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      Review: A New Opera Puts Real Emotions in a Fantasy Garden

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      Kate Soper’s “The Romance of the Rose,” which had its long-delayed premiere at Long Beach Opera, showcases her signature quick-shifting eclecticism.SAN PEDRO, Calif. — “What is art?” the composer Kate Soper asked at the beginning of “Ipsa Dixit,” her last big stage work, from 2016.In her tender, whip-smart new opera, “The Romance of the Rose,” which premiered this weekend at Long Beach Opera, she quotes a chunk of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that poses another query: “What is love?”No one has ever accused Soper of shying away from the big questions. And her works go about answering them studiously but sensuously — with earnestness, wit, whimsy, self-awareness and music that ranges freely among, for a start, Baroque madrigals, power ballads and barbed modernism.In “Ipsa Dixit,” she answers the question “What is art?” with, more or less, the piece’s title: It is whatever I say it is. In “The Romance of the Rose,” the answer to “What is love?” is something like: It’s a lot of conflicting things, in a scary, delicate balance. It’s every thing.Over a decade in the making and based on the medieval epic of the same name — nearly 22,000 lines of octosyllabic Old French couplets — “The Romance of the Rose” adapts some of the poem’s strands while adding inventions of Soper’s own. (She usually writes her librettos, often with interpolations from other authors, ancient to modern.) In an allegorical garden, the Dreamer guides the Lover as she pines for a rose: “What a perfect symbol for a dream of love!”Aroused and confused, the Lover is set upon by the God of Love, Lady Reason and Shame — and all have advice that’s at once persuasive and suspect, compelling and incomplete, about how the Lover should feel, about what love means.As the loose, stylized, funny, often poignant plot progresses, these allegorical characters seem to lose their moorings; in Soper’s world, even stock figures can’t be trusted to maintain their points of view. (This isn’t, or isn’t just, the old battle between head and heart.) The fatal seductiveness of narcissism; ambivalence about performing; the nature of reality — it’s all, ambitiously, here.I should insert what has become a standard caveat about this composer: Describing “The Romance of the Rose” might make it sound dry and bookish, but it isn’t. Soper’s text is so sly and eloquent — “Since the truth’s thus riddled with such tears, the essential question’s not ‘What is the truth?’ but ‘Who cares?’” — and her music so eclectic and quick-shifting that her work keeps you engaged even when you’re a bit baffled. Like her other stage pieces, “Rose” is high culture and low, talky but agile, brainy but — and! — feeling.Few composers are as interested in, or as gifted at, exploring the transitions and the middle ground between speaking and singing, which gives Soper’s works a familial relationship to book-based musical theater. There’s something of “Hadestown” in this new piece’s opera-pop-Broadway amalgam and mythological milieu, even though Soper’s vision is less folksy and more crystalline — more like Sondheim in its precision and cleverness, its laughing-crying lucidity about life’s complications, if not in its sound.Her vision of musicals extends from sumptuous golden-age lyricism through “Phantom of the Opera”-style rock belting to contemporary confessional intimacy, though she’s also unafraid of astringency, complexity and moments of plain noise. There is also the lovely, pared-down tunefulness that gives away Soper’s early-career roots as an aspiring singer-songwriter: She writes in an online essay about “The Romance of the Rose” that the germ of an aching torch-song duet for Idleness and Pleasure (two minor characters who nod toward a Greek chorus), a highlight of the score, dates back to those days.Like a true singer-songwriter, Soper trusts economy of musical expression. Christopher Rountree, Long Beach Opera’s music director, conducts an ensemble of nine, but often the instrumental textures are sparer than even those modest forces. In one memorable passage at the end of the first act, the Dreamer’s elegy is accompanied by the slow calligraphy of a solo viola.Lucas Steele, center, surrounded by cast members in “Rose,” directed by James Darrah, the new head of Long Beach Opera.JJ GeigerIt’s Long Beach Opera’s luck to have ended up with the piece after its premiere — planned for April 2020 at Montclair State University’s Peak Performances series — was canceled by the pandemic.Long Beach, which in 2019 premiered Anthony Davis’s “The Central Park Five” before it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, has had some internal rockiness in the past year over its commitment to inclusion efforts but also a new artistic director, James Darrah, who has staged “The Romance of the Rose” at the Warner Grand Theater here.Darrah’s production is a mixture of scrappiness and chic, and emphasizes the otherworldliness of Soper’s conception. Prairie T. Trivuth’s set, lit starkly by Pablo Santiago, depicts the garden as a pristine white courtyard dotted with potted plants and, eventually, dripping with blood. Molly Irelan’s costumes, with period cuts, vivid fabrics and sparkling touches, further the opera’s mood of pert pastiche. Its Baroque references connect medieval France to the glittery splendor of 17th-century allegorical court masques.In keeping with Soper’s stylistic variety, the cast comes from a range of musical backgrounds but shares a commitment to making the bountiful, erudite text legible. (The supertitles, for once, aren’t really necessary.) As the Dreamer, Lucas Steele has a sweet voice and Disney-prince ingenuousness with a self-referential wink. Radiating a charming mixture of naïveté and intelligence, Tivoli Treloar has a light mezzo-soprano flexible enough to convey all the Lover’s changes of perspective.As the God of Love, Phillip Bullock travels from airy falsetto to basso profundo depths. Anna Schubert is a fiercely articulate Lady Reason, Laurel Irene a punkish Shame. Tiffany Townsend and Bernardo Bermudez bring rich-toned gusto to Idleness and Pleasure, here a couple of louche lounge lizards.“The Romance of the Rose” isn’t perfect. The piece experiments with giving each of the three main allegorical foils a distinctive live-electronic vocal processing identity — Lady Reason, angular vocoding; the God of Love, echoey reverb; Shame, angry distortion. But even if it had been more perfectly executed, this conceit feels like a complication too many in an already complicated piece.Soper’s previous major stage works, “Here Be Sirens” (2014) and “Ipsa Dixit,” were substantial single acts. Conceiving “The Romance of the Rose” in two acts was Soper setting a new challenge for herself, not just in length but also in structure. What, in theater, should prompt an intermission, and what brings the audience back for more? What hunger in the first act does a second act satisfy; what crisis is resolved?These are questions that “The Romance of the Rose” doesn’t entirely solve. The second act feels like more of the same, with a somewhat blurrier version of the characters having the same debates they had before the break. (The production could be clearer in the final half, too.)Discussing the piece later with the friend I brought to the performance, I thought that Shame, which we learn at the beginning is our “urge for self-annihilation” — “an emissary from the gut to foil both the head and the heart” — might have been more effectively introduced as a crisis at the end of the first act. The war that ensues between her and the rest of the dramatis personae might then have given the second act higher and sharper stakes.Shame’s role in the first act as an equal point in the allegorical triangle surrounding the Lover might be true to the original poem. But in the opera this figure feels like the odd one out, rather than the singular nihilistic force opposing everyone else onstage.It’s a criticism, sure. But the fact that my friend and I spent hours going over what we enjoyed and what we might tweak about “The Romance of the Rose” gives you a sense of the piece and its marvels, its ability to stick in the mind and soul. After all, a lesson of the opera is that, for better or worse, we can’t help wanting to perfect the things we love.The Romance of the RoseThe final performance is on Saturday at the Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro, Calif.; longbeachopera.org. More

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      ‘The Romance of the Rose,’ Delayed by the Pandemic, Opens at Last

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      On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, a mezzo-soprano paced during an opera rehearsal before letting her sound loose. When she did, she appeared to shock herself — so much that she broke the fourth wall.“Whoa, whoa, that wasn’t my voice,” that vocalist, Tivoli Treloar, declared to her colleagues, and to an imagined audience. “I mean, I can’t sing like that!”A male voice in the cast parried with a hint of old-world courtliness: “Yet ’twas well sung, my friend!”Welcome to Kate Soper’s “The Romance of the Rose.”In addition to breaking the fourth wall, Soper’s latest work of music theater, which premieres on Saturday at Long Beach Opera, also collapses centuries, bringing its source material — a medieval French poem of the same name — into colloquial and witty collision with our understanding of opera as perhaps our most artifice-strewn art form.In Soper’s script, the mezzo, who is surprised to find herself singing (and so well!), is merely required to respond to that old-world praise with a simple “thanks.” But during the rehearsal, observed by video call, Treloar sang the word as though it were a grand encore, teasing its vowel sound into generous helpings of ornamentation.From left, Bernardo Bermudez, Tivoli Treloar and Tiffany Townsend rehearsing the opera, which was originally scheduled to premiere in 2020 but was canceled because of the pandemic.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesWhen Treloar brought her “thanks” in for a long-delayed landing, others in the room laughed at her effective resolution of the comic-opera beat. Yet the director, James Darrah, wondered if she could stretch out the revelry even more on the next pass. A rehearsal pianist began the scene again, and Treloar indulged Darrah — this time earning an even bigger laugh.This playful moment of extended experimentation felt appropriate to both Soper’s work — her hyperverbal, zigzagging scores, filled with pools of tonal lushness as well as thickets of philosophical discourse — and the prolonged path to Saturday’s premiere.“Rose,” which has been highly anticipated for years, was mere weeks away from opening at Peak Performances, in New Jersey, when, in early 2020, the pandemic shut it down. It then languished until Darrah selected it for his first full season of programming as the artistic director of Long Beach Opera.In an interview, Soper described how “Rose” both extends and deviates from her earlier, celebrated pieces like “Here Be Sirens.” For one, those works, unlike this opera, didn’t have an intermission. “You do the whole thing in one fell swoop,” she said. “Whatever those Aristotelian time-place things are; it’s kind of a big gulp. For this one, the idea of a full two-act opera was interesting to me.”A rehearsal for “Rose,” in which, Soper said, “Who are these characters who think their normal language is operatic singing? What falls apart for them when they start to question that?”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesIn “Sirens,” Soper gave subjective voice to characters who were mere devices in Homer; in “Rose,” she again reinterprets vintage literary concepts, but with expanded ambition and scope. In the three years since its canceled premiere, Soper has worked to refine the libretto. The text, she said, was difficult to write, when creating a “really strange story that was inspired by this incredibly bizarre medieval text.”In the medieval poem, the male protagonist — the Lover — is a dreamer whose affections are aimed at the symbolic entity of a rose. When his advance toward the rose is blocked, he’s schooled on and nudged toward the right way to think about love by a wide range of allegorical characters, such as Reason, Idleness or the God of Love.Two different contributors, separated by decades, worked on the poem as it is known today. And now Soper is having her turn to augment the text. Here, a figure she calls the Dreamer initially puts the character of the Lover through the various allegorical paces. (In the original poem, the pursuer of the rose is himself a dreamer.) And in Soper’s version, there’s a mysterious yet evident rapport between the Dreamer and the Lover — even as the latter, the mezzo-soprano, is still discovering her voice within this dreamy opera world.“Part of it is about: What is music, what does it mean when you sing opera?” Soper said. “Who are these characters who think their normal language is operatic singing? What falls apart for them when they start to question that?”Christopher Rountree, left, the production’s conductor, with Soper at a rehearsal.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesAs a composer, Soper answers such destabilizing questions with a wealth of sonic reference points. She’s firmly in the contemporary classical mold, which means comfort with experimentation and extended techniques — as well as the electronic processing of acoustic sounds. But as the piece progresses, she feasts on polystylism and hummable melody.The production’s conductor, Christopher Rountree, said that, during a recent rehearsal, he had the experience of feeling “like we were solidly inside of Philip Glass.” Then, “within a second, we were in Gilbert and Sullivan,” he added. “And then, a second later, we were in a very heartfelt new-music ballad, but with a character who had not sung in that new-music straight tone yet.”“It’s amazing to see all the things that are being asked of the singers by Kate,” Rountree said. “And it’s cool that we have folks who are willing to go there.”The casting intentionally brings together vocalists from different backgrounds. The dramatic soprano Tiffany Townsend, who plays Idleness, is in the young artist program at Los Angeles Opera, where she has specialized in the standard repertoire. But, she said, she enjoys the way Soper braids different traditions together. Referring to the “Torch Song,” which is sung by Pleasure and Idleness, she said, “The harmony speaks to medieval music; but the way it’s set gives a jazz feel.”The vocalist Lucas Steele, who starred in the musical “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” on Broadway, is making his opera debut in the role of the Dreamer. He said that in Soper’s writing, he sees “a height to the language that reminds me a little bit of Shakespeare” — but also a Brechtian sense of “talking to the audience, shifting in and out of the narrative.” (The rehearsal videos that Long Beach Opera has posted online give a sense of what Steele describes: Soper’s fluid approach to allegory and audience acknowledgment.)“Because Kate is so great at when she decides to insert accessible melody into a piece,” Steele said, “I think it’s going to give the audience something to grab onto, in the moments where it may start to become a little more on the experimental side of things.”Darrah said that “at an intellectual level, I look at it and I go, Oh, she’s very aware of opera as this centuries-old art form. There’s a way that she’s referencing clichés and mocking them at times, but also using the structure.”He paused for a beat, then added, “No one’s writing music like this.”Soper hopes to record the score soon. But for now, she’s enjoying the fruition of a yearslong effort that has pushed her into new creative directions. During her training as a composer — first at Rice University, in Texas, then at Columbia, in New York — she viewed opera singers as “a different species of beautiful people, swanning around wearing scarves. And I was with the composers trying to get people to play our music. I have this distant sense from it.”“I think opera for me,” Soper said, “is a premise and an element of the story rather than an actual medium that I’m writing in.”But with “Rose,” she said, she’s finding a way to edge closer to opera’s mainstream, even as she keeps questioning it on a fundamental level.“Playing around with quote-unquote real opera singers, and lower voices, and coloratura — if something about this is more of a real opera,” she said, “at the same time I can still kind of investigate what it means to be a real opera.” More

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      What Is Russia Thinking? A ‘Documentary Opera’ Tries to Answer.

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      “Russia: Today,” a piece by the composer Eugene Birman, is based on hundreds of interviews with hundreds of Russians, in which they share their private feelings about the country.Many things have been said about Russia since the country launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year ago. But getting a sense of what Russian citizens privately feel about their nation is hard: State news outlets are more strident than ever and independent ones have been closed down. Western reporters still working there are treated with suspicion or fear.Unlikely as it might seem, a new “documentary opera” is attempting to cut through the noise to find something approaching the truth. Called “Russia: Today” — the title is a wry nod to the propaganda-spouting, Kremlin-funded media company, now known as RT — the piece, by the Russian-born, Hong Kong-based composer Eugene Birman, is assembled from hundreds of interviews with Russian citizens, people of Russian heritage and people who live in neighboring countries, conducted over the last few years. On Thursday, the piece receives a rare performance at Kings Place, a London concert hall, after an aborted attempt to premiere it in Moscow and a controversial first outing in Estonia, near the border with Russia.A collage of recorded testimony, new music and chant inspired by Orthodox liturgical practice, “Russia: Today” tries to open a window into Russia’s psyche — exactly when many people outside are wondering what’s on its mind.“I thought it would be a useful thing to give voice to people who are not typically in the Russian press, or aren’t reachable by Western journalists,” Birman said. “The idea is to let people’s words speak for themselves.”Topical though “Russia: Today” seems, it dates from before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. Yet the themes it explores — post-Soviet nostalgia, uncertainty about Russia’s place in the world, anxiety about escalating conflict — seem eerily prescient. At one point, we hear a woman describing Russia as “a huge broken freezer: ripe bananas and rotten tomatoes.” Someone else brusquely compares the country to a “fat kid at a birthday party who everyone makes fun of‌” — until “he explodes.”Birman, second from right, in rehearsal with the singers from Exaudi, the group who will perform “Russia: Today” at Kings Place, in London, on Thursday.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesYet there are notes of optimism too: Another voice suggests that, while Russia is “a mess” right now, there is “hope for change.”The State of the WarRussia’s Heavy Losses: Weeks of failed attacks on the Ukrainian stronghold of Vuhledar have left two Russian brigades in tatters, renewing doubts about Moscow’s ability to maintain its offensive.Bakhmut: With Russian forces closing in, Ukraine is barring aid workers and civilians from entering the besieged city, in what could be a prelude to a Ukrainian withdrawal.Arms Supply: Ukraine and its Western allies are trying to solve a fundamental weakness in its war effort: Kyiv’s forces are firing artillery shells much faster than they are being produced.Prisoners of War: Poorly trained Russian soldiers captured by Ukraine describe being used as cannon fodder by commanders throwing waves of bodies into an assault.In 2017, when the dust was still settling on Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Birman was invited on a European Union-funded program to encourage cultural dialogue between artists from Eastern and Western Europe. For that project, he staged a series of workshops in Riga, Latvia — a city with a large ethnic Russian population. Birman set up a sound booth inside an arts center there and invited anyone who stepped inside to anonymously record their thoughts on Russia’s past, present and future.“There was a queue out the door,” Birman said. “One person spoke for, like, 30 minutes.”To capture a wider range of perspectives, the production team also set up recording booths in Helsinki, Finland, and Vladivostok, Russia, in 2018 and 2019, collecting hundreds more pieces of testimony. These were transcribed and pieced together into a libretto by the writer Scott Diel, with whom Birman has collaborated on other verbatim projects. (Those include the 2013 cantata “Nostra Culpa,” which was based on a Twitter tussle between the Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman and Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the then-president of Estonia.)Despite being billed as an opera, “Russia: Today” has no apparent plot; instead, the material is framed as an hourlong Orthodox memorial service, moving from opening prayers through lamentation to a kind of peace.“There are many different layers to the piece, just as there are many different layers to Russia,” said Sergej Morozov, the director of “Russia: Today,” by phone. “From outside, we see this political, aggressive layer, but there are different layers hidden underneath.”Birman himself left Russia with his family when he was six, in 1994, and grew up in San Francisco, before studying in Britain. As much as anything else, “Russia: Today” was an attempt to understand a country he often feels estranged from, he said. “I wanted to find what Russia is, because I didn’t have the answer myself.”In the version that will be performed in London, five singers are clustered around microphones beneath a screen that shows stark images of the Russian landscape shot by the filmmaker Alexandra Karelina. Snow-swathed railroad tracks and apartment blocks blur into glowering fir forests; vivid green tundra gives way to gray frozen lakes.We see no people, but we hear voices continually. Sometimes the interview recordings are played straight, or woven into cacophonous layers; other times, the words are declaimed verbatim by the performers, in Russian and English. At moments, Birman molds them into eerie, angular vocal lines. Coloring the score are the sounds of bells, whistling, birdlike cries and the growl of a low bass voice.Birman’s original idea was to present stagings of the work in Moscow and London. Plans were well advanced until summer 2021, when the singers of a Russian vocal ensemble that had agreed to premiere the piece, took a closer look at the text and pulled out.“The conductor just called me and said, ‘I’m so sorry, the singers don’t feel comfortable,’” said Tonya Wechsler, the show’s producer. “She said, ‘Look, one of them told me, ‘Do you not realize that it could be our last performance?’”Birman guessed that it was the religious element of “Russia: Today,” as much as its political overtones, that spooked the Moscow singers, given President Vladimir V. Putin’s alignment with the Russian Orthodox Church. “I think it was the appropriation of sacred music,” he said. “They feared that this would be problematic for their careers and their safety.”“Russia: Today” was premiered in Sept. 21 in Narva, Estonia, a city with a large ethnic Russian population.Anastasia VolkovaWhen another ensemble gave the first performance in September 2021 — in Narva, Estonia — some Russian-speaking audience members also made their displeasure felt.“We had a post-show discussion and some of the people there said, ‘Oh, it’s all lies, we cannot believe people actually said this,’” Wechsler said.Further attempts to get a live performance in Russia came to nothing. When a recording was screened in a Vladivostok movie theater a few weeks later, the venue requested that it be shown without subtitles, in case photos of the text found their way onto social media.Given everything that’s happened since, could Birman see “Russia: Today” being performed in the country of his birth any time soon? He laughed. “Nobody’s going to touch this for as long as the current government is in,” he said.Even if he could visit Russia without risking the military draft, it would be impossible to repeat the fieldwork he did just a few years ago, Birman added. “Who’s going to be willing to talk about Russia in this way at this point? Who’s going to say anything honest?” More

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      How a Production of Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin' Changed the Met Opera

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      Robert Wilson’s staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” opened to a wall of boos in 1998. But it brought new theatrical possibilities to the Met.Huge bars of light, floating down from the flies. Singers almost like statues, their gestures shifting at a glacial pace.When Robert Wilson’s slow, spare, luminous production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” opened at the Metropolitan Opera in 1998, it was a shocking break with the house’s prevailing aesthetic. While there had been some progressive stagings there, the elaborate, old-fashioned naturalism of Franco Zeffirelli and Otto Schenk reigned, particularly in the standard repertory.Wilson and his production, with its nearly nonexistent set and precisely calibrated, dreamlike movements, were greeted by a storm of boos on opening night. But this “Lohengrin,” so radical for the Met at the time, anticipated today’s broader range of directorial approaches there — like Willy Decker’s starkly symbolic “La Traviata” and Simon Stone’s contemporary-America “Lucia di Lammermoor.”On Feb. 26, the Met will introduce a new “Lohengrin,” directed by François Girard. The Wilson production, having not been revived since 2006, never quite got its due — or the kind of farewell justified by its impact on the company’s artistic trajectory. Here, interviews with some of the artists, technicians and administrators involved, excerpted and edited, tell the story of a watershed event.ROBERT WILSON In 1976, we had produced “Einstein on the Beach” at the Met on a night they were dark. It was a huge success, and the Met was interested because they got an audience they never had before. So they asked me, “Would you like to direct something?” They suggested “Aida” or “Madama Butterfly.” I said no, I want to do, with Ella Fitzgerald, the first jazz opera. So, the Met didn’t work out. Then, about 10 years later, Alexander Pereira became the director of the Zurich Opera, and he asked me to do “Lohengrin” as his opening production, and he got the Met on board.GREGORY KELLER (former Met staff director and one of Wilson’s assistants on the staging) In the ’80s, the voice was really king, especially at the Met. There was a lot of park-and-bark opera. Most directors were trying to bring in Stanislavski: “Who, what, when, where, why?” “What am I doing in this scene?” The questions a traditional director and actor talk about. And Bob completely breaks with that. He approaches things from an external point of view, with formal, classical, crystalline choreography. He’s fascinated by Eastern theatrical forms, Kabuki and Noh, and those formal, visual, artistic concerns were what he was bringing into the opera world.KIRT BURCROFF (then a new Met electrician) I’m not sure anyone, when we started, knew how we were going to pull it off. I’ve always thought the shows that look the simplest from out front are usually the hardest. And it was pretty sparse out there for “Lohengrin.”JOSEPH VOLPE (then the Met’s general manager) I was there for “Einstein”; I was on the Met’s technical staff at the time. And when I became general manager, there was always a desire to have Bob do something. I remember we had lunch, and he was so specific about every scene; on a napkin he could draw out every scene. He went through the entire opera over lunch. And everything that is called for in “Lohengrin” is there. It’s not there in the way most people would expect it. But it’s all there.WILSON I worked on it with Annette Michelson, the critic. And she said, “Read this.” It was Baudelaire, from after he saw Wagner’s “Tannhaüser”: “I’ve witnessed a spectacle of time, space and light that I have never experienced before.” So that was the key. Then I looked at the original pen-and-ink drawings, and actually, spatially, I did exactly what Wagner did. His first act had a big oak tree over here; I brought in a vertical bar of light that descended. It’s starting with a wider space and zooming into a marriage that doesn’t work, and then back out.The tenor Ben Heppner, who sang the title role in the production, with members of the men’s chorus (who wore stiff and heavy neck-to-ankle tunics) in the background.Metropolitan OperaKELLER I got to work with Bob on “The Magic Flute” at the Paris Opera in 1991. And one of the other Met assistants, Robin Guarino, had worked with him on “Hamletmachine” at N.Y.U. So we both knew the way he worked, and could shepherd him and get a product onstage he would be happy with. He had two of us he could trust.DEBORAH VOIGT (soprano who sang Elsa in the opening run) I had a bit of experience with Bob: I had covered Jessye Norman as Gluck’s Alceste at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1990. We covers were brought in for weeks before the principals. They lined us all on one side of the room and had us walk to the other side, telling us we had two minutes to do it — not a second longer or shorter. And we spent the next six weeks choreographing “Alceste,” and memorizing Bob’s style of movement. I learned what it was like to have his choreography imprinted on my body, and Debbie Voigt’s way of moving and using my body stripped away. That gave me a head start that some of my colleagues did not have.In September 1991, Wilson’s version of “Lohengrin” premiered in Zurich.BEN HEPPNER (tenor who sang the title role in the Met’s “Lohengrin”) I got a call from my Swiss agent, who asked me if I would be willing to jump in for “Lohengrin” in Zurich. I said OK, and if they can send me the video, I’ll try to learn the staging a bit. And my 7-year-old son was so bored; he had nothing else to do, and said: “Dad, I watched it and I’ll tell you what to do. First of all, there’s no sword fight in Act II” — he knew “Lohengrin” pretty well by this point — “and when you move, you’re like a robot, the way you move your arms. And oh yeah, Dad, when you walk, you have to walk like there’s something stuck in the crack of your bum.” With this in mind, I put on the tape, and, son of a gun, if he wasn’t right about everything.KELLER Giuseppe Frigoni, the one who really honed the movement vocabulary, had created all these different moves for the chorus in Zurich. They had someone offstage prompting the chorus for those gestures, and at the Met, we wanted to cue the chorus seamlessly and silently. So with Joe Clark, the technical director, we devised these machines, like in a bakery, the “now serving 98” machines. We put these two big number machines on the edge of the pit so the audience couldn’t see them. And we devised a numerical system to cue the men and an alphabetical system for the women.WILSON It wasn’t all the Met people’s cup of tea. But they had committed. And, actually, Joe Volpe didn’t really understand it, but he was a smart guy; he knew that some of the people who had supported “Einstein” were some of the wealthiest people around. And they said James Levine was going to conduct. I was a big admirer of Levine’s. He had a deep interior sense.RAYMOND HUGHES (then the Met’s chorus master) Wilson saw his artistic concept all the way through the piece. It was about light and darkness. It was not monotonous, but it was black and white.JANE KLAVITER (prompter for the original run) I remember he never raised his voice, and he was totally personable. But he didn’t joke at all; he was very austere. I remember him wearing black. I don’t remember him smiling much.HEPPNER Each character had a resting position. For Lohengrin, it was the arms to the sides but not relaxed straight down; the fingers were together and the thumbs pointed slightly forward. And each character had his or her own set of arm movements, I would say maybe five or six.VOIGT I have always used my body and moving it as the impetus to get air moving and as a means of support, and with Bob you are having to really stand still, and that’s really difficult. Then Elsa’s entrance is so static, and the music is so still, that it’s extra difficult. It’s musically challenging unto itself — and, by the way, don’t move. His style is “Kabuki Position No. 2” moving into “Kabuki Position No. 10,” and you have five minutes to do it.HEPPNER Your arms were never to be relaxed; he wanted isometric tension there. I said, “You understand, if I do that, that tension will climb into my chest and throat, and by the second act you’ll be looking for a new Lohengrin.” He sort of didn’t have an answer for that. He also asked that I not have any facial expression. I said, “If I don’t have an expression, it will sound expressionless.” That also wasn’t his favorite.VOIGT I remember one of the first rehearsals, and Bob said to Ben, “OK, I want you to sing that line to Debbie but look into the house.” And Ben said, “But Debbie’s behind me.” And Bob said, “Yes, I know, but I want you to look out there, and look at your hand when you do it.” His stylized way of expression took a long time to understand and to accept. I had to learn that I had to find meaning in it myself. He was not going to spoon-feed that to us.KELLER I know both Debbie and Ben struggled. Bob gives you the choreographic form, and it’s your job to fill in what I call the Stanislavski part. It was challenging, but eventually we got there. They understood they had an enormous amount of freedom to fill up that form.WILSON The singers were struggling, and it was not Jimmy’s cup of tea. But the mood was not negative.KELLER Everybody felt really committed. It was hard and intense, but it wasn’t fascistic or terrifying.HUGHES What I loved was that the chorus could just stand and sing. They had those numbers projected down by the prompter’s box. Like, 3 meant you hold your shield up; 2 meant you hold your sword up. This was an arrangement that made them sound fantastic. “Lohengrin” had not been done at the Met since 1986, and it’s one of the biggest chorus operas of all time. So we worked really hard.“His stylized way of expression took a long time to understand and to accept,” said Deborah Voigt (right, as Elsa, with Heppner). “I had to learn that I had to find meaning in it myself.”Metropolitan OperaVOIGT Bob did get it; he understood that it was difficult. He respected when you really put yourself into it. It was difficult, but I was also finding it very interesting.WILSON It was just another world for them. There’s no training for what I do.BURCROFF That show brought in the modern era of opera here. We still haven’t done anything like it. Because we’re a repertory theater, we use a lot of the same lights in every opera — especially in those days. But very little about that “Lohengrin” utilized any of our repertory equipment. All of it was custom built. And all those light boxes that flew in from the sides, and popped up from the floor, putting those up and taking them down every day was a monumental task because of the size. Some of the boxes were 60 feet long. The swan was our first foray into automation. It was literally driven by one of our stagehands with a joystick, sending it across the stage and hoping it wouldn’t go into the orchestra pit.KELLER On the back scrim there were constant minuscule lighting changes, so your brain was always getting stimulated.WILSON My problem with Levine was he was so inconsistent with timing. For the prelude, I had these light cues that are so complicated and they’re on a computer, and you can’t change them, but he would vary three or four minutes sometimes in the timing. But we had a good rapport; he had a dialogue with everybody.HUGHES The Kabuki influence, the very stylized acting that he coaxed out, was absolutely convincing, particularly at the beginning, when Lohengrin and Elsa are still rather one-dimensional characters. I found it riveting when she sang “Einsam in trüben Tagen” and she was slowly — very, very, very slowly — walking across the stage. It lent Elsa such a lonesome dignity.KLAVITER The challenge was that the singers couldn’t turn their heads; they weren’t supposed to move. That made it harder for them to see me in the prompter’s box. A lot of prompting is eye contact.KURT PHINNEY (Met chorus tenor) The costumes were rather rigid, I think with the idea of giving a kind of hardened look. They were difficult to bend or move in, but we weren’t permitted to do much of that anyway. I think one chorister wanted to put a portable chair under his costume so that he could sit unobserved, some mechanism that he could find a posture of rest somehow.HEPPNER You have to have fun with these things. If people I knew were coming, I told them to wait for a specific moment, and at that point I would slowly move my fingers into the Spock gesture from “Star Trek.” I didn’t take it as seriously as some people did.At the curtain calls on opening night, March 9, 1998, the cast was cheered. The production team, not so much.WILSON My god. Never in my entire life, 57 years working in the theater, have I had such a hostile reception. I was told the Wagner Society had organized it. And it was violent.HEPPNER The noise seemed like it actually moved the velvet curtain.MATTHEW POLENZANI (star tenor who back then played the tiny part of a noble) It’s the loudest noise I’ve ever heard.KELLER We were all really shocked at the provincial attitude of the New York audience.The reaction was much calmer when the staging was revived that fall. Levine once again conducted, and cast changes included a new Elsa: Karita Mattila.KELLER We were very happy it was going to come back. It was an expensive production. The light boxes, the remote-controlled pieces. In the men’s chorus, each singer had a neck-to-ankle tunic, and it was all boned, with hundreds of nylon bone inserts. I think we also made the enormous graphite spears.VOLPE It took the revival for people to fully understand the production. I think that the singers became much more comfortable with the stage direction, and I think Bob became much more comfortable with the singers.KARITA MATTILA It was the first time — I think the only time — that I have actually gone to the administration. I went to [the assistant general manager] Sally Billinghurst’s office and told her, “I’m not sure I can do this.” And she gave me a good talk, just encouraged me to try and make it work, don’t do anything yet, just give yourself a little time. And I needed some pantyhose, so I went to Saks Fifth Avenue, and I noticed that a man was following me. I went to the cashier, and I was really nervous; I felt he was quite close, and I turned. And before I said anything, he said, “Excuse me, are you Karita Mattila?” “Yes?” “Oh, me and my wife, we are so looking forward to seeing you in ‘Lohengrin.’” It was such a wonderful lesson for me, a reminder to never let down your audience for some personal reason. If it is a challenge to understand, take the challenge. And after that incident at Saks, I was back, with a different attitude. There was no way now that I would want to give up.KELLER By then, we knew how to rehearse it better, how much time everything would take. And we loosened up. We didn’t loosen up the vocabulary. But if Karita said, “I can’t do this gesture now, I’m singing,” we’d say, “OK, do it a bar later.” We were true to what Bob wanted, but we listened to what the singers had to do. And he loved it: “Do the gesture here, do the gesture there; I don’t care.”Karita Mattila, who took over the role of Elsa when the production was revived, told the Met’s administration, “I’m not sure I can do this.”Winnie Klotz/Metropolitan OperaMATTILA I thought I might be doing things differently than some others. And I wondered what Bob Wilson would say. I remember when he came to the first stage rehearsal, I felt a little bit defiant or defensive before he said anything to me. I was going to defend my changes. But to my surprise he was very, very encouraging: “You have understood this perfectly.” I actually felt quite good in the end with the production. I felt like a poet, not a senseless puppy.The production was brought back a final time in 2006, starring Mattila and Heppner, and with the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt making his Met debut as Lohengrin in the final two performances. It was Volpe’s swan song; Peter Gelb took over as general manager that summer.PETER GELB I don’t know if Bob was part of the rehearsals for the revival that season. I was told at the time that the singers were not necessarily embracing his stylized movement the way he planned it.WILSON I was supposed to do “Lohengrin” again. This was some years ago. I don’t know what happened. But Peter Gelb and I talked about doing it.KELLER Robin Guarino had left the Met; I was the last man standing from the old production. They asked me to build a schedule for how many chorus sessions it would require, and their eyes got quite wide. There were probably 10 people left in the chorus who had done the show, so it would have been a lot of time to teach them the gestures, and X amount of time rehearsing in the costumes. At that point, the administration determined it would be as expensive to do a new production.GELB I planned to bring it back, without having first checked on what condition it was in. And I discovered from our technical department that it was in very bad condition physically. All our scenery is packed into these shipping containers in a lot in Newark, and over the years the “Lohengrin” had suffered the ravages of time. Especially the large fluorescent light boxes; they had partially disintegrated. The production would have had to be completely rebuilt, and we didn’t have the time or the budget for that.Twenty-five years after the production’s premiere, it’s possible to see its effects on the company.VOLPE Bob brought the Met along; because of Bob, we were in a different place. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but for me it was a wonderful production. It was time for the Met, and it was time for me, to produce something forward-looking, something different. I believe in opera, in traditional opera. But in a way, this was traditional. Everything that was supposed to be there was there; it was just a different way of presenting it.KELLER For me it was a really seminal experience at the Met. It was kind of the intersection of what I wanted to do as a youth — wild, crazy avant-garde theater — and traditional opera. The Met was trying to be avant-garde, and I think they succeeded, and Bob really wanted to have a show at the Met. This production meant a lot to him, and it meant a lot to help him get his vision done on this grand scale, and have it come off so seamlessly. I think it was a crossroads for the Met, that yes, there’s an audience for this. I would take the 1 train home, and there would be people saying they loved it, people saying they hated it. How much of a reaction can you get out of an audience these days?BURCROFF We didn’t know at the time that it was a crystal ball into the future. You think of the Zeffirelli “Bohème” and “Turandot,” when we’re bringing wagons full of scenery on and offstage. “Lohengrin” was one static set. And that became more the norm for us. Rarely do we open the curtain on Act II and it’s a completely different set. “Lohengrin” was really about the lighting. Before that, at the Met, it was about great scenery. “Lohengrin” was about the singers and the lights, and that’s more the norm now.GELB In a period that was generally known for its theatrical blandness, Wilson, who has been one of the great theater directors, really stood out. His “Lohengrin” was an early indication of theatrical possibilities that the traditional, core Met audience had not experienced.WILSON If I go to the opera tonight, if I really want to hear the music, I close my eyes and I hear much better. So can I keep my eyes open, and what I see can help me hear the music better than when my eyes are closed? That’s simply it. My responsibility as a director is, can I create a space where I can hear music? More

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      Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’ Uses the Word ‘Führer.’ Keep It There.

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      In some cases, the inflammatory, Nazi-associated term has been changed out of sensitivity. What do we lose when that happens?There are some 10,000 words in the libretto of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” which the Metropolitan Opera is presenting in a new production starting on Feb. 26. But the most inflammatory one comes at the end.The title character, a mystical knight who arrived in the first act to defend the honor of a woman accused of killing her brother, points to a handsome youth in shining silver armor who has magically appeared out of the water. He is the lost brother.“Here is the Duke of Brabant,” Lohengrin declares. “He shall be your leader.” In German, Wagner’s text is: “Zum Führer sei er euch ernannt.”Piotr Beczala will sing that line at the Met, as will tenors at the vast majority of other opera houses in the world when they put on “Lohengrin,” a repertory staple for over 170 years.But at a smattering of companies, particularly in Germany, and most prominently at the Bayreuth Festival — founded by Wagner and still run by one of his descendants — the text has quietly been changed because of the association of “Führer” with Hitler, who was a treasured guest at the festival.“Especially we in Bayreuth should be particularly sensitive there,” Katharina Wagner, the festival’s director and the composer’s great-granddaughter, said in a statement, “because we have a special political background and therefore also a special responsibility.”Wagner, who is also a stage director, added that she preferred to make the change — from “Führer” (“leader” or “commander”) to “Schützer” (“protector”) — in her productions of the opera.“Führer” is certainly arresting today. But when Wagner was writing the opera, in the 1840s, it was an unassuming, somewhat vague military title that referred, depending on the word to which it was connected in a compound, to varying degrees of operational command.The word got a new charge toward the end of the 19th century, when Georg Ritter von Schönerer, an Austrian antisemite who agitated for pan-Germanic nationalism and harbored fantasies of ancient Roman revival, took it on as the name his followers would address him by. (They also embraced “heil” and the rigidly outstretched, so-called Roman salute as a greeting.)Von Schönerer’s ideas and his gift for propaganda were inspirations for Hitler, who in the early 1920s began to use “Führer” as his title, along the lines of the success of Mussolini’s self-styling as “Il Duce.”As with Mussolini, the word became central to what was soon the fully cultlike worship of a charismatic would-be national savior, and “Führer” was the foundation of Hitler’s official title starting after the death of Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, in 1934. One of the Nazis’ omnipresent slogans was “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”: “One Nation, One Realm, One Leader.”Anja Harteros, front, and Piotr Beczala in Yuval Sharon’s staging of “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleSomewhat surprisingly for non-German speakers, the word is still found all over that language as part of compounds. A train conductor is a “Zugführer”; a driver’s license is a “Führerschein.” At Bayreuth, Katharina Wagner herself carries the title of “Geschäftsführer,” or managing director.But for the term to stand alone, especially as a military or political title, is basically verboten.And it’s not exactly neutral in the context of Wagner. Even if he wrote long before the rise of the Nazis, his works were tainted by his notorious antisemitism and, decades after his death, by Hitler’s enormous affection for his music and the dictator’s friendship with the Wagner family.Hence the “special political background” that Katharina Wagner referred to, the source of the sensitivities that she has worked to address. Some years ago, the festival unveiled a large display on its grounds about artists killed, imprisoned, exiled or otherwise affected by the Nazis. Several stagings — including Stefan Herheim’s “Parsifal” and Barrie Kosky’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” — have dealt explicitly with Wagner’s and the festival’s political legacy.The change of a single word seems like it could hardly be a subtler interpolation. At Bayreuth, which lacks supertitles, it is likely that almost no one would have noticed had there not been a small flurry of coverage of the issue last summer. And deference toward sensitivity might make sense, given the festival’s history.Yet the erasure of “Führer” is a missed opportunity. It also doesn’t quite make sense, with the unintended consequence of seeming not to take Wagner’s text and his careful word choices seriously. “Schützer” is used elsewhere in the libretto to describe Lohengrin’s role within the plot as a kind of transitional figure after Gottfried, the lost brother, has disappeared. The energizing question of the story is, in a leadership vacuum, what comes next? It’s therefore misleading, after Gottfried’s deus ex machina reappearance, to refer to him as “Schützer,” since he, unlike Lohengrin, is entitled to actually take political and military command.And if we’re rooting out Nazi associations in “Lohengrin,” why stop at “Führer”? Early in the opera, ominous reference is made to armed action against the German “Reich,” and stentorian choral “heils” proliferate, like something out of the propaganda film “Triumph of the Will.” In “Meistersinger,” why then preserve the ending, when the kindly cobbler Hans Sachs suddenly, grimly warns of foreign encroachments on the country and its “holy German art,” a call taken up with rally-style fervor by the crowd?Any of these changes might be made out of respect, but they also let us in the audience off the hook. Wagner’s works are as ambiguous and ambivalent as we are, pulled between the desire for freedom and the desire to be led and commanded. This should not be something to erase, but rather something to explore — for us watching and for the stage directors who shape Wagner’s vision for us.Yuval Sharon, who directed the latest Bayreuth “Lohengrin” but had no part in the decision to change the text, said in an interview: “I feel like it’s part of your responsibility every time you restage this opera, the same responsibility you have with any opera that has fraught language or fraught ideas. The visual aspect gives you an opportunity to offer a counterpoint to that original.”In other words, how should a staging represent Gottfried if we are to take in the nuances of what might be meant by him returning as Führer? Presumably, in 2023, it’s not as an unironically perfect Aryan boy in gleaming armor, an unquestioned savior. Sharon depicted him symbolically, as a verdant flowering of nature; Hans Neuenfels, whose “Lohengrin” preceded Sharon’s at Bayreuth, had an adult-size bloody newborn emerge imperiously from an egg.There are as many options as there are productions. But simply taking out “Führer,” with all its connotations, softens the complexity of the society depicted in the opera — a restive, angry one willing to submit to a leader who will quickly and easily solve its problems. The libretto’s medieval Antwerp is not so different from the Germany that blindly followed its own Führer.It is often said that we shouldn’t anachronistically import into Wagner’s works the ways in which they were heard and used long after his death. In the case of “Lohengrin,” later history actually illuminates this unsettling opera; changing a word out of an excess of sensitivity distorts it.“I think editing it feels a little bit like a whitewash,” Sharon said. “It can dull the edge of what makes the piece so potentially dangerous and disturbing. The opera carries in it the DNA of so many utopian visions, and simultaneously the very beginning of totalitarian thinking. Both coexist in his works, and you can’t have one without the other. Part of what’s amazing about Wagner is engaging with those impulses, in both directions.” More

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      Jürgen Flimm, Director of Festivals and Opera Houses, Dies at 81

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      He left his mark in Hamburg, Berlin, Salzburg and elsewhere. He also directed a memorable “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.Jürgen Flimm, who led some of Europe’s most important theaters, opera houses and performing arts festivals over the last 40 years, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Wischhafen, Germany, northeast of Hamburg. He was 81.His death was announced by the Berlin State Opera, where he had been general manager from 2010 to 2018. His wife, the film producer Susanne Ottersbach Flimm, said the cause was heart failure following pneumonia.Mr. Flimm’s Berlin appointment was his last in a long career that also included directorships at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. He also staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 2000.He directed acclaimed productions outside the German-speaking world as well, including at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.A dress rehearsal for Mr. Flimm’s 2000 production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” one critic wrote of the production, “but the shock was considerable.”Jürgen Flimm was born in Giessen, Germany, on July 17, 1941, to Werner and Ellen Flimm, who were both doctors. His family had fled there after bombs began falling on Cologne, where they had been living, and where they resettled after the war.In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mr. Flimm recalled his childhood. His father was a surgeon who, Mr. Flimm said, used the family’s apartment to see patients: “Every morning I put up my bed and our living room became a waiting room: patients everywhere.” His mother was a general practitioner, but like so many German women in the immediate postwar period, a time of general deprivation, she scrounged to bring home butter and meat. As a child, Jürgen sold old newspapers to fishmongers. While his older brother, Dieter, played drums in jazz bands around the city, Jürgen invented dialogue for his puppets in the attic. Dieter Flimm eventually founded an architecture studio and worked as a set designer and a musician. He died in 2002.Their father, who loved theater, would attend performances as a doctor on duty, and Jürgen often accompanied him. “I secretly hoped that an actor would get sick, so I’d be able to go backstage and see what went on there,” he said, although his father disapproved of his sons’ artistic proclivities and would have preferred for them to study medicine.Jürgen enrolled at the University of Cologne, where he studied theater, German literature and sociology. He abandoned his studies to become an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele theater in Munich, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. He received an acting degree from the Theater der Keller in Cologne.In 1969 Mr. Flimm married the actress Inge Jansen, a colleague at the Kammerspiele. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mr. Flimm remained close to Ms. Jansen’s five children from her previous marriage, four of whom are still living. Ms. Jansen died in 2017.Mr. Flimm married Susanne Ottersbach. The couple lived in a two-story thatched house built in 1648. She is his only immediate survivor.He directed his first production at a theater in Wuppertal in 1971 and held positions at theaters in Mannheim and Hamburg in the 1970s, while also building up his résumé as director in Zurich, Munich and Berlin.He directed his first opera in 1978, the German premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1975 “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” in Frankfurt. The work remained dear to Mr. Flimm’s heart: Decades later, he programmed it, in an acclaimed production by the British director Katie Mitchell, in both Salzburg and Berlin.In 1979, Mr. Flimm returned to Cologne to lead the city’s main theater, the Schauspiel Köln. During his six years as artistic director there, he programmed works by the influential choreographer Pina Bausch and the fanciful French-Argentine director Jérôme Savary.He moved to Hamburg in 1985 to lead the Thalia Theater, which he is widely credited with putting in the international spotlight by inviting avant-garde artists like the American director Robert Wilson.From left, the director Robert Wilson, the author William S. Burroughs and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits at the premiere of their work “The Black Rider” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. It was the most lauded production during Mr. Flimm’s tenure there.Frederika Hoffmann/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1990, Mr. Wilson’s “The Black Rider,” a collaboration with the singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the author William Burroughs, became the most lauded production of Mr. Flimm’s tenure in Hamburg. Despite some famously sour reviews (the German magazine Der Spiegel likened it to “a version of ‘Cats’ for intellectuals and snobs”), it was a hit and toured worldwide.Mr. Flimm left the Thalia in 2000. That summer, his “Ring” cycle had its premiere at Bayreuth.“It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, “but the shock was considerable.” While praising some aspects of the cycle, Mr. Ross concluded that it ultimately left a very mixed impression.“The production felt unfinished,” he wrote, “and the flurry of painted curtains during the ‘Götterdämmerung’ apocalypse suggested that in the end it had simply run out of money.”Mr. Flimm made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” that October. This time Mr. Ross raved, concluding his review by saying that “Flimm is a smart director, and the Met should give him anything he wants.” The production was revived three times between 2002 and 2017.Mr. Flimm’s follow-up at the Met, a 2004 production of “Salome” that was a vehicle for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, was more polarizing. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted that Mr. Flimm received some loud boos on opening night. But, he noted, “the bravos won out, and rightly so.”In 2005, Mr. Flimm became artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a multidisciplinary arts festival in the rust belt of Germany. He stayed an extra summer past his three-year contract after his designated successor, the German theater director Marie Zimmermann, took her life in April 2007.His time there dovetailed with the start of his artistic directorship at the Salzburg Festival, where he had previously served as head of drama from 2002 to 2004. During his first summer, he commissioned a new staging of “Jedermann,” the morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition, from the young Bavarian director Christian Stückl. The production was a hit and remained a festival mainstay for a dozen years.Mr. Flimm ascended to the festival’s leadership in 2007. It was a tumultuous time: Gerard Mortier had taken the festival in a radically new direction throughout the 1990s, and after his departure in 2001, it had struggled to hold on to an artistic director.The four seasons Mr. Flimm spent as Salzburg’s leader were regarded as successful artistically, but he made clear that he was not interested in staying for the long run. In 2008, he announced that he would step down at the end of his term to head the Berlin State Opera.In September 2010, shortly after Mr. Flimm arrived in Berlin, four steamers sailed down the river Spree, conveying 500 members of the opera company westward to the Schiller Theater, where it planned to spend three seasons during renovations to its historic home. Instead, the construction dragged on for seven years.Mr. Flimm imported a number of acclaimed productions to Berlin that had first been seen at Salzburg. One of his original productions in Berlin was a 2016 staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which featured an abstract set designed by Frank Gehry that reportedly cost 100,000 euros.In addition to his work in theater, Mr. Flimm taught at the University of Hamburg and was a guest lecturer at Harvard and New York University. Among his many honors was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German government’s highest, which he received in 2002. In a 2011 interview with the Bavarian radio station BR, Mr. Flimm was asked what accomplishments he was particularly proud of. Among those he mentioned was his 2000 “Fidelio.”“After the premiere,” he said, “I stood on the balcony of the Met, looked out into Manhattan and thought to myself, ‘Not bad, Jürgen!’” More

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      In Chicago, ‘Opera Can Be Hip-Hop, and Hip-Hop Can Be Opera’

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      The baritone Will Liverman was singing in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” about five years ago when he watched a documentary about Jonathan Larson and his musical “Rent.”“It talked about how ‘Rent’ came to be, and how this guy had the idea of taking ‘La Bohème’ and updating it,” Liverman said in an interview this month. “I was wondering why more classics aren’t updated — taking them for ourselves and spinning a new narrative that reclaims the story and tells something that’s meaningful for us.”Then he visited a Black barbershop, and an idea hit him: This could be the setting for a new take on the Rossini, like “La Bohème,” one of the most beloved operas in the repertory. “The thing is,” Liverman said, “I didn’t really take agency over writing anything because of feeling like I was just a singer. I was like, man, someone should do this.”The years since have proven that Liverman isn’t just a singer. An enterprising artist on the rise, he has not only become a fixture of contemporary works at the Metropolitan Opera, including a star turn in Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” last season, but also shepherded new commissions. And now, with his old friend DJ King Rico, he has taken on composing as well.Together they have updated “Barber,” loosely adapting its story into one about a barbershop on the South Side of Chicago and blending operatic writing with a kaleidoscope of styles like R&B, funk, hip-hop, gospel, rap and, of course, barbershop quartet. Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj joined them, collaborating on the show’s book and becoming its dramaturg and director. The result, “The Factotum” — its title recalls the famous Rossini aria “Largo al factotum” — opens Feb. 3 at Lyric Opera of Chicago.Liverman, 34, and DJ King Rico, 33, met as teenagers at the Governor’s School for the Arts in Virginia. There, they found a mentor in Robert Brown, a teacher with a gospel background who taught them, young Black men, what place they could have in a world like opera, and how free the art form could be.“We had someone to look up to that looked like us, that taught us what opera was but also could get on the keys and play the craziest rendition of anything you ever heard,” Liverman said. “That’s what really sparked it all, before we even knew what was inside of us. He instilled that.”On the bus, the pair would hold court, singing songs like Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz’s “Get Low” in classical voices. “The girls would go crazy,” DJ King Rico said; but more important, the playfulness taught him “that opera can be hip-hop, and hip-hop can be opera. It’s the same notes.”In a joint video interview, Liverman and DJ King Rico talked about writing “The Factotum,” and the place it might come to have in the opera world. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.“The possibilities just seemed endless,” Liverman said about composing an opera.Lawrence Agyei for The New York TimesComposing opera is new for both of you. How has it felt to be working in this mode?DJ KING RICO When Will hit me up about this, that was the farthest thing from my mind. I sang opera in high school; I did it for two years. That was really cool, but then I went the other route. So, when he came back, what immediately started playing in my mind was like, OK, we’re going to make this us. It’s going to be really, really authentic.WILL LIVERMAN The exciting thing was, the possibilities just seemed endless. There was a lot of trial and error — figuring out how the operatic voice can serve these styles we know and love. We were in the studio; we’d record something and listen back to it a bunch of times and really pinpoint what things were working and what things we could fix.DJ KING RICO For me, it’s been cool to play various roles. That’s what the factotum is — a jack-of-all-trades. Having to master a lot of different things throughout this process: writing the music, recording, engineering. Whatever helps the process move along, just removing the ego, and that has been transformational.There’s an added layer here, Will, of writing for yourself in the role of Mike.LIVERMAN It’s been a big discovery, because we’re also both the composers and librettists. I loved writing parodies back in the day; if TikTok was a thing in my 20s, I’d be all over that. But now, we noticed there are certain words that just sound so corny if you try to sing them operatically, like “That’s so dope.” And in these styles, you have to keep space for the operatic voice to feel natural.There were some things that I sing for my part that I had to rewrite because it’s like, Oh man, I need to actually breathe here, or do that. On the creating side, you also start thinking about vowels and certain words that speak better.Given how broad the range of styles is in this opera, how did you arrive at what sounded right for any given moment?DJ KING RICO I don’t think we ever arrived at what felt right completely until Rajendra came onboard. He helped complete the story line, and even now, in rehearsals we’re still fine-tuning. But as far as whether to use hip-hop or gospel or whatever — I think it’s more so the emotion that we want the audience to feel and what supports that.We used to play this Basquiat clip where he was like, “Black people are not represented in these spaces.” But we do exist here, and so we are being very intentional about being ourselves in this space. So, there’s this one song, “Conversation,” where it has all of the genres mixed up into one so you see all of the personalities of the different characters in the barbershop. We wanted it to feel a little bit chaotic, and authentic.About the barbershop. In Rajendra’s director’s note, he compares that space to the theater, as a gathering place. What did that idea open up for you in the opera’s story?LIVERMAN One of the cool things about going into a barbershop is, you never know who’s going to come in. Everybody needs to get their hair cut, from the gangster to the preacher to the teacher. It’s a safe space for us to really be and speak our truths. It’s so much more than a haircut. My hair was a mess about a month ago; I was looking like Moses in “The Ten Commandments.” But I go to my guy in Chicago, and I just listen in on the conversations — the openness, the honesty, the funny things, the joy. Then, at the end of it, I come out a new person. I feel like art has the power to do that.DJ KING RICO They definitely both provide community. And a work like this allows multiple people to come together. If you’ve seen the things in this story and been impacted by them, probably someone next to you has experienced the same thing. So, you can come together and feel joy in that.DJ King Rico at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. “Opera can be fun!” he said. “There’s room for everything.”Lawrence Agyei for The New York TimesThe Met Opera recently said, in something of a reversal, that contemporary works have become box office draws — including, Will, the sold-out run of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” that you were in. Not only were those seats full, but the audience was also visibly different. Do you see “The Factotum” aiming for something similar?DJ KING RICO Opera can be fun! There’s room for everything. And so if we’re going to put something like this on on a Friday, let’s make this a thing, a vibe. Let’s experience the art and then kick it after. There’s a renaissance that happening, and I’m just thankful that we’re a part of it. Because opera changed my life as a 14-year-old kid studying those scores. I feel like if we can continue to expand it and expand the audience, it can continue to do the same thing going forward for future generations.LIVERMAN I hope other artists look at this and see that anything’s possible. When you have a dream or that feeling, that inner voice saying “Do this,” do it. Like Rico said, one of the ways we think of the factotum is being a jack-of-all-trades. We put this together ourselves over a number of years, and I want it to be an inspiration for other artists to step outside a box that says “I have to just be in this one lane.”Then there are young kids of color. But there are also young kids period, and older people. I want this to be a story of humanity, like Rico said, coming together. You see so much of the sad mask in opera, but I think there’s something to be said, just as powerful, about joy and happiness. We need those stories, but we also need some of the things that make the heart feel good. More

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      Monica Bellucci Tries on the Dress, and Life, of Maria Callas

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      The film star embodies one of opera’s greatest divas in the solo show “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” coming to the Beacon Theater.There are opera stars, and then there is Maria Callas.Birgit Nilsson or Luciano Pavarotti may have been great, but they haven’t sung posthumously. Callas, on the other hand, has toured — as a hologram — decades after her death. Few have heard of the William Luce play “Bravo, Caruso!,” about that classic tenor, but Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” which revolves around Callas’s exacting methods as a teacher, won a Tony Award in 1996 and is regularly revived.This soprano’s fans — the fiercest of whom the critic Anthony Tommasini affectionately dubbed “Callas crazoids” — will be kept busy this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of her birth. Early out of the gate, in New York, is the actress Monica Bellucci, who is bringing her solo show, “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” to the Beacon Theater on Friday.Bellucci, 58, has been performing the piece, in which she reads selections from Callas’s writings, on and off since 2019. Yet she still finds it hard to explain the peculiar, enduring hold that the soprano often referred to as La Divina still has on the collective imagination.“She had an aura,” Bellucci said during a recent visit to New York.Bellucci herself was regally resplendent that day, projecting the kind of smoky-voiced elegance often associated with marquee names of Golden Age Hollywood. But her résumé is less predictable than that reference might suggest: She has leapfrogged from intimate dramas to the James Bond movie “Spectre,” from Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” to the victim of a brutal rape in the French “provoc-auteur” Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible.” Her reputation as a symbol of European glamour and sophistication is so firmly established that she made fun of it in an episode of the series “Call My Agent!” (One crucial difference from that guest appearance: “I never had a relationship with my agent,” she clarified with a laugh.)Maria Callas, one of the most storied sopranos in opera, greeting fans at Carnegie Hall in 1974.: Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesStill, as open to new adventures as Bellucci has been, she had steered clear of theater. Undaunted, the director, writer and photographer Tom Volf, who had made the 2018 documentary “Maria by Callas,” trekked to her apartment to pitch a project based on his book “Maria Callas: Lettres & Mémoires.”“I remember we were in the living room, and she opened the book randomly and started reading out loud,” Volf, 37, said in a video interview. “That’s when I really saw the alchemy right away. Suddenly her physique, her attitude, her emotion were matching the one that I sensed was Callas’s, especially in some specific letters where you can see the woman and not the artist or the public figure.“I call it an alchemy; I think it’s beyond resemblance,” he continued. “I believe in destiny, like Callas did.” (Whenever Callas comes up, quasi-spiritual references to “aura” and “destiny” have a way of seeping into the conversation.)Equally bowled over, Bellucci forgot her longstanding reservations about appearing onstage. “The sense of beauty I felt was stronger than being scared,” she said. “I wanted to share what I felt with other people. It was through theater that I could get into that.”It’s hard to deny that a Callas-Bellucci pairing feels like it was predestined. Bellucci even played a Callas-like Italian opera star nicknamed La Fiamma in Season 3 of the series “Mozart in the Jungle.” Beyond their physical resemblance, Bellucci, an Italian-born Parisian, has led a border-crossing, multilingual international career, just like Callas, a Greek, New York-born singer decades earlier.Both had to navigate the specific tests that greet famous female celebrities. “I think that Monica can very instinctively and strongly relate to Callas as a woman,” Volf said. “Perhaps because she understands the duality between trying to lead a life as a woman and an artist with worldwide fame, and all the difficulties and the challenges that come with it.”The Callas mystique, beyond her acting and singing talent, was fed by an agitated, to put it mildly, personal life. She was rumored to have bitter rivalries with colleagues; was crushed by a torrid and unhappy affair with the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis; and had a conflicted relationship with her body. (She lost a considerable amount of weight in a crash diet, which some blame for her eventual vocal issues.)“She’s someone who had the courage to follow her heart, so that’s why when people say she had a tragic life. …” Bellucci said, trailing off. “She had a brave life. She wanted to divorce in a moment when, in Italy, divorce was forbidden. She’s still inspiring today because she had everybody against her and she was a fighter.”Callas’s physical reinvention can be also be seen as a sign of autonomy rather than of weakness. “She created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business,” Bellucci said sympathetically. “Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle’: They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”At the Beacon, Bellucci’s instrument will be sheathed in one of Callas’s actual dresses, a black Saint Laurent number that Volf borrowed from a private collection in Milan. The couch that plays a central role, however, is only a replica of one Callas had at her apartment on Avenue Georges-Mandel in Paris.“The idea was a ghost of Callas is coming back to her house,” Bellucci said. “So I move to different places on the sofa, as if it represents this circuit of her life, from when she’s young, full of excitement, and then when she was more mature, finding a balance between work and private life. And then the end, when she was in her sadness and melancholy, but so elegant in that.”Because this is not a biographical show per se, but rather a peek into the singer’s more intimate side, in conversation Bellucci and Volf often differentiated between Callas and Maria, as a way to separate her public and private personas. They also pointed out that “Master Class,” for example, focused on a very specific element of her life: “This was the hard part of her,” Bellucci said. “People used to say that she had a temper. Actually, she was uncompromising and completely dedicated to her work with her soul, her heart.“But the more intimate part of her,” Bellucci continued, “the one that nobody knows, was so fragile and sensitive. And this sensitivity was also the base of her talent: She had the capacity to perceive things like a child. But nobody protected this child — not her mother, not her family. No men protected this child. So the child gets destroyed, and the artist as well.”As rich as her experience with “Letters & Memoirs” has been, Bellucci is not sure she will stick with theater. She said she had turned down, at least for now, an offer to play Medea — not coincidentally, perhaps, the role that gave Callas her sole movie experience, under the direction of Pier Paolo Pasolini.“I think maybe Callas did the one film, and I’m going to do one experience in theater,” Bellucci said. “I’m very thankful for the experience, and I’m going away like I came.” More