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      Virginia Zeani, Versatile and Durable Soprano, Dies at 97

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      A noted Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” she had an equally noted second act as a singing teacher when her performing career ended.Virginia Zeani, a Romanian soprano with a brilliant, powerful voice and striking looks who overcame childhood poverty and the perils of war to become a fixture on the opera stage, died on Monday in West Palm Beach, Fla. She was 97.Her son and only immediate survivor, Alessandro Rossi-Lemeni, said she died in a nursing home “after an extended cardiac respiratory illness.”Leading tenors relished performing alongside Ms. Zeani. “A woman blessed with beauty both physical and vocal, she was in addition a very gifted actress,” Plácido Domingo once wrote. The conductor Richard Bonynge ranked her among the top four sopranos of the 20th century. And according to Ms. Zeani, Maria Callas’s husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, confided to her that she was “one of the very few sopranos that my wife is frightened of.”Yet Ms. Zeani (pronounced zay-AH-nee) failed to gain the mass following and adulation of Callas and other contemporary divas, like Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé, during her 34 years of opera appearances, and she was almost forgotten in retirement despite an illustrious second career as a voice teacher.Her insistence on remaining close to her family in Rome kept her from venturing more often beyond Europe, limiting her career in the United States. She once even turned down a contract from the Metropolitan Opera.Ms. Zeani conceded she had done little to make recordings that would have brought her to a wider audience. “The rise of the publicist and the work that record companies do in selling their artists is how stars are made today,” she said in “Virginia Zeani: My Memories of an Operatic Golden Age” (2004), written with Roger Beaumont and Witi Ihimaera. “In my time very few singers apart from Callas, Sutherland and Caballé had such support behind them,” she said. Only in recent years have recordings of her performances become widely available.Ms. Zeani displayed memorabilia, including a portrait of herself, at her home in West Palm Beach, Fla.Madeline Gray/The Palm Beach Post, via Zuma PressMs. Zeani was known for her versatility. While she practically owned the role of Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” performing it 648 times, she also ranged far beyond Verdi, singing 69 roles in operas by Rossini, Donizetti, Puccini and Wagner, among many others. Contemporary composers sought her out for premieres of their operas.She was disciplined in adopting new roles suitable to her voice as it changed from coloratura in her 20s to lyric soprano in her 30s, and then to lirico-spinto after 40, combining qualities of lighter lyric roles and weightier dramatic aspects with an ability to reach dramatic climaxes on high notes without strain. “When one door closes, another opens,” she said of her vocal evolution.Virginia Zehan was born on Oct. 21, 1925, in Solovastru, a Transylvanian village in central Romania. She changed her surname in her early 20s when she emigrated to Milan after being told that “Zeani” would be easier for Italians to pronounce. Her parents, Dumitru and Vesselina Zehan, owned a hardscrabble farm and moved to Bucharest, the Romanian capital, in search of better incomes when Virginia was 8.Music was among her earliest memories. She remembered singing as a toddler in Solovastru while going with her mother to fetch water from a stream for cooking. “Every Sunday, Gypsy people would gather in our village to play their music, and the villagers would begin dancing,” she said in her memoir.When she was 9, she was invited by a cousin to her first opera: Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” in Bucharest. She was so smitten that she vowed to her parents that she would become an opera singer. She enrolled in her school choir and, with the help of a benefactor, took voice lessons as a teenager with Lucia Anghel, a former mezzo-soprano who told Virginia that she was also a mezzo.During World War II, Bucharest suffered bombardment and occupation by the Nazis, who imprisoned and executed some of Virginia’s close friends and their relatives. She herself narrowly escaped potential rape and murder by jumping from a back window when soldiers invaded her family’s home.One stroke of luck during the war was being accepted as a student by Lydia Lipkowska, a famed Ukrainian soprano, who was stranded in Bucharest. Ms. Lipkowska convinced Virginia that she was a soprano. “I had no high notes at all at that point in my life,” Ms. Zeani recalled, “but after she accepted me and I worked with her for three months I had an incredible range.”She went to Italy in 1947 and continued her vocal studies in Milan, where she joined a bumper crop of future opera stars, including Renata Tebaldi, Giuseppe di Stefano and Franco Corelli.On May 16, 1948, at the age of 22, Ms. Zeani made her debut at Bologna’s Teatro Duse as Violetta in “La Traviata” when Margherita Carosio, the scheduled soprano, fell ill. To get the role, Ms. Zeani lied to the local opera impresario, asserting that she had sung Violetta before. She then fashioned her own gown for the part out of curtain fabric bought at a street market.Critics were impressed by Ms. Zeani’s ability to convey her character’s losing struggle with tuberculosis while hitting all of Verdi’s notes. She herself had earlier dealt with a chronic lung ailment, and she used that experience to aid her performance. “Ironically, my bronchitis helped me to work out a breathing system for the forte moments in the opera, consistent with Violetta’s medical condition,” she explained.She added Vincenzo Bellini to her repertoire when she replaced Maria Callas in the role of Elvira in “I Puritani” in Florence in 1952.It was during that performance that she met her future husband, the Italian bass Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, who sang the role of Elvira’s uncle, Giorgio Valton. They married in 1957 and had one child, Alessandro. Mr. Rossi-Lemeni died in 1991.One of Ms. Zeani’s career highlights was singing the lead role of Blanche in the première of Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” at La Scala in 1957. Mr. Poulenc chose Ms. Zeani after hearing her sing in “La Traviata” in Paris the previous year.“Poulenc convinced me to do the part of Blanche, score unseen,” she recalled. “I was not at first enthusiastic.” The work would be recognized as one of the great 20th-century operas.Ms. Zeani at her home in Florida in 2013.Madeline Gray/The Palm Beach Post, via Zuma PressAnother of Ms. Zeani’s hallmarks was her durability. “In my career I only canceled two performances,” she said in a 2015 interview with the opera website Gramilano on the occasion of her 90th birthday.In 1966, at 41, Ms. Zeani made her belated debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Violetta, and gave one more performance a few days later. Those were her only performances in a Met production.Even when her performances fell short, critics found reasons to praise her. On June 25, 1968, at the Metropolitan Opera, she played Desdemona in a production of Rossini’s “Otello” — a far lesser-known work than the Verdi masterpiece composed 70 years later — put on by the Rome Opera.In reviewing Ms. Zeani’s performance in The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg suggested that she would have been better suited for the latter-day “Otello”: “Much more a Verdi than a Rossini singer, she had some trouble with the fioritura, simplified as it was, but of her basic vocal endowments there can be no doubt.”Her performances, especially in Italy, were warmly received. Her acting in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” in a 1969 Rome Opera performance was singled out for praise by Opera magazine: “Zeani, a most musical and feminine interpreter of Manon, brought out all the part’s desperate passion throughout the opera with much lyrical ardor and touching expressiveness.”Ms. Zeani’s last opera performance was as Mother Marie in “Dialogues of the Carmelites” on Nov. 3, 1982, at the San Francisco Opera. Two years earlier, she and her husband had accepted teaching posts at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.Ms. Zeani continued to teach there until 2004, when she retired to West Palm Beach. She was considered one of the leading singing teachers in the country, and a partial list of her more notable former students included the sopranos Angela Brown, Elina Garanca, Sylvia McNair and Marilyn Mims.Shivani Gonzalez contributed reporting. More

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

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

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      American Directors Bring Fresh Visions to Europe’s Opera Stages

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      Young music theater makers are benefiting from the continent’s huge operatic resources while developing their own distinctive voices.Last summer, American directors headlined three of Europe’s most prestigious opera festivals.In Aix-en-Provence, France, you could see the New York-born Ted Huffman’s take on “L’Incoronazione di Poppea”; the Connecticut native Lydia Steier’s spin on “Die Zauberflöte” at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria; or “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival, in Germany, staged by Yuval Sharon, the visionary leader of the Detroit Opera, who hails from a suburb of Chicago.This would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. Until recently, there were few recognizable American directors working on Europe’s major stages. It was a short list that included the avant-garde directors Robert Wilson, 81, and Peter Sellars, 65, and the Alden brothers, David and Christopher, both 73.Now, a new crop of American directors, most under the age of 50, is gaining an unlikely foothold on the continent and leaving its mark on the opera scene.Germany is a launchpad for many. “More young artists from all over the world are coming here,” said Amy Stebbins, a Berlin-based opera director and librettist from New Hampshire. That’s hardly surprising, she said, given the numerous opportunities there for training and employment. Not only does Germany have more than 80 full-time opera companies; the country’s free education system — including music education — and the availability of paid internships make breaking into opera comparatively democratic and egalitarian.In Germany, even provincial opera companies have the wherewithal to put together full and challenging seasons. Ambitious artistic directors are eager to discover new musical and dramatic points of view.“They’re always on the lookout for kind of new voices and different voices,” said Louisa Proske, the associate artistic director of the Halle Opera, in eastern Germany. Proske, a native Berliner and a co-founder of Heartbeat Opera in New York, said many German directors take “a very intellectual approach” and that “what can be attractive is this kind of propensity to storytelling that I think is more in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.”One house that has been particularly instrumental in luring American directors across the pond is the Frankfurt Opera. Both Huffman and another New Yorker, R.B. Schlather, worked at the company’s alternative venue (where Sharon also directed the German premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s “Lost Highway”) before graduating to the main stage.“Both of them, I feel, come out of the tradition of Bob Wilson,” said Bernd Loebe, the Frankfurt Opera’s artistic director, adding that he sees them as directors who “want to escape this superficial approach to opera” that is often found in the United States.Loebe said he wasn’t interested in “the cliché of old-fashioned opera: beautiful sets, beautiful costumes.”“I want to see a link between music and drama,” he added. “I want directors who are interested in the music.”Here’s a closer look at three American opera directors who are leaving their mark in Europe.Jacquelyn Stucker and Jake Arditti in “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” at the Aix-en Provence Festival in France last summer.Ruth WalzTed HuffmanTed Huffman may well be the only American to graduate from singing in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” as a child to directing a new production of the work at one of Europe’s major opera houses.Huffman’s love of music was nurtured by singing Bach and Handel in a church choir. As a child growing up in the suburbs of New York City, he also auditioned for, and landed some, children’s roles in Broadway shows and at the Metropolitan Opera.“I spent a lot of time as a kid being exposed to all of this,” the 46-year-old director said. “And I think, you know, it got in my system, in a good way. It didn’t let go.”In his early 20s, he and a friend founded the Greenwich Music Festival, an innovative music event in Connecticut that ran between 2004 and 2012, where he directed several productions, including Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón.”Yet despite the festival’s success, he didn’t feel that there was much room for him to realize his directing ambitions on a larger scale.“I quite consciously didn’t go the more traditional American route of assisting in big houses and kind of learning that way, because I felt like that was a kind of trap for directors to learn a system of making work on existing sets with existing costumes,” he said.After taking part in the Merola Opera Program, in San Francisco, in 2010, he shipped to Europe on a career grant from that institute and picked up his first assignments in London, including an acclaimed staging of Maxwell Davies’s “The Lighthouse” in 2012 for English Touring Opera.In the decade since, Huffman has become one of Europe’s most in-demand young opera directors, praised for his ability to coax psychologically complex performances from his actors in visually distinctive and uncluttered stagings. He has staged “Die Zauberflöte” in Frankfurt, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Berlin and “Madama Butterfly” in Zurich.Writing in The New York Times, Zachary Woolfe named Huffman’s “Poppea” at Aix one of last year’s musical highlights, calling it “a vivid, spare staging” and praising the director for guiding “his youthful cast in scenes that were genuinely sexy.”Along with reimagining the classics, Huffman champions new opera, most significantly as a director and librettist for the British composer Philip Venables. To date, they have worked together on “4.48 Psychosis” (2016) and “Denis & Katya” (2019), both of which have been staged in Europe and America. Their latest collaboration, set to premiere at Aix in July, is co-produced by the Skirball Center at N.Y.U.“One of the most exciting things about Europe is that for a longer time there’s been a mandate to produce new work,” Huffman said. “I think that there’s a huge sea change happening in America now,” he added, referencing the Metropolitan Opera’s recent commitment to staging more operas by living composers. It’s one of the reasons, he said, that he’ll continue to divide his career between the United States and Europe for the foreseeable future.A scene from “Die Zauberflöte,” directed by Lydia Steier at the Salzburg Festival, last year.Sandra ThenLydia SteierLydia Steier wanted to direct opera ever since she saw Milos Forman’s Oscar-winning movie “Amadeus” as a child growing up in Hartford, Conn.Her mother encouraged her interest by taking her to the Connecticut Opera, but the stiffly traditional productions there left Steier unfulfilled. “I was always just confused by how the emotional brutality of this kind of music was actually sort of nullified by seeing it onstage,” Steier said.Now, of the American directors of the younger generation, Steier, 44, is arguably the most firmly entrenched in the European opera scene.In recent seasons, she has staged two new productions of “Die Zauberflöte” at Austria’s prestigious Salzburg Festival, “La fanciulla del West” at the Berlin State Opera and “Les Troyens” at the Semper Opera in Dresden.“Lydia is unbelievably honest about what she has to say about human behavior,” said Laura Berman, the American-born artistic director of the Hanover State Opera, where, in 2019, Steier directed an acclaimed production of the religious potboiler “La Juive” that played with antisemitic stereotypes in ways rarely seen on German stages.“I suppose it’s sometimes quite cynical, but it’s very funny at the same time. And she exposes racism and narcissistic behavior in society,” Berman added.Steier never set out to work in Europe. In 2002, a Fulbright fellowship brought her to Berlin to conduct research about the city’s three opera houses. Afterward, she interned at the Komische Oper there, which led to her taking an assistant position at the house, accompanying productions by innovative directors, including Calixto Bieito and Barrie Kosky.In 2009, she assisted Achim Freyer on his production of “Das Rheingold,” the first part of the “Ring” cycle in Los Angeles. (Freyer’s assistants on the tetralogy also included Yuval Sharon.) A year later, also in Los Angeles, she directed a production of “Lohengrin” that remains her most significant American production to date.That same year, her directing career took off in Europe with an acclaimed double bill of “Pagliacci” and Busoni’s rarely seen one-act “Turandot” (which predates Puccini’s more famous setting) in Weimar, Germany. She became a fixture at opera houses across the German-speaking world, including the Komische, where she had shows in back-to-back seasons, and at Theater Basel, in Switzerland, where her 2016 production of Stockhausen’s demanding “Donnerstag aus Licht” was voted the year’s best performance by the German magazine Opernwelt.Around the same time, Markus Hinterhäuser, the incoming artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, saw and was impressed by Steier’s intimate production of Handel’s oratorio “Jephtha” in Vienna. He offered her “Die Zauberflöte,” one of the festival’s key works. Her 2018 production, and the considerably revised staging she presented at last summer’s festival, took a cue from the 1980s cult film “The Princess Bride.”“Millennials and Gen X are known for having an openness and a preference for ironic and edgy humor,” Berman said. “I think that somebody like Lydia has maybe a more unabashed approach to European culture than a European might have.”Berman, who was in charge of opera at Theater Basel when Steier directed “Licht” there, said that audiences tend to respond to Steier’s inclusion of pop cultural references “in a very kind of brazen way.”Despite her accomplishments on the continent, however, Steier said that work in the United States has been elusive. “It has always been the ambition of mine,” she said, “because I think there’s a lot of what I’ve done that would actually sort of shine a new light on what to do with the standard repertoire in the U.S.”Heather Engebretson, left, and Vincenzo Costanzo as Butterfly and Pinkerton in “Madama Butterfly” at the Frankfurt Opera.Barbara AumüllerR.B. SchlatherUnlike Huffman and Steier, R.B. Schlather, 37, is a rare American opera director whose innovative stateside work has attracted international attention.In five years, Schlather went from directing experimental productions at a gallery space on New York’s Lower East Side to working at one of Germany’s leading opera houses.Schlather’s performance-art re-imaginings of Handel’s “Alcina” and “Orlando,” staged in Lower Manhattan in 2014 and 2015, led to an invitation from Loebe, the artistic director at the Frankfurt Opera, to put on another work by the German composer, “Tamerlano,” at the company’s alternative venue, the Bockenheimer Depot, in 2019.“My manager at the time told me that Bernd Loebe was really interested in me and how they have this old warehouse-like space and that he was looking for directors who were thinking more about site-specific work,” Schlather said, “and I said, ‘Fantastic, absolutely. Sign me up.’”That confidence paid off when his stark production, set in a prison camp, was a critical and popular hit.Two years later, Schlather debuted on Frankfurt’s main stage with Domenico Cimarosa’s “L’italiana in Londra,” a 1778 work that lies far outside of the standard repertoire. Once again, it triumphed. A critic in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper called it “the rebirth of the Frankfurt Opera out of the spirit of comedy.”When Schlather returned to Frankfurt last year, it was not with a rarity, but with “Madama Butterfly” in a daringly stripped-down staging that left much to the viewer’s imagination.“There was no cliché of ‘Madame Butterfly,’ like these terrible romantic productions we have seen,” Loebe said, comparing aspects of it to classical Japanese theater. “It was very clean and clear.”The production was so successful that it will return for eight performances between May and July. And Loebe has invited Schlather back to work at the house during the 2024-25 season. (Like Huffman, Schlather is keeping one foot in the States: In October, he will direct a Handel opera in Hudson, N.Y.).“I love working in a place like Frankfurt, where there’s such a diversity of repertoire and you can see the most obscure thing and the most popular thing always in an interesting point of view,” Schlather said, adding that the house has given him opportunities that he would be unlikely to get in the United States.“He took a big leap of faith on me,” Schlather said of Loebe. “So I think I really lucked out by being what he was looking for, or what he was open to.” More

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      Lewis Spratlan, 82, Dies; Took Winding Route to Music Pulitzer

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      His opera sat unproduced for decades. Then a piece of it garnered one of the field’s top prizes. Then it sat some more.Lewis Spratlan won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in music for a chunk of an opera that he had completed in 1978 and that no one had ever staged.Then he waited another decade before someone actually put the full opera in front of an audience.“It was awful, not hearing this piece,” he told The New York Times in 2010, when his long wait was about to come to an end. “It’s like a woman being pregnant forever.”The opera, “Life Is a Dream,” with a libretto by James Maraniss, was finally staged by the Santa Fe Opera in July 2010, 35 years after Mr. Spratlan and Mr. Maraniss had begun writing it.Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the premiere in The Times, called it “an important opera, the rare philosophical work that holds the stage and gives singing actors real characters to grapple with.”Mr. Spratlan, whose long road to the Pulitzer and the premiere also included his self-financing the concert that led to the prize, died on Feb. 9 at a hospice center in Mount Laurel, N.J. He was 82. His wife, Melinda (Kessler) Spratlan, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Spratlan, who taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts for 36 years, composed works for large ensembles and small ones, as well as solo pieces. He even invented an instrument, which he called the terpsiptomaton and which incorporated metal coils and rods, piano strings and ball bearings.“When a key is depressed, the ball bearings are released and fall, hitting the rods and the piano strings,” The Boston Globe explained in 1980. Amherst magazine described it as “a cross between a harpsichord and a pinball machine.”Both the instrument and a piece he composed for it, “Coils,” were given their world premiere in a concert in Amherst in 1980. The instrument seems not to have caught on, but the effort showed Mr. Spratlan’s penchant for whimsy in his works.In the chamber piece “When Crows Gather” (1986), which was inspired in part by the arrival of a throng of crows outside his studio window in Massachusetts, he had the musicians approximate wintry winds and end with, as Mr. Tommasini put it in The Times, “what could be called the ‘Crow Squawk Toccata.’” In 2002, Allan Kozinn of The Times described another chamber piece, “Zoom,” this way:“He begins by having the players alternate sharp, loud chordal bursts with all manner of breathy vocalizations, including sighs, heavy breathing, gasping and panting. Eventually the musical content sweeps away the sound effects, only to career between slidey modernist textures and fleeting hints of big-band jazz. A touch of what seems to be the influence of Frank Zappa streams through the last two movements as well, and from there it’s a short step to cartoonish sound effects.”Michael Theodore, a composer who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, studied under Mr. Spratlan at Amherst. “Composing music was always an adventure for Lew,” he said by email, “and he was restlessly and relentlessly inventive.“His compositions have a remarkable range,” he added, “filled with humor in one moment and heartbreaking tenderness in the next. Lew’s musical voice was entirely his own but often contained clever, subtle nods to the music of the past.”The Santa Fe Opera’s production of Mr. Spratlan’s “Life is a Dream.”Ken Howard, via Santa Fe OperaMeriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was born on Sept. 5, 1940, in Miami. His father was a salesman, and his mother, Wilma (Howell) Spratlan, taught piano.Mr. Spratlan was still a student at Coral Gables High School in Florida when his oboe playing on a piece by Handel at a 1955 recital caught the ear of Doris Reno of The Miami Herald.“Lewis Spratlan, teenaged oboist, distinguished himself in the Handel work,” she wrote, “which he performed with his teacher, Dominique deLerma, first oboe, and his mother, Wilma Spratlan, piano.”Mr. Spratlan earned a bachelor’s degree in music composition and theory at Yale in 1962 and a master’s in composition there in 1965. Before arriving at Amherst in 1970, he taught at Pennsylvania State University and conducted ensembles there, at Tanglewood and elsewhere.“Life Is a Dream” is based on a 17th-century play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca about a prince banished at birth by his father. The play was brought to his attention by Herta Glaz, a retired mezzo-soprano who was director of the New Haven Opera Theater in Connecticut. In 1975, that company commissioned him to write the opera, and he recruited Mr. Maraniss, a colleague at Amherst who died last year, as librettist. But by the time they finished the opera, the New Haven company had gone out of business, leaving Mr. Spratlan and his music publisher to shop it to opera companies in the United States and abroad, without success.“We blanket-bombed them,” Mr. Spratlan told The Albuquerque Journal in 2010. “I didn’t have a single response.”So he set it aside for some two decades. But then he scraped together $75,000 to have the second of its three acts performed, in Amherst and then at Harvard — and recorded. It was that recording that he submitted to the Pulitzer board. It is not uncommon for composers to nominate themselves for the music prize, but Mr. Spratlan didn’t have high expectations.“I couldn’t imagine awarding the prize to a fragment of an opera,” he told the Albuquerque newspaper. “So I was startled.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1966, Mr. Spratlan is survived by two sons, Jacob Young Man Spratlan and Daniel Meriwether Spratlan; a daughter, Lydia Ji Yung DeBona; and two granddaughters.“Lew Spratlan was an American original, a hands-on musician, and an inspiring teacher,” an Amherst colleague and fellow composer, Eric Sawyer, said by email. “His creativity only increased with age, with some of his finest work coming in the past few years.”Professor Theodore said that just last year Mr. Spratlan composed a piano and chamber ensemble work, “Invasion,” in response to the invasion of Ukraine. He recalled unusual Spratlan teaching moments from years before.“We’d be hiking through the woods in Amherst while talking about musical ideas, and Lew would begin improvising with his voice to demonstrate a particular concept,” Professor Theodore said. “Brilliant, intricate, and soulful music would come pouring out. Then he’d finish it off with a silly little flourish because he also had a playful, mischievous sense of humor and loved making people laugh.” More

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

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

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

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

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      Review: The Time for Prokofiev’s ‘War and Peace’ Is Now

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      After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this opera adaptation of Tolstoy seemed unperformable. But in Munich, it has become an urgent antiwar cry.MUNICH — Sergei Prokofiev died the same day as Joseph Stalin: March 5, 1953. It’s a coincidence you’re more likely to come across in the composer’s biography than in Stalin’s.Because while Prokofiev barely figures in Stalin’s life, his own was profoundly, inalterably changed by Soviet rule. Among the many documents of that is his “War and Peace,” a work contorted through forced revision into strident propaganda. Rarely performed, it opened this week on the anniversary of their deaths at the Bavarian State Opera here in a darkly urgent and sensitively executed new production haunted by the war in Ukraine.Prokofiev began to adapt Tolstoy’s novel — an expansive portrait of Moscow society around Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, and a study in the scattered forces that shape history — in the early years of World War II, as the capital was under threat from another Western European dictator. By then, Prokofiev, who had left his homeland after the Russian Revolution, had returned and settled in the Soviet Union.His work was repeatedly inhibited by the state and subject to censorship, though he also took up nationalistic commissions like the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film “Alexander Nevsky.” And he obliged when ordered to revise “War and Peace” to include, in its martial second half, rallying choruses and a grandly heroic treatment of General Kutuzov as a stand-in for Stalin.The edits made for a clumsily uneven work of vestigial intimacy and blunt, bombastic flag-waving. Yet when “War and Peace,” which premiered in 1946, is staged — always an event because of its sheer immensity, with more than 70 characters — the score is often received uncritically, even praised.The State of the WarRussian Strikes: Moscow fired an array of weapons, including its newest hypersonic missiles, in its biggest aerial attack on Ukraine in weeks, knocking out power in multiple regions.Bakhmut: Even as Ukrainian and Russian leaders predicted that the fall of the city could open the way for a broader Russian offensive, the U.S. intelligence chief said that the Kremlin’s forces were too depleted to wage such a campaign.Nord Stream Pipelines: The sabotage in September of the pipelines has become one of the central mysteries of the war. A Times investigation offers new insight into who might have been behind it.That is, until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine called into question the taste of performing it. The Bavarian State Opera, which had been planning this production for several years, was faced with a dilemma. Moving forward would invite controversy; calling it off would play into President Vladimir V. Putin’s claims of Russian culture being canceled in the West.The show went on, but with a rare public defense by the house’s leader, Serge Dorny, who said, “We must not limit art to the nationality of those that create it,” and with more than 30 minutes of cuts to sand down the score’s more uncomfortably chauvinistic moments. Ultimately, though, the production — staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov and conducted by the State Opera’s music director, Vladimir Jurowski, both Russian-born and sharply critical of the war — would have to speak for itself.And it does. This “War and Peace” will go down as a milestone in Jurowski’s tenure at the State Opera, and in Tcherniakov’s often divisive career. They rise to meet the moment, overcoming the work’s near untenability not only to argue for its place in the canon, but also to use it as a vehicle for a passionate statement against Russian nationalism — and, by extension, Putin himself.Tcherniakov’s staging doesn’t retell the story of “War and Peace” so much as examine Russia’s condition as a perpetual outsider and oppositional force, the cyclical ways in which it has been attracted to and at odds with the West — and the destruction those beliefs have repeatedly brought about, foreshadowed in the production’s epigraph, Tolstoy’s 1904 remarks on the Russo-Japanese War: “Again war. Again sufferings, necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled-for; again fraud, again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.”Andrei Zhilikhovsky as Andrei, whose death serves a more political purpose than usual in this staging.Wilfried HöslThe opera is only an impression of the novel. It follows the contrasts of the title, not by juxtaposing the battlefield and the ballroom episodically but rather by dividing them in two. The first part, peace, recounts Natasha’s engagement to and betrayal of Andrei; the second, war, focuses on the occupation and burning of Moscow. Prokofiev and the librettist, Mira Mendelson (his second wife), reduced the plot to a telling parallel between Natasha’s losing her way in her lust for Anatole and the French fashions he represents, and Russia’s falling victim to, then triumphing over, Napoleon’s invasion. Largely lost in translation is Pierre’s meandering search for meaning.In his staging, Tcherniakov brings both strands under the same roof. Literally: He sets the entire opera in the Pillar Hall of the House of the Unions in Moscow, an 18th-century building that survived the fires of 1812 and over the years hosted society balls, the music of Tchaikovsky and the show trials of Stalin; it is also where Soviet leaders, from Lenin to Gorbachev, have lain in state. Here, it is densely populated with people sheltering from some kind of conflict, as Ukrainians have in their landmark buildings.There are cots throughout, and mats for sleeping. People of all classes seem to have come together; some are in jeans or threadbare shirts, while the wealthy Pierre wears shined leather shoes, a Barbour coat, and a wool sweater and hat. Yet no matter their background, they unite to pass the time — first days, then weeks, then months. They throw a New Year’s ball with sashes made from newspaper, toss rings onto toy swords and race in sleeping bags. Private dramas play out publicly. And patriotic pageants that begin innocently turn violently real, feral and ruled by a drunken slob turned warlord.It’s a drive toward self-destruction that was matched in the pit under Jurowski’s baton. He wrangled the eclectic, if erratic, score — a succession of talky set pieces in which arias are more like brief soliloquies — into a coherent, flowing drama. In the first half, he relished dancing rhythms and shifted between Natasha and Andrei’s repeating theme, a quintessentially Prokofiev melody of a long lyrical line leaping upward, and buffo interludes from the likes of Anatole and Dolokhov, with unstoppable momentum. Then, in the second part, he resisted overblowing the choruses and orchestral explosions, making room for intricate, at times disturbingly wicked details, and shaping a long crescendo to the end of the climactic 11th scene of Moscow’s burning and Pierre’s near execution.The cast, Jurowski has said in interviews, is nearly an entire Soviet Union; there are singers from Russia, yes, but also Ukraine, Lithuania, Moldova and other former republics. Onstage, they behave like a true ensemble, with well-rehearsed excellence. There are too many soloists to name — 43 to be exact — but some stand out: Bekhzod Davronov’s bright and belligerent tenor as Anatole, Dmitry Ulyanov’s commanding bass as Kutuzov, Alexandra Yangel’s youthful but determined mezzo-soprano sound as Sonya. As Pierre, Arsen Soghomonyan had a by turns sympathetic and, against the mighty wartime orchestra, surprisingly powerful tenor.From left, Stanislav Kuflyuk, Tómas Tómasson and Kevin Conners as comical depictions of French forces.Wilfried HöslFinest among them were the Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska as Natasha, with a malleable voice that traced her arc from naïve to careworn, and the Moldovan baritone Andrey Zhilikhovsky as an often aching, persuasively acted Andrei. And the chorus, ever-present, was a tireless and frightening force, even if cut back in this production. For the final scene, typically a lightly veiled paean to Stalin, the voices are eliminated entirely, replaced by an onstage brass band.With that change, though, the ending is still troubling. Andrei, who traditionally is wounded in battle and forgives Natasha as he dies, here shoots himself in the chest, mourning the loss of his beloved Russia as he knew it — a self-made victim of the violent nationalism taking hold. His death remains touching; Natasha repeatedly tries to lift him, attempting to dance the waltz that played as they fell in love.But as Andrei’s lifeless body rests at the front of the stage, ignored as the cast erects an ornate podium for Kutuzov to lie in state, Tcherniakov leaves the audience with a hopeless message. And in doing so he depicts a Russia that, despite internal dissidence and generational shifts in politics, is bound to repeat this scene again.War and PeaceThrough March 18, then again in July, at the Bavarian State Opera, Munich; staatsoper.de. Also streaming at staatsoper.tv. More

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      Translating the Music of Trees Into the Sounds of Opera

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      The tech-forward composer Tod Machover has made a chamber opera of Richard Powers’s novel “The Overstory,” featuring Joyce DiDonato.Musical themes abound in the work of the novelist Richard Powers, often intertwined with science and social issues. The parallel decoding of Bach and DNA (“The Gold Bug Variations”), the saga of an interracial family of classical performers unfolding against the events of the Civil Rights era (“The Time of Our Singing”): A signature of Powers’s novels is the virtuosity with which he weaves these strands into narratives that seem both surprising and inevitable.With his 12th novel, “The Overstory,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019, Powers draws on the findings of dendrology (the study of trees) and contemporary environmental anxieties to hint at a music that is always present but largely unrecognized — that of nature itself, as represented by the lives of trees.Powers said in an interview that his “preoccupation with the more-than-human world, the living world beyond the human” had pushed his work in a new direction for “The Overstory,” which he called “the most operatic of my novels.” It is told on a large scale, with an extended cast of characters, wide geographical scope and a long time frame.The composer Tod Machover sensed this operatic potential as soon as he read it and was especially drawn to its relevance. “The subjects Powers brings together here are so important,” Machover said in a phone interview from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, where he directs the Opera of the Future group. “I’ve always wanted to write a theatrical work with many strands that come together in an unusual way.”Machover’s first pass at the material, “Overstory Overture,” a brief chamber opera featuring Joyce DiDonato, premieres on Tuesday at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. The work, which was conceived both as a prelude to a full-scale opera and as a stand-alone piece, was commissioned by the string orchestra Sejong Soloists — their largest contemporary commission to date — and will be performed under the young conductor Earl Lee.Machover’s score.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesMachover — a composer, inventor, educator and researcher into the interface between music and technology — has developed novel approaches to electronics and is a trailblazer in the applications of artificial intelligence to music. “Overstory Overture” blends electronic and instrumental sonorities with DiDonato’s voice and acting to portray the book’s protagonist, the dendrologist Patricia Westerford. Four closely woven scenes distill not only her trajectory but also the novel’s larger themes of communication, environmental devastation and what Machover described as “the necessity of getting outside yourself and of recognizing connections we take for granted.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.This isn’t the first operatic adaptation of Powers’s fiction. When the Belgian composer Kris Defoort’s reworking of “The Time of Our Singing” had its premiere in Brussels in 2021, it made for “a lovely closing of the circle,” Powers said, taking his music-centered narrative and “putting it back into musical form.”But the challenges posed by “The Overstory” are different. Powers said several composers had expressed a desire to adapt it to the opera stage but he chose Machover because of a longstanding admiration for his music and a thematic affinity. He noted that works like Machover’s “Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera” (2010) examine issues of technology and its human ramifications that are very close to concerns in his earlier novels.“It was interesting to me that both Tod and I, who had explored human-machine interdependence, have now shifted attention to the interdependence between humans and other living things,” Powers said. A fan of DiDonato, he added that he was “completely delighted” when he learned that she would create the role of Patricia Westerford — “the heart and soul of the whole book who ties all the rest of it together.”DiDonato.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesMachover.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesRather than become involved in creating the libretto, Powers said he preferred it to be done by “people who know how to target the viscera and the minds of people inside a concert hall in real time.” Machover turned to the British writer, actor and director Simon Robson, with whom he had collaborated on his opera “Schoenberg in Hollywood” (2018).For this first part of the project, Robson compressed Powers’s delineation of Patricia throughout the sprawling novel into a sequence of scenes that evoke mythic archetypes as she comes to understand the hidden language of the forest. The soul and moral compass of the novel, she suffers with the trees the assault of “petrochemical props, chainsaw and machete” before finding peace in a new connection — which Machover sees as “what a different kind of synergy between a human being and the trees might feel like.”Powers’s novel resonated strongly with DiDonato, she said, because of her multiyear, global touring project, “EDEN,” that addresses climate change and our place in nature. She also has a longstanding connection to Machover: Her first leading role came in his 1999 opera “Resurrection,” based on a novella by Tolstoy. “That was the first time I was able to make my mark as a complete artist,” she said in an interview.Finding a vocal language for Patricia was collaborative, “totally a Tod Machover experience,” she said. “We looked for what kind of sounds we could create from me and in conjunction with the electronics and the acoustic instruments as well.”The process was playful. “But it had a deep level as well,” she added, “because both of us are passionate about this topic. Patricia is discovering these sounds that the human ear hasn’t heard before.”The orchestra — string players, a marimba and a bass drum — rehearsing. The ensemble becomes a metaphor for the forest.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesThe orchestral ensemble — 19 string players augmented by a five-octave marimba and a low bass drum — becomes a metaphor for the forest. The electronics play a multifaceted role: sonic fragments recombine to mimic chemical signaling, the process used by the trees to communicate and interact, even to warn of the harsh human threat. Patricia’s decoding of this plant language is based on the work of the scientific pioneer Suzanne Simard, who also was an inspiration for James Cameron’s “Avatar.”Yet for all the technological intervention, it’s melody, the most natural of musical elements, that is accorded critical importance here. “I tried to make the melodic line very present — one big development from beginning to end,” Machover said. Plans for a larger-scale “Overstory” opera are still being put in place, but “Overstory Overture” maps out a musical language that he expects to incorporate.“There is a music in words,” Powers said. “When I write, I try to use that music to support the semantic underpinnings of the story.” When a composer like Tod Machover adapts this to a musical form, “he is also exploring that equivalent from the other side — to take the meaning of the words and put them back into a soundscape that will embody that meaning.” More