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      With Different Singers, One Opera Classic Can Seem Like Two

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      Alongside a winning “L’Elisir d’Amore,” our critic returned to four works at the Met in the middle of their runs to hear new rotations of artists.As the first act of Verdi’s “La Traviata” ends, Violetta, a high-end prostitute, is suffering the symptoms of tuberculosis. A well-to-do young man’s declaration of love shakes her seen-it-all cynicism; should she put an end to her life of pleasure and accept him?Screw it, she decides: As champagne fizzes of coloratura rise and rise, she declares that she is “forever free” and brings the curtain down in defiance.At the Metropolitan Opera in November, the soprano Nadine Sierra sang that moment with luxuriant ease and confidence, a woman certain that she still had all the time in the world. On Sunday at the Met, though, Ermonela Jaho — her tone far less plush than Sierra’s and the aria less easy for her — made it a kind of mad scene. Violetta’s fragility, her sleep-when-I’m-dead mania, were scarily center stage.Same words, same notes, an entirely different effect: This is one of the best parts of my job. In addition to attending first nights at the Met with other critics — as on Tuesday, when a delightful revival of “L’Elisir d’Amore” opened with the power to make you giggle one minute and choke up the next — I spent the last few weeks returning to four classic titles in the middle of their runs to see them with new rotations of singers.Especially in the standard repertory, the Met often cycles through multiple casts in a single season — and then does it again, year after year, Violetta after Violetta after Violetta. Ticket sales in this not-quite-post-pandemic period have blinked red lights at this practice. Houses are full for new productions, even of contemporary works. But revivals, less obviously newsworthy and less widely promoted, are no longer certain draws.The tenor Javier Camarena, center, emanates sincerity and modesty in “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaThere is not the audience there once was to hear “La Traviata” twice over a couple of months. There is not even the audience there once was to hear it twice over a couple of years.Which is something to mourn. Being a lover of the performing arts is about the thirst for the new play and concerto. But it’s also about relishing the Hamlet of cool distance next to the one of slovenly aggression; about how Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can be noble or ferocious in the hands of different orchestras and conductors; about how each new soprano increases our sense of what is possible in a work, and suggests how capacious we are, too.Not that every contrast is quite as extreme as in the Met’s “Traviata” this season. In November I had been impressed by Sierra, who in her mid-30s is coming into her own vocally. But, as in her sumptuously sung “Lucia di Lammermoor” last year, she has not yet solved one of opera’s fundamental challenges: making rich, ample tone convey desperation, illness and frailty.Desperation, illness and frailty happen to be Ermonela Jaho’s stock in trade. We often hear about opera singers being larger than life onstage; Jaho manages to be smaller, to give the sense of death incarnate, a walking, singing corpse.About 15 years Sierra’s senior, she has a slender, meticulous sound that she doesn’t push to be bigger than it is. Her “Ah, fors’è lui” and “Dite alla giovine” were murmured reveries, ghosts of tone; you got the sensation of thousands of people in the audience leaning in to overhear private musings. I can’t remember experiencing such prolonged passages of extremely soft yet palpable singing in the Met’s huge theater, which artists often think they need to scream to fill.Jaho can be shamelessly old-school; this was probably the most coughing I’d ever heard from a Violetta, and her “Addio, del passato” in the final act milked every wide-eyed tremble and gasp for air. She didn’t summon the fullness of voice that an ideal Violetta requires, at least at certain moments. But Jaho unsettlingly lives this unsettling opera, providing a sensitive, unique vision of a classic.The tenor Ismael Jordi, making his Met debut as Alfredo this season, was on Sunday a gawky more than dashing presence, who spread mellow legato lines like schmears of cream cheese. The baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat is also making a company debut — this one rather more impressive — as Alfredo’s father, the elder Germont, with his burnished-mahogany “Di Provenza il mar” providing the most deeply satisfying singing of anyone onstage.In another Verdi work, “Rigoletto,” the shift of personnel marked a less dramatic change but resulted in a keen performance. On Dec. 17, the soprano Lisette Oropesa sang Gilda with a tone a few shades brighter and more finely vibrating than the softer-grain Rosa Feola had earlier in the fall.Lisette Oropesa, left, and Luca Salsi in Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaThe baritone Luca Salsi, in the title role, sounded firmer and less haunted than had Quinn Kelsey, with his echoey, indelibly wounded voice. The tenor Stephen Costello sang with blithe, poised arrogance — and his characteristic physical stiffness, his stock gestures, somehow worked. He became something of an automaton of power.When “Aida” — yet more Verdi — opened in the beginning of December, it was one of the season’s shakier efforts, with Latonia Moore struggling in the title role. Michelle Bradley had always been scheduled to take on the part in the new year, but her entrance was accelerated when Moore dropped out after the first performance.I returned on Dec. 27, and found Bradley in pleasant form: a demure, even reticent Aida. The tenor Brian Jagde was more nuanced, if also less steady, than he had been in his unrelenting first performance a few weeks earlier.The mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova, who stayed on in the run when Anita Rachvelishvili, who was supposed to replace her, canceled after a single evening, also seemed more settled in. The most salutary change was Kelsey, who turned from Rigoletto to Amonasro, and who gave his trademark smoky tone and aura of threat to a role that, earlier in the month, George Gagnidze had rendered merely tight and querulous.In the machine that is the Met’s abridged holiday presentation of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” the baritone Benjamin Taylor, the second-cast Papageno, was the highlight on Dec. 28, his voice compact yet resonant, his charisma easygoing without being cloying. But for charm, even he couldn’t beat this “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Donizetti’s comedy is one of my favorite operas, but it can easily go awry. While laugh-out-loud funny, it is not a farce. Bartlett Sher’s quaint production interpolates a bit too much physical violence, presumably to raise the emotional stakes, but understands that the piece is at heart a small, sweet romance, drawing both smiles and tears.Thankfully, a cast led by the tenor Javier Camarena and the soprano Golda Schultz, and the spirited conductor Michele Gamba, in his Met debut, trust “Elisir” to reach the corners of the vast Met without overstatement or caricature.Camarena, as always, emanates sincerity and modesty; his Nemorino is a simple guy, but not a buffoon. After the slightest bit of burr to his top notes early on, they were pure and ringing by the end, and his “Una furtiva lagrima” began conversationally before breaking into golden rhapsody.Schultz’s tone had the gentle, silky glow of moonlight, but with a glisten that penetrated, and she gave a sense of both Adina’s independence and her vulnerability. The baritone Davide Luciano was suave as the conceited army sergeant Belcore; as the quack doctor Dulcamara, who provides the cheap wine that Nemorino takes as a love potion, the baritone Ambrogio Maestri was robust without being over-the-top.This was as lovely as opera gets. And it’s not over yet. After five more performances with this cast through January, “Elisir” comes back in April with Aleksandra Kurzak; the newcomers Xabier Anduaga and Jonah Hoskins; Joshua Hopkins; and Alex Esposito.Before that, in March, the soprano Angel Blue will star when “La Traviata” returns yet again. What will she add to Sierra’s and Jaho’s angles on the doomed, desperate Violetta? I know I’ll be there in the audience, ready to find yet more facets in these diamonds of the repertory. More

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      A Penetrating Cry in the Dark at the Prototype Festival

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      This year’s iteration marks a joyous return to theaters for the festival, which was canceled last year.A cry in the dark, gentle yet penetrating.At some moment in time immemorial, emerging from some creature, that sound must have been made: A voice was being used to make drama, and — eons before 16th-century Italy — opera was truly born.So it feels like a connection to the very roots of the art form when “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” Gelsey Bell’s wonderful, uncategorizable guide to what might unfold on Earth in the millions and billions of years after human history, begins with exactly such a gentle, penetrating cry in the dark; a slippery hum from singers, the barest shuffle of clapping, then lights.Presented by the bold, invaluable Prototype festival of new music-theater at HERE Arts Center in SoHo, “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]” is an intimate storytelling ritual, a kind of campfire tale that offers a look far beyond the future as we generally perceive it.Dressed in commune-style thrift-store pattern clashes on a barely adorned cork stage in front of just over 100 people, Bell and four other performers sing and play modest instruments and objects including drizzles of water and marbles swirling in bowls; simple synthesizers; a hand-held Celtic harp and a bowed wooden daxophone.The group doesn’t ever make clear the catastrophe that has wiped out human existence. (“Within the first few hours,” we are told for a start, “millions of dogs have peed in places they’d rather not.”) But in song and speech, Bell, Ashley Pérez Flanagan, Justin Hicks, Aviva Jaye and Paul Pinto describe — poetically, prosaically, funnily, heartbreakingly — the stages of rewilding, decomposition and evolution to come.Obviously ominous but ultimately sly and sweet, wistful and winsome and altogether lovable, the 90-minute show, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad, recalls the wordless collective solemnity of Meredith Monk, the enigmatic texts and yarn-spinning ability of Laurie Anderson, and the folksy keening, shading into luminous pop sweetness, of the Duncan Sheik of “Spring Awakening.” Bell is also an experienced performer in Robert Ashley’s pathbreaking operas, to which she nods here with the use of wry, matter-of-fact speaking (sometimes in airily musical cadences) over gently woozy drones.Prototype began presenting small-scale but high-impact, carefully considered and often exciting work 10 years ago. Organized by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, it filled a niche for experimental yet professionally produced opera, much of it staged in intimate black-box-style venues, and its record of accomplishment has grown distinguished: Two Prototype shows, Du Yun and Royce Vavrek’s “Angel’s Bone” and Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” have won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.This year’s iteration, which runs through Jan. 15, marks a joyous return to theaters for the festival, which was almost entirely virtual in 2021 and was canceled last year because of the Omicron wave. The loss of Prototype 2022 felt especially sharp because classical music and its stylistic descendants were otherwise largely spared in an outbreak that wreaked more havoc on dance and theater.Emma O’Halloran’s “Mary Motorhead” is a monodrama featuring Naomi Louisa O’Connell in the raconteur title role.Maria BaranovaThe work Prototype has presented has ranged widely, but over a decade a kind of house style (or at least stereotype) has emerged. The subject matter leans toward the politically charged and emotionally brutal, extreme even by operatic standards of suffering. Electronics are often in the mix, as is amplification even in tiny theaters, and the music tends rock-inflected and intense — and often just plain loud, with a shouting-in-your-face urgency that can be thrilling from some artists, wearying from others.Despite a couple of crashing moments, though, the three premieres over this year’s first weekend kept the volume fairly moderate. (Silvana Estrada’s “Marchita” and David Lang’s “note to a friend” open later this week, and the animated opera “Undine” is streaming.)Even without (too much) screaming, the intensity rarely flags in Emma O’Halloran’s two-hour double bill about the down and out and desperate for connection, “Trade/Mary Motorhead” — to librettos by her uncle, the actor and writer Mark O’Halloran — at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side.Directed by Tom Creed, both operas offer virtuosic showcases for daring singing actors. “Mary Motorhead” is a monodrama featuring the vivid, charismatic Naomi Louisa O’Connell in the raconteur title role of a woman in prison for killing her husband. In “Trade,” set in a hotel room where two men — one older, one younger — are meeting for sex, the Broadway veteran Marc Kudisch and the tenor Kyle Bielfield are fiercely committed as they toggle between aggression and tenderness.With Elaine Kelly conducting the ensemble NOVUS NY, O’Halloran shapes lucid, communicative vocal lines; the text always sings out. “Mary Motorhead” finds its protagonist sometimes angry, sometimes exhausted; “Trade” has the relentlessly, effectively weepy emotionalism of Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which recently played at the Metropolitan Opera, but is more affecting without the Met work’s overblown trappings.O’Halloran rides these stories’ waves of feeling with some squealing electric guitar riffs, but Du Yun’s “In Our Daughter’s Eyes” — a collaboration with the librettist and director Michael Joseph McQuilken and the baritone Nathan Gunn at Baruch Performing Arts Center in Kips Bay — has more of the chamber-metal spirit that is a Prototype trademark.Structured as a series of diary entries written by an expectant father who struggles to avoid falling off the wagon after learning that his unborn child has catastrophic health problems, the work (and Maruti Evans’s set) has a naturalistic core but also dreamlike flights. Gunn, once a hunky star in Mozart and Britten, is now in his early 50s and the physical and temperamental embodiment of the earnest American dad. He’s masculinity incarnate, in all its confidence and anxieties — direct, sonorous and conversational even as the tragedy builds.The score is intriguingly varied and eccentric: sometimes spare yet warm, as in a clever passage bringing together cello and muted trumpet; sometimes noirish Badalamenti-style cool vamping; sometimes chilly instrumental squiggles and shards; and sometimes exploding in raucous, frantic energy.Du Yun’s “In Our Daughter’s Eyes” is a collaboration with the librettist and director Michael Joseph McQuilken and the baritone Nathan Gunn at Baruch Performing Arts Center.Maria BaranovaThe more blaringly rock passages have much in common with “Black Lodge,” McQuilken’s recent, wailing collaboration with the composer David T. Little, which premiered in Philadelphia a few months ago. As in that piece, the music here is rather more interesting than the text, which could use a little more subtlety. And the 75-minute length is palpable in a one-man show; “Mary Motorhead,” by comparison, lasts a compact 30.Despite a bit of lag toward the end, “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” felt considerably tighter, without losing its charmingly patient way of unfolding. One of its most memorable scenes is a wittily nostalgic look back at humans and their habits, once the Anthropocene has been left far behind: “I liked their sustaining fealty to two-dimensional imagery in rectangle frames,” one line goes.The quiet climax of the piece is a song that relishes the moral that “nothing lasts forever.” Climate change is the work’s unspoken context, of course, and Bell offers a considerably more accepting (indeed, Zen-ly optimistic) vision of its deadly consequences than the current liberal consensus — something closer to that early-pandemic fantasy that “nature is healing.” Disaster is a fait accompli, Bell seems to be saying, so why not embrace what’s to come?But is the piece’s implication that control over our destiny is an illusion and resistance is (at best) futile complicit in climate denialism? I’m not sure, and that question is why “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]” left me smiling yet unsettled. And wanting to hear it again: Bring out a recording, please. 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      Henry Grossman, Photographer of Celebrities and Beatles, Dies at 86

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      He was best known for his formal portraits of prominent politicians and entertainers. Less famously, he took thousands of candid shots of John, Paul, George and Ringo.Henry Grossman, a photographer who was best known for his formal portraits of celebrities and other public figures — but who also, less famously, immortalized the Beatles on film in thousands of unscripted antics while juggling a side career as a Metropolitan Opera tenor and a Broadway bit player — died on Nov. 27 in Englewood, N.J. He was 86.His son, David, said he died in a hospital several months after sustaining injuries in a fall.Mr. Grossman produced paradigmatic portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt, Richard M. Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor, Martha Graham, Leontyne Price, Leonard Bernstein and Nelson Mandela. He photographed new Metropolitan Opera productions for Time magazine and was the official photographer for many Broadway shows.His portraits of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were published on the front page of The New York Times on Nov. 23, 1963, accompanying the news that the young president had been assassinated in Dallas and succeeded by his vice president the day before.The Nov. 23, 1963, front page of The New York Times featured two formal portraits by Mr. Grossman: one of President John F. Kennedy, who had just been assassinated, and one of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had just been sworn in to replace him.Mr. Grossman’s sensitivity to classical portraiture’s interplay of shadow and light was inspired by his father, the artist Elias M. Grossman, an immigrant from Russia whose etchings were acquired by numerous institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.By the time Henry graduated from Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1958, he had compiled an impressive portfolio of portraits of guest speakers on campus and photographs of stage productions there. His fledgling second career as a singer would imbue him with an empathy for performers that helped him establish an unusual bond with celebrity subjects.He was only 27 — barely older than the Beatles themselves — when he was commissioned by Life magazine in 1964 to cover the band’s American television debut, on the popular CBS variety series “The Ed Sullivan Show.”Mr. Grossman photographed the hirsute quartet juxtaposed against a jungle of television cameras, amplifiers and other backstage impedimenta, and he shot from the balcony to capture their electrifying effect on the audience. His creative eye would be reflected in an archive of some 7,000 photos he would take of the Beatles over the next four years.That only a few dozen were published or even printed at the time — most famously a 1967 portrait for Life of the newly mustachioed band members — left other photographers (among them Robert Freeman, Dezo Hoffmann, Astrid Kirchherr, Jürgen Vollmer and Robert Whitaker) more closely associated with the Beatles than Mr. Grossman was.Only a few dozen of Mr. Grossman’s Beatles photos were published at the time he took them. The best known was this one, seen on the cover of Life magazine in 1967. Henry Grossman/Grossman Enterprises. All rights reserved.But Mr. Grossman’s archive of intimate moments at home, at private parties and during overnight recording sessions amounted to more images of the band taken over a longer period than any other photographer’s, according to his publisher, Curvebender Publishing.In 2008, Curvebender released “Kaleidoscope Eyes,” a limited-edition book of Mr. Grossman’s photographs documenting an evening at Abbey Road Studios in London as the Beatles were recording the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” In 2012, the company published “Places I Remember,” a hefty volume that included 1,000 of his Beatles photographs.The Beatles’ “Ed Sullivan Show” debut did not transform Mr. Grossman into a fan overnight. But during the band’s American tour that summer, he befriended George Harrison.“After that,” Mr. Grossman told The Times in 2012, “anytime I went to London, I’d check into my hotel, call their office to find out George’s phone number du jour — they had to change them, because the fans would find them out — and I’d arrange to spend a day with them.”“They were accustomed to seeing me with a camera, documenting everything that went on around me,” he explained in “Places I Remember.” “It was simply part of me, part of who I was. More than that, I had become a friend.”“I was first a friend and second a photographer,” he added. “So when I pulled out my camera, no one thought twice about it. No one cared. It wasn’t seen as invasive.”Among the many public figures Mr. Grossman photographed was Eleanor Roosevelt in 1960. Henry Grossman/Grossman Enterprises. All rights reserved.Henry Maxwell Grossman was born on Oct. 11, 1936, in Manhattan. His father died when he was 10, and his mother, Josephine (Erschler) Grossman, helped support the family by selling her husband’s etchings.After graduating from Metropolitan Vocational and Technical High School in Manhattan at 16, Henry earned a scholarship to Brandeis, where he received a degree in theater arts and did graduate work in anthropology — and where he first made a mark as a photographer.After returning to New York City, he began his career as a freelance photographer for Life, Time, Newsweek and Paris Match, among other magazines, and for The Times.His marriage to Carol Ann Hauptfuhrer in 1973 ended in divorce. He is survived by their children, David and Christine Grossman, who are both professional musicians, and his sister, Suzanne Grossman.While in his 20s, Mr. Grossman studied at the Actors Studio. After touring in the 1960s with the national company of the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Grossman, a tenor, made his New York singing debut at Carnegie Hall in 1973 and went on to appear with the Washington Opera Society and the Philadelphia Lyric Opera. In the 1980s, he performed in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Riccardo Muti, and in the next decade he sang in three productions at the Metropolitan Opera.He also did some acting. He made a brief appearance in the 1978 movie “Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?” while on location in Italy as film photographer, and he played a scullery worker in the original cast of the Broadway musical “Grand Hotel” for its full run, from 1989 to 1992.Jacqueline Kennedy in 1967. Mr. Grossman waited to be invited rather than insinuating himself into his subjects’ private lives.Henry Grossman/Grossman Enterprises. All rights reserved.Mr. Grossman was gregarious but largely unassuming, waiting to be invited rather than insinuating himself into his subjects’ private lives. That was how he managed to take photos for Jacqueline Kennedy of her children at home, and to accompany George Harrison on his “Dark Horse” tour of North America in 1974.“I learned a lot from the Beatles,” he was quoted as saying in the 2012 Times article. “I was interested in how they took to fame, how they used it. It wasn’t easy for them.“One night in Atlantic City, I asked Ringo how he liked seeing America. He took me to the window of his hotel room, pointed to a brick wall across the parking lot, and said, ‘That’s what we’ve seen.’ They were trapped.”“I guess one reason we got along so well was that they knew I wasn’t trying to get anything from them,” Mr. Grossman said. “And I think I got the pictures I got because I wasn’t posing them. I wasn’t injecting myself into the scene as a participant. I was just watching.“I was like a fly on the wall. I got what was there.” More

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      Prototype, an Essential New York Opera Festival, Turns 10

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

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

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

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

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

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      Bridgette Wimberly, Playwright and Librettist, Dies at 68

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

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

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