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      Richard Gaddes, Opera Impresario Who Spotted Young Talent, Dies at 81

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      As leader of opera companies in Santa Fe and St. Louis, he welcomed new works as well as new artists.Richard Gaddes, a British-born opera impresario who nurtured young talent as director of companies in Santa Fe, N.M., and St Louis, died on Dec. 12 in Manhattan. He was 81.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Santa Fe Opera, where he served as general director for eight years, and by the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, of which he was a founder. The executor of his estate, Maria Schlafly, said he died after a brief illness.Leading the two companies over several decades, Mr. Gaddes (pronounced GAD-iss) helped spur the careers of younger stars like Thomas Hampson, Christine Brewer and Frank Lopardo, and brought prominent artists well known in Europe, like the soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and the conductor Edo de Waart, to audiences in the United States.His generous, open-minded embrace of an art form he saw as encompassing all others spurred his attempts to open it up — to new artists, new audiences and new works. In Santa Fe, he offered discounted tickets to New Mexico residents and staged a production of “The Beggar’s Opera” at the city’s El Museo Cultural using mostly local performers.“I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing if it hadn’t been his leap of faith,” said Ms. Brewer, who had been a school music teacher before Mr. Gaddes heard her sing in a competition in St. Louis and decided to take a chance on her. She didn’t win the competition, but Mr. Gaddes sent her a check anyway.“Richard just said, ‘I heard it in your voice.’ He was super supportive,” Ms. Brewer said in a phone interview.Invited to create an opera company in St. Louis at the end of the 1970s, Mr. Gaddes had an idea at odds with local grand-opera expectations: to use the new company to engage young American singers at the beginning of their careers. His idea turned out to be fruitful.From left, Alan Kays, Stephen Dickson and Joseph McKee in a 1979 production of “Three Pintos” at the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, where Mr. Gaddes was general director.Opera Theater of Saint Louis“I recommended to them that rather than doing extravaganzas with elephants and camels and mob scenes in large spaces, what they should do is have an ensemble company presenting the cream of the crop of young American singers,” Mr. Gaddes said in an interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, which honored him in 2008.The conductor Leonard Slatkin wrote in an email that the St. Louis company “became a destination point for those starting careers.” He added that Mr. Gaddes “had an encyclopedic knowledge of the repertoire and knew what could and could not be done.”Mr. Gaddes pursued a similarly democratizing approach toward expanding the audience in Santa Fe. He had already had a long career there before becoming director in 2000, a post he held until 2008.“I felt there was a slight attitude of our being elitist,” he said, noting that the company, located seven miles outside the city, “didn’t have much to do with the locals.”His initiatives, including the reduced-price ticket scheme, transformed the audience, which went from being 38 percent New Mexican to over 50 percent.“What’s marvelous is, Richard has really taken the reins in a new era in which the piece of contemporary opera that everyone feels we are obliged to do does not have to be an act of sufferance,” the director Peter Sellars said in an interview after Mr. Gaddes was honored by the N.E.A. “It’s not like having to go in for invasive surgery. It is in fact, a pleasure.”Richard Gaddes was born on May 23, 1942, in Wallsend, an old coal mining and shipbuilding town near Newcastle in the north of England. His father, Thomas, worked in the local shipyards; his mother, Emily (Rickard) Gaddes, was a homemaker.He showed an early aptitude for music — his parents both sang in local choirs — and his mother, defying his father’s wishes, paid for his train ticket to London to audition at Trinity College of Music (now the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance), where he was immediately accepted. He graduated in 1964.To earn money, he turned pages at Wigmore Hall, then London’s premiere chamber music venue; started a series of lunchtime concerts at the hall, which became immensely popular; and went to work for an artist management company.Mr. Gaddes credited his days at Wigmore Hall with stirring his interest in helping young singers. “I turned pages for many great accompanists, including Gerald Moore,” he said in the 2008 interview. “I sat at the piano during the cycles of singers such as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau, los Ángeles, Hans Hotter. An amazing, amazing exposure to music that you couldn’t buy.”Spotted by the conductor John Crosby, the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, on a trip to London, he was eventually recruited to become the company’s artistic administrator in 1969, at age 25.He became founding general director of the Opera Theater of Saint Louis in 1976, and under his stewardship it became the first American opera company to receive an invitation to the Edinburgh International Festival. He returned to the Santa Fe company in 1994 and became its second general director in 2000.Mr. Gaddes is survived by his brother Harry. Another brother, Simon, died in 2011. More

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      In Detroit, an Opera Leader Finishes With One Last Triumph

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      After Yuval Sharon became the artistic director of Michigan Opera Theater in 2020, the company renamed itself the Detroit Opera — perhaps the most visible among moves that have led to a remarkable streak of successes based on a new, ambitious approach.The house has placed itself at the center of operatic conversation with productions like a drive-through “Götterdämmerung” and a virtual-reality “Walküre.” It has broken fund-raising records, drawn first-time ticket buyers by the thousands and collaborated more with companies elsewhere. Robert O’Hara’s staging of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” at the Metropolitan Opera last November, for instance, began life a year and a half earlier in Michigan; the Met asked Detroit if it could join the production, not the other way around.Sharon receives most of the plaudits for the rise in Detroit’s fortunes, but little of its advance would have been possible without the courage and acumen of Wayne Brown. One of the few Black leaders in the field, Brown served as the Detroit Opera’s president and chief executive from 2014 until he retired at the end of 2023.“Wayne has always been wonderful to deal with,” said Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met. “One doesn’t think necessarily of Detroit as a center of opera production or creativity, but by hiring Yuval he has accomplished that. He has changed that impression of Detroit.”From left, Ethan Davidson, Yuval Sharon and Brown onstage at the Detroit Opera House.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaBrown, 75, is a veteran executive with almost half a century of varied experience, from stints at regional symphony orchestras to a spell from 1997 to 2014 as the director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. Even upon his retirement, his enthusiasm for the process of putting on a show remains infectious.“The fascination is about making sure that those connections can be made,” Brown said. “It’s not just about transaction; it’s about, how does one find that sweet spot where the art and the audiences align?”Brown is widely admired in the field for being a leader different from the norm, and one reluctant to take the spotlight for himself.“He’s been a uniter of people,” said Deborah Borda, the former head of the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, who has known Brown since the 1970s. “He has a very quiet strength. He has a kind word for all, which is quite unusual in our business. I think he’s regarded as somewhat Solomonic.”Davóne Tines, the bass-baritone who served as an artist in residence at the Detroit Opera in 2021 and 2022, said that Brown’s support for creativity was an example, especially as “a young Black creator whose career began in arts administration.”“Someone in the position of the C.E.O. or the top executive of an opera company, you may have presuppositions about what that sort of person might be,” Tines said. “He’s a man of incredible gravity and conducts himself with a dignity that’s very inspiring. It’s wonderful to see that balance with how genuinely curious he is.”Davóne Tines, front center, in the title role of “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” at Detroit Opera in 2022.Micah Shumake/Detroit OperaBrown’s musical life began with learning the violin in fourth grade, and later the cello. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he joined the men’s glee club, and was its president. “Increasingly, it became not just performance” that mattered, he said, “but performance with context, the whole notion of making it work.”Shortly before Brown graduated from college, the dean of the music school asked if he would be interested in a job with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which was looking for an assistant administrator. “I said sure,” he recalled. “I mean, I didn’t know what it was.” He was quickly promoted to assistant manager, and embarked on a career working for orchestras that later included tenures as executive director of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts and, for a decade, the Louisville Orchestra.Brown also briefly worked as a producer for the Cultural Olympiad that took place during the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, a remit that included jazz, opera, chamber music and more. “Those were interesting opportunities,” he said, smiling.Borda recalled the tact with which Brown later convened the expert panels that advised the National Endowment for the Arts on its grants. “You had to go to Washington, D.C., for four days, you had to review literally a hundred applications, and listen to them, to do a good job,” she said. Brown made a burdensome process more meaningful. “When Wayne was there, I think he asked me almost every year, and I would go. After Wayne, I didn’t do it anymore.”Brown speaks fondly of the opportunity for public service that the N.E.A. afforded him, and he took useful lessons from the opportunity it gave him to see the field as a whole. “You can’t necessarily apply a scenario that’s taking place in one community to another,” he said. “Innovation is a relative term. Something can be innovative but be perceived as just a marginal difference in a larger setting.”At Detroit Opera, Brown said, “We wanted to make sure that we could convey a message of openness, inclusiveness, and a level of engagement.”Nick Hagen for The New York TimesContext certainly counted in Brown’s decision to return to Detroit to run Michigan Opera Theater in 2014. Going back to the city where his career had begun, Brown was determined to secure what the downtown house’s longtime leader, David DiChiera, had achieved after founding the company in 1971, four years after the 1967 race riots in the city.“If I could play a role in a place that I cared about, a place that inspired me, I could not imagine at the time any other role that would have been of interest,” Brown said. “We wanted to make sure that we could convey a message of openness, inclusiveness, and a level of engagement.”Marc Scorca, the president of Opera America, believes that Brown was the ideal person to manage the house’s transformation after DiChiera’s retirement. “It was Wayne’s extraordinary diplomacy that enabled that transition to happen with respect and dignity,” Scorca said.Hiring Sharon in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic was something of a tribute to the theater’s founding mission. DiChiera, Brown said, “had an interest in making sure that what was taking place in Detroit could resonate broadly.” Yet the theater was nothing if it was not rooted in its city.Sharon entered the job promising not only to make the house the most progressive in America, but also to embed it still more deeply in its community, even asking that it change its name when he arrived. Brown urged restraint, so that they could do the patient work necessary to build consensus.“My approach was very impulsive,” Sharon said. “Wayne’s more analytic and thoughtful approach, and his calm way of thinking through these things, made it so that when we ultimately took the vote on it, it had complete board support.”“I really saw the value,” Sharon added, “of what it means to not necessarily go into things like a bull in a china shop.”Sharon singled out the co-production of “X” as Brown’s other major achievement during their time working together in Michigan. “It really was so out of the realm of what the company has ever done in terms of its scale,” Sharon said. Almost half of the sold-out crowd that attended the run in Detroit was visiting the company for the first time.“The art form spans centuries; it’s not stopping,” Brown said of opera. “It’s about moving forward and being bold about it, and there’s no better time to do so than now.” 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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      A Pilgrimage to the Land of Giuseppe Verdi

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      I was 15 when I went to my first Verdi opera, “Il Trovatore,” at the Met, the old Met, in 1964. I could barely figure out what was going on but didn’t care. Leontyne Price sang Leonora, and I was in awe of her plush, beautiful voice. The singing, the chorus, the orchestra, the emotional drama, the music with its mixture of soaring melody, intensity and structure (though I couldn’t have expressed this back then) all hooked me. Two months later I was back at the Met for Verdi’s “Otello” starring, no less, Renata Tebaldi as Desdemona. I still remember the poignant warmth and uncanny bloom of her voice as she sang the sighing refrain of “salce, salce” in the “Willow Song.”I would go on to hear, and eventually review, most of the Verdi operas in productions around the world. I studied the scores in music classes and on my own at the piano. I read biographies that emphasized his deep ties to the rural region of northern Italy he came from and never really left. To me, that devotion seemed of a piece both with Verdi’s character — he was a crusty, principled man with a built-in hypocrisy detector who was suspicious of urban elites — and his respect for the heritage of Italian opera. If Wagner brought a radical agenda to remaking German opera, Verdi was a reformer who worked from within the traditions and conventions of Italian opera while subtly, steadily introducing ingenious innovations that would, over time, transform it. So I wanted to see for myself where he came from, and how his roots shaped his life and art.This fall, at long last, I made my Verdi pilgrimage, retracing his steps from his birthplace in Roncole to the crypt where he is buried in Milan. More

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      Best Arts Photos of 2023

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      Peter Fisher for The New York Times2023 in Retrospect: 59 Photographs That Defined the Year in ArtsDeadheads, ballerinas and Mick Jagger: As 2023 winds down, revisit a memorable handful of the thousands of images commissioned by our photo editors that capture the year in culture.Marysa Greenawalt 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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      5 Operas You Can Stream at Home

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      This selection of works, available to rent and purchase, features some of today’s boldest directors and greatest vocal talents.Enjoying opera — fully staged opera — at home has become easier. Recent productions from top European houses have begun to appear for rental and purchase on Amazon Prime Video.So, on an impulse, you can take in these works — and keep them, too. (There are other opera-focused streaming platforms, but those rarely allow for purchases.) The productions include rarely staged gems, and feature some of the boldest directors and greatest vocal talents today. Earlier this year, we put the spotlight on five offerings. Here are five more recent additions.‘Fidelio’Tobias Kratzer is a director who is willing to jerk a canonical text around to fit a contemporary concept. In his take on Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” for the Royal Opera in London in 2020, he upends both acts: The first takes place in a Jacobin milieu, amid the French Revolution; the second, however, departs from historical specificity, showing its chorus in modern dress. This approach fits an opera that has always proved a challenge for straightforward storytelling. Crucially, Kratzer’s direction of singing actors tends to be marvelous; here, the star soprano Lise Davidsen is truly gripping as Leonore.Kratzer makes many small alterations. One involves a partial disrobing by Fidelio (Leonore disguised as a man) in front of Marzelline during the first act. But the humanist impulse of this opera — clearly about more than saving just one man from prison — is consistently emphasized by a strong cast, the Royal Opera orchestra and the conductor, Antonio Pappano. And Davidsen, a powerhouse soprano known for blowing the roof off the Metropolitan Opera, also indulges her talents for delicate scene partnership, as in the early Canon Quartet.‘Der Schatzgräber’“Der Schatzgräber” at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin.Monika RittershausWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More