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      Grace Bumbry, Barrier-Shattering Opera Diva, Is Dead at 86

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      A flamboyant mezzo-soprano (who could also sing meaty soprano roles), she overcame racial prejudice to become one of opera’s first, and biggest, Black stars.Grace Bumbry, a barrier-shattering mezzo-soprano whose vast vocal range and transcendent stage presence made her a towering figure in opera and one of its first, and biggest, Black stars, died on Sunday in Vienna. She was 86.Her death, following a stroke in October, was confirmed in a statement by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she was long a mainstay, performing more than 200 times over two decades.Growing up in St. Louis in an era of segregation, Ms. Bumbry came of age at a time when African American singers were a rare sight on the opera stage, despite breakthroughs by luminaries like Leontyne Price and Marian Anderson.But with a fierce drive and an outsize charisma, Ms. Bumbry broke out internationally in 1960, at 23, when she sang Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Paris Opera.The following year, she landed in something of a national scandal in West Germany when Wieland Wagner, a grandson of Richard Wagner, cast her as Venus, the Roman goddess of love, in a modernized version of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the storied Bayreuth Festival.She was the first Black woman to perform at the festival, cast as a character typically portrayed as a Nordic ideal in an opera written by a composer known for his antisemitism and German nationalism. The festival — and newspapers — were flooded with letters asserting that the composer would “turn in his grave.”Ms. Bumbry was undeterred. Indeed, she was well prepared.“Everything that I had learned from my childhood was now being tested,” she recalled in an interview with St. Louis Magazine in 2021. “Because I remember being discriminated against in the United States, so why should it be any different in Germany?”The audience did not share such misgivings: Ms. Bumbry was showered with 30 minutes of applause. German critics were equally enchanted, christening her “the Black Venus.” The Cologne-area newspaper Kölnische Rundschau credited her with an “artistic triumph,” and Die Welt called her a “big discovery.”Her landmark performance helped earn her a $250,000 contract (the equivalent of more than $2.5 million now) with the opera impresario Sol Hurok.Ms. Bumbry performed at the White House in 1962, invited by the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, on the advice of European friends who had seen her at Bayreuth.Cecil Stoughton/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumIt also won her another honor: a performance at the White House, in February 1962. On the advice of European friends who had seen Ms. Bumbry at Bayreuth, Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady, invited her to sing at a state dinner attended by President John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren and other Washington power brokers.Suddenly, she was a star.“If there is a more exciting new voice than Grace Bumbry’s skyrocketing over the horizon I have not heard it,” Claudia Cassidy wrote in The Chicago Tribune in a review of a recording of her arias the same year. “This is a glorious voice, by grace of the gods given its chance to be heard in its fullest beauty.”Of her Carnegie Hall debut in November 1962, Alan Rich of The New York Times gave a qualified review, but allowed that “Miss Bumbry has a gorgeous, clear, ringing voice and a great deal of control over it.”“She can swoop without the slightest effort from a brilliant high to a beautiful resonant chest tone,” he wrote.Ms. Bumbry transcended not only racial perceptions but vocal categorizations as well. Originally a mezzo-soprano, she made a striking departure by taking on soprano parts, too, which gave her access to marquee roles in operas such as Richard Strauss’s “Salome” and Puccini’s “Tosca.”“She gloried in the fact that she was able to perform both roles in Verdi’s ‘Aïda,’” Fred Plotkin wrote in a 2013 appreciation for the website for WXQR, the New York public radio station. “She could be Tosca and Salome, but also Carmen and Eboli.”Ms. Bumbry appearing in the 1968 film of Bizet’s opera “Carmen.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMs. Bumbry displayed a broad range in her choice of roles. In 1985, she received raves for her performance as Bess in the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th anniversary performance of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” despite her conflicted feelings about a folk opera set among the tenements of Charleston, S.C., and rife with unflattering Black stereotypes.“I thought it beneath me,” she said in an interview with Life magazine. “I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.”Grace Melzia Bumbry was born on Jan. 4, 1937, in St. Louis, the youngest of three children of Benjamin Bumbry, a railroad freight handler, and Melzia Bumbry, a schoolteacher.A musical prodigy as a youth, she honed her skills in the choir at St. Louis Union Memorial Church and by performing Chopin on the piano at ladies’ tea parties. At 16, she saw a performance by Ms. Anderson, who would become a mentor, and was inspired to enter a singing contest on a local radio station. She took top prize, which included a $1,000 war bond and a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music. She was nonetheless denied admission because of her race.“The reality was wounding,” Ms. Bumbry said in an interview with The Boston Globe. “But when it happened, I also thought, I’m the winner. Nothing can change that. My talent is superior.”Ms. Bumbry sang the national anthem at the Kennedy Center Honors gala in Washington in 2009. She was an honoree that year.Alex Brandon/Associated PressEmbarrassed, the radio contest organizers arranged for her to appear on “Talent Scouts,” a national radio and television program hosted by Arthur Godfrey. After hearing her heart-rending performance of “O Don Fatale,” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” the avuncular Mr. Godfrey informed the audience, “Her name will be one of the most famous names in music one day.”The exposure helped put her on a path to Boston University, and later, Northwestern University, where she fell under the tutelage of the German opera luminary Lotte Lehmann, who became another valuable mentor as Ms. Bumbry moved toward her debut in Paris.As her star continued to rise over the years, Ms. Bumbry was never afraid to inhabit the prima donna role offstage as well as on, outfitting herself in Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta and tooling around in a Lamborghini.After marrying the tenor Erwin Jaeckel in 1963, she settled in a villa in Lugano, Switzerland. The couple divorced in 1972. Ms. Bumbry left no immediate survivors.Beyond her prodigious vocal skills, Ms. Bumbry brought a famous sultriness to her roles, a reputation she put to good use for a 1970 performance of “Salome” at the Royal Opera House in London.She leaked word to the press that for the racy “Dance of the Seven Veils,” she would strip off all seven veils, down to her “jewels and perfume,” as she put it — although the jewels, it turned out, were sufficient enough to serve as a “modest bikini,” as The New York Times noted.It hardly mattered. “In the history of Covent Garden,” Ms. Bumbry said in a 1985 interview with People magazine, “they never sold so many binoculars.” More

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      Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels Win the Pulitzer Prize for Music

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      Giddens said that the success of their opera “Omar” proves that “nobody has the lock on being a composer.”“I mean, look: I’m bowled over right now,” the polymathic musician Rhiannon Giddens said from her home in Ireland on Monday, shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize for music.She was speaking in a phone interview with the composer Michael Abels, who joined separately by phone from the United States. Together, they wrote the Pulitzer-winner, “Omar,” an opera about Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim scholar who was captured in Africa in the early 1800s and sold into slavery in Charleston, S.C. It was there that the work premiered last May, at Spoleto Festival USA.Giddens wrote the libretto based on Said’s autobiography, and recorded self-accompanied demos that Abels then responded to with a fleshed-out score. The result was a multigenre, multicultural swirl — a tour through the sound worlds of Islam, bluegrass, spirituals and more — that I described in my review of the premiere as “an unforced ideal of American sound: expansive and ever-changing.”Abels has written for concert halls and films, including the “Get Out” soundtrack. Giddens is most famous as a folk musician but trained as a classical singer and has dipped her toes into opera in recent years, hosting the podcast “Aria Code” and performing works by John Adams. And now, to accolades like Grammy Awards and a MacArthur “genius” grant, Giddens, who never studied composition, can add the Pulitzer.“Nobody has the lock on being a composer,” she said. “We’ve got to stop with separation and who gets to be called a composer. There are a bunch of people who could write the next ‘Omar.’”In the interview, during which their phones could be heard ringing with calls and congratulations, Giddens and Abels reflected more on the creation of their opera and looked ahead to its future and theirs. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Where are your heads right now?RHIANNON GIDDENS It feels amazing, because Michael and I just put into this what we know. It was a love letter to my country. There’s so much to hate about it, but what I love about it is that ability that people have to come together and make some new amazing thing. American music is a spectrum.MICHAEL ABELS It shows the importance of telling all of our stories through our fine art, that people are waking up to the truth of that statement and the importance of our stories’ being part of our full artistic legacy. I’ve just come from seeing a couple of the shows in Boston, where it was playing to sold-out houses [at Boston Lyric Opera]. In each city, you’ve seen people who have never come to the opera before, feeling seen and feeling moved and being welcomed into an artistic space where they haven’t felt welcomed before.Rather than following the traditional route of a dramatic ending, the opera winds down with a communal, spiritual experience. Can you talk about why?GIDDENS There was a lot of instinctual writing. If you’d asked me this as I was writing the ending, I’d say, “I don’t know, I just need to do it this way.” Because the autobiography is so scant on details, I knew immediately that having a conventional narrative was not going to work.There have been American operas dealing with very American topics, but for African Americans, we had “Porgy and Bess.” It’s a beautiful opera, but now we’re starting to tell our stories. And we have to think about the story we’re telling, and how we want the audience to walk out of the theater. The end had to be about him and his faith, and it had to be about healing.ABELS It didn’t occur to me that it was unusual, that the first part was narrative and the last part wasn’t. Everything ended up where it needed to be. As a performing artist, [Rhiannon] constructs evenings for audiences all the time. I think her understanding that we need to take care of the audience at the end of this work comes from her being a performer.GIDDENS It shows that you don’t have to do it the same way everybody does it. I have not taken one composition class in my entire life. But I’ve lived composition in a different way.What does the future hold for this opera?GIDDENS The Ojai Music Festival commissioned a shorter concert version of “Omar.” And I’m going to be bold and say that I hope today pushes us to a recording. That would be my dream.And for you two as collaborators?ABELS Rhiannon is the most talented person I know, in terms of the variety and breadth of talent, and I’m thrilled to be part of her musical life.GIDDENS I’m not even blowing smoke when I say I don’t know what angel whispered Michael’s name — well, I do, because it was his soundtrack to “Get Out.” But I didn’t know what would happen. I had an instinct that it would work, and I don’t know how I lucked out so much in finding a collaborator. I can’t imagine us not doing more together. Watch this space. More

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      Mo Willems Finds Yet Another Way to Entertain Kids: Opera

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      The beloved author of children’s books is experimenting with new forms, alongside starry collaborators, at the Kennedy Center.WASHINGTON — Do you know the words to the Queen of the Night’s stratospheric showcase from “The Magic Flute”? Maybe the Duke’s famous tune from “Rigoletto”? Carmen’s Habanera?No, not those words. The other ones: the words, at least, as they are now known to my 6-year-old daughter and the hundreds of children who took grown-ups like me to the Kennedy Center here recently for the premiere of “The Ice Cream Truck Is Broken! & Other Emotional Arias,” an experiment, including a short new work by the composer Carlos Simon, in what it might mean to draw a very young and impossibly demanding audience into a life in opera.See, you might think that Carmen is relating her views on love, but no. Listen closely, and you’ll find that the singer should have shared her cotton candy with her friends, and absolutely will … tomorrow. “La donna è mobile”? That’s about how milk squirts out your nose if you happen to laugh at exactly the wrong time. The Queen’s aria? That’s still about anger, but it now invokes something far worse than the vengeance of hell.“This bicycle,” it begins, in a fit of preschool pique, “is such a poo-poo vehicle.”The director Felicia Curry, left, with Willems during a rehearsal for “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!,” a short new opera created with the composer Carlos Simon.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesWillems and Simon reunited after their first opera effort, “SLOPERA!,” also at the Kennedy Center.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesOpera’s great composers have a new librettist, and he is almost certainly the only person who could induce an institution like the Kennedy Center to do something like this, let alone get Renée Fleming to join him in hosting it; inspire a quintet of young singers to ham their way through it; and persuade Simon, one of the busiest composers around, to crown the show with a 20-minute piece that gives an attention-seeking, picture-book Pigeon the prima donna spotlight it has surely always craved.The writer for it all? Mo Willems, who, it turns out, really loves opera!“The commonalities between what my industry, or my main industry, does and what opera does are incredible,” said Willems, a six-time Emmy Award-winning former Sesame Street writer, who has earned three Caldecott Honors for picture books and reigns as a near-deity in children’s literature.“It’s big emotions,” he added during an interview at the Kennedy Center before the premiere. “It’s direct communication. It’s interior dialogue. It’s self-discovery. And both forms really have been pushed off to the side of the mainstream, and I think that they have more power that way.”WILLEMS HAS ALWAYS BEEN a broader artist than just a writer of picture books, though that task alone is such that he calls it “as easy as describing the history of Byzantium in three words.” Some of his most celebrated characters — who include a venturesome plushie called Knuffle Bunny, the on-and-off best friends Elephant and Piggie, and that insatiable, inimitable Pigeon — had already starred in musicals that he had written before he formalized his long association with the Kennedy Center in 2019, when he became its education artist in residence. That three-year position coincided with the pandemic, to which he responded with invaluable “Lunch Doodles” videos, but it still let him explore a range of genres, including symphonic music, which he said “has always been important to me.”“Beethoven’s Fifth is the easiest example,” he explained, “but it’s basically the arc of an episode of television, or a movie: ‘Ba-ba-ba-baaam,’ oh, it’s exciting — and then you take the theme, you take the theme, and then you build with it. So when I was writing a show called ‘Codename: Kids Next Door,’ which is a silly sort of action comedy, I would literally write to the symphony.”Siphokazi Molteno, left, during a rehearsal for “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesA rehearsal for “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!,” which is based on Willems’s book “Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesFor the National Symphony Orchestra, Willems painted giant abstractions to accompany a cycle of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, and he worked with the musician Ben Folds to adapt one of his books, “Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs,” for the concert hall. Hearing plans for “Goldilocks” led Tim O’Leary, the general director of the Washington National Opera and a Willems-reading father of three, to inquire about a commission.At their first meeting, Willems was “feigning ignorance” about opera, O’Leary recalled, but the author quickly sent him a copy of an Elephant and Piggie book — “I Really Like Slop!” — with the inscription “Tim, this book really sings.” By their second encounter, Willems had the libretto in his head, a sketch of the characters in concert dress and a title: “SLOPERA!”“Obviously, once it was called the ‘SLOPERA!’ we had to do it,” O’Leary said.Willems says that opera is similar to picture books in that in both cases, the text cannot stand on its own.Lexey Swall for The New York Times“SLOPERA!” could only be performed live outdoors on account of the pandemic, but an indoor recording, with piano accompaniment, was shown virtually to more than 300,000 schoolchildren.” Piggie gets Gerald the Elephant to try slop, a stinky green delicacy among porcine foodies. He does, after his initial refusals upset his companion, and he endures the consequences in something like a bel canto mad (or death) scene. He recovers, though, and tells Piggie that while he might not like her food, he still likes her. Scored cutely by Simon, it is funny, catchy and in the end moving, a paean to friendship and trying new things.“Everything that I do as a picture book writer is reductive,” Willems said, reflecting on what writing his first libretto taught him, aside from the importance of placing consonants carefully. “If you look at a picture book manuscript, and you can understand it, it has too many words. If you look at just the illustrations, and you can understand it, the drawings are too detailed. They both have to be incomprehensible. It’s very similar with writing an opera, that the words that you’re using have to be dependent on the music, but the music has to be dependent on the words, and either of them shouldn’t really be able to stand alone.”WILLEMS CAUGHT THE opera bug and started planning a follow-up, “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!,” which O’Leary said was initially conceived as a monodrama for the inquisitive, intransigent Pigeon — akin to an avian “Erwartung.” Deborah Rutter, the Kennedy Center’s president, also suggested that Willems collaborate with Fleming, the center’s artistic adviser at large.Fleming sent Willems reams of classic arias to listen to, select from and rewrite to fit how kids might experience emotions like joy, disgust or shame. “They are sung beautifully,” Fleming said of the results. “They are sung in all seriousness. It’s just the text. A, it’s in English, and B, it’s really devised for 6-year-olds.”Curry, center, preparing the premiere of “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesSimon, right, the composer of “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesSmushed together under the title “The Ice Cream Truck Is Broken!” so that nine rewritten arias surrounded the Pigeon opera, the hourlong show ended up being a bit of a mishmash, as if the remarkable sum of resources being drawn from all over the Kennedy Center — not least, its comedy budget — were being thrown around to see what stuck.The arias didn’t quite land, to judge by the polite but not thrilled reactions of the children sitting near me. Dressed to the nines, Willems and Fleming introduced them, laboring over a running joke about an “opera song” really being called an “aria.” Felicia Curry, a leading Washington actress, directed with a light touch, sharing with her collaborators a faith in the music itself to connect. Though the early-career singers — Suzannah Waddington, Siphokazi Molteno, Oznur Tuluoglu, Jonathan Pierce Rhodes, Shea Owens — were amplified and could not possibly have sung more clearly or enthusiastically, it was still hard for my young assistant either to follow the lyrics with her ears, or to sound out the supertitles in time. I found some of the texts ingenious, but it all felt a bit too earnest, too consciously instructional to inspire.She was there, in any case, to see a bird sing; and sing the Pigeon did. After eight of the arias and a fair bit of fidgeting came the Willems-Simon piece, which is based on “Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late!,” a past-bedtime classic in which the Pigeon works through a repertoire of tactics to ward off sleepy time. Tuluoglu, a young soprano whose most recent prior role was Barbarina at the Annapolis Opera, took on the title character. “When you train, you have to be able to sing Mozart, you gotta be able to be a pigeon,” she said before the show.Willems adds two cousins to the Pigeon’s flock, and in turn the pajama-clad birds try out a trio of techniques — “Negotiation,” “Guilt” and “Tantrum,” as their arias are called — on an audience that is encouraged to yell back in denial. Simon’s score is a delight, propulsive and charming with a swishing jazz number and a lullaby ripped from Brahms. The kids enjoyed it, and so did the adults.Now, Willems hopes to write the libretto of a full-scale opera.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesTHE HOLY GRAIL of so-called family or education programming must surely be something along those lines, but in the experience of this frustrated musical parent, the recipe is often wrong. Willems and his collaborators understand the same thing as their goal, although as the author said, “no one is a true expert in children’s, Al Yankovic-ing, spoofing opera pieces.” Experimentation is required.“You have to approach it with all the same seriousness” as a main-stage opera, O’Leary said, “and get all the greatest people involved, because actually kids are the toughest audience, the most discerning, and if you can make it work, then you know you’ve got something.”Willems has long written books that transcend generational divides: my children love them because they are silly, and I love them because they make me a sillier father than I would ever be without one in my hand. As a librettist — a description that must now be added to all his other job titles, as he enjoys the collaborative nature of opera so much that he hopes to write a full-scale piece — he inevitably thinks along the same lines. His arias, he said, were for me and my children alike.“She already thinks it’s cool because it’s great music,” Willems said, nodding to my daughter. “You have a history to it, and by stripping that history away hopefully you’ll listen to it differently. You’re coming into it with preconceived notions, and these guys aren’t, and then there’s somebody in the middle who just, like, saw a lot of Chuck Jones films, and has a vague sense of it.”“I struggle,” he added, “with the idea that a grown-up would bring one of the younger people in their lives, with the expectation that that person is going to learn something, but that the person bringing them isn’t. I want everybody to be open to a new experience.” More

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      Europe’s Opera Stages Next Season: What to See

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      Among our critic’s recommendations are multiple “Ring” cycles, a premiere by Ellen Reid and the soprano Lise Davidsen in Strauss’s “Salome.”Keeping up with opera in Europe is a nearly impossible task. There never seems to be enough time, or money, to see all that the continent has to offer across its many storied houses. Many of the most important among them have announced their 2023-24 seasons. Here are some highlights, in chronological order.‘Das Rheingold’The Royal Opera House in London embarks on the multiseason effort of staging Wagner’s four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen” with its first installment (Sept. 11-29) right as its music director, Antonio Pappano, enters his final season there. He will be back to conduct the other three, though, lending a sense of cohesion to this new staging by the reliably entertaining Barrie Kosky, starring Christopher Maltman as Wotan. Not long after, another major “Ring” begins at the Monnaie in Brussels, where the symbol-happy abstractionist Romeo Castellucci’s productions of “Das Rheingold” (Oct. 24-Nov. 9) and “Die Walküre” (Jan. 21-Feb. 11) will follow in quick succession.Antonio Pappano will conduct “Das Rheingold” at the Royal Opera House in London. This season will be Pappano’s last as the house’s music director.Victor Llorente for The New York Times‘Das Floss der Medusa’As the Komische Oper in Berlin closes for renovations, the company enters a nomadic period familiar to its neighbor, the Berlin State Opera, which for years operated out of the Schiller Theater, where many of the Komische’s productions will be presented next season. But it will also branch out, including with its new staging, by the sleekly smart Tobias Kratzer of Hans Werner Henze’s “Das Floss der Medusa” (“The Raft of the Medusa”), inside a hangar at the disused Tempelhof Airport (Sept. 16-Oct. 2).‘Aida’The provocateur Calixto Bieito’s production of Verdi’s “Aida” at Theater Basel over a decade ago has been described as a difficult, even disturbing depiction of immigration in Europe. His new staging, at the Berlin State Opera (Oct. 3-29), is being billed more modestly, as homing in on the work’s intimacy, and as mining the tension between the opera and the politics of its time. Nicola Luisotti conducts a cast that includes the tenor Yusif Eyvazov as Radamès and the bass René Pape as Ramfis.‘Masque of Might’Masques, which were something like variety shows in the 17th century, get contemporary treatment in this Opera North pastiche from the inveterate director David Pountney touring northern England (Oct. 6-Nov. 16). The hope is to give Henry Purcell — one of his country’s essential composers and, in Pountney’s view, its greatest creator of stage music until Benjamin Britten — his due as a writer for the theater. So, rather than revive Purcell’s only opera, “Dido and Aeneas,” Pountney has assembled bits and pieces from elsewhere in his output for a new show on topical contemporary themes.‘Antony & Cleopatra’After its premiere in San Francisco this season, John Adams’s latest opera, an intricate yet flowing adaptation of Shakespeare, travels to the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Spain (Oct. 28-Nov. 8). One of the stars it was written for, the soprano Julia Bullock, missed the earlier run because she was pregnant, but she will be back, with the rest of the principal cast, for this revival, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer. Adams, who famously revises his scores, will be at the conductor’s podium.John Adams’s “Antony & Cleopatra” will come to the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Spain, in the fall after an earlier staging in California.Cory Weaver‘Götterdämmerung’Yes, more of the “Ring.” The Zurich Opera House’s cycle, conducted by its general music director, Gianandrea Noseda, and directed by Andreas Homoki, its artistic leader, reaches its conclusion with the premiere of “Götterdämmerung,” starring the elegant, mighty soprano Camilla Nylund as Brünnhilde and the ethereal-voiced tenor Klaus Florian Vogt as Siegfried (Nov. 5-Dec. 3). Then, the whole “Ring” will be presented in cycles in spring 2024, with performers including Tomasz Konieczny as Wotan and Christopher Purves as Alberich (May 3-9 and 18-26).‘Le Grand Macabre’György Ligeti’s only opera — an apocalyptic dark comedy of dizzying eclecticism — was widely seen in the years immediately after its 1978 premiere. These days, a performance of it feels like more of a special occasion; but next season, there are two to choose from. At the Vienna State Opera, Jan Lauwers, who directed a strident revival of Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza 1960” at the Salzburg Festival, helms a new production conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado (Nov. 11-23). Then, at the Bavarian State Opera, the work will be presented in a new staging by the cerebral Krzysztof Warlikowski, conducted by one of that house’s former general music directors, Kent Nagano (June 28-July 7).Gustavo Dudamel, the Paris Opera’s music director, will conduct a new production of Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel.”Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images‘The Exterminating Angel’Thomas Adès’s third opera — one of the finest so far this century — seemed to have a future threatened by its own ambition. With an enormous (which is to say expensive) cast of principal characters and an orchestra of Wagnerian scale, it was not exactly inviting revivals. Yet there it is on the schedule for the Paris Opera’s coming season — with a less starry cast than its early runs at the Salzburg Festival and the Metropolitan Opera, perhaps, but with a new production from Calixto Bieito, and the baton of Gustavo Dudamel, the company’s music director and a sure hand in Adès’s music (Feb. 29-March 23).Ellen Reid presents her opera “The Shell Trial” at the Dutch National Opera in March 2024.Erin Baiano‘The Shell Trial’The Dutch National Opera, which in the past couple of seasons has been a font of successful world premieres like Michel van der Aa’s “Upload” and Alexander Raskatov’s “Animal Farm,” has now commissioned the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid, whose “The Shell Trial” will be introduced at the house’s Opera Forward Festival (March 16-21). Inspired by a Dutch court’s 2021 ruling that the Shell company was legally responsible for contributing to climate change, it will feature Julia Bullock, a star of “Upload,” in the dual role of the Law and the Artist.‘Salome’Everything on this list has been a new production or a premiere. But opera is an art form that thrives on revivals of repertory classics, and on hearing the stars of today revisit the works, and productions, of the past. One of those singers is the soprano Lise Davidsen, who tends to astonish in her role debuts, like her Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera recently. Coming soon is more Strauss, when she takes on the title character in his “Salome” at the Paris Opera, in Lydia Steier’s staging, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth (May 9-28). More

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      A Drone Opera, Brought to You by General Dynamics? A Company Clarifies.

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      “Grounded,” a new work about the psychological toll of drone warfare, drew scrutiny after its presenter, Washington National Opera, advertised the support of a major military contractor.When the Washington National Opera announced that it would open its coming season with the premiere of “Grounded,” a new opera exploring the psychological toll of drone warfare, its star composer, Jeanine Tesori, got less attention than its listed sponsor: General Dynamics, the military contractor.Anger erupted online, with critics accusing Washington National Opera of serving as a mouthpiece for the defense industry. A think tank that advocates military restraint labeled it a “killer drone opera.” New York magazine gave the opera a “despicable” rating on its Approval Matrix, describing it as “the drone-bombing opera ‘Grounded,’ sponsored by General Dynamics.” RT, a state-owned Russian news outlet, said the work showed the strength of the American military-industrial complex.The creative team behind “Grounded,” an adaptation of an acclaimed Off Broadway play, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which commissioned the opera, grew disturbed by how the new opera was being portrayed. They worked behind the scenes to push the Washington National Opera to make it clear that General Dynamics, which has been a major sponsor of the opera company since 1997, had nothing to do with the creation of the opera.“I felt action was needed to guarantee that the audience would see ‘Grounded’ knowing that it is solely the work of its creators,” Tesori, a major Broadway composer who has expanded into opera, said in a statement to The New York Times. She added that she had only recently become aware of the philanthropic support of General Dynamics.The composer Jeanine Tesori said that “action was needed to guarantee that the audience would see ‘Grounded’ knowing that it is solely the work of its creators.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesOn Tuesday, after days of negotiations, Washington National Opera posted a statement seeking some distance from its benefactor.“For the sake of clarity,” the statement said, “no sponsor or supporter of W.N.O. had any involvement in the creation of ‘Grounded’ or in the contents of its libretto.”The company changed its website, whose “Grounded” page had described General Dynamics as its “presenting sponsor,” to clarify that the company is a “W.N.O. season sponsor.” It also rewrote its promotional text for the opera, removing some militaristic language, including a line that had described its protagonist as a “hot shot F-16 fighter pilot, an elite warrior trained for the sky” and a line noting that “war ‘with all the benefits of home’ isn’t clear-cut.” The new description cut a reference to the “horror of war.”An early rendering of the set of the opera “Grounded.”Design and rendering by Mimi LienThe episode highlights the difficulties that cultural institutions sometimes face in protecting the integrity of their art while cultivating rich donors. The Kennedy Center, the parent organization of Washington National Opera, has in recent years faced pressure to cut ties with some benefactors, including tobacco companies.General Dynamics has long been a sponsor of Washington National Opera, providing more than $500,000 to the company each year in recent years. Gregory S. Gallopoulos, a senior vice president at General Dynamics, is a member of the opera company’s board.Timothy O’Leary, the general director of Washington National Opera, said in an interview that General Dynamics had no input on “Grounded,” or any other works.“No sponsor has any say in our artistic decisions, or ever could,” he said. “Any sponsor who tried to interfere in that way is not a sponsor from whom we would accept support.”The “Grounded” opera, adapted from a play by George Brant, was announced by the Met in 2017, part of an effort by the company to promote contemporary opera. The Met agreed to co-produce the opera with Washington National Opera ahead of its planned Met premiere in 2025.The New York Times described the play it is based on as a “haunting portrait of a woman serving in the United States Armed Forces coming under pressure as the human cost of war, for combatants as well as civilians, slowly eats away at her well-armored psyche.”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, described the work as an “antiwar opera” and said that it provided a nuanced portrayal of the costs of war. He said he had advised his counterparts in Washington to take swift action once concerns started spreading on social media about the opera’s support from General Dynamics.“If this misperception was not corrected, it would be very bad for the work,” he said in an interview. “The work would be somehow tainted before anybody ever got a chance to see it.”General Dynamics on Tuesday declined to comment on the controversy, but said in a statement, “We are proud to support the arts.”Phebe N. Novakovic, the chairman and chief executive of General Dynamics since 2013, is an opera buff who grew up listening to recordings on a Victrola record player with her Serbian grandmother. Shortly after she rose to the top of the company, General Dynamics became a full-season sponsor of Washington National Opera.When asked in a 2016 interview why the company was such a big supporter of the opera, Novakovic cited her grandmother’s influence.“I have honored both her memory and my love of that form of human expression through supporting the opera,” she said at the Economic Club of Washington. “We get folks from all over our company coming to the opera.” More

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      When La Scala Is Sold Out, You Can Still Get In (Online)

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      The opera house’s new streaming service provides live and on-demand performances, as well as extras like backstage glimpses and educational programs.La Scala’s audience can now be anywhere.The opera house in Milan is sharing select performances online through LaScalaTv, a platform that started streaming in February. Its first live offering was a broadcast of Verdi’s opera “I Vespri siciliani,” conducted by Fabio Luisi and featuring such soloists as Marina Rebeka and Luca Micheletti.The program also includes concerts and ballets. On May 11, Alberto Malazzi conducts “Petite Messe Solennelle” by Rossini, to commemorate the anniversary of La Scala’s restoration and reopening after World War II. The ballet “Romeo and Juliet” by Sergei Prokofiev takes the screen to choreography by Kenneth MacMillan on June 28.The on-demand library also includes performances for children, starting with a staged concert based on carnival celebrations called “Lalla & Skali and … the Enchanted Mask.”The platform is part of a wider effort to modernize La Scala’s infrastructure, including an extensive educational outreach program using the technology and plans for subtitles on seat backs.Mirjam Schiavello, left, and Matteo Sala in a performance of “Lalla and Skali and … the Enchanted Mask” at La Scala, part of the house’s on-demand offerings for children.Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla ScalaDominique Meyer, the theater’s current artistic director and chief executive, said that technological advances in recent years had made it easier for an opera house to widen its reach.“It is a real leap,” he said, recalling the difficulties he faced in 2013 when starting a platform for the Vienna State Opera during his tenure there. “Most people have a faster internet connection, which is extremely important when viewers want to watch a stream in 4K.”The equipment available for in-house operations has also advanced rapidly. Small, robotic cameras can capture performances in the dark without necessitating changes of light, leaving on-site viewers undisturbed. And microphones can easily transmit quality sound.Performances on LaScalaTv are available in either ultra high definition or high definition. The most expensive offering, a live program at the highest resolution, costs 11.90 euros (about $13), while a children’s program at the lower resolution costs €2.90. The audio track is uniformly transmitted in AAC, a compression format of a higher grade than MP3.Mr. Meyer has prioritized a wide view of the stage. “It was important to me to respect a certain distance,” he said. “One doesn’t need close-ups that show the sweat on the face of Gilda at the end of ‘Rigoletto.’”He also wants to capture dance performances at a healthy distance. “If you come too close, it looks like the dancer’s head is about to hit the top of the screen,” he said. “A principle of the whole project was that there would not be too many cuts, and that the viewer would have the liberty to focus where he or she pleases.”Cameras at La Scala can capture performances for online audiences without disturbing viewers in the opera house itself. Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla ScallaIntermissions provide glimpses backstage and facts about La Scala’s history. Recent offerings have included a tour of the theater’s museum, home to such treasures as a manuscript page from Verdi’s “Nabucco” and a portrait of the soprano Maria Callas.Mr. Meyer said that the house had just scratched the surface of the possibilities and that “there was a lot to tell,” citing “the rehearsals, what happens behind the scenes, the [costume and set] workshops.”Of central importance is bringing some of these stories to younger viewers. The theater has started by creating a network of 200 schools in Italy to bring students into contact with opera.For example, a live rehearsal of Puccini’s “La Bohème” was recently followed by a livestream of the performance itself. A documentary about Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi” was combined with an on-demand viewing of the opera itself. This September will bring the first ballet program, revolving around Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”The house is also teaming up with RAI, Italy’s state broadcaster, to share footage from the 1970s and ’80s, including performances under the conductors Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti. The main sponsor of LaScalaTv is the bank Intesa Sanpaolo, and the Cariplo Foundation is supporting the dissemination of content to schools.A scene from “La Bohème” at La Scala. A recent stream of a rehearsal for that opera was followed by a livestream of the performance itself.Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla Scalla“We brought in about €40.5 million in sponsorship revenue last season,” Mr. Meyer said. “That is huge in Europe. All these projects are being financed.”In the theater, subtitles will be installed this summer on the backs of chairs with translations in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish, using the same software as the streaming platform (eventually there will be eight languages). On May 29, La Scala unveils its new website — which includes a digital magazine — coinciding with its presentation of the 2023-24 season.Italian viewers thus far make up half the streaming service’s audience. Another fourth comes from other European countries. Outside Europe, the highest numbers are currently in the United States and Russia.In-house, Mr. Meyer said, La Scala has regularly sold out this season. “We of course can’t create more seats,” he said. “This technology allows us to expand our audience, also to children.” More

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      Dvorak’s Opera ‘Rusalka’ Prepares to Debut at La Scala in Milan

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      The opera by Antonin Dvorak about a water nymph’s journey into the human world, first performed in 1901, is making its debut at La Scala in June.Poor Rusalka. The title character of Antonin Dvorak’s opera is a love-struck water nymph, misunderstood and scorned. She has long been appreciated but was not exactly celebrated as an operatic heroine for decades before slowly emerging as a darling of the opera world.But now, “Rusalka” is having a moment that may charm even the most jaded of water nymphs. The opera will make its debut at La Scala in Milan next month, 122 years after it first delighted audiences in Dvorak’s native Czech homeland in 1901. Many might say it’s long overdue at one of the world’s most prestigious opera houses, but for the creative team assembled at La Scala it’s a chance to discover, or rediscover, an opera still being interpreted more than a century later.“Rusalka,” playing six performances from June 6 to 22, is based on Slavic folklore (with parallels to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Little Mermaid”). Rusalka lives in a lake with her water-goblin father and falls in love with a prince. With the help of a local witch and a potion, she decides to become a human to win her prince. Let’s just say that things don’t exactly go her way.The design for the character Rusalka, a love-struck water nymph. “This Rusalka won’t have the fish tail like a mermaid, but she will have tentacles like an octopus,” the director, Emma Dante, said.Vanessa SanninoThe opera is known mostly for its first-act aria “Song to the Moon” — championed by many high-profile sopranos over the last few decades, including Renée Fleming — which has helped cement its position at several major opera houses. And now at La Scala.“I have directed at many opera houses and in the repertoire of each of them there was at least one opera that was conspicuously absent,” Dominique Meyer, the artistic director and chief executive of La Scala, said by email. “When I was directing the Vienna [State] Opera, we realized that ‘Anna Bolena’ had never been performed there. At La Scala, something similar happened with ‘Rusalka.’”Mr. Meyer said the debut production was the ideal vehicle to bring back Emma Dante, a theater and film director known for her 2013 movie “A Street in Palermo” as well as avant-garde theater and opera productions. Mr. Meyer cited her “imagination and sensitivity.”“I’m happy to come back to La Scala with an opera whose protagonist is a woman,” Ms. Dante said in a video interview. “My first time was with ‘Carmen,’ and I felt a strong connection with this woman, just as I do now with Rusalka.”Ms. Dante said she feels Rusalka’s journey into the human world — and her desire to be accepted there — is a timeless topic and applicable today in a world of refugees and political turmoil worldwide.A drawing of one of the sets for “Rusalka” with the title character at left.Carmine Maringola“She arrives in a land that is not her land, so I’m interested in that transformation,” Ms. Dante said. “I’m also deeply interested in how the community does not accept her diversity.”She worked with the costume designer Vanessa Sannino and the set designer Carmine Maringola, both of whom she has collaborated with before, to do more than emphasize the fairy-tale aspect of the story.“This Rusalka won’t have the fish tail like a mermaid, but she will have tentacles like an octopus, which you can see in a wheelchair when she first comes onto land,” Ms. Dante explained. “Also, we won’t have a lake, but instead the church and the prince’s palace will both be flooded to represent a world adrift. This flooded world is a catastrophic cause of nonacceptance, of intolerance toward those of different origins and appearance.”Ms. Sannino also wanted to emphasize the witch and the prince in this otherworldly setting.“We wanted the witch to be like a madonna, monochromatic red and immense and made of muscle fibers,” she said. “And the lightness that we decided to give the prince can be found in the flowers and butterflies in his cloak and in the armor he wears.”The costume design for the prince. “The lightness that we decided to give the prince can be found in the flowers and butterflies in his cloak and in the armor he wears,” the costume designer said.Vanessa SanninoThis approach seems fitting for an opera based on folklore, and not, say, a romantic Italian opera based on a famous book and specific to its time and place. It’s also open to discovery from a musical perspective.“It’s genius music, but Dvorak was not known as a typical opera composer, and therefore it comes with some difficulties that might not always sell the piece,” said the Czech conductor Tomas Hanus in a phone interview from his home in Brno, Czech Republic. He is making his debut at La Scala with “Rusalka,” which he also conducted at the Vienna State Opera (in his debut there in 2017) and in Copenhagen, Helsinki and Munich. “The Czech composing schools did not always teach how to write these big romantic operatic scores. It’s very dependent on the interpretation of singers and conductors.”That is a sentiment echoed by the Ukrainian soprano Olga Bezsmertna, who will sing the title role, which she has come to adore (she sang it at the Vienna State Opera in 2014 and 2020 and last year in Bratislava, Slovakia). It becomes more layered each time she sings it, she said.“It’s a very difficult opera, but my voice feels at home because I don’t have to push,” Ms. Bezsmertna said in a phone interview from her home in Vienna. “My first time in Vienna, I jumped in five days before the first performance. I honestly didn’t have time to think about what to do. But it’s perfect for a lyric soprano voice.”Ms. Bezsmertna has grown into the character more in the past few years, she said, especially the journey Rusalka takes both emotionally and musically.“The second act is so completely different from the first act because she is destroyed,” Ms. Bezsmertna said. “It’s not a fairy tale anymore. She’s alone, and the prince loves another woman. Life has changed completely.”And it’s in that fairy-tale-versus-real-world situation where “Rusalka” seems to flourish, despite its dark corners, for those who know the opera or for first-time viewers at the debut at La Scala.“Death is very present in ‘Rusalka,’ but we have to keep this idea of lightness,” Ms. Dante said. “It’s a tragedy, but it’s still a fairy tale. And we always have to look at death as an occasion for rebirth.” More

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      How an Architect Gave La Scala a 21st-Century Update

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      Mario Botta, who just finished leading a second round of updates to the 18th-century opera house in Milan, discussed his work and his inspiration.Over the past two decades, La Scala, completed by the architect Giuseppe Piermarini in 1778, has experienced its most profound changes since after World War II, when it suffered severe damage from Allied bombing raids.The recent updates to the opera house in Milan have been led by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, renowned for designing luminous, formidable spaces worldwide, including the Church of Santo Volto in Turin, Italy, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Mr. Botta’s first phase of work at La Scala was carried out from 2002 to 2004, and the second, begun in 2019, has just wrapped up. He discussed his work in a video interview. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.What is the scope of your work at La Scala? And what have your goals been?The work has been about creating a dialogue between the 18th century and modernity. This theater was born as a space to create dreams, illusions, adventures. It’s still a place of collective imagination. But to effectively make it work today, it needed to be much more flexible and capable than what existed in the 1700s. It had run out of space to perform effectively. We’ve created a series of elements designed to make the theater function for the 2000s.The work completed in 2004 included conserving the opera’s interiors [including restoring original elements that had been abandoned or hidden over the years], a much taller fly tower for stage sets and an elliptical building. For the most recent work, we’ve added a 17-story structure [six floors are underground] parallel to La Scala on the Via Verdi. At the base of this tower is an orchestra practice room, and on top is an airy dance studio. In between is needed functional space like offices, storage and rehearsal space.Mario Botta. “I work in the realm of modernity, but within a culture that traces back to the total history of architecture,” he said.Matteo Fieni, via Mario Botta ArchitettiThe new forms you’ve created feel modern but also timeless. Your work seems especially inspired by the tension between history and modernity. How has that informed your design process here?We’re working with the materials and techniques of today. But at the same time, this is a space that was created in a different lifetime. We want to merge the two. It’s an effort that goes on all the time in the city. The city is constantly transforming; it is a discussion between centuries. Piermarini had an image; now I need to listen to what the opera needs.When I was younger, I looked for a language inspired by futurists like Antonio Sant’Elia. They wanted to create a completely futuristic city. Over the years, my design has evolved to be about the confrontation between times. A collage of different languages. It’s about the functions, needs and realities of today merging with the continuation of historical representation.The facade of the extension of La Scala.Theatre La ScalaWhat does your creative process look like?In my work, the pencil is the protagonist. I don’t work with computers. I work with models. With solid pieces, like an artisan. As all the issues come to the table, I find a synthesis. History is the mother; the pencil is the father. History stays history, but it provides endless inspiration. Without history, we don’t exist. I work in the realm of modernity, but within a culture that traces back to the total history of architecture. We have so many examples of images of the past. Without history, there is no inspiration.For this project, you’ve created substantial new buildings clad in Botticino marble. This diverges from the work of many modern architects, who tend to highlight lighter materials like glass and steel.Glass as a material is less inspiring, less honest. Stone is honest. With glass, you can see it’s transparent, but you can’t really understand what’s inside. I look for forms and materials that speak to the function of a building: a church, a library, a museum. Something with a familiar presence. A gravity. If a building has no gravity, it doesn’t exist. I look for the truth of a material, and of a building. Buildings today all look the same. You can’t read their function. This is the homogeneity that’s been created by globalization. It’s destroyed the symbolic power of buildings; the value of architecture. Now, a McDonald’s can resemble a theater. We’ve lost the capacity to express the true value of architecture.You’ve got a long history with Milan — you studied there when you were young. How has it played a role in your design?Milan has very specific characteristics. Its history is very much about strength and gravity, and there are so many buildings that express themselves through verticality and honesty.This is because Milan is a city of work. More than other cities in Italy, it’s a city of industry, of promotion, of entrepreneurship. It needs buildings like that.You’re well known for your weighty but uplifting sacred architecture. The work here seems to have a sacred component to it. Can you talk about that?I find that architecture is always a sacred act, because it transforms nature and it represents our entire world. The architecture of sacred spaces is very close to the architecture of theaters or museums. You’re trying to create a type of value and strength. You’re attempting to embody a certain message. To try to understand our world. I only do work that I consider sacred. I’m trying to interpret and build a kind of spirit. I leave McDonald’s to America. More