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      Met Opera Taps Its Endowment Again to Weather Downturn

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      The company has withdrawn nearly $40 million in additional funds from its endowment to cover expenses, but sees signs it may be emerging from its post-pandemic woes.The Metropolitan Opera, still reeling from the disruption brought by the pandemic, said on Thursday that it had withdrawn nearly $40 million in additional emergency funds from its endowment as it works to survive one of the most trying periods in its 141-year history.The move came after the Met took $30 million from its endowment fund last season to help cover operating expenses amid weak ticket sales and a cash shortfall. Nonprofits usually try to avoid drawing down their endowments, which are meant to grow over time while producing investment income. The Met’s endowment fund is now worth about $255 million, down from $309 million in July.“For most people the pandemic is over. For arts institutions, we’re still in it,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “But we see a way out. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”The company pointed to several signs that it may be turning the corner.Paid attendance has risen to about 73 percent so far this season from roughly 63 percent at the same point last season, and is nearly back to what it was just before the pandemic hit. The Met’s Live in HD cinema broadcasts — which contributed more than $15 million to the company’s bottom line before the pandemic, but are currently only breaking even — are beginning to draw larger crowds. And as the Met presents more contemporary opera, it is attracting younger audiences: The average age of single-ticket buyers for in-person performances has fallen to 44 from 50 before the pandemic.The Met expects cash gifts of more than $100 million to help replenish the endowment over the next few years. The company is also working to land a “transformative” gift, Gelb said. He declined to provide details, saying only that he hoped it would come “sooner rather than later.”Gelb said that the Met “obviously can’t make a habit” of dipping into its endowment, but that the withdrawal would help the company while ticket revenues recover and as it waits for expected donations.Victor Ryan Robertson, left, and Will Liverman, right, in Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” a contemporary opera that attracted an audience this season. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Under the extraordinary financial challenges and circumstances that we’re facing we believed it was the prudent thing to do,” he said. “The alternative would be not to perform.”The Met is hardly the only performing arts organization still struggling to emerge from the pandemic. Across the United States, regional theaters are staging fewer shows, giving fewer performances, laying off staff and, in some cases, shutting down. Orchestras and dance and opera companies have in recent months slashed budgets, sold real estate and trimmed their seasons to try to stay afloat.But the Met faces acute challenges. Mounting live opera is expensive, requiring lavish sets, star singers and a much larger orchestra and chorus than the biggest Broadway shows can boast. Inflation has added to the opera company’s burden, with the costs of shipping and materials increasing sharply. And ticket revenues last season from in-person performances and movie-theater broadcasts were down by about $25 million from before the pandemic.In addition to tapping its endowment, the Met said it would institute measures to cut costs and increase revenues that were suggested by Boston Consulting Group, which conducted a study of the company’s operations on a pro bono basis.The Met has already begun giving fewer performances: 194 this season, down from 215 last season. It plans to change its scheduling over the next few years so that each opera has a more condensed run; they currently can have two or three short runs that may be spread out in the fall, winter and spring. Doing so will allow the company, which sometimes presents as many as four different operas in the course of a week, to have fewer operas in rotation at any given moment. And the plans call for scheduling more of the Met’s most popular titles, like Puccini’s “La Bohème,” on weekends, when they tend to bring in substantially more revenue than less familiar works. These changes, along with other cost-cutting measures and more targeted marketing efforts, are expected to net the company about $25 million to $40 million each year.Even before the pandemic, the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, with an annual budget of about $312 million, faced existential questions, as the old model in which subscribers would buy tickets to many productions each year faded.The pandemic, which forced the company to shut down for more than a year and a half, exacerbated those troubles. Many of the Met’s patrons, who are older, stopped attending live performances and cinema broadcasts as frequently, leaving the company looking for new audiences.This season, the Met accelerated its embrace of contemporary works, which have made up a greater share of the repertory in recent seasons.Modern operas have proved over the past few years to be more of a box-office draw on average than the classics. In December, Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” ended an eight-performance run with 78 percent attendance — outselling “La Bohème,” which had 74 percent attendance. Others fared less well: Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” which was promoted heavily and given the coveted spot to open the 2023-24 season, ended its nine-performance run in October with 62 percent attendance.Later this season the Met will bring back Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” hoping to replicate their success in earlier seasons, when they drew sellout crowds.Next season, the Met will present four contemporary operas, down from six this season. “Grounded,” about the toll of drone warfare by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, will open the season in September. John Adams will conduct the Met premiere of his latest opera, “Antony and Cleopatra.” And Heggie’s “Moby Dick” and Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar” will also be on the agenda.Gelb said he was confident that the Met’s bet on contemporary opera would pay off, adding that ticket sales could surpass prepandemic levels next season. “We’re demonstrating that accessible, new work that is emotionally impactful can be as successful or more successful than revivals of classics,” he said.While works like “La Bohème” and Bizet’s “Carmen” continue to draw crowds, and a holiday version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” had 87 percent attendance over 13 performances in December, there has been less interest in other staples of the repertory. A nine-performance revival of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” ended in November with 56 percent attendance; an eight-performance run of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” with a starry international cast, finished with 64 percent attendance.Gelb said that the company would continue to present an array of classics and revivals: Richard Strauss’s fairy tale opera “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” for one, will be staged in the 2024-25 season.The recent withdrawals have undone some of the Met’s halting attempts to rebuild its endowment, which has long been seen as too small for an institution of its size, and meant that the smaller fund did not benefit as much from the recent stock market rally. The Met, which has been authorized to draw an additional $40 million from the endowment, has withdrawn $36 million so far.Asked if he was concerned about the dwindling endowment, Gelb said: “It’s what keeps me up at night.” He said the latest withdrawals were necessary because the company was “fighting for our survival.”“The endowment is there certainly not to be raided,” he said, “but to be used in a time of crisis rather than going out of business.”Across the country, opera companies of all sizes are still grappling with the effects of the pandemic as they face smaller audiences because of shifting habits and lifestyles, rising costs and the loss of government aid that kept many alive during the pandemic.Opera Philadelphia eliminated five staff positions this season and slashed its budget by about 15 percent. Seattle Opera, seeing a steep drop in subscriptions, has significantly reduced its slate of performances, and Portland Opera recently said it would sell its headquarters to help pay off debt and replenish its endowment. Tulsa Opera scaled back its season, moving some performances to smaller venues. And Syracuse Opera, facing ticket sales that were still more than 40 percent below prepandemic levels and difficulties securing sponsors, announced in November that it was canceling the rest of its season and furloughing staff.“We’re competing with traveling Broadway shows and popular concerts,” said Camille Tisdel, the chair of Syracuse Opera’s board. “Families have only so much money to spend, and during the pandemic, people really got used to being at home.”The Met has so far avoided serious disruptions to its operations. But there are still fears that without a significant infusion of cash in the near future, there could be more turbulence.“I believe ultimately we are going to find a winning path,” Gelb said. “We have very loyal audiences and very loyal new audiences who believe the Met is a thrilling and exciting cultural institution. And ultimately that is how we’re going to fight our way out of this difficult hole that the pandemic has helped put us in.” More

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      The Metropolitan Opera Moves Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ to America

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      Starring a magnetic Aigul Akhmetshina, Carrie Cracknell’s lethargic staging updates Bizet’s opera to present-day America.The Metropolitan Opera says its new production of “Carmen” aims at “reinvigorating the classic story.”To that end, the director Carrie Cracknell has updated Bizet’s tale of a heedless, headstrong woman and her tragic fate from early-19th-century Spain to present-day America. It seems that the action has been placed somewhere along the border with Mexico, where guns are smuggled in long-haul trucks and rodeo riders (rather than the libretto’s toreadors) are local celebrities.But this change — intended “to find the relevance to contemporary concerns” in the piece, as Cracknell says in an interview in the program — ends up being little change at all. The bland, lethargic staging, which opened on New Year’s Eve, falls into the pattern of so many of the Met’s updatings: It is, almost gesture for gesture, the same as any extra-stale traditional “Carmen,” just dressed up in cutoff jeans and trucker hats instead of flamenco skirts and castanets.Don’t be fooled. The only truly impressive aspect of this “Carmen” is its Carmen: the 27-year-old mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, in turquoise cowboy boots. Though this icon of the repertory is her first leading role at the Met, she seems unfazed by the pressure, singing with easily penetrating evenness and clarity, never needing to push. Her molten yet agile tone can be confiding one moment and extroverted the next, and she moves with magnetic naturalness onstage.But she suffers from a staging that lacks passion, wit, depth and variety. Cracknell, who is making her Met debut, describes her directorial approach as “looking through a feminist lens.” Perhaps because harshness or darkness in the title character could be perceived as antifeminist — as Carmen somehow provoking her ex-lover to kill her rather than lose her — Akhmetshina’s take on the part is fundamentally sweet and sincere, well-meaning and fun-loving. Even her seductiveness is gently nonthreatening, with the same old hand-on-hip mannerisms as the Carmens of a century ago.The other leading artists are still more at sea. As the opera’s ingénue, the soprano Angel Blue swings up to excitingly free high notes, but her voice pales a bit and wavers with vibrato lower down — and the production can’t decide whether it wants the standard meek Micaëla or a more assertive woman. As Escamillo, here a selfie-taking rodeo star rather than a bullfighter, the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen swaggers just enough to remain sympathetic, his sound compactly resonant.Akhmetshina and the tenor Rafael Davila, who played Don José in the production’s New Year’s Eve opening.Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaOn Sunday, the tenor Rafael Davila had the tough assignment of replacing Piotr Beczala, who was announced as ill just a few hours before curtain, as Don José, the soldier whose mania for Carmen drives him from decent country boy to murderous outlaw. Davila’s sturdy voice grew unreliable as it rose, and in a staging seeking to shift as much moral responsibility as possible onto José, he was, oddly, no more violent or volatile than the norm.The conductor Daniele Rustioni kept to moderate, well-judged tempos, and the train always stayed firmly on the tracks, including precise work by the chorus — although that came at the expense of ferocity and sensuality. In the preludes to the third and fourth acts were glimpses of a wilder, more expansive and more beautiful vision of Bizet’s score.Michael Levine’s sets are grandly spare and unevocative. With a high chain-link fence awkwardly shoving much of the action to a thin strip downstage, the first act takes place outside a factory making weapons, rather than the libretto’s cigarettes. Carmen and her merry band make off with a truck that then dominates the second and — crashed and burning on its side — third act. Skeletal, cagelike black bleachers rotate ominously in the fourth.Modern-day touches abound. Ann Yee’s choreography for a little second-act dance party echoes the finger-pumping-in-the-air style of the crowd at a pop show; the rodeo audience does the wave. Tom Scutt’s costumes are plausible Carhartt-ish evocations of today’s border country denizens; Guy Hoare’s lighting veers wildly, naturalistic to stark to frantic.Yet the 21st-century-ness is all on the surface, even if Cracknell’s goal is nothing less than a revolution in the opera’s sexual dynamics. “Ending violence against women and reimagining the depiction of violence against women,” she says, “live at the center of the feminist movement.”But this “Carmen” reimagines nothing. It seems from her interviews that Cracknell wants to emphasize the broader structures of gender and class that make Carmen’s death a societal tragedy instead of an individual crime of passion. But the director struggles to render that distinction legible to the audience.The bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, as the rodeo star Escamillo, takes a selfie with Akhmetshina and a crowd.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSure, a security guard walks by during Carmen and José’s final confrontation and doesn’t intervene. And at the end, the women in the bleachers at the rodeo rise in solidarity while the men remain seated. But it’s all too little, too late for anything approaching a structural critique — or even just interesting, vibrant theater.Some of Cracknell’s choices, in fact, make the work less provocative. The children’s chorus mimics the changing of the guard in the opera’s opening act; if you’d like, society is training them for militarism. But rather than doubling down, Cracknell has the kids sing directly to the audience, choosing charm over menace.And it’s wrongheaded to imply, as Cracknell does, that the male chauvinism has been suppressed and the violence romanticized in previous “Carmen” productions. At the Met alone, I remember a performance of an old-fashioned Franco Zeffirelli staging around 2000, a few years after it premiered, in which the deadly final scene really did provide the queasy sensation of spying through a window on a murder, with all the attendant feelings of horror, excitement and shame.Richard Eyre’s production, which replaced the Zeffirelli in 2009 and set the work at the time of the Spanish Civil War, introduced a pervading sense of grimness, of the characters being thrown together by forces beyond their control. That was a show in which you certainly felt Carmen’s brooding fate more than her stereotypical insouciance or sex appeal. It made the stakes of the opera clearer and darker than they were on Sunday.And in removing the opera’s exoticizing of Spain as the playground of bandits and Gypsies, Cracknell, who is British, introduces a more insidious exoticizing. As in the Australian director Simon Stone’s 2022 Met staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” the frisson of this “Carmen” is its glib depiction of so-called flyover states — the part of the country that fascinates the operagoing elite as much as Seville fascinated 19th-century Paris.There’s something depressing, even corrosive, in taking such a superficial glance at our fellow Americans, when — especially as an election year dawns — our cultural institutions should be trying to help us understand one another.CarmenThrough Jan. 27, and returning in the spring with a new cast, at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Murder Most Unromantic in a New ‘Carmen’ at the Metropolitan Opera

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      A close observer might have noticed the flicker of menace that passed between the man and the woman: how his hand, which had just cupped her cheek, slid down and opened to encircle her throat. But though her body grew still for a moment, it didn’t show fear. Instead, she seemed to give as good as she got during their heated exchange of words that occurs in full view of a crowd — a crowd that appeared to freeze when he grabbed her arm and roughly shoved her, sending her flying to the ground.Domestic abuse is often considered a private problem that happens behind closed doors. On New Year’s Eve, it will take center stage at the Metropolitan Opera in a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” conducted by Daniele Rustioni. The opening run stars the Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina in the title role and the tenor Piotr Beczala as José, the soldier whose obsession with Carmen culminates in her murder. The modern-dress production, set near an unspecified border in America, includes scenes like this moment from Act II, rehearsed on a recent afternoon, that aim to shed light on society’s complicity in violence against women.The production’s director, Carrie Cracknell, said she wanted to question the view that Carmen’s death at the hands of José is a crime of passion, the result of her corrupting and discarding an innocent soldier. “We talk about domestic violence as these things which we understand to be a secret between a man and a woman,” she said. In the case of Carmen’s death, she added, “we’re trying to frame that as an outcome that feels as much about gender as about two individuals.”Akhmetshina rehearsing. The production is set not in Andalusia but at an unspecified American border.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe British Cracknell, 43, has made a name for herself in theater with acclaimed productions of works like Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and Euripides’ “Medea” — stories, she said, “about women who find themselves caged by patriarchal structures and cause chaos as a way of dealing with it.” With “Carmen,” her Met debut, she takes on a reliable box office hit, one whose title character — with her teasing, chromatic melodies — came to define operatic sex appeal for generations.But these days the opera also leaves many uncomfortable with its French colonialist fantasies played out in an Andalusia peopled by licentious women and lawless smugglers, a place that risks luring a good man away from duty, family and the churchgoing girl his mother wants him to marry. When José stabs Carmen at the same moment that her new lover triumphs inside the bullfighting arena, it feels as if Bizet is not only killing off a character but restoring the hierarchical order of his time.In recent years, productions have put new spins on this ending. In Cologne, the director Lydia Steier had Carmen wrest back enough agency to kill herself. At the Royal Opera House in London, Barrie Kosky’s androgynous Carmen rose up after her death with a shrug. In a 2018 production in Florence, directed by Leo Muscato, Carmen turned the gun on José and shot him. (That drew disapproving tweets from the future prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni.)The musicologist Susan McClary, who has been publishing studies on class, race and sex in classical music since the early 1990s, said in a video interview that while the tensions in “Carmen” lend themselves to modern interpretation, the music makes the audience complicit in craving the destruction of Carmen and what she represents.“The problem is that final chord, which seems to shout ‘hurrah!’” McClary said. Up until then, she argues, the slippery chromaticism of Carmen’s music has been pitted against the more stable lyricism that characterizes José and Micaëla, the childhood sweetheart sent by his mother to bring him to his senses. At the moment in which the bullfighter triumphs and José moves in for the kill, McClary said, “all of the dissonances that have led up to that in the confrontation between José and Carmen are suddenly resolved in that chord.”Cracknell said of Carmen’s death: “We’re trying to frame that as an outcome that feels as much about gender as about two individuals.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCracknell said that while it is inevitable that audiences feel pulled toward the dramatic resolution of the opera — which here is the death of a woman — she wants to “de-romanticize” Carmen’s death. When women are killed by their intimate partners, “the reality of these things is that they’re chaotic and messy and horrific and that they destroy lives,” she said. “So we’ve tried to replicate that rather than allowing it to feel like a kind of intimate, central moment of transition.”In Akhmetshina, who is making her highly anticipated Met debut, Cracknell has an interpreter who brings deep experience with the work to the stage. At 27, Akhmetshina has already sung the role in so many productions — this is her seventh, and she has plans to star in two more, at London’s Royal Opera House and at Glyndebourne — that she can rattle off a list of different takes on the death scene. In an interview in between rehearsals, she spoke of Carmen as a character who continues to be unsettling.“What is fascinating is that women hate Carmen and men hate Carmen,” Akhmetshina said, still wearing her costume of black leather trousers, a black cutout top and turquoise cowboy boots. “Women because they cannot have the same power, men because they cannot control her.” Even today, she said, “our world is not ready for Carmen. She’s absolutely honest and truthful.”In one production, she said, her character willed José to kill her to put an end to his killing men he was jealous of. In another, she committed suicide in a desperate search for intense feelings. Earlier this season at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, in a staging set among organ traffickers, she joked that she spent so much time “cutting people in pieces” that she was ready to kill Carmen herself. “I was like, ‘just murder her,’” she said, “that’s it. Get rid of her.”Akhmetshina said she identified with Carmen’s outsider perspective and love of freedom. She grew up in a village in Bashkortostan, the daughter of a single mother of three. “Until I moved to the city, I never thought that we were not OK,” she said. “We had a farm and everything was enough.” When she moved to a city, she encountered a different reality — of steep rents and airfares so high, her mother’s salary could barely cover the cost of a flight to Moscow. “The whole structure is built so that people from the small places stay in their place,” she said.A scene from Cracknell’s “Carmen” with Akhmetshina (in blue cowboy boots), who said she identified with Carmen’s outsider perspective and love of freedom.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I needed space, I needed freedom,” Akhmetshina said. “I’m half Tatar, half Bashkir. If you look at the history of these small nations, we were constantly traveling around mountains, the forest, living in small communities that constantly moved around.” Her affinity with Carmen runs deeper than music, she said. “It’s kind of in my blood.”Ethnic difference is not a factor in Cracknell’s production, which instead highlights gender and class tensions. For the choreographer Ann Yee, this was an opportunity to develop dances free of castanets and flamenco clichés. She described Carmen’s allure as connecting more to psychological yearnings than to Orientalist fantasy. “We’ve hooked into this idea of liberation and wildness, about what is on the other side of the journey, the border,” she said in an interview. “It’s this wild appetite that exists in Carmen and which radiates through the people that she is a part of.”Yee said that removing “Carmen” from the Andalusian context also helped to sharpen its feminist message. “If you are looking too hard to situate it in one place, it becomes more difficult to realize that this could happen anywhere.” By the time Carmen meets her death, Yee suggested, “we can all hold ourselves accountable.”“Women are still killed by their partners on an enormous scale in most places in the world,” Cracknell said. “And we are obsessed with that narrative.” In her production, she emphasizes the number of witnesses who watch José’s jealousy turn progressively more menacing without intervening.In the Act III confrontation that results in Carmen being pushed to the floor, not one of her fellow smugglers steps in to help. Instead it is Micaëla, the character Bizet created as Carmen’s opposite and rival, sung here by the soprano Angel Blue, who offers a helping hand. Carmen accepts it, reluctantly, but lets go of it so quickly that she comes to her feet in an embarrassed stumble.Cracknell said it was Blue who had come up with the idea in rehearsal. “Angel just instinctively walked over and helped her up,” she said. “It became this incredible, simple moment of solidarity between these two stepping outside of the trope of two women being pitted against each other and fighting at all costs to win the man. And in that moment, Micaëla’s choice was to support another woman and to see her as a victim in her own right.” More

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      Mildred Miller, Stalwart of the Metropolitan Opera, Dies at 98

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      In her 23 years at the Met, she sang with the greatest stars of her day. She had a second career as a leading figure in the artistic life of Pittsburgh.Mildred Miller as Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera, which was said to be her favorite role. Sedge LeBlanc/The Metropolitan OperaThe mezzo-soprano Mildred Miller Posvar sang opera’s so-called trouser roles so many times that one of her daughters once told a friend, “My mommy is a boy.”Ms. Posvar, known in her professional life as Mildred Miller, was Cherubino in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” a record-breaking 61 times at the Metropolitan Opera House. Her warm, even tone and clear diction became associated indelibly with the composer’s amorous page in the way that Kirsten Flagstad was with Isolde and Feodor Chaliapin with Boris Godunov. She “defined that role for a generation of opera lovers,” Opera News said about her. And there were many other roles as well.Ms. Posvar died on Nov. 29 at her home in Pittsburgh. She was 98.Her death was confirmed by her daughter Lisa Posvar Rossi and by the Metropolitan Opera, where she sang in 338 performances, including the title role in “Carmen,” Suzuki in “Madama Butterfly” and Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier,” which was said to be her favorite.After her debut at the Met on Nov. 17, 1951, the New York Times critic Noel Straus wrote that she had “scored heavily” as Cherubino and that she had “a handsome magnetic stage presence; a fine, fresh voice expertly produced; and pronounced histrionic ability.”Ms. Miller would go on to perform with the company for another 23 years; her final performance was on Dec. 3, 1974, as Lola in “Cavalleria Rusticana.” In Europe as well as the U.S., she sang with the greatest stars of her day: Nicolai Gedda, Leontyne Price, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and others. She was already broadly known in the U.S. by the end of the 1950s, thanks to appearances on television shows like “Voice of Firestone” and “The Bell Telephone Hour.”Ms. Miller and Lawrence Davidson rehearsing the Met’s production of Gounod’s “Faust” in 1953. She was with the Met from 1951 to 1974.Sam Falk/The New York TimesPerhaps the highlight of her career was the recordings she made of Mahler’s great orchestral song cycles with Bruno Walter, the magisterial conductor who had given the premiere of one of them. Walter handpicked the young Ms. Miller for his 1960 recording of “Das Lied von der Erde,” 49 years after giving the first performance in Munich; afterward, according to the 2001 book “Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere,” by Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, he said, “I don’t think we can improve on that.” A 1963 recording she made with Walter of “Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen” won the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque in France.Her reviews were mostly excellent throughout her career, with a few quibbles here and there. “My impression is that she was a really solid singer who sang well and was really important to the company,” said Peter Clark, the former archives director at the Metropolitan Opera. “The kind of solid singer that the Met really depended on. She could sing whatever the Met asked her to.”Ms. Miller also had a second career, as a leading figure in the artistic life of Pittsburgh, which assumed more importance after her retirement from the Met. In 1967 her husband, Wesley Posvar, had become president of the University of Pittsburgh, and 11 years later Ms. Miller founded, with Helen Knox, the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, now known as the Pittsburgh Festival Opera, which has been notable in the development of emerging opera stars. The company established the Mildred Miller International Voice Competition in 2011.Mildred Müller was born on Dec. 16, 1924, in Cleveland, the daughter of immigrants from Germany, Wilhelm and Elsa Müller. Rudolf Bing, the Met’s imperious general manager, later insisted that she Americanize her surname, given the proximity of the war years. Her father owned a household decorating store in Cleveland and was, she later recalled, “very strict” about her piano practicing.She graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1946 and from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied under the famous midcentury opera conductor and impresario Boris Goldovsky, in 1948. “He taught me to sing and act,” she later said.She made her opera debut at the Tanglewood Music Festival in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” under Leonard Bernstein, who she later said conducted with his fists. She was beginning to be noticed.When Mr. Bing contacted her for the Met, she turned him down because she wasn’t satisfied with the role he offered. She later turned him down a second time. It wasn’t until the third try that he snagged her, for the role of Cherubino, which she would go on to make her own.Ms. Miller played so many so-called trouser roles in her career that one of her daughters once told a friend, “My mommy is a boy.”Opera VictoriaHer husband died in 2001. In addition to her daughter Lisa, she is survived by another daughter, Marina Posvar; a son, Wesley William Posvar; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.Ms. Miller also made her mark in the world of lieder. Critics remarked on the naturalness of her diction in German and, as was typical of music criticism at the time, her striking appearance: She “seems to acquire more of the accouterments of glamour with each passing year,” the critic Allen Hughes wrote in The Times in 1966, going on to offer a mild complaint that her lieder recital had “created a hunger for simplicity,” before offering the condescending observation that “one wondered how Miss Miller would sing these songs if she wore a simple sweater and skirt.”All that notwithstanding, he concluded, the “recital was virtually flawless from start to finish.” More

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      Can One of Opera’s Greatest Singers Get Her Voice Back?

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      Anita Rachvelishvili was pregnant when she began to lose her voice.It was the middle of 2021. She and her husband had tried for years to conceive, and it seemed like a child would be the storybook ending to being forced to slow down during the pandemic. Rachvelishvili, the Georgian mezzo-soprano, had spent the previous decade crisscrossing the world, blazing through some of the most difficult parts in opera.She made her name with a potent combination of capacious sound and interpretive subtlety. In 2018, Riccardo Muti, the pre-eminent Verdi conductor, called her “without doubt the best Verdi mezzo-soprano today on the planet.” Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, recently said: “She was the greatest dramatic mezzo-soprano singing. It seemed there was no big, meaty role she couldn’t tackle.”Rachvelishvili sang Carmen, the role of her 2009 breakthrough, hundreds of times, and was scheduled to ring in 2024 as Bizet’s classic antiheroine in the splashy premiere of a new production at the Met.Instead, the show will go on without her. Rachvelishvili, 39, will spend New Year’s Eve at home in Tbilisi, where she was born, as she tries to reconstruct the fundamentals of the voice that brought her stardom and then abandoned her.“It is a nightmare, a total nightmare,” she said over dinner in September at a rustic restaurant nestled in the woods outside the city. “I’ve had two years of nightmare at this point.”Transforming the body and causing sweeping hormonal changes, pregnancy is rarely easy for opera singers, who rely on a carefully calibrated physical apparatus to dependably produce huge waves of unamplified sound. Rachvelishvili had not quite felt herself in the handful of performances she did while she was carrying the baby — her voice, she said, came out “scratchy and strange” — but she assumed things would return to normal after the birth.Lioness: Rachvelishvili at the Tbilisi State Conservatory, where she studied after auditioning with a Whitney Houston song.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesShe delivered her daughter, Lileana, in late November 2021, and something still felt different, though the lower part of her voice was, if anything, bigger than before. She figured she could handle the low-lying role of Marfa in Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” which she was to rehearse in Paris just a month later — months sooner than many singers return after giving birth.“It was the worst decision of my life,” she said, sitting alongside Otari Maisuradze, her husband — who became her vocal coach, too, after a rift with her teacher early in her crisis.Over a week of conversations, meals, walks and drives in and around Tbilisi, Rachvelishvili described how rushing back to the stage had helped set off an agonizing dance of one step forward, two steps back. Seeming improvement would be countered by dispiriting nights, and the increased size of her low notes was offset by the sudden disappearance of her high ones. Her once-steady confidence and smooth column of sound were both fractured.“You start having big panic attacks, then you lose control completely,” she said. “Of breath, of body. Everything.”Her husband spoke softly. “She was my lioness,” he said. “I am very proud I have very strong women in my family. But these two years, with this trouble, she became like a little cat.”A VOICE IS A MYSTERIOUS, largely invisible amalgam of body and psyche — of tiny, vibrating vocal cords; muscles that provide support for the breath; cavities through which sound resonates; and the self-belief to fearlessly deploy it all. Problems are inevitable, though the path to overcoming them is uncertain, since medical interventions can be chancy. And talking about them is still stigmatized within the industry, perhaps in part because responses to artists are already so subjective that illness or injury can cloud later evaluation even if the difficulty has been “fixed.”“Every singer, at some point, will have some kind of vocal issue,” said the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who made an arduous recovery from surgery on her cords earlier in her career. “It’s like football players: Every quarterback has some shoulder issue at some point.”Rachvelishvili warming up with her husband, who has become her vocal coach.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesMaria Callas couldn’t undo her instrument’s unraveling. In an essay about her, the conductor and critic Will Crutchfield once wrote, “There is no example of an important operatic singer encountering serious vocal problems and returning to form.”That is true, to a point. The tenor Jonas Kaufmann has been open about vocal issues, yet has managed to keep singing challenging parts at a high level. But Rolando Villazón, another 21st-century star tenor, never recovered from his troubles.“Every singer goes through that fear of the high notes, or feeling not really comfortable with your voice,” Rachvelishvili said. “I just need to have this battle with myself, by myself. Nobody else can help me. I need to remember how I was, and how Anita did it.”THOUGH SHE CAME TO OPERA LATE — she sang a Whitney Houston song when she auditioned for conservatory — Rachvelishvili was not merely an intuitive natural talent but also a smart, dedicated musician. She slowly built on a firm technique and stuck to her relatively low signature role as she waited and worked.“I sang Carmen for so many years because I didn’t have easy high notes,” she said. “I took time to learn how to do those notes so that the body knew what it was doing.”Those notes grew stronger without her pushing, and she practiced diligently to incorporate the nuances, colors and seductive soft singing that set her apart from many who shared her repertoire. She sang the wild Azucena in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” with startling refinement in 2018 at the Met, where her triumphs culminated in a scorching run as the Princesse de Bouillon in Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” early in 2019.Rachvelishvili and Otari Maisuradze with their daughter, Lileana, who was born in November 2021. Rachvelishvili’s vocal problems began when she was pregnant.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesHer future seemed limitless. In addition to Azucena and Verdi’s Eboli and Amneris, major roles in “Les Troyens,” “Werther,” “La Favorite” and “La Gioconda” were on the horizon. With her powerful high notes, sumptuous tone and onstage intensity, it seemed that Wagner’s Ortrud, Fricka, Kundry and even Isolde — the province of big-voiced sopranos — might be possible.Then came the pandemic. Rachvelishvili had struggled to get pregnant in the past, but she said that the drastic reduction in travel and stress in 2020, as well as the hormones prescribed by her doctor, helped it happen.Fearful of losing the baby, she was cautious in the early days of the pregnancy, but she sang some performances in mid-2021. Muti said of their concert “Aida” in Italy that summer, “She was able in the past to hold long phrases without any problem, and now going in the high register she had some difficulty.”Still, he added, “you could feel, here and there, the great singer.”When she sang “Khovanshchina” in Paris so soon after giving birth, it was possible, because of the role’s low center of vocal gravity, to believe she was back in her old shape — even if a short excerpt posted by the opera company suggests that her tone had grown more fragile, her vibrato wider, even beyond her high notes.“It was like a completely different body,” Rachvelishvili said, “with a completely different voice.”“It was like a completely different body,” Rachvelishvili said of performing after giving birth, “with a completely different voice.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesIn the past, her muscular support had originated down by her pelvis, but that was disrupted by the pregnancy and birth. While she searched for a new approach, her next engagement, “Adriana Lecouvreur” at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in early 2022, was disastrous. The Princesse’s high notes, once easy for her, refused to come. At the premiere, Rachvelishvili fled the theater in despair before her curtain call, something she had never done.“It was the most horrible experience of my life, not being able to sing the way I wanted,” she said. “I couldn’t go out after a performance like that. It’s not the old Anita they’re used to, or I’m used to. I’m not going out; it’s insulting to them, to La Scala.”She canceled the rest of the run, then moved on to Munich, where she had a long rehearsal period before she was supposed to sing her first Didon in Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” A doctor saw inflammation on her vocal cords; it could have been allergies, acid reflux, a hormonal imbalance or laryngitis, or some combination of those factors.Unable to produce high notes or offer the elegant control of volume and texture for which she was admired, she left before the premiere. She began to lose faith in herself, which set off a vicious cycle with her physical problems.“I said to my therapist that I’d kill myself if it wasn’t for the baby,” she recalled. “I have a baby to take care of.”She was also her family’s breadwinner. Maisuradze had long ago devoted himself to supporting her career, and even star singers are freelancers.“The responsibility is huge, because everybody depends on me working,” she said. “I have my parents to take care of, and my family, and the baby. People said that if I couldn’t sing, I should just stop. And I said, ‘Will you feed my family if I stop?’ I have to at least try and try and try. I need to bring some money to the table.”But in summer 2022, she had to drop “Cavalleria Rusticana” in London and “Aida” in Salzburg before they opened. Leaving the “Aida,” Rachvelishvili released a statement citing back pain after the birth of her daughter and asking “all haters and even some colleagues” to “please stop inventing stories about me losing my voice or nonsense like this.”She retreated to Tbilisi to work. And early in fall 2022, she was able to creditably sing the generally low Dalila in Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” in Naples, though her high notes were still problematic.“I said to my therapist that I’d kill myself if it wasn’t for the baby,” Rachvelishvili recalled. “I have a baby to take care of.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesThe tenor Brian Jagde, her co-star in that “Samson” and several other productions during this period, sometimes went so far as to anchor her during scenes with a hand at her waist, to lend the lower muscular support that she no longer felt internally.“There’s nothing harder to watch than a person onstage with you that you believe in so much, and she’s struggling,” he said. “There were clear signs the top wasn’t working like she wanted it to, and she was working desperately to make it work. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.”She canceled a fall run of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” at the Met, but arrived there to sing “Aida” in December. Rachvelishvili thought the first performance went passably, but the company’s administration disagreed.“It was obvious that she was not the same singer — at least temporarily not the same singer — who had conquered our stage so brilliantly up to that point,” Gelb said, and he decided to remove her from the coming “Carmen” and a solo recital that was to have taken place earlier this month.“I had a painful discussion with her in my office, because I wanted her to hear it from me,” he said. “I said that we needed to wait until she was back singing well again, and then we’d be happy to have her return. She had a hard time accepting that.”EARLY THIS YEAR, RACHVELISHVILI was able to get through another “Samson,” in Berlin, and a new role, Charlotte in Massenet’s “Werther,” in Athens, with her body feeling more dependable. But when she returned to Munich in the spring for “Aida,” she began having terrifying panic attacks onstage, paralyzed by fear of the high notes, and left after four of eight performances.“She’s such a tough character, but she’s human,” Jagde said. “That was what I saw progress for her in a negative way: less belief in herself because of what was happening. The physical affected the mental for her.”“On 50 seconds, we are working two or three days,” Maisuradze said of Rachvelishvili’s practice routine. “They must be beautiful, the voice and colors, and stylistically true.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesDropping out of all her engagements after early June, she had minor surgeries for stomach problems and to lessen the effects of acid reflux, and another procedure to remove what she said was a small polyp on her vocal cords. Since then, she has been at home in Tbilisi with her husband and daughter. Lileana, she said, is “worth everything. She’s even worth never singing again.”But she still hopes she can have both. Rachvelishvili and Maisuradze have been painstakingly reviewing her instrument and technique, going through scores phrase by phrase and restitching together her different registers, returning to the basics.“On 50 seconds, we are working two or three days,” Maisuradze said. “They must be beautiful, the voice and colors, and stylistically true.”Of her high register, Rachvelishvili said this month: “It’s not as perfect as I want, or as I had it a few years ago, honestly. But it’s much easier; it’s there; it’s not difficult anymore to take them.”The clock is ticking: A new role, Laura in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda,” is scheduled for April in Naples, before a revival of “Aida” in Munich. Noting her voice’s solid technical foundation, Muti was optimistic.“She is young,” he said, “so she will come back. We are waiting with great enthusiasm.”Rachvelishvili has fought her panic with therapy, antidepressants and meditation, but it still lurks. “All the physical problems, the vocal problems, are gone,” she said. “Right now, I’m just battling with myself and my head to make sure that when I go onstage soon, I will feel calm inside. The joy of being back is so big that it overtakes me sometimes.”She described a recent video call with her manager. “I was doing a high note in Dalila’s second aria,” she said, “and he stopped me: ‘I see the fear in your eyes. Don’t be afraid, just go for it. You can do it without fear in you.’ And I did it, and it was perfect.” More

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      At the Met Opera, ‘Tannhäuser’ Is Halted by Climate Protests

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      A revival of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” was notable for the arrival of Christian Gerhaher. But with an abrupt protest, the performance took a turn.“Wolfram, wake up!” came a shout from the highest box seats of the Metropolitan Opera. “The spring is polluted!”At first, it seemed like an odd thing to throw at the character of Wolfram in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” which returned to the Met on Thursday night, with that role sung by the great baritone Christian Gerhaher in his company debut. (Indeed, his arrival was what made the night notable to begin with.) But that cry was the start of an unbroken stream of climate grievances, designed to coincide with Wolfram’s description, during the singing contest midway through Act II, of love as a miraculous spring.“The spring is tainted!” the protester up in the Family Circle continued, then dropped a banner that said, “No Opera on a Dead Planet.”Several more protesting voices emerged, from the group Extinction Rebellion. Onstage, performers froze in place until the Met’s golden curtain came down around its gilded proscenium. Demonstrators and booing audience members began to roar at each other across the vast auditorium.“Shame!” a person near me yelled in the general direction of the protests. Others howled “Go away!” and “Go home!” As a performatively bothered couple walked out, one of them, a man dressed in black tie, said, “Is there no security here?”People had questions. One person asked an usher, “Are the police here?,” while another usher asked no one in particular, “Where’s Gelb?” — referring to Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.Another banner unfurled from a box seat across the hall, saying “Extinction Rebellion,” accompanied by the group’s logo of a circle with an hourglass inside it. Someone in the box below immediately tried to pull the banner down, obscuring the text, and the woman who had dropped it was suddenly removed from her perch. Security had arrived.Gelb stepped onstage and told the audience: “We’re very sorry for the disturbance. We’re going to be starting in about one minute.”When the performance did restart, though, it didn’t last one minute before another protester rose to shout from the rear of the Orchestra section, holding a square banner of the Extinction Rebellion logo. The curtain came down again.A man near the protester ripped the banner from her hands. Another threw a playbill at her face. Two rows in front of me, someone, seemingly unfazed, started to read on a Kindle.After 20-some minutes of delays, Gelb returned to the stage and told the audience that the performance would continue, but with the house lights on, “so our security personnel in the building can remove any protesters who wish to protest and be arrested.” (The New York City Police Department later said that no arrests had been reported.) Then, he added with a strangely martial tone, “We are not going to be defeated by them.”By that point, the theater was visibly emptier — not just because of the protesters who had been taken out, but also because of the many audience members who simply gave up. Still, the show went on.Here is where I have to offer a necessary disclosure. As a critic, I’m comfortable thinking and writing about the performance up to this point. But, while I have a general sense of what followed — and what followed was excellent — I never felt fully engaged with the show again. There was the visual distraction of vigilant security, and of the police officers in the aisles. And there was the nervous anticipation of the protest’s return: Would it come back in the famed Pilgrims’ Chorus? In the “Song to the Evening Star”?It was understandable that some in the audience had been dismayed by the disruption of their night out, but it was difficult to shake the angrily bothered, even violent response from others toward the protesters. Did they consider that “Tannhäuser” comes from the most politically active time in Wagner’s life, his years in Dresden, Germany, which ended with his fleeing after the May Uprising in 1849? Did they clock that when the performance resumed, it was with the scene of a whole hall turning against Tannhäuser for an ode that to him rings of truth, and to them of heresy?The rest of the evening — which because of the protests stretched until midnight — unfolded without any disturbance beyond the usual chime of a cellphone ring. There was no more news, at least beyond the original headline of Gerhaher’s debut.And his performance is reason alone to return to this “Tannhäuser,” in Otto Schenk’s dusty and unfashionable, but utterly lovable, production from the 1970s. Gerhaher is one of our finest living lieder singers, a raconteur and a chameleon, a perceptive and persuasive interpreter whose approach to text shines in the recital hall. But he has also appeared on Europe’s opera stages; his “Wozzeck” at the Aix Festival in France this summer, performed without ever leaving the stage, was a Kafkaesque descent into torment and tragedy.The Met’s immensity can be unkind to singers with Gerhaher’s size and attention to detail. But on Thursday, he filled the hall with ease, drowned out only by the protests. He was slightly strained at his loudest, but more human for it. His “Song to the Evening Star” was not comforting or buttery, like Peter Mattei’s when this production was last revived, in 2015; a brittle solace, it ached, and felt like a true farewell.Gerhaher was surrounded by seasoned Wagnerian singers: Ekaterina Gubanova as a lush Venus; Georg Zeppenfeld as a stentorian Landgraf Hermann; Elza van den Heever as an Elisabeth more affecting in her prayerful “Allmächt’ge Jungfrau” than in the exuberant “Dich, teure Halle.” Andreas Schager’s tenor has bright power but the irrepressibility of a fire hose, which suits roles of heroic bumbling naïveté like Siegfried and Parsifal, and not so much the anguished and multidimensional Tannhäuser. His Rome Narrative in Act III was bluntly angry where it should have been shattering.In the orchestra pit, Donald Runnicles led the opera at first slowly, but with shape, the opening more spiritual than stately. That built toward orgiastic music for the Venusberg that may have been as PG-rated as the staging that followed, but it also had remarkable clarity — in phrasing and in balance. Throughout the night, Runnicles was in full control of the score, even if he could stand to relinquish a bit of his grip.With such an approach, though, the orchestra resisted the invitation for a saccharine opening to the third act, which instead took on a heart-rending holiness as it prefigured Elisabeth’s resigned prayer for death. While Runnicles gestured at the podium, security and police stalked the aisles, as if to preserve the music’s beauty by force. Not for the first or last time that evening, it made a good moment feel bad.TannhäuserThrough Dec. 23 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Maria Callas Was Opera’s Defining Diva. She Still Is.

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      Her voice is the shadow that remains after shock, after anger: the sound of a woman realizing she has nothing left to live for.It is the second act of Verdi’s opera “La Traviata.” Violetta and Alfredo, a prostitute and a wealthy young man, have fallen madly in love. But his father confronts her, demanding she drop the disreputable affair to salvage the marriage prospects of Alfredo’s sister.For Violetta, it is an unbearable sacrifice, but she’ll do it. “Dite alla giovine,” she sings, in a broken murmur: Tell your daughter that I will abandon the one good thing I have, for her sake.Singing that passage on May 28, 1955, at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the soprano Maria Callas reached the phrase about how “bella e pura” Alfredo’s sister is — how beautiful and pure — and inserted the tiniest breath before “pura.” It’s a barely noticeable silence, but within it is a black hole of resignation. Callas’s split-second pause achingly suggests Violetta knows that if she, too, were pure, her happiness would not be expendable.Tiny details like this are how Callas — who would have turned 100 on Dec. 2 — gave opera’s over-the-top melodramas a startling sense of reality, and her characters the psychological depth and nuance of actual people. Tiny details like this, captured on hundreds of recordings, are how this most mythical of singers has stubbornly resisted drifting entirely into myth.Maria Callas rehearsing “Medea” in 1953 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla ScalaThe defining diva of the 20th century, Callas is not so far from us in some ways; a normal life span would have brought her well into the 21st. Those many recordings — endlessly remastered, repackaged and rereleased — have kept her in our ears, the benchmark of what is possible in opera, musically and emotionally. Her dramatic art and dramatic life, often intertwined, have made her an enduring cultural touchstone: a coolly glamorous stare in Apple ads and the inspiration for plays (including a Tony Award winner), performances by Marina Abramovic (bad) and Monica Bellucci (worse), a coming film starring Angelina Jolie (we’ll see), even a hologram tour (sigh).Yet Callas can also seem like a figure of faraway history. Her lonely death was back in 1977, when she was just 53 — and by then, her days of true performing glory were almost 20 years behind her. The number of people who saw her live, particularly in staged opera, is dwindling, and her short career was just early enough that precious little of it was filmed.So she has been for decades, for most of us, a creation of still images and audio. We have to use those tools to conjure what her performances were like, to complete them.But when you hear her, this is surprisingly easy. You listen to that “Dite alla giovine” and immediately see, in her voice, the blankness of her face, the mouth barely moving and the rest a mask of surrender, the shoulders collapsed. At the end of her classic 1953 “Tosca” recording, you can again “see” that indelible face, this time shifting in a couple of seconds from hushed excitement to catastrophic loss. (Listen to the sudden fear in that second cry of “Mario!”) With Callas, the aural always presses toward the visual; the voice, with its specificity and pungency, its weirdly death-haunted vitality, makes you imagine her body, moving in space.In her performances, there was never a sense of opera as mere entertainment, a night out with pretty music. She took every note seriously, where others fudged and coasted; she was refined where others were vulgar. In her powerfully expressive voice and magnetic presence, opera really, truly mattered.Watch her perform “Tu che le vanità” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo” in concert in 1962, near the end of her career. You are aware even before she opens her mouth of opera’s founding paradoxes. She is grand, and honest; epic, and intimate.Opera in the modern era is at its core an exhumation of the past, a literal revival. Callas is the essential singer — she is opera — not because of her instrument or her acting, but because, with a combination of born intuition and carefully acquired skill, she imagined and reconstructed a vanished world.She took on a whole repertory — the bel canto of the early 19th century, notably operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini — that had been ignored or distorted for generations. And she approached pieces that had never left the public, like “La Traviata,” Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bellini’s “Norma,” as if they were being done for the first time. The title character of “Lucia,” then widely assumed to be a chirpy cipher, was in Callas’s throat a morbid, ecstatic gothic heroine — more intense, and more believable. In the wake of World War II, she showed that Europe’s patrimony could emerge from the rubble.Born in New York to Greek immigrants, Callas grew up listening to Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts and, at 13, returned with her mother to Greece. Just a year later, she was singing Carmen’s “Habanera” and Norma’s “Casta diva” as a conservatory student in Athens.She had no real apprenticeship. There were no supporting parts, no young-artist programs. By her early 20s, she was singing some of the most challenging roles in the repertory; by her early 30s, she was singing them all over the world.She made her name with outlandish feats like doing Brünnhilde in Wagner’s “Die Walküre” and Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” — which few sopranos paired in the same lifetime — in the same week. And once she became an object of worship, scratchy pirated recordings of a passionate “Traviata” from Lisbon were passed around like religious relics; ditto a Mexico City “Aida,” in which Callas stretched an old but rare interpolated high E flat to gleaming length at the end of the Triumphal Scene.Her voice, matchlessly articulate and often quite beautiful but also idiosyncratic and fragile, didn’t hold out too long, and her career was brief; there was maybe a decade of prime singing, largely in the 1950s. By the time she was 40, it was essentially over.Brief — and unbelievably dense and tumultuous. Who knows the root of Callas’s restlessness, her insane commitment, her ferocity, her rivalries? There was clearly a deeply ingrained sense of unworthiness that you could trace back to her difficult childhood, with a mother who openly preferred her prettier sister. Self-buttressing, self-hating, self-defeating, Callas needed the stage desperately, and yet she always needed to be pushed onto it.Her loss of some five or six dozen pounds in the early ’50s, slimming into one of the century’s most stylish women, made news, as did her dropping out midway through a “Norma” in Rome in 1958. The year before, she had pleaded illness before missing a performance of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” in Edinburgh, then was photographed at a swank party in Venice. A lifetime later, it all seems so petty, but the venom that greeted these cancellations — hard to imagine today — helped usher in the end of Callas’s career.Callas in 1958 on a train in Rome. She had maybe a decade of prime singing, largely in the 1950s. By the time she was 40, her career was essentially over.Alfredo Miccoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe left her husband for the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, largely giving up performing in the process. When Onassis eventually married Jackie Kennedy instead, Callas was alone and bereft, without either the vocation that had given her purpose or the man who had replaced it. Living mostly in seclusion, though always harboring hopes of returning to the stage, she became for many a kind of saint or martyr, an embodiment of the hopelessly loving, direly abandoned characters she had played.“Until the end,” a friend said, “she continued her vocal exercises.”As Callas’s life fades ever further into the distance, her voice is more and more what we are left with. “Generally, I upset people the first time they hear me,” she told a biographer, “but I am usually able to convince them of what I am doing.”Francesco Siciliani, an impresario who engaged Callas as she rose in the late 1940s, was right when he said, “Parts of the voice were beautiful, others empty.” But the flaws that grew more prominent over time — the thinnesses and wobbles, the metallic harshness and questionable intonation — were, as she knew, usually convincing, not least because her sound, for all its troubles, was so instantly recognizable, and such a perfect vessel for extreme emotion. There was always that sense of every phrase being considered, without feeling studied — of a voice with a purpose.We can see from photos the amazing ability of her face — and, perhaps just as important, her hands — to capture anguish, authority and charm. But among the most pernicious stereotypes about Callas is that she was an actress who could barely sing, who got by on charisma alone.The records disprove this. Listen to her tender “O mio babbino caro.” Listen to her delicate yet commanding “D’amor sull’ali rosee.” She was always a bel canto singer at heart. In the early 1970s, when she led a series of master classes at the Juilliard School, a student defended herself after a bad high note by saying it was meant as a cry of despair.“It’s not a cry of despair,” Callas shot back. “It’s a B flat.”Callas in “Norma” in Paris, in 1964. She approached operas that had never left the repertory as if they were being done for the first time.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s appropriate that this is the lasting image of her final years, and the theme of Terrence McNally’s Tony-winning play “Master Class”: Callas as a wise but overbearing, even fearsome teacher. She and those hundreds of recordings continue to teach, continue to loom over opera. Singers are still compared to her, especially those with compelling presences and voices on the acidic side.Sixty years after Callas sang “Medea,” the star of a new production at the Met in 2021 said Callas’s legacy hadn’t stopped being the “elephant in the room.” Opera is still asking the question that the writer Ethan Mordden recalled being posed by a friend back in 1969: “Is there life after Callas?”Should there be? She and her flash of a career remain a beacon of artistic integrity and profundity — of the cultivation of tradition and craft, of a desire to bring the past to bear on the present — in a culture that values those qualities less and less.The costume designer Piero Tosi was there for her great “Traviata” at La Scala in 1955. “She scarcely seemed to be singing,” he said of her “Dite alla giovine.” “Yet everyone heard.”Impossibly distant, yet immensely present: At her centennial, Callas still occupies a position in opera something like the sun.Audio and video courtesy of Warner ClassicsProduced by More

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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