside of the bounds of our musical format guidelines.” And she said that both Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” contain “offensive language plainly audible to everyone.”“We want parents to know that they can leave our station playing for their children because our broadcasts are without mature themes or foul language,” she wrote in the letter. “We must maintain the trust of listeners.”The station decided last season not to broadcast Blanchard’s “Champion.”The Met, which has said it follows Federal Communications Commission guidelines regarding profanity and language, said it was happy with the change of course. “We’re pleased that opera fans in North Carolina will be able to hear all 27 of our scheduled broadcasts this season,” the Met said in a statement.The station’s letter, and the survey attached to it, received scant attention before reaching social media last week. Rhiannon Giddens, a North Carolina native who shared the Pulitzer Prize this year with Michael Abels for their opera “Omar,” wrote an open letter voicing her displeasure over the station’s stance and noted that challenging adult themes are staples of many of the most popular operas of the past.“The Met broadcasts are the only way many people get to hear the productions, which are situated in New York and priced way out of many people’s budgets,” Giddens wrote. “Radio is supposed to be egalitarian and an equalizer, not used as a weapon, as you are doing.”The station reversed course after receiving feedback from the public and holding internal conversations.“We really value being safe for a general audience, especially children,” Moss said in the interview. “But one of our core values is that we are a refuge from the political and troubles of the world and we are returning to that value.” More

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      The Met’s ‘Dead Man Walking’ Goes to Sing Sing

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      One by one, the inmates filed into a chapel at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y. — past a line of security officers, past a sign reading, “Open wide the door to Christ.” Under stained-glass windows, they formed a circle, introducing themselves to a crowd of visitors as composers, rappers, painters and poets. Then they began to sing.The inmates had gathered one recent afternoon for a rehearsal of “Dead Man Walking,” the death-row tale that opened the Metropolitan Opera season last week. Together, they formed a 14-member chorus that would accompany a group of Met singers for a one-night-only performance of the work before an audience of about 150 of their fellow inmates.“I feel like I’m at home,” said a chorus member, Joseph Striplin, 47, who is serving a life sentence for murder, as the men warmed up with scales and stretches. “I feel I’m alive.”Steven Osgood, the conductor, with Sister Helen Prejean. Osgood rehearsed with the inmates for more than five hours, practicing rhythm, diction and dynamics.James Estrin/The New York Times“Dead Man Walking,” based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 memoir about her experience trying to save the soul of a convicted murderer at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, has been staged more than 75 times around the world since its premiere in 2000.But the opera, with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Terrence McNally, had never been performed in a prison until last week at Sing Sing, which is home to more than 1,400 inmates.There were no costumes or props. Chorus members, who were dressed in prison-issued green pants, had to be counted and screened before entering the auditorium, lining up by cell block and building number. Arias were sometimes interrupted by the sound of security officers’ radios.Yet the opera, with its themes of sin and redemption — and of the pain endured by victims’ families — resonated with inmates.Michael Shane Hale, an inmate, with Jake Heggie, the composer of “Dead Man Walking” and DiDonato. Working on the opera, Hale said, “reminds you not to get lost in prison.”James Estrin/The New York TimesMichael Shane Hale, 51, a chorus member serving a sentence of 50 years to life for murder, said that he often thought of himself as a monster. In the 1990s, prosecutors sought the death penalty in his case. (New York suspended the practice in 2004.)Hale said the opera, which portrays the friendship between Sister Helen and Joseph De Rocher, a death-row prisoner, had taught him to see his own humanity.“We feel so powerless; we feel so invisible,” Hale said. “It reminds you not to get lost in prison.”Not everyone at Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison about 30 miles north of New York City, was enamored. Some prisoners declined to take part in the opera because of concerns about its dark themes, including the portrayal of a prisoner’s death by lethal injection. Carnegie Hall, which helped to bring the opera to Sing Sing through the education initiative Musical Connections, said that about half of the 30 inmates in the program did not participate. (Musical Connections, which has offered instruction in performance, music theory and composition to inmates since 2009, is among similar projects nationwide that aim to help prisoners connect with society through culture.)In the prison chapel, Wendy Bryn Harmer (at the keyboard) warms up the inmate participants, including Bartholomew Crawford, front. Crawford said the opera offered hope: “It shows you’re not alone in this world.”James Estrin/The New York TimesBartholomew Crawford, 54, who is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for burglary, said he understood the concerns of his fellow inmates, but that, for him, the opera offered hope.“It shows you’re not alone in this world,” he said. “It shows you that in the darkest hour there’s light somewhere.”The idea for bringing “Dead Man Walking” to Sing Sing emerged several years ago when an inmate promised the renowned singer Joyce DiDonato, who plays Sister Helen in the Met’s production, that the men could sing the chorus parts.“This is not just theater,” said DiDonato, who has been visiting Sing Sing since 2015. “This is a story that has real consequences.”An inmate in the choir at Sing Sing. Some prisoners in the Musical Connections program declined to take part in the opera because of concerns about its dark themes, including the portrayal of a prisoner’s death by lethal injectionJames Estrin/The New York TimesFor months, the men at Sing Sing worked on an abridged version of “Dead Man Walking.” Bryan Wagorn, a Met pianist, coached them via video chat and recorded individual chorus parts for them to study. (It took several weeks for the files to clear security.) He joined Manuel Bagorro, who manages Carnegie’s program, on visits to the prison.Paul Cortez, 43, who is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for murder, worked with Wagorn to learn the score and held Saturday night rehearsals with small groups of prisoners at Sing Sing. Some were initially hesitant, unsure if the opera advanced prisoners’ rights and fearing they “might be exploited,” he said, but eventually more people started showing up.“It was daunting at first,” said Cortez, who majored in theater in college. “I did not know how I was going to get the guys in shape. But they were so diligent. They took it seriously.”From left, Sister Helen; Wilson Chimborazo, an inmate who sings in the chorus; McKinny; Joseph Striplin, another inmate singing in the production; and DiDonato.James Estrin/The New York TimesLast month, DiDonato, joined by Sister Helen, 84, visited the prison to work through the music and to get to know the participants. They discussed life in prison, morality, shame and stigma, as well as Sister Helen’s efforts to abolish the death penalty. Some inmates, saying they were still consumed by guilt about their crimes, asked about seeking forgiveness.DiDonato and Sister Helen returned last week, two days after opening night at the Met, joined by singers and staff from the Met and Carnegie Hall, and by Heggie, who offered guidance on adapting the opera for a smaller stage and reviewed some of the inmates’ Musical Connections compositions.“We’ve got each other’s backs,” DiDonato said to everyone as rehearsal got underway. “This, now, is our circle.”DiDonato, who has been visiting Sing Sing since 2015, rehearsing in the chapel with inmates. “This is not just theater,” she said. “This is a story that has real consequences.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThe Met singers introduced themselves, taking pains to remind the inmates that they were only pretending to be prison guards and police officers. (“Clemency!” a prisoner shouted, after the bass Raymond Aceto announced he was playing the role of a warden.)Sister Helen, standing among the inmates, said that there was love and trust in the room.“This is a sacred gathering,” she added. “There is no place on earth at this time that I’d rather be. We’re going to create beauty today, and you’re going to feel it.”For more than five hours, the men worked with the Met artists, under the conductor Steven Osgood, practicing rhythm, diction and dynamics in three sections that feature the chorus.They stomped their feet and clapped their hands in “He Will Gather Us Around,” a spiritual that opens the opera, which is typically performed by women and children. And they sang with fiery intensity as De Rocher confesses his murder, shortly before his execution.The Met singers and Sister Helen after the performance. Susan Graham, third from left, told the inmates that she had not fully understood the meaning of the opera until that day.James Estrin/The New York TimesThe bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, who sings the role of De Rocher, offered encouragement, telling the inmates, “This is your moment to shine.” The soprano Latonia Moore, who performs as Sister Rose, complimented the speed with which they had learned a contemporary opera. “Bravo to you,” she said.And Susan Graham, the mezzo-soprano who plays De Rocher’s mother at the Met and originated the role of Sister Helen at the premiere of “Dead Man Walking” in 2000, told the inmates that she had not fully understood the meaning of the opera until that day.Then, around 6:30 p.m., an audience of inmates and corrections officials took their seats in the auditorium, adjacent to the chapel.“The most beautiful thing in the world is a human being that does something and is transformed,” Sister Helen said in introducing the opera. “Everybody’s worth more than the worst thing they ever did.”“How you lifted your voices tonight — that spirits stays here,” DiDonato told the inmates after the performance. “It is embedded in my heart.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThe prisoners watched intensely, tapping their toes on the concrete floor and gasping when an irate De Rocher tells Sister Helen: “You’re not a nun. You’re the angel of death.” One man stood up to applaud a scene near the end when De Rocher and Sister Helen tell each other, “I love you,” shortly before he is killed. After the final rendition of “He Will Gather Us Around,” the audience offered a standing ovation.Chorus members were moved too, including Hale, who said that De Rocher’s confession “blew me away.” He hoped that the opera would inspire inmates to take responsibility for their crimes.“We have to deal with the life we have left and move forward,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing here. You have murderers singing this piece at Sing Sing.”A guard watches over the production. “You have murderers singing this piece at Sing Sing,” said the inmate Michael Shane Hale.James Estrin/The New York TimesDiDonato told the chorus members that they had created something indelible.“How you lifted your voices tonight — that spirits stays here,” she said. “It is embedded in my heart.”In their few remaining minutes together in the chapel, the prisoners and artists embraced and signed programs. Security officers wandered the pews, reminding the inmates that it was time to go back to their cells.As a guard motioned toward an exit, Cortez thanked DiDonato and the other artists, telling them, “I will never forget this moment.”Then he headed for the door. “Now,” he said, “back to reality.” More

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      A Film-Minded Director Returns to the Metropolitan Opera

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      Mariusz Trelinski returns to the Metropolitan Opera next year with a new staging of “La Forza del Destino,” which leans into psychoanalysis and fate.In Verdi’s epic opera “La Forza del Destino” (“The Power of Destiny”), none of the characters can escape the inexorable drive toward a tragic ending. The director Mariusz Trelinski, originally a filmmaker by training, has identified one force in particular that determines the events.“It is a story about patricide and the consequences,” he said by phone from Lyon, France, referring to the death of the Marquis of Calatrava. “The killing of the father in the first act determines the fate of all the characters. They are pushed like billiard balls and can only continue rolling passively.”From Feb. 26 to March 29, Mr. Trelinski will mount the Metropolitan Opera’s first new staging of the opera in nearly three decades. It is a co-production with Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera in Warsaw, where Mr. Trelinski serves as artistic director and where the production was first seen in January.At the Met, the music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts a cast including Lise Davidsen in her role debut as a Spanish noblewoman, Donna Leonora de Vargas, and Brian Jagde as her suitor, Don Alvaro, who is half Peruvian. Igor Golovatenko plays her brother Don Carlo de Vargas — whom Alvaro kills in a duel.The relationship between Mr. Trelinski, 61, and the Met began in 2015 with a double bill of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Tchaikovsky’s one-act opera, “Iolanta.” The next year, the Met’s season opened with his staging of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” Both operas emerged in co-production with the Polish National Opera (“Tristan” was additionally mounted at the Baden-Baden Festival in Germany).A scene from “Bluebeard’s Castle” at the Met, which was directed by Mr. Trelinski in 2015.Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaThe director’s career in opera first took off with a 1999 production of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” that traveled from Warsaw to Washington and Los Angeles, followed by stops in Valencia, Spain; Tel Aviv; and St. Petersburg, Russia. Known for his contemporary but clear visual language, Mr. Trelinski was in 2018 named best director at the International Opera Awards in London.The following interview has been edited and condensed.You often approach your characters from a psychoanalytical perspective. Tell us more about your production of “La Forza del Destino.”For me, Calatrava is the symbol of patriarchy. His assassination is a rejection of everything that has formed us: norms, laws and logos. After that moment, the characters become slaves of the situation.It is an epic story that unfolds over about 20 years. We begin with Calatrava’s birthday party, where we see the elite of society and the prestige of military forces.After that, war breaks out. We see that the world is turned upside-down. And in the third part, after so many years, we see the ruin of civilization. Our heroes are older and tired.The set is in almost permanent motion, as a kind of metaphor for the mad rush of fate and events that you cannot stop. We cannot stop these wheels from turning until the end of our lives.Does faith or God offer any promise of redemption?Nowadays faith does not consist of the divine judgments we find in Verdi’s opera, but rather human complexes that are deeply inscribed in the fabric of life. The result is broken lives, children searching for a kind of surrogate father, and a series of false unconscious choices.This is the reason Leonora takes refuge in a monastery and Alvaro joins the army. They choose a surrogate father because these are patriarchal institutions. We cast the same singer [Soloman Howard] as Calatrava and the superior of the monastery, Padre Guardiano, to drive home this principle.“La Forza del Destino” at the Polish National Opera.Krzysztof Bieliński/Teatr Wielki – Polish National OperaAnd true love has no chance in these societal structures?I think Verdi’s answer is pessimistic. Love initially gives Leonora and Alvaro together hope for a different life. But patricide separates them for many years.When they finally meet again, they see in each other the ones who killed the father. They both feel guilty and cannot live together.Verdi is very clever here. The crime leaves behind such a wound that even love cannot really repair it.I have staged “La Traviata,” where you also have a domineering father who represents patriarchal society. It was important for me to return to this opera and understand this as key to the story.How has your relationship with the Met and [the general manager] Peter Gelb evolved over the years?I’m very happy with the trust we’ve built. And I think a big part of it is my filmic approach. People today see the world through the eyes of cinema — they speak through pictures.This is a key issue because what does it mean to be opera director? An opera director is somebody who can visualize the music.The music really shows you the energy of the production, the tempo of the changes. And it’s always the truth, because there are a few librettos that are really great, but in, let’s say, 70 percent of operas, we have genius music, and the libretto is secondary. And if we want to bring this genre to life, we have to keep this in mind, because the music is eternal. More