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    Kenward Elmslie, Poet and Librettist, Dies at 93

    He collaborated on operas with Jack Beeson and Ned Rorem and published numerous poetry books. Late in life, he was victimized by theft.Kenward Elmslie, who wrote poetry, opera librettos and stage musicals, and who late in life made headlines when his chauffeur bilked him out of millions of dollars and several valuable artworks, including one by Andy Warhol, died on June 29 at his home in the West Village. He was 93.The poet Ron Padgett, a friend since the 1960s, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Elmslie had been dealing with dementia for many years.Mr. Elmslie, a grandson of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, became interested in musical theater while in high school, and in 1952 he met and became a lover of John Latouche, a lyricist who worked with Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington and others and had numerous Broadway credits. Mr. Elmslie is said to have helped Mr. Latouche on some of his projects, generally uncredited.After Mr. Latouche’s death in 1956, Mr. Elmslie continued to live in the house they had shared in Vermont, alternating between there and Manhattan. And he began to have success himself as a lyricist and librettist.He provided the libretto for the Jack Beeson opera “The Sweet Bye and Bye,” which was first performed by the Juilliard Opera Theater in New York in 1957. In 1965 he worked with Mr. Beeson again, on “Lizzie Borden,” an embellished version of the famed ax-murder case, which premiered that year at City Center in New York. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.“The performers, the composer, the librettist, the designer and the director shared the bows at the end,” Howard Klein wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Many bravos were heard.”Ellen Faull and Richard Krause in a scene from the Jack Beeson opera “Lizzie Borden,” for which Mr. Elmslie wrote the libretto. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.NET Opera, via PhotofestMr. Elmslie’s other opera credits included the libretto for Ned Rorem’s “Miss Julie” (1965). He also dabbled in songwriting — his “Love-Wise,” written with Marvin Fisher, was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1959 — and in theater, even accumulating a Broadway credit as book writer and lyricist for “The Grass Harp,” a musical based on a Truman Capote novel that opened in 1971 but, unloved by critics, closed days later.W.C. Bamberger, in the introduction to “Routine Disruptions,” a 1998 collection of Mr. Elmslie’s poems and lyrics, wrote that it was during lulls in his opera and lyric-writing work that Mr. Elmslie began trying his hand at poetry. He was plugged into the New York art and literary scene and had befriended Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and other poets. His first collection, “Pavilions,” appeared in 1961, followed by more than a dozen others, including “Motor Disturbance” (1971) and “Tropicalism” (1975).In the 1970s, as editor of Z Press and its annual Z Magazine, Mr. Elmslie published many of the poets he admired. His own work defied categorization. There was plenty of wit, as in “Touche’s Salon,” which shamelessly dropped names to evoke a 1950s gathering at Mr. Latouche’s penthouse:Meet Jack Kerouac. Humpy and available.His novel On The Road is unreadable. And unsalable.John Cage is sober, Tennessee loaded.Better not ask how his last flop show did.But his more serious poetry could be ambitious, as well as dense. Mr. Ashbery once said that it was like the notes of “a mad scientist who has swallowed the wrong potion in his lab and is desperately trying to get his calculations on paper before everything closes in.”Mr. Elmslie came to combine his various hats — librettist, songwriter, poet — both in his books, some of which were collaborations with visual artists, and in his poetry readings, which might find him in costume delivering a song in addition to reading his verses. Susan Rosenbaum, reviewing his 2000 book, “Blast From the Past: Stories, Poems, Song Lyrics & Remembrances,” in Jacket magazine, noted that the printed page didn’t do justice to his wide-ranging interests.“For an artist as multitalented as Elmslie, the book is a limiting format: One wants to see and hear his musical works in performance, to visit the galleries where his visual collaborations are displayed,” she wrote. “But the very ability to elicit this desire — to reveal poetry’s affinities with song, theater and visual art — is a measure of the talent of this unique poet.”Kenward Gray Elmslie was born on April 27, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, William, met Constance Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer’s youngest daughter, when he was working as a tutor for another of the Pulitzer children. They married in 1913.Kenward grew up in Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C., and graduated from Harvard University in 1950 with an English degree. In New York in the 1950s and ’60s, he mixed easily with an artsy crowd. A 1965 article in The Times about a trendy party in the Bowery had him among the guests, with Warhol, the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, the pioneering electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, all gathered to hear a reading by William S. Burroughs.The year before that party, Warhol had given Mr. Elmslie one of his Heinz ketchup box sculptures, a classic example of Warholian Pop Art. More than four decades later, in 2009, the work was stolen, along with other valuable items and several million dollars. “Pulitzer kin hit in pop art scam,” the headline in The Daily News read.In 2010, James Biear, who had been Mr. Elmslie’s chauffeur and caretaker, was indicted in the thefts. News accounts at the time said he took advantage of Mr. Elmslie’s dementia, which was already in its early stages. In 2012 Mr. Biear was sentenced to 10 years in prison.In 1963 Mr. Elmslie began a long relationship with Joe Brainard, an artist and writer with whom he also collaborated on various projects. Mr. Brainard died in 1994. Mr. Elmslie is survived by a half sister, Alexandra Whitelock. More

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    Is the Future of American Opera Unfolding in Detroit?

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Last September, as cultural organizations began their fall seasons in a state of crisis, unsure if audiences would venture from their homes in the midst of a pandemic, Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of the Michigan Opera Theater, decided to mount a show called “Bliss.” A restaging of a marathon piece by the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, “Bliss” requires its performers to replay the final three minutes of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” without pause for 12 hours. Sharon’s production took place in what was once the Michigan Building Theater, a former Detroit movie palace that closed in 1976; infamously, when architects determined that demolishing the theater would make an adjoining office building structurally unsound, the interior was gutted and transformed into a multilevel garage. The sight of cars parked beneath moldering Renaissance-style plasterwork and traces of long-gone balconies has long proved irresistible to Detroit ruin photographers, but no one before Sharon had ever staged a live performance among them. The production was pay-what-you-like, and those of us in the audience reached the performance space by walking up a ramp. Looking over its edge, I spotted a dusty Jeep parked on a lower level with the words LIONS SUCK traced on the windshield. A pair of low stages, minimally dressed to set a banquet scene, had been assembled, and the rest of the space was hauntingly lit, with an orchestra on the same level as the audience, whose members were free to sit or orbit at their leisure, entering or leaving at any part of the show, which began at noon and ended at midnight. Sharon paced the perimeter in a bow tie, a colorful jacket and yellow sneakers. Now 42, Sharon is the most visionary opera director of his generation. He founded an experimental company, cheekily named the Industry, in Los Angeles in 2012, and was met with near-immediate acclaim for stagings so wildly inventive they often dispensed with stages altogether. A 2013 production of “Invisible Cities,” the composer Christopher Cerrone’s adaptation of Italo Calvino’s imaginary travelogue, took place in Los Angeles’s Union Station, one of the busiest passenger railroad terminals in the country; performers moved around the space as concertgoers listened on wireless headphones (and commuters raced for their trains). A 2015 opera inspired by Julio Cortázar’s “Hopscotch” — a novel whose chapters can be read sequentially or by “hopscotching” around the book — recreated the format in Los Angeles traffic: Audience members would enter one of 24 limousines, each of which also contained performers, and proceed along one of three routes, occasionally changing cars or stopping at key landmarks to witness vignettes. Other Sharon productions have combined live singers with green screens and digital animation, stuck performers inside a giant glass vitrine and redeployed defunct air-raid sirens to broadcast music onto city streets. In 2017, Sharon was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant; the following year, he became the first American to direct at Bayreuth, the Wagnerian opera festival founded by Richard Wagner himself in 1876. The conductor Gustavo Dudamel — the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where Sharon served a three-year residency as artist-collaborator — told me in an email that Sharon was a “creative genius” who “understands the heart of every piece and takes us there through a vision that is incomparable.” And yet Sharon’s boldest venture may have been the announcement, in 2020, that he would be accepting a position as artistic director of the Michigan Opera Theater — since renamed, at Sharon’s insistence, Detroit Opera. It’s hard to overstate the unlikelihood of a director as innovative and internationally celebrated as Sharon taking the reins of a decidedly regional (and in certain respects conservative) opera company like Detroit’s. But today, nearly two years into his five-year contract, Sharon has already radically elevated Detroit Opera’s status in the larger cultural ecosystem. His first production in Detroit — a drive-through, socially distant version of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” in a downtown parking structure — received a rave from Alex Ross in The New Yorker: The piece “would have been a triumph in any season,” Ross wrote, but it “felt borderline miraculous” in 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic. Sharon went on to commission a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which had never received a full revival since its premiere at New York City Opera in 1986. Davis told me he’d taken meetings at the Metropolitan Opera over the years to discuss possible productions, but nothing had ever come of the talks; after the Detroit production was announced, though, “Yuval said the Met called him,” and arranged to bring the production to New York in 2023. I came early to “Bliss,” then returned again closer to the finish, grabbing a chair near Corey McKern, the baritone playing the philandering Count Almaviva. For the last 11 hours or so, the count had been begging forgiveness from his wife, and now McKern sat slumped on some steps at the edge of the stage. Kjartansson originally staged “Bliss” in 2011, but a decade later, its purgatorial repetition had become a perfect metaphor for our daily lives during the pandemic; the endless loop of penitent toxic maleness also had an amusing new resonance. On a personal level, more than whatever conceptual power the piece held, more than the ways in which repetition deepened and complicated the beauty of Mozart’s music, even more than the athleticism of the singers or the novelty of hearing them, unamplified, from only a few feet away, I was struck by the space itself. I’m a former resident of the city, and Detroit’s ruins were not new to me; to be frank, I’d been skeptical of the decision to stage the performance in the former Michigan Building Theater at all. So I was surprised to find myself tearing up during the final burst of applause at midnight. Had it been the amazing feat of endurance I’d just witnessed? The fact that this was one of the first live musical performances I’d seen in over a year? Or was it because we hadn’t been invited into this space simply to gawk at a memento mori, but rather to transform it into something transcendent, or at least to try?Mark Williams, the chief executive of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, told me that when he heard about Sharon’s move to Detroit, he was not surprised. He and Sharon had worked together at the Cleveland Orchestra, where Sharon directed a pair of acclaimed opera productions. But Sharon’s ambitions, Williams said, were bigger than guest directing; he was “the sort of person who would want to come into a space where he could really effect change, rather than going into a more established space and becoming more of a caretaker. So when he told me about Detroit, I thought, Gosh, that makes perfect sense. I believe that Yuval and Detroit Opera could really become the company that is showing America what opera can be.” As a deep partisan of the city, I say with all fondness: The future of American opera unfolding in Detroit was not a plot twist I saw coming. And yet, Sharon countered, Detroit might actually be “the perfect place to really push for what the future of opera can be.” He is not interested in a universalist, one-size-fits-all approach, where “La Bohème” ends up the same in Detroit as it does everywhere else: “No, it’s got to be totally of Detroit in the end. That, to me, is the path forward.” Couldn’t — shouldn’t, Sharon insisted — opera in Detroit look and feel and sound like nothing else in the country?In person, Sharon has the air of a convivial host. Boyish and elfin, with a slight frame and probing blue eyes, he’s a hugger, an easy laugher, a hoarder of both apt quotes by heavyweight European thinkers (Brecht, Barthes, Adorno, Kierkegaard, Peter Sloterdijk) and gossipy anecdotes (e.g. the one about the famous opera diva who phoned her agent in Europe so he could call the driver of her limo and have him lower the air-conditioning) — someone who “knows what he wants but is very polite, the opposite of an authoritarian director,” according to Matthias Schulz, the director of the Berlin State Opera, who sounded, when we talked, at once impressed and slightly puzzled by this approach.Earlier this year, Schulz invited Sharon to Berlin to revive his production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” which he first presented in 2019. “The Magic Flute” is Sharon’s favorite opera, and in his staging the singers are puppets dangling from strings in a children’s theater, with Tamino, the hero, costumed to resemble the manga character Astro Boy. (“The original version had tons of flying,” Sharon says. “We’re cutting that back.”) A few days before that revival opened, I met Sharon in front of Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where he arrived on a lime-green rental bicycle. He spent time in the city in the early aughts, when the KW, housed in an abandoned margarine factory, was among his favorite haunts. “I didn’t even check what was on,” he said as we entered, pulling a black N95 mask from the pocket of a sharp coat assembled from expensive-looking shingles of rough-hewed wool. “I always love what they do here.” It turned out that in the first gallery we were greeted by a quartet of stylized marionettes by the Austrian artist Peter Friedl. “Wow,” Sharon said. He pulled out his phone and snapped a photograph. Critics of his “Magic Flute,” he noted, didn’t like the marionette concept. He chuckled. “They thought of it as childish. I think it’s childlike. There’s a distinction!”Sharon’s 2019 production of ‘‘The Magic Flute’’ at Berlin State Opera.Monika RittershausThe original 2019 production was plagued with difficulties. The flying devices barely worked, and the original conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, dropped out three weeks before the opening for an emergency knee surgery. Audience members booed at the premiere. A zero-star review in The Financial Times began: “There are natural catastrophes, such as floods and earthquakes. And then there are man-made catastrophes, such as Yuval Sharon’s new production of Die Zauberflöte at Berlin’s Staatsoper.” Sharon has since acknowledged that the opening was “a disaster” — but the production did find its footing, and actually became popular, hence Schulz’s desire for the streamlined revival, which has become part of the Staatsoper’s repertory. “Matthias told me it became a cult favorite,” Sharon said, “which I think is a nice way of saying critics hated it but audiences like it.”I’d been scheduled to attend a rehearsal two nights earlier, but just before I left my hotel, I received an apologetic email saying one of the cast members felt uncomfortable having a journalist in the house. I would only be allowed to watch an hour of the proceedings from high in a balcony, far from everyone. Later I learned the context of my banishment from Sharon, who arrived in Berlin the day before: After a quick stop at his hotel he headed straight to the opera house, where the first thing he heard, from the same cast member who objected to my presence, was: This production is [expletive]. What are we doing? Sharon recounted the story with good humor, but he was obviously annoyed. “I was like, OK, you go sing your part, and I’ll deal with people who want to be here,” Sharon said. He sighed. “You can’t win ’em all. A big part of being a director is realizing that. And you know, watching it again? I thought, I still like all of this! If you asked me to do ‘The Magic Flute’ today, this is the production I’d do.”On opening night, I sat next to a girl who couldn’t have been older than 10 and had brought along a pair of opera glasses. The technical and conceptual audacity of Sharon’s productions tend to reap the most attention, but I’ve often come away from his work remembering smaller moments, funny or surreal, that grasp the emotional heart of the operas he’s deconstructing. In the case of “The Magic Flute,” one such moment came near the end, after Tamino rescues Pamina — and then, suddenly, the pair re-emerge in modern dress, the setting having shifted to a pristine replica of a 1960s suburban kitchen, jarringly rerouting the lovers’ fable-like quest narrative into a scene from a David Lynch movie, a version of Ever After both sinister and deflatingly mundane.The tenor George Shirley in rehearsal for ‘‘La Bohème.’’Dan Winters for The New York TimesThe standing ovation the show received would seem to justify Sharon’s self-confidence. But the skeptical cast member’s question gets at a nagging tension that hovers in the background whenever a provocateur like Sharon enters a more tradition-bound establishment — and there are few arts establishments more tradition-bound than opera, an endeavor that, perhaps for this very reason, seems perpetually in crisis. Devotees fret about aging audiences (the average Metropolitan Opera subscriber in the last season before Covid-19 was 65), cultural irrelevance, overdependence on wealthy donors, elitism, lack of diversity and of course the challenges of presenting what’s known as the “inherited repertoire,” which can make major opera houses feel more like museums displaying beautifully lit but familiar versions of beloved masterpieces. According to Marc Scorca, president of Opera America, many opera houses are financially healthy at the moment, thanks to recent federal stimulus packages — but “underneath that,” he says, “is huge concern about how the audience will rematerialize once Covid is behind us.” Sharon recognizes these challenges as being even more fraught in Detroit, where an already lean budget became leaner during the pandemic — and where, he told me, “the old metrics were, you have a 90-percent-white audience in a city that’s 80 percent Black.” He went on: “They lured me in with the sentiment that said, ‘We absolutely need to change.’ And I said, ‘Well, if change is really what you’re interested in, then, I mean — continuation is not what I’m here to do.’” Detroit Opera’s “Bliss” in the former Michigan Building Theater, which is now a parking garage.Noah Elliot MorrisonThe job in Detroit has been a return of sorts for Sharon, who grew up nearby, in Chicago. His parents, both Israeli, came to the United States when his father, Ariel, a nuclear engineer, attended Northwestern University. After Chernobyl, Ariel started a company that made nuclear-plant emergency simulators, a job that kept him on the road — often to Germany, where, “kind of the way American businessmen would go golfing together, clients there would take him to the opera,” Yuval told me. Ariel had always been an amateur music lover, noodling around on the family’s piano and insisting that Yuval (but, for some reason, neither of his siblings) stick with lessons. The pattern repeated itself with opera: As Ariel became more of a buff, his son, who thought the swords and dragons in Wagner were cool, would become his regular companion at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.The first opera Yuval saw, a production of “La Traviata” on a visit to Germany when he was 12 or 13, didn’t speak to him, but he still remembers a single, dreamlike moment from the otherwise traditional staging. In the final act, as Violetta lay dying in bed while a chorus sang offstage — party music, Sharon says, the moment where the woman realizes the world outside doesn’t care — a clown holding a balloon emerged from beneath her bed and sneaked out a window. “It was the only moment in which the reality of what was happening onstage was broken,” he says. The rest of the production rapidly faded, leaving little impression. But the image of the clown stuck in his mind. By middle school he’d become a self-described “loner kid”; by high school he was watching Bergman’s “Persona” for pleasure. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in literature but hoping to get into film or theater directing. After graduating he moved to Berlin, living in a flat with a coal stove and teaching English part-time. Living in the city was so cheap that he could afford to go out to plays, concerts and operas. Opera had never struck him as the sort of endeavor in which he could play a part; it felt fixed, like going to a museum or reading the Great Books. But in Berlin he saw opera directors with the freedom, thanks in part to state funding, to be wildly experimental, and realized an opera production could be more than a re-creation of something from the past.Sharon moved to New York in 2002. He helped found an experimental theater company, but he soon realized that all of his shows had musical elements. He was becoming more excited about his day job at New York City Opera, where he would eventually run a new-music program called Vox. Meeting composers and workshopping their operas with the orchestra, he found himself most enthusiastic about the pieces that didn’t feel as if they would make sense framed in a normal theater — those composed specifically for amplified voices, say, or incorporating electronic components. But starting a company to produce new opera seemed impossible in New York, and none of the cramped black-box theaters he could afford to rent felt like exciting visual spaces. In 2008 he began spending time in Los Angeles, working as an assistant director to Achim Freyer, a student of Bertolt Brecht’s and one of the avant-garde directors whose work he found inspiring in Berlin. Sharon says he got the job, working on a monumental staging of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, because “they needed someone who could speak German and who loved Wagner enough to make a two-year commitment.” Scorca, of Opera America, remembers the transplanted Easterner raving about how Los Angeles had a special freshness, an absence of cynicism and an openness to the arts. The Los Angeles Opera had been around only since 1986; Freyer’s production was to be the first complete “Ring” cycle ever performed in the city. “There was a whole arts infrastructure really being birthed,” Scorca says. “The Broad Museum hadn’t been built yet. Disney Hall was still relatively new. Something very special was happening, and there was a receptivity to the new that Yuval liked.” And unlike New York, Los Angeles had space to accommodate the scale of Sharon’s creative vision.“We were the new New York,” chuckles Cedric Berry, a bass-baritone who performed in the Industry’s first production, “Crescent City.” Set in a fictional city based on New Orleans after Katrina, the opera, by the Louisiana native Anne LeBaron, had been a favorite of Sharon’s since it was workshopped at Vox, and in some ways became his impetus for starting the Industry. He raised $250,000 from donors and grants and rented a warehouse in the Atwater Village neighborhood. “The music was the hardest piece I’ve ever done,” Berry told me. “But in addition to being an opera, it was an art installation” — Sharon had invited local visual artists to design immersive sets — “so the audience was on the stage, around the stage, you walked through them. My character was building a house. And they had cameras in your face, projecting video onto screens, so you had to be a smart actor, period.” The dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who was starting the LA Dance Project around the same time, recalls looking at a synopsis of the show “and thinking, This is the sort of thing very unlikely to work.” But by all accounts it did. The staging was high-concept; “I never make things easier, I make them more complicated,” Sharon admitted to me, while Berry says that “if it’s not something anyone in their right mind thinks is impossible, Yuval wouldn’t want to do it.” But Sharon remained laser-focused on performance and traditional technique, rooting out what Berry called “ ‘smacting,’ a kind of mock-acting, what people think of when they think of musical theater.” In a rapturous review, the Los Angeles Times classical-music critic Mark Swed described the Industry as “potentially groundbreaking” for the city. Millepied came away such a convert that the LA Dance Project collaborated with the Industry on its next project, “Invisible Cities.” For Sharon, Wagner’s theory of Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art,” makes opera the “ultimate collaborative art form and the ultimate multimedia art form” — even if for Wagner himself the term “meant ‘everything comes from my brain, and it’s all unified.’” Sharon’s own concept for a 21st-century Gesamtkunstwerk is “multivoiced, a polyphony rather than a monotony.” The 2020 Industry production “Sweet Land,” for instance, had two directors, two composers and two librettists. And the polyphony of public space came into play during site-specific Industry productions like “Hopscotch,” injecting some degree of anarchy into the pieces. Berry, who performed the role of Kublai Khan in “Invisible Cities” in street clothes and a wheelchair, told me he was often mistaken by commuters at Union Station for “some random homeless person” who happened to be singing; during one performance, when Berry paused during one of his arias, a woman who had been listening took the opportunity to start belting her own song.Sharon’s “Lohengrin” at the 2018 Bayreuth Festival in Germany.Enrico NawrathOne of the composers for “Sweet Land,” the Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun, told me that Sharon, from the outset of their unorthodox collaboration, encouraged the artists to let their imaginations run wild “as if there were no financial concerns.” Normally, she said, the artistic director of an opera company would be the one raising practical questions: “They’ll say, ‘We can’t do this, and here are a hundred reasons why.’ At the early meetings for ‘Sweet Land,’ that was me. It’s the first time I thought, Wait, am I conservative?” There’s an element of directing that’s practical, Sharon told me — “basically, managing time. But then you need another level, where you’re tapping into the realm of the impossible, what can barely be imagined. Sing in a moving car! Play violin while crossing a busy street!” In “Hopscotch,” an actor on a motorcycle pulled alongside the limousines in moving traffic to deliver lines sent to the vehicles’ speakers via wireless mics — after which, Sharon said, audience members would “start to wonder what else might be part of the show. A helicopter flew by and they assumed that was us!” Bringing the fictional into the everyday world highlights, for Sharon, the porousness of those boundaries, allowing witnesses to imagine transformative change in what might have seemed like an immutable reality. The space housing the Detroit Opera celebrates its 100th birthday this year. Originally called the Capitol Theater, it operated as a movie palace and live venue — Louis Armstrong, Will Rogers and Duke Ellington all performed there in its heyday — until 1985, when it was closed and left abandoned and unguarded for four years, with homeless people taking up residence inside and looters carting off one of the crystal chandeliers. When the Michigan Opera Theater purchased the building for $600,000 in 1989, its section of downtown Detroit had become so ruinous that “everybody thought we were really insane,” the company’s charismatic founder, David DiChiera, told The Times in 1999. But DiChiera started the company only four years after the 1967 Detroit riot, when businesses and residents were fleeing to the suburbs, and he’d made sustaining an opera company in a blue-collar town his life’s work. He cannily tapped automakers, among others, for funding, including for the restoration of what became the Detroit Opera House, which reopened in 1996 with a performance featuring Luciano Pavarotti. His programming leaned to the classical, but he also worked to reflect the demographics of the city, becoming an early advocate of colorblind casting (Kathleen Battle made her professional operatic debut at M.O.T.) and helping commission the 2005 premiere of “Margaret Garner,” an opera with a libretto by Toni Morrison based on the true story that inspired her novel “Beloved.” DiChiera stepped away from the institution in 2017 and died the following year, leaving the company in what the critic Mark Stryker described in The Detroit Free Press as an “artistic holding pattern.” In 2019, Stephen Lord, the principal conductor, resigned following allegations of sexual harassment at other companies. (Lord denied the accusations at the time.) Sharon, meanwhile, was planning to use a portion of his MacArthur grant to take a yearlong sabbatical in Japan; he’d been studying Japanese and had purchased a plane ticket for April 1, 2020. (“I know,” he said, after telling me the date. “It’s funny. It was like, April Fools!”)Gary Wasserman, a Detroit philanthropist and longtime supporter of the Michigan Opera Theater, had been following Sharon’s career for years; he told me he considered “Hopscotch” one of the most memorable theatrical experiences he’d ever had, comparing its intricacy to a fine watch. He caught a performance of “Sweet Land” before the pandemic, hoping he could lure Sharon to bring it to Michigan. After the pandemic arrived and the possibility of upcoming productions vanished, an M.O.T. board member asked him if Sharon might consider coming on as artistic director. Sharon flew to Detroit in June. He knew that if he accepted the job, he wanted to announce a fall production immediately — but performing inside the theater remained impossible. It was only when Sharon asked about the company’s other assets that he was told about the parking structure across the street. “Twilight: Gods,” mounted that fall, was Sharon’s drive-through abridgment of the final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle — normally five or six hours, pared by Sharon to a slim 65 minutes or so, with groups of eight cars at a time moving from level to level to watch different scenes unfold while listening to the music via FM radio. It was an unambiguous triumph. “The last part of the Ring cycle is about a world order that’s collapsing, and the need, in a way, for it to collapse,” Sharon told me. Brünnhilde throws fire into her father’s hall “to literally burn it down, with the hope that a future humanity will arise that will be better. It’s, on one hand, pessimistic. On the other hand, I felt like it was what we were living through anyway.” The great dramatic soprano Christine Goerke came onboard to sing Brünnhilde; her steed, appropriately enough, became a Ford Mustang. Sharon and M.O.T.’s chief executive, Wayne Brown, personally greeted each car. Some theatergoers arrived in jeans or sweats, others in evening attire. Brown told me one group of attendees hung a chandelier in their car and brought flutes of Champagne. The meeting point for “Hopscotch,” a mobile opera directed by Sharon in 2015, in which 24 cars carried audience members throughout Los Angeles.Joshua LiptonOne thing that made Sharon’s work at the Industry so exciting was the way in which it seemed to exist in dialogue with the sprawling, messy history of the city around it. It’s still too early to say how Sharon’s vision will intersect with Detroit, but there have been strong hints. He tapped a local writer, Marsha Music, to narrate “Twilight: Gods” and give the story a Detroit voice. The production of “X,” of course, had resonance thanks to Malcolm (a.k.a. Detroit Red) and the Nation of Islam’s Michigan roots. “Blue,” a 2019 opera by the composer Jeanine Tesori and the librettist Tazewell Thompson about police violence, was performed last year at the riverfront Aretha Franklin Amphitheater, which Marsha Music called “historically a Black performance space,” marveling that, at least on the night she attended, “When the people walked up in there, it looked like Ebony Fashion Fair.” The nearly sold-out run of “X” was especially popular; three-quarters of its single-ticket sales were to new audience members, with more than double the usual number coming from Detroit residents.In April, Sharon directed the company’s first show back in the Detroit Opera House since the start of the pandemic: the inherited-repertoire favorite “La Bohème.” Sharon being Sharon, his version unfolded in reverse order, opening with Act IV, in which Mimì dies, and ending with Act I, in which she and her lover, Rodolfo, first meet. Detroit has died and been reborn so many times that Sharon’s reworking of the classic felt like an oblique nod to the city. Beginning with the sorrow that would befall these young people created a fantastic dramatic tension as the story proceeded, but an odd feeling of hope persisted as the story moved from the end of the affair to its blooming: Tragedy may be inevitable, but the lovers’ time together felt entirely worthwhile. The final scene from Sharon’s production of “La Bohème.”Andrea Stinson Photography/Detroit OperaNot everyone loved the idea. Sharon, when I saw him at the dress rehearsal, was delighted by a write-up on the website of The Daily Mail, the British tabloid, bearing the headline, “Detroit gives tragic classic opera La Bohème a woke reboot: City will stage production in REVERSE order to avoid ending where main character dies so audience leaves feeling ‘hopeful and optimistic.’” He began reciting various angry comments to me (“Excellent idea by the woke left”), cackling so loudly that a tech guy preparing to film the rehearsal shushed us. Taking a seat in the mostly empty house, Sharon leaned back to watch the run-through while an assistant director typed his murmured notes into a laptop: His beard looks too trim, make it messier. A couple of words in this supertitle are wrong. Move that stool out of the shadow or it’ll be too dark. And, when one of the characters stood in a particular position with his arm raised: Oh, no — that looks like the poster from “Hamilton!”At the gala opening two days later, a string quartet played songs by Taylor Swift and Daft Punk. The opera itself flew by, per Sharon’s design: “I wanted it to feel like Japanese calligraphy, where you can’t remove your brush from the page,” he said in a talk before the show. “That’s what I’d like this production to feel like: one brush stroke, quick. Like being young.” The minimalist set, by John Conklin, allowed Sharon to eliminate intermissions, which are usually necessary for scene changes, and the relative simplicity of the staging gave him time to focus on the performers, who now had to be prepared to sing the most difficult arias at the end of the evening; Edward Parks and Brandie Inez Sutton, playing the comic-relief lovebirds Marcello and Musetta, stole the show.“The challenge, when we do ‘La Bohème’ and more standard repertoire,” Sharon told me last fall, “will be, how do we bring an improvisatory spirit into something that feels more fixed?” — a spirit closer to that of “Bliss,” wherein the discipline required of the performers also came with enormous freedom. “For me, that’s one of the big experiments of coming into an environment like an opera house, and why ‘La Bohème,’ for me, is one of my biggest experiments.” Not merely doing it backward, he went on, but trying to figure out how to make an opera written in the 19th century feel as if it were being invented right there on the spot. “That discovery, in each and every repetition,” Sharon said. “That’s what you want to try and find a way to capture.” As his production neared its finish (technically the start), even throwaway lines accrued unexpected weight, landing sudden, sharp blows. In the conclusion of Act I, Mimì agrees to join Rodolfo at the Café Momus: “E al ritorno?” he asks. And when we come back? “Curioso,” she replies. Let’s see.Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a feature about a biker shootout in Waco, Texas. More

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    ‘Country House Operas’ Offer a Glimpse of Opera’s Future

    Steeped in romantic history, smaller “country house operas” such as Grange Park Opera, west of London, offer a leisurely pace and less overhead.When the British TV host Bamber Gascoigne unexpectedly inherited a 350-acre estate in 2014 from his 99-year-old great-aunt, he was stunned by the inheritance tax bill he was facing, not to mention the upkeep of a crumbling 50-room house once briefly owned by Henry VIII.His solution: Set up a registered charity, or trust, to turn it all into an arts center, including a summer opera festival looking for a new home. Like an intervention by the gods in a Wagner opera, the tax bill was slashed, a 700-seat theater was built in about 11 months and the well-heeled came to frolic at West Horsley Place, which had been largely frolic-free for decades.The success of Grange Park Opera (its current season runs through July 17), about 23 miles west of London, is an example of a symbiotic relationship between old English country estates that benefit from becoming a British charity and a thirst for highbrow arts and socializing away from the bustle of the capital in the summertime.A recent performance of “La Gioconda” at Grange Park Opera. Marc BrennerIt is one of several so-called country house operas around Britain. Others include Garsington (in a temporary structure on the Getty estate) and The Grange Festival (in a dilapidated Greek Revival mansion, which was Grange Park Opera’s first home, starting in 1998). There is also Glyndebourne, which in 1934 began daylong outings to an opera in the country, complete with champagne while strolling the grounds, picnics on lawns or tucked away in garden corners, and lavish meals in dining rooms sheltered from the elements.“If you go to the opera in London, you have to scramble for a drink at the interval or gulp down something to eat in 20 minutes,” said Wasfi Kani, the founder and chief executive of Grange Park Opera. “But instead of just a few hours in an evening, you can make it a half day, have a walk in the country and enjoy your dinner at a leisurely pace.”That pace — and an unofficial dress code of tuxedos and evening gowns — also harks back to the opera of old. To some, the country house operas are not only steeped in the romantic history of upper-crust England, but, ironically, may also provide a glimpse of how opera may survive.“Houses like Grange Park are somewhat the future of opera because they are smaller and have less overhead, which is appropriate for dwindling audiences,” said the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja, who returns to the festival this summer in “La Gioconda” after opening the opera house in 2017 with “Tosca.” “They built all of it in less than a year, and right up to the last minute. We were doing ‘Tosca,’ and the soprano was singing ‘Mario, Mario, Mario’ to the sound of drilling.”Christina and Bamber Gascoigne in 2017. The couple turned West Horsley Place, a centuries-old English estate, into the current home of Grange Park Opera.Grange Park OperaThe company, which usually stages four operas or musicals each summer, has an annual operating budget of around 4 million pounds, about $4.9 million, and a full-time staff of about 12 (with 300 to 400 part-time workers during the summer). Like most other country house operas, it is funded entirely by ticket sales and donations, receiving no government money.Mr. Gascoigne, the original host of the popular TV show “University Challenge,” died in February at 87. But his vision to make West Horsley Place a trust — similar to a U.S. nonprofit organization — is intact, and the opera company, a separate charity, has a 99-year lease on the estate.The core of the 50-room mansion dates from the 15th century, and Mr. Gascoigne’s great-aunt, Mary Innes-Ker, the Duchess of Roxburghe, was its last resident (her ashes are buried beneath the orchestra pit). She lived alone for years in an almost Miss Havisham-like existence where few visitors went beyond the front rooms. When she died in 2014, the home and grounds were in disrepair.“Every time there was a new drip, she thought: Get a new bucket,” Mr. Gascoigne was quoted as saying in 2018.Ms. Kani had been looking for a new home for Grange Park Opera, since its previous home was quite far for its core London audience. She read about Mr. Gascoigne and the house and debt he was being saddled with. It seemed like a moment to seize.A picnic on the grounds of West Horsley Place.Richard LewisohnTurning the property into an arts center with an opera house seemed like a fine idea to Mr. Gascoigne and his wife, Christina. Many of the home’s furnishings and artworks — along with silver, crystal, servants’ outfits and even a long-lost pencil and chalk drawing that thrilled Sotheby’s experts — were auctioned to offset the remaining tax bill and pay for repairs on the house. Mr. Gascoigne gave up about £20 million in assets to create the trust.“Grange Park Opera approached Bamber and me at the perfect time,” said Ms. Gascoigne, who was married to Mr. Gascoigne for 57 years. “What was a potential financial burden became almost a community service for Bamber in his final years.”And his legacy plays out in a five-year-old opera house and the meandering gardens, honoring opera’s leisurely origins when the European elite had little more to do on a given day than listen to opera and fuss with their formal wear.“I’ve always said that a third of them come because it’s an amazing place, a third of them come to see the opera and a third of them to say they’ve been there,” Ms. Kani said. More

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    How Opera Houses Are Putting Puccini Into Contemporary Context

    Opera houses in London and Boston have taken a critical look at “Madama Butterfly” to correct its clichés, caricatures and anachronisms.LONDON — Draped in a crisp white kimono and a translucent veil, Madama Butterfly kneels beside an American officer as they wed in a religious ceremony. The priest celebrates their nuptials while guests dressed in traditional Japanese robes look on.At first glance, there’s nothing conspicuously different about the Royal Opera House’s revival of its 2002 production of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” Yet it’s the result of a year of consultations with academics, practitioners and professionals to strip away any hint of cliché or caricature.Concretely, this has meant removing “the extremely white makeup” that the performers previously wore. By the early 20th century, the period in which “Madama Butterfly” is set, “nobody was wearing white makeup on the street,” said Sonoko Kamimura, an expert in Japanese movement and design who was hired by the Royal Opera to update the production.Ms. Kamimura worked to get rid of other anachronistic elements, such as wigs, samurai-style coiffures and costumes.“I really like this opera, because the music is beautiful. But then I would also say it is stereotypical,” she said, adding that the Royal Opera House had found a way around the issue. “Rather than cancel the show,” she said, the house had organized “a dialogue” around it that she was “really glad to be a part of.”Some opera companies have opted to shelve or cancel “Madama Butterfly” because of its increasingly problematic portrayals, particularly to audiences of Asian heritage.Tristram Kenton / ROHSince its world premiere in 1904 at La Scala in Milan, “Madama Butterfly” has been a staple of theaters around the world. First performed at Covent Garden in 1905, it’s the ninth most programmed work at the Royal Opera House, having been performed more than 400 times.Its portrayal of a lovelorn 15-year-old geisha, who is impregnated and abandoned by an American lieutenant, has become increasingly problematic in the 21st century, particularly to audiences of Asian heritage. Institutions such as the Royal Opera House and Boston Lyric Opera are working hard to bring it up-to-date, in every sense of the word.“We’re all very conscious these days that opera and race have had a complicated relationship and history,” said Oliver Mears, the director of opera at the Royal Opera House. “There is always a risk, when a Western opera house is portraying a different culture, that it can make missteps, and that the level of authenticity is not quite as high as it could be.”Mr. Mears said that there was “certainly a huge amount of nervousness on the part of fellow opera companies in mounting this opera at all in the current moment,” and that many were canceling or shelving their “Madama Butterfly” productions “because it feels like it’s too dangerous to go there.”“We think that’s a huge shame, because ‘Madama Butterfly’ is a masterpiece,” he said. “We would much rather be in dialogue with these pieces rather than canceling them.”A similar revision has been taking place across the Atlantic at Boston Lyric Opera. The consultations there, known as the Butterfly Process, will lead to a production of the opera in the fall of 2023 on the Lyric stage.The Lyric was initially set to perform “Madama Butterfly” in the fall of 2020, but the pandemic delayed it for a year. In that time, “there were incidents of heightened racism and violence toward Asian communities across the country,” Bradley Vernatter, acting general and artistic director of the Lyric, said in an email. After conversations with artists and staff members, the production was postponed further, because it was “critical to re-examine the modern context before presenting the work,” Mr. Vernatter said.Licia Albanese made her Metropolitan Opera debut on February 1940 as Madama Butterfly. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, performances of that opera were banned in the U.S. until 1946, when World War II ended.AlamyHe noted that operas weren’t “static museum pieces,” and that shifts in society and politics affected audience reactions to operas. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, for example, “Madama Butterfly” was performed almost every season between 1907 and 1941. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the work stayed off the Met stage until 1946.Mr. Vernatter explained that Puccini had never set foot in Japan when he saw David Belasco’s one-act play “Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan” and decided to write an operatic version. To research Japanese music, he attended a touring Kabuki show in Milan and asked the wife of the Japanese ambassador to Italy to sing him Japanese folk songs. Because of Puccini’s unfamiliarity with the culture, “the Japanese characters in his opera come off as caricatures,” Mr. Vernatter said.Revising operas to reflect contemporary times can have its own pitfalls. In the fall of 2019, the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto put on an updated performance of another Puccini opera, “Turandot,” about a Chinese princess who murders her suitors.One of the three main characters — whose names in the original libretto are Ping, Pang and Pong — was played by a Taiwanese American tenor whose daughter Katherine Hu later wrote an opinion article in The New York Times. To tone down the caricature, the director renamed the characters Jim, Bob and Bill.“But the characters continued to play into stereotypes of effeminate Asian men as they pranced around onstage, giggling at one another,” Ms. Hu wrote in the article. “Alterations like these have become part of a broader trend as opera clumsily reckons with its racist and sexist past.”“To survive, opera has to confront the depth of its racism and sexism point-blank, treating classic operas as historical artifacts instead of dynamic cultural productions,” she wrote. “Opera directors should approach the production of these classics as museum curators and professors — educating audiences about historical context and making stereotypes visible.”Both the Royal Opera House and Boston Lyric Opera chiefs said that was exactly what they wanted to do.“The goal here is for everyone to participate in an art form that hasn’t traditionally been inclusive, and to strengthen our communities and audiences through the music and stories we present,” Mr. Vernatter said. “I believe we can do it by engaging with and listening to people of many backgrounds and life experiences, and incorporating that into our work.” More

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    Ermonela Jaho, an Albanian Soprano, ‘Can Sing Your Music’

    The Albanian soprano has won over audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Her latest role is Nedda in Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” at the Royal Opera.Nedda, the leading female character of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” must die rather than consummate true love. The soprano Ermonela Jaho, who makes her debut in the role at London’s Royal Opera House this month, has discovered that the character is more complex than she first thought.“She is strong enough to fight until death for her freedom,” Ms. Jaho said in a phone interview. “She never loses the light inside of her.”The Albanian soprano, 48, has won over audiences on both sides of the Atlantic with the depth and authenticity of her performances, especially in the realism of “verismo” works by Verdi and Puccini. Her portrayal of the character Violetta in “La Traviata” is a signature role which brought her into the international spotlight after she jumped in on short notice at the Royal Opera House in 2008. (She will return to the Verdi work at the Metropolitan Opera in January). The London stage also brought her role debut as Suor Angelica in Puccini’s “Il Trittico,” which she will sing at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu in December.Ms. Jaho was chosen to appear in the documentary “Fuoco Sacro,” now playing on the French-German television station Arte. Next April, she will return to the Royal Opera to sing the role of Liù in Puccini’s “Turandot,” which she recorded for the Warner Classics label under the baton of Antonio Pappano.And at the Royal Opera from Tuesday through July 20, audiences will have the chance to experience her in Damiano Michieletto’s double bill of “Pagliacci” and Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” first seen in 2015.Mr. Pappano, the Royal Opera’s longtime music director, pointed to a winning combination of empathy and strength in Ms. Jaho’s performances. “She is sensitive to every curve of every phrase and every situation the character finds herself in — also in heartbreaking situations,” he said in a phone interview. “But she’s also got this steely resolve, which she has to have in ‘Suor Angelica’ and, in particular, ‘Madame Butterfly.’”Ms. Jaho, who grew up in Albania, trained at academies in Mantua and Rome. Above, she performs the role of Suor Angelica in Puccini’s “Il Trittico.”Bill Cooper/ROH“She is capable,” he said, “with her voice and with her acting — which is so detailed and so nuanced — to make you cry. She’s very generous when she’s out there. She’s not saving for anything.”In “Pagliacci,” the soprano role demands tremendous flexibility and range. The story focuses on a theater troupe in 19th-century Calabria. The work creates a metadramatic tightrope when Nedda’s husband, Canio, takes vengeance for her infidelity both in a comedy onstage and with a villager.“This is absolutely essential verismo,” said the conductor. “Sometimes the part is almost spoken, and then it becomes thrusting and dramatic.”Ms. Jaho sees a challenge in conveying her character’s complexity within the two-act drama. “You have to play all these cards, all these emotions, and be read from the public in little time,” she said.The soprano began assimilating Italian culture at 17, when she was chosen by the soprano Katia Ricciarelli to study at her academy in Mantua, Italy. Ms. Jaho went on to enroll at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where she studied with Valerio Paperi. She was also coached on the side by the bass Paolo Montarsolo.“I wanted to prove to everyone that even if I come from Albania, I can speak your language, I can sing your music,” said Ms. Jaho, who now lives in New York.Having grown up in a country that was behind the Iron Curtain, the soprano struggled in Italy with both culture shock and the distance from her family. She also had to work odd jobs, babysitting and taking care of older people. “But always I had in mind that if the dream is big, maybe the sacrifices and difficulties will be big as well,” she said.She inherited a gift for mindfulness from her father, who was a military officer and professor of philosophy: “Sometimes you feel hopeless, because life is not always beautiful. He told me that nothing is impossible. And you have to work hard.”Ms. Jaho considers it destiny that she went on to star in “La Traviata” after falling in love with that opera in her hometown of Tirana, the Albanian capital, at 14. It was her first experience with live opera, and she swore to her older brother that she would sing the character before she died.To date, she has sung the role of Violetta 301 times. She said that the role had become “richer with life experience” and that it remained “like a dream for my voice.”“Somehow, it pushes me to stay in shape,” she said.Last fall, she added the title character of Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” to her repertoire, with performances at the Vienna State Opera. She also sings French-language works such as Massenet’s “Thaïs.” But she does not aim to play roles for which she does not have a natural affinity.“It’s not because I don’t like challenges,” she said. “But sometimes you need to know which kind of battles you want to win.”Since 2012, she has given master classes to students both in her home country of Albania and in cities including London, Paris and Sydney, Australia. “The young generation today wants to take it so easy,” she observed. “They think it’s enough to put your face on social media — which we need as well — but only with a certain balance.”She emphasized that the Covid era had underscored the vulnerability of the profession: “We discovered that we are nothing — the opera houses were closed. It really has to be love from your guts.”Ms. Jaho expresses a childlike delight with Mr. Michieletto’s staging, which for her captures “all the details and flavors” of southern Italy. “You forget that you are the artist who’s singing the character,” she said. “You become the character because everything around you helps with that.”The director also weaves together the two short operas by having characters from “Pagliacci” appear onstage during “Cavalleria Rusticana” and vice versa. “Everything makes sense,” she said. “Their hate, their love. You don’t understand the difference in the end, even though they are different composers.”And much as Leoncavallo’s opera reveals the fluid boundaries between art and life, Ms. Jaho says she believes that a singer must be “real onstage” in order to serve the music. “If you don’t cry, love and smile as yourself,” she said, “you cannot give to the public.” More

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    Overlooked No More: Klaus Nomi, Singer With an Otherworldly Persona

    His sound and look influenced everyone from Anohni to Lady Gaga. He also sang backup vocals for David Bowie.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A wide range of musical genres fueled New York’s nightclubs in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including new wave, no wave, punk and post punk. Klaus Nomi, who performed during that era, defied being categorized under any of them.“I wouldn’t give it a label,” Nomi said of his sound in a Belgian television interview. “Maybe the only label is my own label: It’s Nomi style.”His music combined opera, infectious melodies, disco beats, German-accented countertenor vocals and undeniable grandeur. He influenced everyone from the singer-songwriter Anohni to Lady Gaga; in 2009, when Morrissey was asked to select eight essential records for the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs,” Nomi’s version of Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum” made the list.Nomi’s stage look was equally eclectic, and inseparable from his sound. The gender-fluid mix included dark, dramatically-applied lipstick as well as nail polish, the occasional women’s garment and often a giant structured tuxedo top that suggested Dada as much as sci-fi. His style influenced the fashion world as well, in collections by designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Riccardo Tisci.Nomi’s look was indisputably nonbinary, and a bit otherworldly. “He still comes across as an outrageously expressive and strange figure,” Tim Lawrence, author of the 2016 book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983,” said in a phone interview.“There was something about his entire being, which seemed to be queer, around makeup and voice and music and dress,” Lawrence said.Nomi — or Klaus Sperber, the name he was born with — moved to New York City from his native Germany in the early 1970s. He fell in with a group of creative friends and in late 1978 joined many of them to perform at New Wave Vaudeville, a series of quirky variety shows. The bill included a stripper, a singing dog and a performance artist dressed as a sadistic nun.Nomi, in the background at center, at the Mudd Club in Manhattan in 1979, the year he met David Bowie there.Alan KleinbergAs the closing act, Nomi sang an aria from Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” while wearing a transparent raincoat over a shiny, fitted top and pants along with dramatic eye makeup and lipstick.“He really blew people’s minds,” Ann Magnuson, who directed the shows, said in an interview. “He had all these snarky punk rockers out there who were speechless.”With the performances came a new name, inspired by the name of a magazine focused on outer space, Omni.“Klaus said, ‘I can’t go out as Klaus Sperber,’” his friend Joey Arias, the singer and performance artist, recalled by phone. “‘That’s not a star’s name.’”Soon he was performing as Klaus Nomi at tastemaker Manhattan clubs like Max’s Kansas City and Hurrah, with a set list created with the help of Kristian Hoffman, a musician who served for a time as his musical director. The material included edgy originals and unconventional takes on well-known hits. Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” became an enraged dirge, for example; the chorus of “Lightnin’ Strikes” morphed into an aria. The thought was that pop songs would “catch the ear of an audience who isn’t ready for opera,” Hoffman said in an interview.As The New York Times put it in a review of one of his performances, Nomi’s music was “positively catchy, in a strange sort of way.”One night in late 1979, Nomi and Arias were at the Mudd Club, in TriBeCa, when they met David Bowie there. Nomi called him later — Bowie had asked him to, scribbling his phone number with a friend’s eyeliner — and Nomi and Arias were recruited to be Bowie’s backup singers for an appearance that December as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”For the show’s three songs, they wore clinging women’s Thierry Mugler dresses, purchased at Henri Bendel. The look was extremely provocative at the time, especially on national television. Throughout, the TV cameras’ focus seemed to be as much on them as on Bowie.“It legitimized everything, because it had been sort of a private scene, and all of a sudden there it is, right in front of you on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said Katy Kattelman, a designer who is known professionally as Katy K and who was a friend of Nomi’s.Soon after, Nomi signed a record deal with RCA France. His debut album, titled simply “Klaus Nomi,” was released in Europe in 1981; a second album, “A Simple Man,” came out the next year. The records sold well — “Klaus Nomi” earned gold-record status in France — and he performed abroad to packed venues.Nomi returned to New York toward the end of 1982, excited by the prospect of possible American tours and releases. But he arrived gaunt and exhausted — he had contracted AIDS. He died of complications of the illness on Aug. 6, 1983. He was 39.A scene from the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song” showing Nomi getting ready for a performance.Palm PicturesNomi at Hurrah, one of many nightclubs he performed at in New York City.Harvey WangKlaus Sperber was born on Jan. 24, 1944, in Immenstadt, a town in what was then West Germany. He was raised by his mother, Bettina, who worked odd jobs. A fling with a soldier, whom Klaus never met, resulted in his birth. When he was a child, he and his mother moved to the city of Essen, about 400 miles away. Opera music was often playing in their house, and it set Klaus on his path.“The first time I heard an opera singer on the radio I said, ‘My God, I want to sing just like that,’” he said in interview footage that is included in the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song.” As a teenager, he became equally fond of Elvis Presley.He moved to West Berlin and worked as an usher at Deutsche Oper, where he sometimes sang for colleagues after the audience had left. But he aspired to sing professionally, and, Arias said, “he felt like he was at a dead end.”“He wanted to come to New York because he felt like it would change his life,” Arias added.Nomi settled in Manhattan’s East Village. He worked for a while in the kitchen of the Upper East Side cafe and celebrity hangout Serendipity 3 and started a baking business with Kattelman called Tarts, Inc., supplying restaurants with desserts made in Nomi’s St. Marks Place apartment.Nomi was known to frequent after-hours clubs, like the Anvil and Mineshaft, where casual sex was commonplace. There were sexual encounters at home as well — Arias said he once arrived at Nomi’s apartment to find a naked Jean-Michel Basquiat toweling off.To get a green card, he married a woman, Melissa Moon, a U.S. citizen, in 1980.“I don’t think he was in any way being anything that wasn’t himself, which was pretty gay as far as I knew,” said the artist Kenny Scharf. “When you’re creating your persona, the sexuality part is obviously part of the persona. It was all part of his sense of style and him being an artist in every way.” More

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    Wagner’s Early Operas Shouldn’t Be Mere Curiosities

    A survey at Oper Leipzig provides an opportunity to reassess the youthful efforts that have been excluded from the composer’s canon.LEIPZIG, Germany — How quickly Richard Wagner changed his mind about “Rienzi,” his first successful opera.In his self-aggrandizing memoir, “My Life,” assembled at the request of the Bavarian King Ludwig II and dictated to his wife, Cosima, Wagner described the 1842 opening night as something like the apotheosis of his artistic coming-of-age. “No subsequent experience,” he said, “has given me feelings even remotely similar to those I had on this day of the first performance of ‘Rienzi.’”Granted, that was written before bigger achievements: inaugurating his Bayreuth Festival Theater with the first “Ring” cycle in 1876, or premiering his final work, “Parsifal,” six years later. But Wagner nevertheless regarded “Rienzi” with affection.Affection, and then indifference. By the time he was working on “Lohengrin,” in the mid-1840s, “Rienzi” had become, he said, “a work that no longer interested me” — a welcome, much-needed source of income, but not a reflection of the poetry, mystery and singular musical language that would come to define his mature operas.And so, when the non-“Ring” and “Parsifal” works were slowly introduced to the Bayreuth stage by Cosima after her husband’s death in 1883, she stopped short of “Rienzi,” going back only as far as its successor, “Der Fliegende Holländer,” and codifying the 10 canonical operas that continue to be performed at the festival today.Doomed to exclusion and obscurity were his three earlier efforts, which in addition to “Rienzi” include “Die Feen,” a work never performed in Wagner’s lifetime, and “Das Liebesverbot,” from 1836. All have appeared onstage throughout the years, but they remain curiosities.Should they? At Oper Leipzig, in Wagner’s hometown, a survey of his entire stage output — a festival called Wagner 22, which continues through July 14 — offers a fresh opportunity to assess his early works in juxtaposition with their canonical siblings, and in chronological order.The trio of rarities reveals an impressionable composer who, before finding a voice of his own, knew how to expertly draw on those he admired; and who, before pioneering a declamatory style of operatic dramaturgy, rapidly developed a keen sense for theatrical storytelling and a grasp for the fashions of his time. In some ways, he is himself from the start, writing less in a mode of entertainment than of profound exploration — in the tradition of Mozart’s collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, like “Don Giovanni,” and of Beethoven’s fiercely political “Fidelio.”Mozart especially looms over “Die Feen,” composed when Wagner was 20 years old. It came after he had abandoned an earlier work, “Die Hochzeit,” and after he had rejected a suggestion to compose an opera about the life of the Polish national hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko. He wrote the libretto himself, inspired by Carlo Gozzi’s “La Donna Serpente,” setting a precedent for all of his works.“I had really become a ‘musician’ and a ‘composer’ and wanted simply to write a decent libretto,” he later recalled, “for now I realized nobody else could do this for me, inasmuch as an opera book is something unique unto itself and cannot be easily brought off by poets and literati.”Renaud Doucet’s production of “Die Feen” blends the opera’s dreamy fantasy with the realism of a contemporary apartment.Kirsten Nijhof“Die Feen” didn’t premiere until 1888, five years after Wagner’s death. So he was spared the pain of the public reception it might have had in his youth. It’s impossible to say what that would have been, but from the perspective of 2022, the opera is, frankly, not very good. And that’s not the fault of Oper Leipzig, which — in a reminder that the performing arts continue to tread carefully under the threat of Covid-19 — put on its production last week with last-minute replacements for not only the two leading roles, but also the conductor.If anything, the staging, by Renaud Doucet, helps orient viewers with a work they probably don’t know, aided at every turn by the clear and luxurious sound of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the pit. Doucet’s production is set in the present, at the home of a man who tunes in to a radio broadcast of the opera, which provides a contextualizing introduction. The dreamy action begins to intrude on reality; this evening is as much about discovering “Die Feen” as performing it.The libretto features the subplots of a Mozart comedy and the Romanticism of Carl Maria von Weber, whose “Der Freischütz” was formative for the young Wagner. Stylistically, the music is indebted to them as well. These arias are designed to open up the inner thoughts of the characters, without the grace that would come in, say, the incidental ruminations of Hans Sachs or the delirium of Tristan.“Die Feen” is a number opera — far from the “endless melody” Wagner would describe in his 1860s essay “Music of the Future.” And it’s a clumsy one, attempting in the third act to weave aria pauses into a breakneck pace and an abrupt, Orphic turn. Like Wagner’s instrumental works from around that time, it doesn’t need to be taken out of the curio cabinet except for the occasional dusting.A similar fate shouldn’t befall “Das Liebesverbot,” Wagner’s first staged opera. A loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” it was mostly met with shrugs at its premiere. But, while still a world from the mature works, it is a skillfully, entertainingly told story with depth and resonance.The Italianate overture, which begins with a ringing tambourine and festive percussion, isn’t recognizably Wagner. But the opera’s substance is. His librettos were like subtweets; that’s why, Wagner believed, the critic Eduard Hanslick cooled on him after a reading of the text for “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” a cri de coeur against artistic gatekeeping. Here, Wagner’s target is chastity-obsessed conservatism and the bad behavior it breeds.He would later wrestle with socially unacceptable sensuality in “Tannhäuser” and “Tristan und Isolde,” not without an element of autobiography. Neither of those works, though, is as barbed as “Das Liebesverbot,” which skewers hypocrisy — with crimes and punishment for the #MeToo age — while arguing that morality is a malleable thing on which we can only try to force rigidity.Tuomas Pursio as Friedrich, the moralistic governor who gets his comeuppance in “Das Liebesverbot.”Kirsten NijhofFor close listeners, there are flashes of the future Wagner. And coincidences as well; the line “Es ist ein Mann” recalls its opposite, “Das ist kein Mann!,” which Siegfried exclaims upon discovering the sleeping Brünnhilde in the “Ring.” Early on, when the heroine, the novice Isabella, is introduced with a prayer, the music seems to prefigure “Parsifal.”Much closer to mature Wagner is “Rienzi,” a sprawling, five-act adaptation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel about Cola di Rienzo, a 14th-century tragic figure of Italian politics who took on a new importance in nationalistic movements of the 1800s. If “Tannhäuser,” another transitional work, is on unsure ground stylistically, “Rienzi” is even more so: transparently an answer to the grand operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, yet also contending with a new musical language that would take shape with “Holländer.”In Leipzig, “Rienzi” was, understandably, presented with extensive cuts. Employing requisite elements of grand opera, like a plot-stopping ballet, the original version ran more than six hours. It was so long, it was later split into two evenings, “Rienzi’s Greatness” and “Rienzi’s Fall,” but reverted to one after audiences responded negatively to paying for multiple tickets.After cuts, the Oper Leipzig “Rienzi” still lasted a little more than four hours, and unfolded on an expansive scale, despite missing 21 chorus members out with Covid-19. The work is best known today for its overture, a staple in the concert hall and the easiest way to share the music, which otherwise demands a substantial investment for an enormous cast and production, along with a tenor with the stamina to endure a punishing role on the level of Siegfried and Tristan. (Here, Rienzi was fearlessly sung by Stefan Vinke, a veteran Siegfried.)“Rienzi” speaks as much to the present as its own time, and not just because it includes a scene in which a mob storms a capitol building. As in “Lohengrin,” Wagner interrogates the limits of charisma and the burden of leadership, and begins to deal in the ambiguity and complication that would course through his canonical works. And he does so in an increasingly declamatory rather than melodic mode, never more than in Rienzi’s Act V prayer, “Allmächt’ger Vater.”The work was a hit when it premiered in Dresden, admired by colleagues and audiences alike. Less well received was “Der Fliegende Holländer,” which debuted at the same theater about two and a half months later and signified an entirely new direction for Wagner — one in which he would call his librettos “poems,” and in which he would bear out his vision of “The Artwork of the Future.”“The management saw itself compelled to prevent my reputation from being tarnished by putting ‘Rienzi’ back on the boards in short order,” Wagner said in “My Life.” “And now I had to ponder the success of this opera, as well as the failure of the other.”“Holländer,” as we know, won out. Yet Wagner’s achievements are now accepted wholesale, so there isn’t a need to categorize any of his operas as successes or failures — except, perhaps, for “Die Feen.” The doors of Bayreuth have long been shut to the early, worthy works of its founder. It’s time to open them up. More

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    Review: Before Riccardo Muti Leaves Chicago, a Verdi Farewell

    “Un Ballo in Maschera” is the last in a series of Verdi operas led in concert by the Chicago Symphony’s music director, who departs after next season.CHICAGO — Mortality, the fragility of life, permeates Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” from its lonely first measures.As the opera opens, a crowd sings while a ruler sleeps. For those who love him, it is a state that should bring him rest and refreshment. For those who conspire against him, it is a premonition of his hoped-for death. That battle — between vitality and the grave — continues to the score’s crushing finale.It was particularly hard to avoid thinking of endings during the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s sumptuous performance of “Ballo” here on Thursday evening. Riccardo Muti, the ensemble’s music director since 2010, will depart after next season. And after more than a decade dotted by acclaimed concert versions of his beloved Verdi in Chicago, this is his last opera with this superb orchestra. (Saturday and Tuesday bring two final chances to hear it.)More proof of life’s fragility: Covid-19 very nearly derailed the run.After missing performances here in April because of a positive test, Muti tested positive again last Thursday, leaving that weekend’s concerts to another conductor and putting “Ballo” — which requires more rehearsals than a normal subscription program — in serious jeopardy.But on Thursday, there was Muti, who turns 81 next month. While the bags under his eyes looked heavier than usual, even from a seat in the balcony, he was still stomping on the podium and vigorously pumping his arms downward to draw out the weightiest marcato emphases. He was still crouching nearly to the floor when he wanted the volume softer, and reaching toward the ceiling to summon thunderous climaxes.Muti brings a gleaming, even fearsome clarity to Verdi’s operas.Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony OrchestraVerdi is his life’s work. Few who chat with him for more than a minute or two avoid a passionate lecture about how this composer’s scores remain underrated for their sophistication: messily conducted, vulgarly sung and damnably staged.This positions Muti conveniently in the role of savior: finally wiping the grime from long-dirty windows. Whatever he may think, he is not the only conductor who tries to do Verdi justice, but there is no question that he brings to these operas a gleaming, even fearsome clarity.And stretching back to his performances of the Requiem as the Chicago Symphony’s music director designate in 2009, Verdi has provided a series of exclamation points on his tenure here. Never have I attended an opera performance as breathtakingly focused and ferocious as their “Otello” in 2011. “Macbeth” (2013) was a grimly propulsive march, and “Falstaff” (2016) a witty wonder, a smile in the shape of a symphony orchestra. Only “Aida,” in 2019, struck me as excessively controlled and arid.A tense tale of disguises and deceptions, “Ballo” is by far the strangest of this collection, a product of Verdi’s middle-period experimentations in emotional ambiguity and sometimes jarring juxtapositions of tone. (It premiered in 1859, after “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” and “Simon Boccanegra,” and before “La Forza del Destino.”)The opera is an eerie combination of melodrama and lighthearted, operettalike moments, with a homoerotic whisper over its central love triangle: Renato kills his best friend, Riccardo, because Riccardo is in love with Renato’s wife, Amelia, but it can be hard to tell which one of them arouses Renato’s jealousy more.The quality of the singers, in some of opera’s most fiendishly difficult roles, has varied in the Verdi pieces Muti has led here. But the work of his orchestra has been consistently agile and virtuosic, an ideal vehicle for his goal of bringing out rarely heard details without stinting overall blend and drive.So in this grand but tight “Ballo,” you heard — as you usually don’t — the slight, sour instrumental harmonies under the conspirators’ bitter laughter. Later, as those assassins plotted, their crime was sternly echoed in the resonance and unanimity of the evocative combination of harp and plucked double basses.Meli, left, as Riccardo, with Yulia Matochkina as Ulrica.Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony OrchestraAs Amelia admitted her love to Riccardo, the strings trembled with a softness as palpable as it was audible; those strings had earlier roared with sinewy bristle when Riccardo asked a fortune teller who his killer would be. The prelude to the second act mingled lyrical expansion, somber brasses and a strangled stutter in the cellos; the Chicago winds these days combine artfully, their variety of textures united by their shared phrasing.Especially memorable on Thursday were the understated eloquence of John Sharp’s cello solo during Amelia’s aria “Morrò, ma prima in grazia,” and the spine — sometimes strong, sometimes shadowy — provided by the timpanist David Herbert. “Ballo” is full of simmering quiet, from which the full orchestra was able, time and again, to suddenly explode with savage, Mutian precision.The Chicago Symphony Chorus — prepared by Donald Palumbo, here for a stint after the end of the season at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is the chorus master — sounded richly massed, and sometimes terrifyingly robust, but not turgid. Even forceful phrases did not cut off abruptly; consonants and vowels alike felt rounded and full.Best among the featured singers were the mezzo-soprano Yulia Matochkina, commanding as the soothsayer Ulrica, and the soprano Damiana Mizzi, sprightly but silky as the page Oscar, a rare Verdian trouser role. The baritone Luca Salsi was an articulate, occasionally gruff Renato. The tenor Francesco Meli — like Salsi, a Muti favorite — was brash and ringing as Riccardo; his generosity faltered only occasionally at the very top of his range.When the accompaniment was spare and the vocal line floating, the soprano Joyce El-Khoury sang Amelia with soft-grained delicacy, though her tone narrowed as more pressure was placed on it. With her sound brooding, she effectively projected her character’s pitifully unmitigated sorrow. But she and Meli were pressed to their limits by the ecstatic end of their Act II duet.Singing the main conspirators were two talented bass-baritones: Kevin Short and (especially solid) Alfred Walker. The baritone Ricardo José Rivera; the clear, forthright tenor Lunga Eric Hallam; and the sweet-sounding tenor Aaron Short showed the care with which the orchestra cast even tiny roles.But the star of the show was never in doubt. This was not Muti’s final performance in Chicago, not by a long shot. There was nevertheless special poignancy near the end, hearing — from the voice of a character named Riccardo, no less — a dying farewell to “beloved America.”Un Ballo in MascheraRepeats Saturday and Tuesday at Symphony Center, Chicago; cso.org. More