Opera

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Prototype, an Essential New York Opera Festival, Turns 10

      by

      “There are all these unbelievable artists who are creating work that’s really hard to define,” Beth Morrison, a music theater impresario, said during a recent interview. “It’s the work that falls between disciplines, that is beautiful and strange and challenging, and there’s so little space for that in New York right now.”Morrison, the leader of Beth Morrison Projects, produces exactly those types of works — operas and other pieces that can approach cabaret, concert or musical forms but defy categorization — with white-hot fervor, particularly as one of the founders of the Prototype Festival, which started 10 years ago and returns on Thursday with seven shows as idiosyncratic and fearlessly strange as ever.The niche that Prototype occupies on the New York performing arts calendar — something of a purely musical cousin to the Under the Radar theater festival, also this month — has become increasingly essential as Lincoln Center moves away from presenting festivals that would have hosted chamber and avant-garde operas, for example, or as small theaters nurture new works with an eye toward Broadway.Things weren’t much better when Prototype, created by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, took shape with the help of a Mellon Foundation grant. “There wasn’t much,” said Kim Whitener, a founding director (and formerly of HERE), who is now an independent producer. “There didn’t seem to be a space for this really important work.”Over the years, Prototype has put on black box productions and works in progress, and expanded to theaters across the city as its operas grew in scale, like “Dog Days” and “Breaking the Waves.” During the pandemic, it commissioned streaming projects. And last year, when the Omicron variant’s spread led to the festival’s cancellation mere days before its start, it adapted yet again, finding ways to salvage much of its programming.Du Yun and Royce Vavrek’s “Angel’s Bone” (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. This year, Du Yun has a new chamber opera, written for and starring the baritone Nathan Gunn.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesA scene from Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” another Pulitzer winner.Maria BaranovaAlong the way, it has been an early supporter of artists like Taylor Mac and Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte — the Lithuanian trio that went on to global recognition, and critical adoration, with its opera “Sun and Sea.” Two Prototype shows, the Du Yun and Royce Vavrek opera “Angel’s Bone,” and Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” have won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.Du Yun is back this year with the chamber opera “In Our Daughter’s Eyes,” written for and starring the baritone Nathan Gunn; other productions include Emma O’Halloran’s double bill “Trade/Mary Motorhead,” the vocalist Gelsey Bell’s “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” Silvana Estrada’s “Marchita,” David Lang’s “note to a friend,” the streaming opera “Undine” and the 10th anniversary celebration “The All Sing ‘Here Lies Joy.’”Morrison and Whitener — along with Kristin Marting, HERE’s artistic director, who was among Prototypes founders and leads it with Morrison today, and Jecca Barry, a former director who was on the 2023 edition’s curatorial team — discussed Prototype’s past and present in a group video call. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Over the past decade, what kind of influence have you observed Prototype having on the industry?JECCA BARRY We’ve seen, across the country, other opera companies that have started their own festivals or explored the idea of second stages — other venues, like black box theaters. The first partnership show that we did with Los Angeles Opera was “Dog Days,” and that was at Redcat [a 200-seat theater]. L.A. Opera told us that 70 percent of the audience that came to see that had never set foot in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion [the company’s much-larger home]. It’s actually about creating a totally different audience, and really, that’s so important for opera companies these days.KRISTIN MARTING That’s about both form and content. I feel like the festival spans this spectrum of work. There’s a crossover thing that’s happening, and that’s because so many of the artists that we’re working with are not trying to stay within the lines. Then the second thing about content: I just feel like what we’re really interested in is socially relevant work that resonates with people — a whole range of people, told by a whole ranges of voices. I think that’s also something that the industry has been incorporating, happily, after so long of it being monochromatic.How would you say the New York cultural landscape changed during Prototype’s history, and what has that meant for the festival’s mission?BETH MORRISON It’s almost impossible right now to get opera programs at any of the venues in town. With Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera is doing new work, finally, but there’s a whole host of work that is being created for smaller stages and other kinds of stages that the big presenters aren’t doing here. And for a company like us, that doesn’t have a performing space, it’s freaking hard. Our stuff used to be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that’s completely shifted. Lincoln Center is not doing opera. The Shed’s not doing it. That means we can only get our stuff done in our festival when we self-present it, and I think that’s a real shame.BARRY The creative impulses are there. I mean, it’s incredible how many young composers want to write their first opera right out of the gate.KIM WHITENER They’re finding their niches elsewhere. I just think that we’re in a time of such great sea change; it’s really more that what we’re talking about with the loss of New York is the sense of a real footprint, you know, for opera theater in the way we used to have.Thinking about the pandemic, changing audience habits and new ways of presenting opera, how has the festival adapted?MORRISON We were really proud of what we did in ’21 with the commissions to composers to create work in a digital space, and making sure that we had a presence and an impact in our community’s lives at a time when we were all so locked down. Last year really sucked, though — to have the festival canceled a week before we opened was completely devastating. We lost a couple hundred thousand dollars because we paid all the artists. We managed to do three of the shows later in the year and then moved other things to this January. But I think that this year’s festival has come together really beautifully as a result.What effect, if any, has the festival’s success with awards like the Pulitzer Prize had on how it operates?MARTING I think we’re taking the same risks.MORRISON What we’re committed to is letting the artists lead and sort of walking hand-in-hand and bringing their visions to the fore. That recognition’s incredible, and I think we’re all thrilled that we were able to produce and present that work.BARRY But I think it’s also a testament to flexibility. So many companies that are developing new work, especially big institutions, are very rigid in their structures of what that looks like and what that timeline is, and that is not the way any producer on this screen works. Both of the pieces that won the Pulitzer took more time than we originally thought they were going to and got rescheduled and rescheduled.There’s this wonderful point when an artist says, “Can I really do that?” And to be able to say, “Yes, you can try that idea,” and then, on the flip side, to have the audience come in and say, “I didn’t know you could do that with opera.” Being able to empower artists to take those risks and then being able to see the audience, it’s so satisfying.MORRISON With “Dog Days” in particular, and with what Jecca just said — it reminds me of the phone call that I got from David T. Little when he was writing it, saying: “I don’t think the last 20 minutes has any words. Is that OK?” I love that phone call. That’s the best phone call ever, because they want the permission to go in a completely boundary-pushing direction, and that’s what we want.WHITENER When you really trust the artist, they in turn trust you. They’re putting this really raw, alien thing in your hands and trusting you to see it through.BARRY And from that, we then trust the audiences. We are putting that work out there and trusting audiences to come on that ride with us, and we certainly have no expectation that everybody who shows up to every Prototype show every year is going to love it all.There are a lot of world premieres at the festival this year. But we’re still dealing with Covid and flu outbreaks. How confident are you that Prototype is truly back?BARRY We have community agreements that we’re asking everyone to adhere to to keep themselves as safe as possible. We do daily testing. We do PCR weekly. Anyone who is not performing is masked in rehearsal. So, we take a lot of precautions. Our fingers are crossed that we’ll be able to offer all the performances that we want to offer audiences this January.WHITENER The opening night kind of thing — the big gathering of all the artists, getting together and partying — that’s definitely not happening right now. As a field, we are missing that a lot. You hear everybody saying that: how much they miss the community. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Wax Cylinders Hold Audio From a Century Ago. The Library Is Listening.

      by

      The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts acquired a machine that transfers recordings from the fragile format. Then a batch of cylinders from a Met Opera librarian arrived.The first recording, swathed in sheets of distortion, was nonetheless recognizable as a child’s voice — small, nervous, encouraged by his father — wishing a very Merry Christmas to whoever was listening.The second recording, though still noisy, adequately captured the finale of the second act of “Aida,” performed by the German singer Johanna Gadski at the Metropolitan Opera House in the spring of 1903.And the third recording was the clearest yet: the waltz from “Romeo and Juliet,” also from the Met, sung by the Australian soprano Nellie Melba.Accessed by laptop in a conference room at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the recordings had been excavated and digitized from a much older source: wax cylinders, an audio format popularized in the late 19th century as the first commercial means of recording sound. These particular documentations originated with Lionel Mapleson, an English-born librarian for the Metropolitan Opera, who made hundreds of wax cylinder recordings, capturing both the turn-of-the-century opera performances he saw as part of his job and the minutiae of family life.For decades, the Mapleson Cylinders, as they’re called by archivists and audiologists, have been a valuable but fragile resource. Wax cylinders were not made for long-term use — the earliest models wore out after a few dozen plays — and are especially vulnerable to poor storage conditions. But with the innovation of the Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine, a custom-built piece of equipment made specifically for safely transferring audio from the cylinders, the library is embarking on an ambitious preservation project: to digitize not just the Mapleson Cylinders, but roughly 2,500 others in the library’s possession.Mapleson’s diaries studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe machine will also allow the library to play a handful of broken Mapleson cylinders that nobody alive has ever heard. “I have no idea what they’re going to sound like, but the fact that they were shattered a long time ago saved them from being played too often,” said Jessica Wood, the library’s assistant curator for music and recorded sound. “It’s possible that the sound quality of those will let us hear something totally new from the earliest moments in recording history.”Some of the Mapleson Cylinders had already been in the library’s collection, but another batch was recently provided by Alfred Mapleson, the Met librarian’s great-grandson. This donation was accompanied by another valuable resource: a collection of diaries, written by Lionel Mapleson, that studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar. The diaries provide extra context to both Mapleson’s audio recordings and the broader world of New York opera. One entry from New Year’s Day in 1908 noted the “tremendous reception” for a performance by Gustav Mahler. Another described the time that the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, “in rage,” dismissed his orchestra because of noise on the roof.“The consistent keeping of this diary is much more important than just for music,” said Bob Kosovsky, a librarian in the New York Public Library’s music division. “It’s such an amazing insight into life in New York and England, since he went back every summer to the family.”The library acquired the Endpoint machine from its creator, Nicholas Bergh, last spring, as NPR reported then. “The Western music at that time was being recorded in the studios, so it’s very unique to have someone that was documenting what was actually going on there at the theater,” said Bergh, who developed the machine as part of his work in audio preservation.Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAlfred Mapleson soon reached out to the library about the diaries, and the collection of his great-grandfather’s cylinders that had, for years, awaited rediscovery in his mother’s Long Island basement. In November, they were packed into coolers and transported by climate-controlled truck to the library, where they’re now stored in acid-free cardboard boxes meant to mitigate the risk of future degradation. (On Long Island, they’d been kept in Tuborg Gold beer caddies.)These particular cylinders were previously available to the library in the 1980s, when they were transferred to magnetic tape and released as part of a six-volume LP set compiling the Mapleson recordings. After that, they were returned to the Mapleson family, while the greater collection stayed with the library. But, Wood said, “there’s people all over the world that are convinced that a new transfer of those cylinders would reveal more audio details than the previous ones.”Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph, where, similar to a modern record player, a stylus followed grooves in the wax and translated the information into sound. The Endpoint machine uses a laser that places less stress on the cylinders, allowing it to take a detailed imprint without sacrificing physical integrity, and to adjust for how some cylinders have warped over time. The machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played, which can then be digitally reconstituted into a complete recording.Within the next few years, the library hopes to digitize both the cylinders and the diaries, and make them available to the public. The non-Mapleson cylinders in the library’s collection are also eligible to be digitized, though Wood said that process will be determined based on requests for certain cylinders. The library’s engineers are shared across departments, and with a backlog of thousands, she said, “We have to wait our turn.”The wax cylinders comprise just one aspect of the library’s ongoing audiovisual archival projects. Its archives of magnetic tape were recently digitized thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And curators are in talks with Bergh about a new machine he’s developing that can play back wire recording, a midcentury format that captured audio on a thin steel wire. Wood estimated that about 32,000 lacquer discs — a predecessor to the vinyl record — at “very high risk of deterioration” are also in the digitization queue. These discs contain all types of audio, including radio excerpts, early jazz music and recordings made at amusement parks.The Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Libraries, in general, are very focused on books and paper formats,” Wood said. “We’re getting to a point where we’ve had to argue less hard for the importance of sound recordings, and that’s allowing us to get some more traction to invest resources in digitizing these.”Alfred Mapleson said he was simply happy to put his family inheritance to good use. The cylinders were previously part of the Mapleson Music Library, a family-owned business that rented sheet music, among other things, to performers. But the business liquidated in the mid-1990s, and the cylinders had sat untouched in his mother’s basement ever since.“There’s an important obligation to history that needs to be maintained,” he said. “We don’t want them sitting in our possession, where they could get lost or damaged.” He waved off the possibility of selling them to a private collector, where they might find no public utility: “That’s not something that would sit well with my family.”His great-grandfather’s archives had offered him plenty to reflect on. His wife had gone through the diaries, he said, and pointed out the behavioral similarities between living family members and their ancestors. He noted, with some awe, how his grandfather’s voice — the one wishing a Merry Christmas — resembled his own children’s voices. But it was time to pass everything on, and he said he had no interest in repossessing the materials once the library had finished digitizing everything.“It’s in better hands at the New York Public Library,” he said. The recordings had originated at the Metropolitan Opera; now, they would reside nearby forever. “Let’s keep it in New York, because this is where it all happened. I like that idea.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Review: The Met Opera Found an Audience for ‘Fedora.’ For Now.

      by

      Worries about the company’s future were momentarily stilled at a festive gala premiere on New Year’s Eve.The mood was festive, the audience large and enthusiastic, for the gala premiere on New Year’s Eve of a rare new production of Umberto Giordano’s lovably preposterous potboiler “Fedora” at the Metropolitan Opera.The soprano Sonya Yoncheva and the tenor Piotr Beczala, playing aristocrats locked in a series of betrayals and counter-betrayals, passionately loved and raged; the conductor Marco Armiliato and the Met’s orchestra brought restrained silkiness out of the pit; David McVicar’s staging was bustling and handsome. A good time was had by all.But I couldn’t quiet a tiny voice of dread in me. Not about the celebratory scene on Saturday evening, but about what it will be like when the Met tries to get its money’s worth out of the new production and revives it, with far less marketing and press coverage and quite possibly a less starry cast. Who will be in the audience for that “Fedora” in a season or two or three?The question has extra urgency after the coal that arrived in the Met’s stocking the day after Christmas, when the company announced that weak ticket sales and recalcitrant donors as the pandemic drags on would force it to raid its endowment to the tune of $30 million — a full tenth of the fund’s value — and to cut 10 percent of its planned performances next season.As a silver lining, the Met said at the same time that it would immediately expand its presentations of contemporary operas, which have been outselling some of the classics.Yoncheva plays a Russian princess in the late 19th century who swears vengeance after her fiancé is killed.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in truth, what has been selling at the house is what gets promotional resources and media exposure: new productions, be they of brand-new pieces or 125-year-old ones like “Fedora.” Without that kind of publicity, attendance was particularly dire this fall for revivals of masterpieces that are hardly obscure but not quite “Aida,” like Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” Britten’s “Peter Grimes” and Verdi’s “Don Carlo.” This could very well be the fate of “Fedora,” too, when it’s brought back.There is a real audience for the Met, as sold-out runs of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” have proved. Just not so much for a pillar of opera-going: hearing repertory pieces as they evolve, year in and year out, with different casts. It is, sad to say, an ever-smaller group of people who care to see “La Traviata” subtly but unmistakably transform with each new Violetta — or “Fedora” with each new Fedora.That is why the 10 percent trim in performances for next season is a portent of what’s to come. The Met’s long-term future may well consist of seasons with significantly fewer performances of significantly fewer titles, and a greater proportion of new stagings to returning productions.That model, which would edge the Met closer to an annual event like the Salzburg Festival from its repertory-house tradition, may yield some strong artistic results. But the transition to it will involve a tumultuous rethinking of the company’s costs, and therefore its labor contracts, as well as fewer dismally selling revivals like this season’s “Idomeneo,” “Peter Grimes” and “Don Carlo” — all of which were excellent and all of which are integral to the Met’s responsibility to its art form.Even if this “Fedora” is never revived, we will at least have had a sensitive, spirited run of a work that last came to the Met in the 1996-97 season, when it was a vehicle for the great diva Mirella Freni’s full-production farewell to the company.“Fedora” is about as opera as opera gets. The title character (Yoncheva) is a Russian princess in the late 19th century who swears vengeance after her fiancé is shot to death. The plot, of course, thickens. It turns out that the killer, Count Loris Ipanov (Beczala), did not commit the crime for political reasons, as everyone assumed. (The dark specter here, as in Dosteovsky’s “Demons” and the Coen brothers’s “The Big Lebowski,” is nihilists.) No, Fedora’s man was making it with Loris’s wife, setting off a jealous gunfight; once that is revealed, enmity between princess and count turns to lust.This being a tear-jerker, their brief idyll is smashed when her prematurely sent letter of accusation inadvertently results in the death of Loris’s brother and mother, leading to his ferocious condemnation of Fedora and her overhasty suicide by the poison she keeps in a cross around her neck. (Don’t you?)The play on which this dead-serious farrago is based was written by Victorien Sardou, the reigning French master of theatrical sensation, who was also the source for Puccini’s “Tosca” around the same time. Giordano, Puccini and other Italian composers who came of age in the 1880s and ’90s have become known to posterity under the catchall “verismo,” a term which came to suggest a style of sumptuous orchestral complexity and moment-by-moment emotional responsiveness, with arias and other numbers that emerge and recede organically rather than formally — at least compared to Italian opera as it had been before — but with a melodic lushness that set them apart from Wagner.The gawkier sibling to its better-known predecessor, Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier,” “Fedora” is not a perfect piece. The roles other than Fedora and Loris are thoroughly unrewarding. The high spirits with which Giordano opens the second and third acts, for all-too-obvious contrast with the intense drama to come, drag on too long. There is an aria about Veuve Clicquot champagne, and an aria about bicycles, both thin.But for all its absurdity, the pairing of Fedora and Loris can catch fire with committed singers. It goes without saying that this can be an opportunity for wild-eyed scenery chewing. As fun as that can be, it is to Yoncheva, Beczala, Armiliato and McVicar’s credit that a sense of classiness and dignity prevailed on Saturday.Sometimes too much. For some of the opera Yoncheva seemed a bit, well, collected amid all the shattering revelations; nothing really seemed to faze her. And her high register tended to lack not volume but richness, so her climactic exclamations were less than harrowing.But she had far more vocal presence here than in her pale turn as Élisabeth in Verdi’s “Don Carlos” (in French) at the Met last season. Her dark-hued, resinous, trembling-vibrato soprano has an inherent morbidity, haunting in both Fedora’s longer lyrical lines and speech-like parlando. She is superbly articulate even in tiny moments: Near the end, she sees the tragedy that is unfolding and tells her friends, practically murmuring, “Andate, andate pure” (“Go, just go”).After audibly warming up through his brief aria “Amor ti vieta,” long beloved of tenors, Beczala sang with his usual stylish ardor. Among a sprawling cast, the robust baritone Lucas Meachem (as the diplomat De Siriex) and the bright soprano Rosa Feola (Countess Olga) did their best in bland supporting parts. Bryan Wagorn, a veteran of the Met’s music staff, had a turn as the Chopinesque pianist who plays at a party as Fedora and Loris confront one another.Armiliato’s conducting was notable for bringing out the score’s dynamic range; much of this orchestral performance was subtle and delicate, rather than the blaring blood-and-guts that is still the verismo stereotype.This is somehow McVicar’s 13th Met production since 2009, and its main concept is a straightforward logistical one: Each of the three acts — the plot moves from St. Petersburg to Paris to the Swiss Alps — expands the grand, airy set (by Charles Edwards) a chunk further upstage. As in McVicar’s staging of another verismo-era work, Francesco Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur,” which opened at the Met on New Year’s Eve four years ago, there is a suggestion of the blending of domestic and theatrical spaces. His most idiosyncratic interpolation here is the pale figure of Fedora’s murdered fiancé, who wanders around haunting her; whatever.The color scheme of the costumes (by Brigitte Reiffenstuel), largely black and white, unfortunately restricts what should be a smashing palette range for Fedora’s gowns, though Yoncheva looked splendid in the cinched-waist, heavy-bustle cuts.In the first act, she wears a dramatic raven-color dress, with a many-diamonded tiara. Diva entrances rarely get the old-fashioned reception at the Met these days, so to hear the audience erupt in applause as she first came on was delightful enough to momentarily still that tiny voice of dread in my head about the company’s future. At least for the couple of seconds it took for her to stride across the stage, cool and confident, basking in the ovation, it was New Year’s Eve, it was one of those works that warms any true opera lover’s heart, and all was right with the world.FedoraThrough Jan. 28 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Bridgette Wimberly, Playwright and Librettist, Dies at 68

      by

      She had success with a play about abortion in 2001, and in 2015 wrote the libretto for the opera “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”Bridgette A. Wimberly, a playwright whose first staged work, a drama about abortion, was an Off Broadway hit in 2001 with Ruby Dee in the lead role, and who later made a mark in opera, writing the libretto for the widely produced “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” died on Dec. 1 at a care center in the Bronx. She was 68.Her family said the cause was complications of strokes.Ms. Wimberly took up playwriting relatively late. In an interview with The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2003, when one of her plays was being staged by the Cleveland Play House, she confessed that had someone told her a decade earlier that she would be a playwright, “I would have said that someday I’d be going to Mars, too.”Yet her first produced play, “Saint Lucy’s Eyes,” staged at the Women’s Project Theater in Manhattan in April 2001, was so well received — The New York Times called her “one of the country’s most powerful chroniclers of the Black underclass” — that after its initial run ended it was brought back for an eight-week summer run at the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village.The play was developed through the Cherry Lane Alternative mentorship project, in which Ms. Wimberly worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein.Ms. Dee, then 76, played a character known only as Grandma who, as the story opens in a scene set in Memphis in 1968, is preparing to perform an illegal abortion on a teenager. The action later shifts to 1980, with Ms. Wimberly’s script exploring the consequences of that abortion and another one that Grandma is preparing to perform.“The play is smart enough to realize that there are many truths,” Anita Gates wrote in a review in The New York Times, “some of them contradictory.” In Newsday, Gordon Cox wrote, “‘Saint Lucy’s Eyes’ doesn’t boast much narrative momentum, but Wimberly shows an admirable talent for the unhurried development of her characters and for dialogue that consistently rings true.”Several more of Ms. Wimberly’s plays were produced over the next dozen years, and then, in 2014, she was offered the chance to take her writing in a different direction.Daniel Schnyder, a Swiss-born saxophonist and composer, had been commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Gotham Chamber Opera to write an opera, and had landed on the pioneering jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker as a subject. He knew Ms. Wimberly through her brother, Michael, a percussionist with whom he had performed, and asked her to write the libretto of what would become “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”First, though, Ms. Wimberly had to overcome some personal reservations. An uncle had been a jazz saxophonist and had been somewhat obsessed with Parker. He had also begun using heroin, the drug that contributed to Parker’s death in 1955 at 34. Her uncle, 14 years younger than Parker, died at 35.“My grandmother hated Charlie Parker because she thought he got my uncle hooked on heroin,” Ms. Wimberly told The Times in 2015. “All my life, he was just a bad name.”Lawrence Brownlee, right, as Charlie Parker and Will Liverman as Dizzy Gillespie in Opera Philadelphia’s 2015 production of “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”Dominic M. MercierBut she took the assignment and developed a certain respect for Parker. “Yardbird” was commissioned as a showcase for the tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who portrayed Parker when the opera had its premiere in Philadelphia in 2015. The work imagined the period immediately after Parker’s death in 1955, with the jazz great pondering, among other things, his wives and other people from his past as well as the large orchestral work that he was never able to write.“In the end, he didn’t write an orchestra piece, and we weren’t going to have him write a false one,” Ms. Wimberly told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2015. “But I feel that what he passed on was that he inspired so many people to create, he opened up the doors, he set the birds free, the people free, the music free, like with what he did with the blues. What he did for jazz itself was allow others to do what he was not able to do in his lifetime.”Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the Philadelphia premiere for The Times, called the work “a 90-minute, swift-paced chamber opera with a pulsing, jazz-infused score.” The next year the opera had its New York premiere at the Apollo Theater, where Parker himself had played. It has since been staged by Seattle Opera, Arizona Opera and other companies, and will be performed in January by the New Orleans Opera.Mr. Schnyder, in a phone interview, said that, because it had a white, male, European composer, the piece needed a librettist who could bring an African American and a female sensibility.“It was a perfect match because she looked at the story of Charlie Parker from a really different perspective, focusing on his relationships with different women in his life,” he said. “That proved to be much more interesting than just focusing on the music.”Bridgette Angela Wimberly was born on Jan. 7, 1954, in Cleveland to John and Conchita (Smith) Wimberly. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in 1978 and later did graduate studies at Columbia.Ms. Wimberly, third from right, and other former members of the Cherry Lane Theater’s mentorship project at a 2014 event celebrating the project’s 16th anniversary.Walter McBride/Getty ImagesShe was trained as a medical researcher and worked for a time at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center; later several of her plays, including “Saint Lucy’s Eyes” and “Forest City,” about Cleveland’s first integrated hospital, would touch on medical issues.She was interested in poetry and began sharing some of hers in a reading group that met in a Harlem theater where the conditions were not always ideal.“When it was cold, we froze,” she told The Times in 2001. “When it rained, we had to use our umbrellas inside. When it was hot, we burned up.”The poetry led her to dabble in theater. In 1997 she participated in a directing workshop at Lincoln Center. She wrote a scene for one exercise; others in the class, she recalled, told her, “You should finish this”; and the eventual result was “Saint Lucy’s Eyes.”Ms. Wimberly is survived by her mother; her brother; and a sister, Bernadette Scruggs.Seth Gordon, who teaches at the Helmerich School of Drama at the University of Oklahoma, directed the premiere of “Forest City” for the Cleveland Play House in 2003.“Bridgette gave voice to the stories of people who struggled quietly and with dignity, and to chapters of African American history that deserve attention,” he said by email. “She wrote with a striking poetic flair, and with a sense of grace that also defined her very generous spirit.” More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Pandemic Woes Lead Met Opera to Tap Endowment and Embrace New Work

      by

      Facing tepid ticket sales, the company will withdraw up to $30 million from its endowment and stage more operas by living composers, which have been outselling the classics.Hit hard by a cash shortfall and lackluster ticket sales as it tries to lure audiences back amid the pandemic, the Metropolitan Opera said Monday that it would withdraw up to $30 million from its endowment, give fewer performances next season and accelerate its embrace of contemporary works, which, in a shift, have been outselling the classics.The dramatic financial and artistic moves show the extent to which the pandemic and its aftermath continue to roil the Met, the premier opera company in the United States, and come as many other performing arts institutions face similar pressures.“The challenges are greater than ever,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “The only path forward is reinvention.”Nonprofit organizations try to dip into their endowments only as a last resort, since the funds are meant to grow over time while producing a steady source of investment income. The Met’s endowment, which was valued at $306 million, was already considered small for an institution of its size. This season it is turning to the endowment to cover operating expenses, to help offset weak ticket sales and a cash shortfall that emerged as some donors were reluctant to accelerate pledged gifts amid the stock market downturn. As more cash gifts materialize, the company hopes to replenish the endowment.To further cut costs, the company, which is giving 215 performances this season, is planning to reduce the number of performances next season by close to 10 percent.The Met’s decision to stage significantly more contemporary operas is a remarkable turnabout for the company, which largely avoided newer works for many decades because its conservative audience base seemed to prefer war horses like Puccini’s “La Bohème,” Verdi’s “Aida” and Bizet’s “Carmen.”But as the Met staged more new work in recent years that dynamic has begun to shift, a change that has grown more pronounced since the pandemic: While attendance has been generally anemic, contemporary works including Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” last season and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” this season drew sellout crowds. (Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” by contrast, ended its run this month with 40 percent attendance.)Read More on the Coronavirus PandemicBoosters: Americans who received updated shots for Covid-19 saw their risk of hospitalization reduced by roughly 50 percent this fall compared with certain groups inoculated with the original vaccines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.Seniors Forgo Boosters: Nearly all Americans over 65 got their initial Covid vaccines. But only 36 percent have received the bivalent booster, according to C.D.C. data.Free at-Home Tests: With cases on the rise, the Biden administration restarted a program that has provided hundreds of millions of tests through the Postal Service.Contagion: Like a zombie in a horror film, the coronavirus can persist in the bodies of infected patients well after death, even spreading to others, according to two startling studies.From now on, Mr. Gelb said, the Met will open each season with a new production of a contemporary work.It will begin next year with the company premiere of Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” and the season will feature its first performances of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X”; Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” and a staged production of John Adams’s “El Niño.” And Mr. Gelb said that the Met was rearranging next season to bring back “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours,” with its three divas, Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O’Hara, reprising their roles.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, left, said that the company would embrace more contemporary works. He spoke with the composer Philip Glass in 2019. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Opera should reflect the times we’re in,” said Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director. “It’s our responsibility to generate new works so that people can recognize themselves and their realities on our stage.”Mr. Gelb said that the company’s change in strategy was possible in part because major stars are increasingly interested in performing music by living composers. “It’s a big shift in terms of opera singers themselves, embracing new work and understanding that this is the future,” he said.The Met has drawn many of the most illustrious singers of the day since Enrico Caruso ruled its stage, and it gave the world premiere of several Puccini operas and the American premiere of works by Richard Strauss and Wagner. It returned triumphantly last year after the long pandemic shutdown, which cost it $150 million in anticipated revenues. Audiences were back, though still lagging. Donations were up. And the determination of the whole company, including its artists and stagehands and ushers, was on full display: even as Omicron shut down many theaters last season, the Met never missed a curtain.By summer, however, the company, which has an annual budget of $312 million, making it the largest performing arts organization in the United States, began to feel the strains of the pandemic more acutely.Ticket revenues last season from in-person performances and the Met’s Live in HD cinema presentations were down by more than $40 million compared with before the pandemic. Paid attendance in the opera house has fallen to 61 percent of capacity, down from 73 percent. Donors have stepped in to fill much of the shortfall: During the pandemic, they have pledged more than $150 million in extra emergency funds. But amid the market downturn, some were hesitant to quickly deliver those gifts.“When the economy shudders, major donors shudder along with it,” Mr. Gelb said.The company had avoided dipping into its endowment in the early days of the pandemic, even as many other struggling opera companies and orchestras did, partly because it had taken the painful step of furloughing workers, including its orchestra and chorus, without pay. But now it has withdrawn $23 million from its endowment and can draw another seven million.A recent cyberattack that left the Met website and box office unable to sell new tickets for nine days has added to the company’s woes.But as more private donations come in — in the beginning of the new year the company expects to take in an additional $36 million in cash above its normal contributions — it hopes to replenish the endowment before the end of the fiscal year, at the end of July. It is unclear if that will be possible.“The Hours,” the new Kevin Puts opera starring Renée Fleming and Kyle Ketelsen, was such a strong seller this year that the company will bring it back next season. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met’s decision to turn to its endowment undoes some of the work it has undertaken in recent years to build it back up. A few years ago the company announced a fund-raising drive to double the endowment, and took steps to lower the amount its draws from it each year down to 5 percent of its value, from 8 percent.The Met is not alone in finding it difficult to emerge from the pandemic.Portland Opera in Oregon, which is struggling with a prolonged decline in ticket sales, has reduced its staff and cut in half the number of operas it stages each season to three from six before the pandemic. “The situation currently facing Portland Opera is not unique, but it is still a crisis,” said Sue Dixon, the company’s general director, who said that the cuts were necessary in the short term but would hurt the company’s ability to grow back.The Philadelphia Orchestra has seen paid attendance hovering at around 47 percent this fall, down from about 66 percent before the pandemic, though a recent uptick in sales has provided some optimism. “Many people are not back in the habit,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the orchestra and the Kimmel Center. “We need to remind them that it’s not only a beautiful and extraordinary and special experience, but it’s also easy and inexpensive.”Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, a troupe in Ohio, canceled its holiday shows this month because of tepid demand and rising production costs. And the Philly Pops, a 43-year-old orchestra, has announced plans to dissolve next year, citing mounting debt and a sharp decline in subscriptions during the pandemic.Verdi’s “Don Carlo” ended its run this fall with only 40 percent paid attendance.Ken Howard/Met OperaThe prospect of a recession next year is further rattling arts groups and raising fears that weak attendance could extend into next season and beyond. Federal assistance, which helped many companies survive the pandemic shutdown, has now largely dried up.“We’re still in this period of great uncertainty and anxiety,” said Simon Woods, the president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras. “The need to build new audiences is more urgent than ever.”For many opera companies and orchestras, the pandemic has accelerated the decline of the subscription model for selling tickets, which was once a major source of revenue.At the Met, subscriptions are expected to fall to 19 percent of total box office revenues this season, compared with 45 percent two decades ago. As single tickets become more popular, and some older subscribers stay at home because of virus fears, the average age of the Met’s audience has dropped to 52, from 57 in 2020.Mr. Nézet-Séguin, who became the Met’s music director in 2018, succeeding James Levine, who led the company for four decades, said the company would remain committed to the classics even as it embraced innovation. And he said that the company could try to appeal to different audiences with an array of works, both old and new.“I want everyone to feel welcome at the Met,” he said. “Will they fall in love with every opera we do? Of course not. But I don’t want anyone to say, ‘The Met is not for me.’” More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      America Needs Its Own Comic Opera Company

      by

      There is no house in the United States dedicated to presenting works from a prominent corner of homegrown music theater repertory.Whenever I’m trying to sell a friend on a night at the opera, my memory calls up a scene from “Twin Peaks.”The local doctor, Will Hayward, sits down to dinner, clearly haggard, thanks to his work mopping up local catastrophes. Then someone asks him how it’s going.“I feel like I’ve sat through back-to-back operas,” he says with a sigh. Everyone at the table smirks. In this view, even one opera might prove a test of endurance. It’s a somewhat surprising joke at the music world’s expense, given that “Twin Peaks” often found pleasure in an eclectic array of sound worlds (spurred on by the inventive, varied work of the show’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, who died this month at 85).But the gag also makes perfect sense. While “Twin Peaks” had art house trappings, it straddled the line between rarefied and popular: a feat that American opera hasn’t bothered with much since it stopped regularly letting its hair down on television in the 1950s.Long before grand Metropolitan Opera productions represented the first, last and final word about opera onscreen, thanks to its public-television broadcasts, audiences could find their way to sprightly, comedic musical spectacles. After a successful Broadway run in the 1940s, Kurt Weill’s “Lady in the Dark,” with a book by Moss Hart and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, was performed live on NBC in 1954. This night at the theater at home featured a plot driven by psychoanalysis and songs that unfurled within dreams. (“Twin Peaks,” eat your heart out.)It was a critical hit again, just as it had been live. Weill’s “One Touch of Venus,” with text by Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman, followed on NBC in 1955. Around that time, audiences could also catch Oscar Straus’s “The Chocolate Soldier” and Victor Herbert’s “Naughty Marietta” on TV. Shows that would otherwise be found on the stages of comic opera houses — theaters that specialize in the genre of theatrical works with spoken dialogue and often humorous plots — were readily available in living rooms across America.Thankfully, all those telecasts have been preserved on DVD by the VAI imprint. And although the orchestrations in use weren’t those of the composers, at least the tunes are all there — which is more than you can say for the Hollywood adaptations of the same works. But why do we hardly see this kind of material today, on television or in theaters?Composers didn’t lose all purchase on humor around 1960. But since then, Broadway has become a less reliable steward of these kinds of scores. Pit orchestras have been reduced in size; amplification of voices has become more common. Sondheim’s catalog, with its complexity and wit, is the exception to these trends (and even his shows aren’t in consistent enough circulation today).Despite that reduced range of performance, American classical artists still demonstrate comic bents just waiting for an outlet. One example: Anthony Davis, a Pulitzer Prize winner, writes serious-minded grand stage works like “The Central Park Five” and “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which is headed to the Metropolitan Opera in 2023. But he also writes comic operas, and they have languished.Davis’s 1992 opera on the Patty Hearst saga, “Tania,” contains a satirical jewel titled “If I Were a Black Man,” with words by Michael John LaChiusa. It is sung by a white Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist, and lampoons the liberal fascination with what Tom Wolfe called radical chic. Anyone weary of cringe-y, performative displays of bien-pensant thinking might crack a smile — or let loose a belly laugh. (Davis, too, chuckled while singing a line to himself when I spoke with him this year.)But you really have to go searching for “Tania,” or this song. Rare is the algorithm that would promote it; and the CD version, from the Koch label, is catch as catch can on the secondhand marketplace.Davis’s fellow Pulitzer awardee William Bolcom is in similar straits. His verismo operatic adaptation of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” from 1999, was prominently documented on a New World Records album from Chicago’s Lyric Opera. Yet Bolcom’s comedic efforts, like the 1990 “Casino Paradise” — with its Trump-like land developer protagonist — aren’t as widely known.Some elements of “Paradise” are dated, but the verve of “A Great Man’s Child,” the show’s failson anthem, with a lyric by Arnold Weinstein, still plays well alongside contemporary talk about “nepotism babies.” Bolcom’s accolades have tended to be for concert works like his “Twelve New Etudes for Piano.” When I interviewed him this year, however, he made his underlying affections clear, saying, “Since the beginning, I’ve had love for the theater.”This strain of American cultural life clearly exists. But how could it be better represented? The answer is simple: It’s time for this country to create a comic opera company of its own.The comic opera tradition — which traditionally has included not only spoken dialogue, but also smaller voices relative to grander works in the repertory — has since cross-pollinated with neighboring forms like the musical. The Komische Oper in Berlin or the Opéra Comique in Paris might play “Kiss Me, Kate” one night, and an experimental opera with spoken bits — or comedic angles — the next.Critics trip over one another for assignments to these houses. (One of the performance highlights of my year was a new production, at the Komische Oper, of Jaromir Weinberger’s riotous “Schwanda the Bagpiper,” whose orchestral music delighted American audiences in the mid-20th century.) But New York has no such organization. And aside from small, specialized troupes — a local Gilbert & Sullivan society, or Ohio Light Opera — the United States doesn’t really have any comic opera companies.The American Musical Theater Festival in Philadelphia commissioned and premiered both “Tania” and “Casino Paradise” but was shuttered in 2014. You might occasionally find a great chorus like MasterVoices in New York partnering with an estimable local ensemble like the Orchestra of St. Luke’s to stage the original, comic opera version of Bizet’s “Carmen” — but generally for one night only. That same creative team brought “Lady in the Dark” back for a triumphant one-weekend run in 2019. (The short run was billed as a celebration of a previous New York revival, during the first season of Encores!, in 1994.)Together, MasterVoices and St. Luke’s could form the backbone of America’s first true comic opera company. What else would they play and sing? Perhaps those comedies from Davis and Bolcom, and more of Weill’s works. But also, surely, shows by Sondheim — and perhaps other musicals that wouldn’t be appropriate for commercial runs on Broadway today.That catalog could include, for example, the vaudeville music of the composer and lyricist team Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, whose 1921 show “Shuffle Along” was a landmark of Black Broadway. The show employed William Grant Still, who was eventually called “the dean of African American composers,” as an oboist in the pit. (Still was said to have improvised a motif in performances that George Gershwin supposedly heard and later used for “I Got Rhythm.”)The book of “Shuffle Along” is weighed down by racial stereotypes of the period — yet Blake and Sissle’s music deserves a new outing. In 2016, Broadway tried a story-behind-the-show approach, though it shuttered prematurely after its star, Audra McDonald, had to withdraw because of a pregnancy. A new adaptation of “Shuffle” would be fitting for an American opera company, and more viable outside the profit-driven confines of Broadway.Contemporary composers who would be a good fit for a comic opera company include Joseph White, whose outlandish “The Wagging Craze” — a self-described “radio opera” from late 2021 — dramatizes a ribald (and, of course, fictional) male-bonding fraternity that attracts Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. (J. Edgar Hoover, for his part, is appalled.)There’s also Kate Soper — the dramatist, soprano and librettist behind out-of-the-box theater pieces like “Here Be Sirens.” We would all benefit from her having the space, and budget, to produce new works. (Her long-delayed opera “The Romance of the Rose,” originally intended for spring 2020, will at last make its debut at Long Beach Opera in February.) Or maybe Soper could just pop into the theater to perform a black box-style show based on her most recent album, “The Understanding of All Things,” in which she winningly dissects a male suitor’s negging in the Yeats poem “For Anne Gregory.”It’s not likely that we’ll see a contemporary version of mid-20th century opera telecasts. Those old Weill productions would be too ambitious; Soper’s conceits, too experimental.A proper stage for these and other works wouldn’t merely help to reclaim comic opera’s past and present; it could also set priorities for the future. After all, what incentive is there for budding artists to write in the vein of Davis and Bolcom if their own works can’t be heard? It’s time to give our comic spirits the opportunity to punch up the script of American opera. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Vienna Philharmonic to Honor Players Lost in World War II

      by

      In the new year, the Vienna Philharmonic will pay tribute to more than a dozen of its members who were ousted, exiled and killed during World War II.VIENNA — When armed forces stormed the State Opera here during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” on March 11, 1938, prominent players from the Vienna Philharmonic fled through the back door and would never regain their positions.The solo bassoonist Hugo Burghauser was removed from his post as chairman and replaced with Wilhelm Jerger, a member of the Nazi Party. By the next week, all other orchestra members affected by the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws had been expelled.More than 80 years later, after the Vienna Philharmonic’s 180th anniversary and before its next New Year’s Concert, the orchestra’s current chairman, Daniel Froschauer, has decided to commemorate the players who were victimized during World War II.In 2023, Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones” for the 16 lost members will be laid in the sidewalk in front of their former homes in the Austrian capital. An additional stone will be laid for Alma Rosé, daughter of the veteran concert master Arnold Rosé. The tradition of creating these small plaques to memorialize victims of the Holocaust began in Germany in 1992. The Philharmonic stones include the name of each player, their position with the orchestra, and when and where they died.On March 28, a chamber music concert will take place in front of the onetime building of the Rosés. Also planned is a concert with the orchestra’s academy at the Theresienstadt ghetto in May.In a recent interview, Mr. Froschauer recalled arriving on New York’s Upper West Side as a student in 1982, violin case in hand, and being greeted enthusiastically by local residents of Austrian Jewish descent. Among the people he contacted at his father’s behest was Burghauser, who died three months after they spoke by phone.Hugo Burghauser, a solo bassoonist, in an undated photo. In 1938, he was forced out as chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic. He emigrated to North America.Wiener PhilharmonikerThe brass plaque to be attached to Burghauser’s “stumbling stone.” Details on it include his roles with the orchestra and the date of his death in New York.Wiener PhilharmonikerMr. Froschauer pointed out that while Burghauser was fortunate to find work through the support of the conductor Arturo Toscanini — playing in the Toronto Symphony before joining the NBC Symphony Orchestra and then the ensemble of the Metropolitan Opera — others were left to struggle. Seven members were murdered or died during the war.“There was something inside me that hadn’t yet been worked out,” Mr. Froschauer said of the effort to pay tribute to the lost musicians. “This project should a create a consciousness for what these people had to endure.”Postwar Vienna was slow to face wartime atrocities. According to Fritz Trümpi, author of “The Political Orchestra: The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics During the Third Reich,” the remaining Vienna players seemed more interested in symbolic gestures. With former party members as the majority of the executive committee into the 1960s, the orchestra’s attitude was marked by a kind of indifference, he explains in his book, and attempts to ward off responsibility.“When the question of financial compensation comes up — pensions, extra pay — the orchestra members dismiss them with at times crude arguments,” Mr. Trümpi said in an interview. “It is all the more bitter in a situation when someone is sick but told, ‘You will receive nothing, you are not here anymore.’”The Philharmonic granted modest financial support mostly because of “image concerns,” he concluded in the book “Orchestrated Expulsion,” written with Bernadette Mayrhofer. Among the beneficiaries was the violinist Berthold Salander, who arrived in New York a ruined man and never resumed his orchestra activities.In Berlin last year, a resident polished “stumbling stones” that commemorated four members of a family who died at Auschwitz. The tradition of installing the stones began in Germany in 1992. Markus Schreiber/Associated PressThe violinist Ludwig Wittels had to leave his position with the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera because he had lung cancer. According to “Orchestrated Expulsion,” requests for financial aid from Vienna led to an exchange in which the orchestra’s chairman and executive director accused him and his wife of “blackmail.” They ultimately granted a sum that was a tiny fraction of the funds allocated for a U.S. tour in 1956. Wittels died in December of that year.In 1952, seven exiled members of the orchestra were presented with silver medals celebrating its centenary at the Austrian Consulate in New York — an event originally planned for 1948. “Overdue,” read the headline in The New York Times on Dec. 21.Efforts to reconcile the orchestra with its ousted members met with resistance on both sides. The violinist Dr. Daniel Falk, who lost several close family members to the Holocaust, replied to an invitation to rejoin the Philharmonic in 1946 that a return would “raise questions” that neither he nor his “adored colleagues” were “in the position to solve.”The Argentine-born Ricardo Odnoposoff became an exception, returning to Vienna as a professor in 1956 and appearing as a soloist with the Philharmonic where he once served as concert master. The violinist Leopold Förderl and his wife, Eva, who was Jewish, also returned to their home city, in 1953.Leopold Föderl returned to Vienna in 1953.Wiener PhilharmonikerRicardo Odnoposoff also returned to Vienna, in 1956, and played again with the Philharmonic.Wiener PhilharmonikerMichael Haas, senior researcher at the Exilarte Center for Banned Music at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, said that postwar Austria in general was reluctant to welcome back former citizens who had the right to reparations because it “would have bankrupted the country.” In turn, he continued, the fact that Austria emerged from the war “relatively unscathed” may have led to resentment among Jewish families.He said that in the past decade, however, the Philharmonic had undertaken a “much more honest and sober appraisal” of its history: “I would probably say that we’ve seen the orchestra begin to confront its own past and deal with some of its issues.”Mr. Trümpi noted that there was still “a need for discussion,” and not only with regard to the history of the Philharmonic. Ms. Mayrhofer, his co-author on “Orchestrated Expulsion,” has estimated that about 100 workers at the State Opera — from stagehands to choristers — were ousted, exiled or murdered after the events of 1938.Ms. Mayrhofer has also found that Jerger, who took over as chairman in 1938, tried to save five members of the Philharmonic from deportation in 1941, but that his efforts were too late: All of them died in the Holocaust. He did manage, however, to facilitate the release of the violinist Josef Geringer from the Dachau concentration camp in December 1938 (he emigrated to New York, passing away in 1979).The Philharmonic recently acquired the correspondence of the former concert master Franz Mairecker, who remained in touch with the cellist Friedrich Buxbaum after he emigrated to London (they were close friends and chamber music partners). And Clemens Hellsberger, chairman of the Philharmonic from 1997 to 2014, is updating his 1992 book “Democracy of the Kings,” a history of the orchestra that reckons with World War II and its aftermath.Mr. Haas said reinstating repertoire by Jewish composers that was performed before the war would represent a further step in repairing cultural damage. He noted that Meyerbeer’s “Robert le diable” (performed in German as “Robert der Teufel”) was one of the most popular works at the Vienna State Opera in the second half of the 19th century. He also mentioned Karl Goldmark’s “Könign von Saba” (Queen of Sheba), which premiered there in 1875 and remained in repertoire until December 1937.The operetta composer Jacques Offenbach, who visited Vienna frequently and inspired Johann Strauss to write “Die Fledermaus,” was also well received before World War II. Operettas in Viennese dialect, such as the works of Edmund Eysler, also thrived.With the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, local traditions were altered to fit antisemitic propaganda. For example, the National Socialists modified baptismal documents to conceal the fact that Strauss had a Jewish great-grandfather, while Mr. Trümpi’s research has revealed that more than 40 percent of the Vienna Philharmonic’s programming from 1940 to 1945 consisted of works by the Strauss dynasty.The New Year’s Concert on Jan. 1, 2022, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. The concert’s origins stem from World War II.Wiener PhilharmonikerOn Dec. 31, 1939, a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic performing Strauss works served to support the War Winter Relief Program. After World War II, the tradition continued as a vehicle of hope and joy on the first day of every year.This year’s New Year’s Concert includes works by Carl Michael Ziehrer and Franz von Suppé — and Josef Hellmesberger Jr., who in addition to playing and teaching violin served as the Philharmonic chairman and composed ballets.Among Hellmesberger’s students was Fritz Kreisler, a prodigy who began his conservatory studies at age 7 and emigrated to New York in 1938. He had performed as a soloist with both the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras, premiering Elgar’s Violin Concerto in 1910 (an exhibit is currently on view at the Exilarte Center for Banned Music).Mr. Haas said that “it is only slowly beginning to seep in” to what extent Austrian Jewish musicians contributed to Viennese cultural life. Although there were also prominent doctors, scientists and writers, he explained, “music was greater than any other discipline.”For Mr. Froschauer, laying down the “stumbling stones” for the lost members of his orchestra is a moving opportunity to create awareness about the challenges these individuals faced while the rest of the ensemble was able to carry on with a degree of normalcy.“One should simply never forget,” he said. “This is a very late apology and a sign of gratitude for their accomplishments.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      At the Vienna State Opera, the Curtain Is an Art Exhibition

      by

      The “Safety Curtain” series at the Vienna State Opera has put artwork from all over the world in front of audiences since 1998.The Vienna State Opera is not exactly a go-to place for cutting-edge contemporary art: Inaugurated a century and a half ago, it is housed in an ornate edifice with gilded and velvet interiors.Yet every year since 1998, a contemporary artist has been commissioned to deliver a design for the safety curtain that about 600,000 operagoers gaze at before performances and during intervals all season long — for eight or nine months. More than two dozen artists have designed 176-square-meter (nearly 1,900-square-foot) images for the opera house and produced safety curtains that are nothing like what operagoers see elsewhere.Kara Walker, who was the inaugural artist in 1998, delivered a curtain featuring her signature silhouettes of African American figures. Jeff Koons adorned one with toy monkeys and cartoon characters.And Cerith Wyn Evans treated the public to a brief text (in German) that invited operagoers to “imagine a situation that, in all likelihood, you’ve never been in.”The text began: “Permit yourself to drift from what you are reading at this very moment into another situation, another way of acting within the historical and psychic geographies in which the event of your own reading is here and now taking place.”The Vienna State Opera in January.Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesThis season, the Chinese-born multimedia artist Cao Fei is showing a female avatar — a dystopian, pale-white head so imposing that signs have been put up all over the opera house to alert spectators to its presence.The “Safety Curtain” series was started by Museum in Progress, a nonprofit established in 1990 by an Austrian couple: the curator Kathrin Messner and the artist and curator Josef Ortner. Their mission was to showcase contemporary art in unexpected places to audiences that might otherwise not engage with it. In more than three decades, Museum in Progress has displayed contemporary art in the pages of newspapers and magazines, on television, on billboards and building facades, and in concert and performance halls.“The core idea of Museum in Progress is really simple: It’s about developing new presentation formats for contemporary art,” said Kaspar Mühlemann Hartl, managing director of the organization.He said it was necessary to present the public with “really high-class art,” adding that although Austrian museums and cultural institutions do put on exhibitions regularly, they are aimed at attracting crowds. “We feel it’s really important not to popularize, not to choose artists whom everybody would like,” he said.The contemporary safety curtains are not just ornamental: They are placed over a curtain with a dark past. That curtain was designed by Rudolf Hermann Eisenmenger, a Vienna-educated artist who went on to become hugely successful in wartime. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933; produced murals for Vienna City Hall showing young Nazi supporters in brown shirts waving swastika flags; and was awarded the title of professor by Hitler himself.The artist Rudolf Hermann Eisenmenger in 1955.Votava/Brandstaetter via Getty ImagesEisenmenger’s career continued after World War II. When the Vienna State Opera — which had been heavily damaged by bombings — reopened in 1955 after a major redevelopment, Eisenmenger was selected to design its safety curtain. And that curtain, with a depiction of Orpheus and Eurydice, was never questioned until the mid-’90s, when the opera house’s director at the time suggested that it should be taken down because of Eisenmenger’s Nazi past — and met with strong opposition in public opinion and the media. In 1997, Museum in Progress stepped in to propose the “Safety Curtain” project.Despite its troubled history, the original safety curtain, which can still be seen outside of the opera season, seems to remain popular with some Austrians. Every time the Vienna State Opera gets a new director, he receives “lots and lots of letters trying to convince him” to stop the contemporary-art project, Mr. Mühlemann Hartl said. In 2010, a far-right politician even raised the question in Parliament, he added.The contemporary “Safety Curtain” project has nonetheless managed to continue for 24 years, as it is well liked overall, and every year’s design gets abundant news coverage in Austria.Artists are chosen by a jury of curators, currently composed of Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of Acute Art (a London-based digital art platform); Bice Curiger, artistic director of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France; and Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London.The process of choosing the winning artist is “incredibly fast,” Ms. Curiger said in an interview. Judges draw up a long list and rank each artist based on whether they can “come up with a good idea” that will work for an opera house and speaks to 21st-century audiences.“We want to be contemporary,” she said. “We don’t want to just have nice decorative things.”Ms. Curiger noted that the jury felt “a responsibility,” because the Vienna State Opera’s staff and audience “have to live with a work, which is really big, for a whole year.”Hans Ulrich Obrist, a member of the jury that chooses the artist for each new safety curtain, speaking in front of Carrie Mae Weems’ design for the 2020-21 edition, which featured an image of Mary J. Blige.Andreas Scheiblecker/Museum in ProgressFor the 2020-21 season, the chosen talent was the American artist Carrie Mae Weems. She presented a large photographic image of the singer Mary J. Blige — a version of which had appeared in W Magazine — that showed her wearing a crown and sitting at a table covered with flowers, fruit, glassware and an elaborate tablecloth that were reminiscent of an old-master painting.“Mary is a very careful woman, concerned about how Black women are experienced and understood, and what they look like,” Ms. Weems said of the image in a video interview in 2020 with Mr. Obrist. “So it was perfect.”The project costs 80,000 euros (about $85,000) a year to fund, according to Mr. Mühlemann Hartl, a modest amount by the standards of Western cultural fund-raising. Yet he said Museum in Progress still had difficulty raising the money every year, because in Austria, individual and corporate cultural philanthropy were not very developed.In a recent interview, Mr. Obrist described the project as “an interesting oxymoron,” because in a house where most of the music played is not from the 21st or even from the 20th century, the artists are “bringing something extremely contemporary in relationship to a work from the past.”He said he would love to see the initiative spread to other opera houses around the world, as was the intention of the couple who conceived it.“It’s almost like a model that they created,” he said. More