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      With Her First Opera, Rhiannon Giddens Returns to Her Roots

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      “Omar,” composed by Giddens and Michael Abels, and based on the life of a Muslim scholar sold into slavery, premieres at the Spoleto Festival USA.CHARLESTON, S.C. — Five years ago, the directors of Spoleto Festival USA here asked the musician Rhiannon Giddens two questions.The first: Had she heard of Omar ibn Said?Said was a man from what is now Senegal who was sold into slavery in 1807 and forced across the ocean to Charleston. That made him one of many, since some 40 percent of Africans brought to the United States as slaves arrived at this Southern city’s harbor, the numbers increasing before the trans-Atlantic trade was outlawed a year later.Yet Said was also distinct. Thirty-seven when he was captured, he was a Muslim who had been studying Islam most of his life. Bought by a cruel master in Charleston, he escaped but was captured again in North Carolina, where he lived enslaved for more than 50 years, was baptized and wrote several works in Arabic, including an autobiographical essay that would win him some posthumous fame.Giddens had not heard of Said, and because she was born and raised in North Carolina and is a serious student of slavery’s history, she was a little surprised. Not as surprised, though, as she was by the next question: Would she like to write an opera about him?Omar ibn Said, the Muslim scholar who was sold into slavery in the early 19th century.Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript LibraryKnown principally as a banjo-playing folk singer and songwriter, Giddens is an artist of many accomplishments that include winning Grammy Awards and a MacArthur “genius” grant. At the time, though, writing operas was not one of them. Now, it is. “Omar,” composed with Michael Abels, will have its pandemic-delayed premiere at the festival on May 27 before it travels to Los Angeles Opera and Boston Lyric Opera next season.“I’m one of those say yes now, and figure out how to do it later types,” Giddens said after a recent rehearsal. “But then I immediately thought, ‘What have I done?’”It wasn’t that Giddens had no experience in opera. She trained as an opera singer at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. But after she graduated in 2000 her interests shifted.Once she moved back to North Carolina, she got into string band music, the genre of square dances and hoedowns. As the child of a white father and a Black mother, she felt at first like an interloper, like “the other,” as she explained in a 2017 keynote address for the International Bluegrass Music Association.But she discovered that the roots of the music were cross-cultural, at least as Black as they were white. It was only in the early 20th century that the music became exclusively associated with rural whiteness, “which led to me feeling like an alien in what I find out is my own cultural tradition,” she said in the speech.She took up the banjo, another symbol of hillbilly whiteness that actually has Black and African roots. Learning from the octogenarian Black fiddler Joe Thompson, she and two friends formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops, helping to reclaim the string band tradition for Black artists.As she turned solo, around 2015, the cultural tradition that she claimed and extended grew broader, encompassing Dolly Parton and Nina Simone songs alongside her own, which sometimes drew on slave narratives. Most recently, with the Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, who is also her romantic partner, she has been connecting that American music to the music of Africa, the Mediterranean and the Islamic world. (They perform at Spoleto on May 28.)Along the way, Giddens acquired what she calls her mission: “uncovering and highlighting parts of our history that have been suppressed to tell a false narrative that is tearing us apart.” Her music expresses an idea about deeply tangled cultural roots, an ethos encapsulated in the title of her 2019 album: “There Is No Other.”She never lost her love of opera, though. “I kept my oar in a little bit,” she said, by singing arias with orchestras and hosting the podcast “Aria Code.” She also starred in a Greensboro Opera production of “Porgy and Bess” earlier this year. But “Omar” was “an opportunity to be back in the world of opera in the way I was needed,” she said. “It’s a return to opera, but on my own terms.”Originally, Spoleto proposed that Giddens bring on a librettist, but she soon decided that she could handle the libretto herself; what she needed was another composer as collaborator, one with more knowledge of the orchestra. Remembering Abels’s score for the Jordan Peele horror film “Get Out,” she got the composer’s email address from a colleague and wrote to him: “You don’t know me, but would you like to write an opera with me?”“What she didn’t know,” Abels said in an interview, “was that it had always been a dream of mine to write an opera.” He immediately said yes.The next challenge was to shape the story. Said’s brief autobiographical essay provides some basic facts, though much of it is quotations from the Quran. “We know so little about his life,” Giddens said, “and the story has to come from what he’s left us, which is his spiritual journey.” Although she consulted with scholars, she feared writing about a Muslim culture that wasn’t hers. “I had to fight a lot of impostor syndrome,” she said, “but a friend told me, ‘They hired you, so just be you.’”“I was really guided by instinct,” she continued. Scenes came to her nearly full-fledged, as “deep ancestral memory moments.” She imagined Omar’s journey across the Atlantic, the Middle Passage, and was struck by the overwhelming smell. “I wanted the everyday stuff that is actually the most devastating thing about slavery,” she said.Models and concept art for the “Omar” production,” which opens Friday before traveling widely.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesShe also imagined fictional characters. Julie, an enslaved woman whom Omar meets at the Charleston slave market and who helps him get to North Carolina, “just walked into the story,” Giddens said. In a photograph of Said, he wears a head wrap that Giddens turned into a metaphor for how he holds on to his faith and a connection between the characters. The first line of Julie’s aria, which Giddens said “just came to her,” is “My daddy had a cap like yours.”After Omar arrives in America, much of the opera’s drama is channeled through what the production’s director, Kaneza Schaal, called “a contest of languages,” involving much translation and mistranslation. When other enslaved people sing “Oh, Lord, how long,” Omar hears “Allah.” When a slave owner asks Omar to write the “Lord is my shepherd” in Arabic, what he actually writes (in a script the owner can’t read) is “I want to go home.” Omar’s journey, translated into opera, becomes about finding a language to hold together all that he experiences.Giddens knows about that search. If writing about Senegal was a stretch for her, several of the scenes were familiar territory. When Omar arrives at a North Carolina plantation, there’s a frolic, complete with a caller telling the dancers when to promenade. It’s like a corn-shucking, a barn dance — an earlier iteration of the tradition Giddens learned from Thompson.The sound of “Omar,” however, is always that of an orchestra. “I wrote a lot of it on banjo, but nobody’s playing banjo in it,” Giddens said. “The orchestra becomes a banjo, and that’s the most radical move.”While composing, Giddens recorded tracks, singing and accompanying herself, that she sent to Abels. “She has a wonderful gift for melody, but what people may not know is how great she is at creating character with her voice,” he said. “She would sing Omar or Julie or the auctioneer, and the personality was clear in the music.”Abels then took those themes and orchestrated them, sometimes making the harmonic language more complex and applying the sense of pacing he’s developed writing for film. The result was a blend of their voices, and, Giddens said, “the genius of Michael is figuring out where the lines blur.”From left, the conductors John Kennedy and Kellen Gray, as well as Giddens and the singers Cheryse McLeod Lewis and Jamez McCorkle, rehearsing “Omar.”Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesIt was important to both composers that the opera be composed for a conventional orchestra. One reason was aesthetic, Abels said: “It pulls on so many diverse genres of music” — of the Muslim diaspora, spirituals, bluegrass, Wagner and that other opera set in Charleston, “Porgy.” “The traditional orchestra unifies them.”Another motivation was practical, if political. “The subject matter is extremely not traditional, so we want the opera to feel traditional,” Abels said. An opera company producing “Omar” is already likely to have to recruit Black cast members. A standard orchestra helps make the work, as Giddens put it, “replicable.” In other words, there are fewer excuses not to program it.For now, that strategy seems to be working. In addition to runs in Los Angeles and Boston, “Omar” is due at the houses of its other co-commissioners, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera. Giddens and Abels said that they are excited to be part of a wave of Black composers whose operas are now being produced — such as Terence Blanchard, whose “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season in New York, becoming the first work by a Black composer in that company’s repertory.Giddens said that she wrote arias that are “nice for the voice” in part so young Black singers could use them in recitals. “I wanted to write for me at 18,” she said.Having the composers in the rehearsal room also makes a difference. As the cast worked on one of the early Africa scenes, Giddens suggested to Jamez McCorkle, who plays Omar, how his vocal line, “like a river on top of the rhythm,” should “weave the spell of how beautiful Omar’s spirituality is.” McCorkle took the note like a revelation. “Can you not leave?” he asked her half-jokingly. (Busy with her solo career, leading the Silkroad Ensemble and raising her children in Ireland, where she lives, Giddens can’t attend all rehearsals.)“It matters so much that she’s a singer,” McCorkle said afterward. “The music is so easy on the voice, and the opera is a chance for us to be represented, for our history not to be erased.”Giddens, reflecting on the rehearsal process, said that she was newly impressed “by the amount of brainpower, creativity and collaboration it takes to put on something like this.” She marveled at how opera is “such a powerful, transcendent art form,” but also one that has been “trapped.”In that 2017 speech, Giddens said, “The question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?” Opera is no different, she said in Charleston. Echoing a point Schaal made about how opera is a form built on hundreds of years of cultural exchange, Giddens spoke of how “every person puts their imprint on tradition” and how “we can look at music and see where we have come together.”“Omar” is just a start. “Opera is for everybody, so how do we reach more people?” she asked, listing all the areas — accessibility, audience development, community work — that need more creativity and commitment. “I’m starting,” she said, “to learn to ask for that at the beginning.”The mission continues. More

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      Review: Grammy-Winning ‘Akhnaten’ Returns to the Met Opera

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      Philip Glass’s portrait of a pathbreaking pharaoh returns to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time since its hit debut there in 2019.It wasn’t so long ago this season — just January — that the Metropolitan Opera’s programming was about as classic as it gets: tried-and-true works by Verdi, Puccini and Mozart.But scan the coming weeks, and you’ll find what looks like a better, more adventurous company. On Thursday, Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” returned for the first time since its Met debut, in 2019, joining the American premiere last week of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet.” Next to open, on May 30, is a revival of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” in a staging by Jonathan Miller that is older but more stylish than many at the house. By June, “Rigoletto” will stand alone as a holdout of the core repertory.While a break from the Met’s standard programming, “Akhnaten” — the final installment, from 1984, in Glass’s trilogy of “portrait” operas, after the pathbreaking “Einstein on the Beach” and “Satyagraha,” a meditation on Gandhi’s nonviolent movement — may be a surer bet than, say, “Tosca.” When “Akhnaten” belatedly arrived there a few years ago, it was a critical and box office success, one that attracted a visibly younger audience.That run eventually made its way onto a recording that recently won a Grammy Award. This revival is something of a victory lap, with the same conductor and nearly the same cast. Even Thursday’s audience seemed transported from those earlier days. With artists like Erin Markey and Justin Vivian Bond mingling on the theater’s promenade, the scene was more Joe’s Pub than Lincoln Center.There were, though, some crucial differences from 2019. Phelim McDermott’s production, now more lived-in, unfolded with elegant inevitability rather than effort; the score was executed with a clarity and drive absent on the often slack album. And while “Akhnaten” may be one of Glass’s tributes to great men who changed the world — through science, politics and faith — Thursday’s performance of it made a persuasive argument for where the real power lies: with the women.For example, the mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb, the cast’s newcomer, as Nefertiti, Akhnaten’s wife. Long presented at the Met in operas from the 18th and 19th centuries, she was singing a new kind of role on Thursday, one she seized with assurance and ringing might. As a partner for Anthony Roth Costanzo, the countertenor who has a virtual monopoly on the title role in this production, her lush, vibrato-rich sound was a productive contrast to his ethereal purity — she grounded and he celestial, they met somewhere in the middle for their long, hypnotically sensual love duet.More powerful yet was the soprano Disella Larusdottir as Queen Tye, Akhnaten’s mother. Penetrating and resonant, she shot out burst-like phrases with nearly mechanical exactitude and endurance, but was also expressive within the discipline. It’s Akhnaten, pioneering a kind of monotheism in his worship of the sun god Aten, who banishes the priests from the temple in Act II. On Thursday, though, the attack seemed to come from Queen Tye, so frightening and forceful was Larusdottir in her delivery.The conductor Karen Kamensek held together what can be an unwieldy production and led a Met Orchestra much more reliably capable than in 2019. She and the ensemble set the tone with the opera’s mood-altering, time-bending prelude. On the recording, propulsive, shifting arpeggios come off as sluggish, with lapses of legato phrasing. Returned to with more experience, along with noticeably more control, the score moved along with crisp transparency and a tense momentum that didn’t let up in the first act. The instrumentalists still have work to do, though. As the show went on, the strings occasionally slid into soft articulation; and the brasses suffered from clumsiness and imprecision, mistakes that can’t be hidden in music that lives or dies on accuracy.McDermott’s production similarly exposes its performers: not only the singers but also a dozen jugglers in catsuits, including Sean Gandini, the show’s choreographer. As scrappy as it is ornate, the staging — with imaginative, thrift-store-find costumes by Kevin Pollard and sets to match by Tom Pye, and artful lighting by Bruno Poet — demands the patience and steadiness of yoga in its movement, as well as an active eye for anyone watching. (At one point, one of Gandini’s people balances atop a large rolling wheel while, on scaffolding above, jugglers toss balls as the chorus does a version of the same thing; playing out amid the spectacle is the funeral of Akhnaten’s father.)It can be a lot to take in, and the metaphor of juggling — its spheres redolent of Akhnaten’s precious sun, their constant and unpredictable motion as precarious as his reign — proves its point too quickly to go on for as long as it does. As ritual, it doesn’t achieve the transcendence of McDermott’s “Satyagraha,” one of the Met’s finest productions, a staging whose visual diversity and inventiveness give way to sublime austerity.Zachary James, left, with Costanzo and members of the juggling ensemble led by Sean Gandini.Ken HowardThe choreography, though, does have its awe-inspiring moments, such as when juggling pins fly around Aaron Blake, as the High Priest of Amon, who — despite the risk of being hit by one — doesn’t even suggest a flinch while singing with a full-bodied tenor sound. Blake’s character is joined by Aye (the bass Richard Bernstein) and General Horemhab (the baritone Will Liverman) to form a tripartite resistance to Akhnaten’s rule, inciting the revolt that ends it and restores the old religious order. The arc of the pharaoh’s reign is recounted in spoken passages by Zachary James, whose towering presence and booming declamations feel thrillingly neither of this time nor world.James assumes the role of a lecturing professor near the opera’s ending, while Costanzo’s Akhnaten appears as a museum display. This is how we remember, McDermott is saying: through history, through exhibition, through the pageantry of opera performance. Glass makes his own version of that point with the centerpiece aria, “Hymn to the Sun,” a setting of a prayer to Aten that ends with an offstage chorus singing the text of Psalm 104 — tracing a direct line from Akhnaten to the monotheism that dominates today.As if that weren’t enough to place Akhnaten in the pantheon of great innovators, the final scene’s music introduces a subtle quotation from “Einstein on the Beach.” Here, Glass doesn’t tidily package his “portraits” trilogy as much as acknowledge it. On Thursday, though, that intrusion was also a reminder: After the triumphs of “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten,” when will the Met and McDermott give Einstein his due with a production of his own?AkhnatenThrough June 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Combing the Beach, and the Archives, to Revive ‘The Wreckers’

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      In the early 20th century, Smyth was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but her music fell out of the repertoire. Glyndebourne Festival Opera is bringing back her 1906 maritime opera.LEWES, England — Late last fall, there was an unusual sight on a beach in southern England: a team of staff members from Glyndebourne Festival Opera combing the shingle for flotsam and jetsam, then carting it off in wheelbarrows for use onstage.It is an unusually true-to-life approach for one of Glyndebourne’s productions this season — “The Wreckers,” by the British composer Ethel Smyth. The action is set among an impoverished seaside community in 18th-century England, whose inhabitants make their living from scavenging the wreckage of ships they have driven ashore (as many did, historically).Glyndebourne staff members have combed a nearby beach in southern England for flotsam and jetsam to use onstage.Sam StephensonGlyndebourne is lavishing a lot of effort on “The Wreckers,” which, despite premiering in 1906, has been staged professionally only a handful of times. For nearly three years, Glyndebourne’s archivist has been combing through documents and old musical scores to assemble a new performing edition that matches the composer’s intentions as closely as possible. A production of this news restored version, which runs Saturday through June 24, will be sung in French, as the original was.A chorus of over 50, a team of dancers and a 75-piece orchestra have been hired to give the production some oomph. And, as a mark of respect, “The Wreckers” has been placed in pole position as the summer festival’s opening show, displacing the operatic big-hitters that generally take up this spot.“We’re trying to do Ethel justice,” Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director, said in an interview. “Quite honestly, it’s about time someone did.”Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director. Ethel Smyth is “someone who has a ferocious sense of what she believed in,” he said, “and that comes through in the drama.”James BelloriniIn the first decades of the 20th century, Smyth was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but now her work is almost never heard. She was championed by Mahler and by the conductor Thomas Beecham, who proclaimed “The Wreckers” a masterpiece and put it on at the Royal Opera House in London. In 1903, Smyth became the first woman to have a work staged at the Metropolitan Opera (and, astonishingly, remained the only one until 2016).Yet after her death in 1944, Smyth’s music gradually faded from the repertoire. There were fewer and fewer outings for her symphonies, choral works or chamber pieces, and even fewer stagings of her six operas. Only a handful of recordings exist: The sole version of “The Wreckers” currently available is from a 1994 live performance.Patient advocacy by the American conductor Leon Botstein yielded a production of “The Wreckers” at the Bard SummerScape Festival in 2015 at Bard College in New York, and there have been scattered performances of Smyth’s other works since. In November, the Houston Opera will also put on “The Wreckers” in its own new staging.Smyth might have arched an eyebrow: near nothing for decades, then two new shows at once.Leah Broad, a music historian at Oxford University who is writing a group biography that includes Smyth, said “gender prejudice” was one of the chief reasons Smyth’s music was so little performed.“There are other issues, but that’s a lot to do with it,” Broad said. “She’s a really significant historical composer.”Smyth in 1943. In the first decades of the 20th century, she was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but now her work is almost never heard. Kurt Hutton/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesSmyth also has one of the great life stories in musical history. Brought up in a military household, she was initially forbidden from studying music by her father, but she eventually won out and attended the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany in 1887.Although she dropped out after a year, unimpressed by the teaching, while she was there she met Dvorak, Grieg and Tchaikovsky — who wrote in his diary that Smyth was “one of the few women composers whom one can seriously consider to be achieving something valuable.”A formidable networker, Symth later befriended many well-known people, including George Bernard Shaw and Empress Eugenie of France, and she had much-gossiped-about romantic affairs with both men and women.Smyth got many of her works performed and won a degree of acceptance, but always battled the assumption that what she was doing was essentially second-rate. Writing in The Times of London in 1893, a critic praised her “virile” compositions and commended “the entire absence of the qualities that are usually associated with feminine productions.”More humiliatingly, Smyth was often treated as the butt of a joke — as famous for her forceful personality, many dogs and penchant for wearing men’s suits as anything she had written. Virginia Woolf, who carried on an intimate correspondence with the much-older Smyth, nonetheless complained in her diary that becoming the subject of Smyth’s affections was like being “caught by a giant crab.”In 1910, Smyth became involved with the women’s suffrage movement. Two years later, she was sent to Holloway prison in London for several months after throwing a rock through the window of a government office. When Beecham visited her in jail, he later recalled, he was astonished to see Smyth conducting an exercise-yard performance of her rousing “March of the Women” from a cell window “in almost Bacchic frenzy, with a toothbrush.”“The Wreckers” stage at Glyndebourne. The show starts on Saturday and runs through late June.James BelloriniLike much of Smyth’s music, “The Wreckers” is an intense experience. Inspired by visits the composer made to remote coastal villages in Cornwall, in southwest England, it centers on a local preacher’s wife, Thirza, who is torn between her sense of duty to her puritanical husband and her love for a kindhearted fisherman.Not incidentally, Smyth was herself involved in a romantic triangle with the opera’s librettist, the married American poet Henry Brewster, and his wife, Julia. “There’s such passion in the love music,” said Karis Tucker, who sings Thirza at Glyndebourne. “She knew what she was writing about.”Ticciati said the score had both power and remarkable range, sounding “sometimes like Brahms, then Mendelssohn, then French exoticism, even late Debussy.” He added: “You think: ‘What is this?’ And then you realize that this is Ethel Smyth; this is what she sounds like.”As well as conjuring a fogbound maritime atmosphere, infused with snatches of folk song and sea shanties, Smyth seems to find particular relish in crowd scenes, as her supposedly God-fearing villagers prepare to lynch shipwrecked sailors before turning on each other.Tucker and the chorus of “The Wreckers” rehearsing last month.Richard Hubert SmithThere’s more than a hint of “The Crucible” about “The Wreckers,” and as Broad, the music historian, pointed out, the pre-echoes of another seafaring work, Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” (1945), are even stronger. “Britten owned a score of ‘The Wreckers’; it’s right there in his library,” Broad said. “He was never polite about Ethel Smyth’s music, but he was clearly influenced by it.”Finally, more of us will get the opportunity to make up our own minds. In addition to the Houston production, Glyndebourne will take a semistaged version of its “Wreckers” to the BBC Proms festival this July. The Proms is making Smyth a major focus and spotlighting other works of hers, including Mass in D and Concerto for Violin and Horn.“She’s so overdue her moment,” Broad said. “When you hear her, it’s like a gap in music suddenly gets filled.”Fearlessly inventive, sensuous and sometimes shocking, “The Wreckers” is a fine testament to the woman who created it, Ticciati said. “She’s someone who has a ferocious sense of what she believed in, and that comes through in the drama,” he argued.“I don’t want to say Ethel was larger than life,” Ticciati added, “because I think that was her life.”The WreckersMay 21 through June 24 at the Glyndebourne Festival in Lewes, England; glyndebourne.com. More

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      A Donkey Debuts in ‘La Bohème’ at the Met Opera

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      Wanda, a 15-year-old seasoned performer, is appearing in the company’s beloved and lavish “La Bohème.”Backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, before the curtain rose on Monday on a revival of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” a donkey in a pink jester’s hat waited patiently for her cue.This was Wanda, a 15-year-old, with handsome brown stripes running down her back and onto her tail. Making her Met debut this season, Wanda plays a brief but notable role in this romantic, tragic opera: During the grand Café Momus scene, she pulls a brightly colored cart full of toys, which the peddler Parpignol hands out to excited children.In Franco Zeffirelli’s lavish production, the moment is an awe-inspiring spectacle, evoking the Latin Quarter in Paris and bustling with some 250 people onstage — and a donkey and a horse, who pulls a hansom cab onstage for a dramatic entrance.Wanda backstage with her handler, Martyn Blackmore, left, and behind her, John Allegra and Nancy Novograd, who runs All Tame Animals. (Allegra is the owner and onstage handler of the horse Lord.)Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesWanda has big hooves to fill. For 16 seasons, the role was played by the same donkey, Sir Gabriel, who was adored by cast members and backstage crew. “He was a big presence at the Met, in ‘Barber of Seville,’ in ‘Bohème’; he was really beloved,” said Nancy Novograd, who runs All Tame Animals, the animal agency that works with the Met. (The agency has also represented hissing cockroaches and lion cubs, among others, for film, fashion, theater and more.)Sir Gabriel retired from opera this year to a farm that Novograd owns in Maryland. This is not a dark euphemism: He has begun a second act as a companion donkey to a mare who lost her partner at a farm down the road. At first, the two were aloof toward each other, standing on either side of the paddock, but after a few months they edged closer and closer, until they finally bonded.Wanda making her way through the Met’s corridors to backstage.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesAnd so Wanda has taken up the mantle in “La Bohème.” She is in her prime — donkeys often live to be 30 to 35 — and has prepared for this moment with a wide variety of roles. She has been in a petting zoo and once stood outside a bar to attract customers. She has starred in commercials. And she is a recurring star of services on Palm Sunday at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, as the donkey that Jesus rides into Jerusalem. This season, though, was her first time on the Met stage — and Novograd said, so far, so good.What makes for a good opera donkey? It’s not so different from what makes for any good opera star. “When it comes to hoofed animals like horses and donkeys, you want one who is bold rather than quiet, which sometimes surprises people,” Novograd said. “There’s a lot going on that might seem frightening or dangerous, and if they’re too timid that will overwhelm them. Confidence is the most important thing, whether it’s a horse or a donkey or a dog.”Every night of the “Bohème” run, Wanda comes in a trailer either from Wallkill, N.Y., or the Bronx, where she stays when she has a steady gig in the city. Novograd and her handlers take Wanda out of her trailer, and head to something called “the horse door,” a large entrance on the street that leads into the labyrinth of hallways in the Met, past costumes in storage, lockers for the cast and stagehands, pieces of the set, and other miscellany behind the curtain. On opening night, Novograd and three men — carrying buckets and shovels in case of an accident — led Wanda and her equine co-star Lord, a dark chestnut horse, to their waiting place backstage, beside Wanda’s colorful cart.Wanda pulling a cart of toys peddled by Parpignol (Gregory Warren).Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaLord pulls a hansom cab, carrying the character Musetta and her aging, wealthy lover into Café Momus, where they meet Mimì, Rodolfo, and Musetta’s former flame Marcello. It is a dramatic entrance, one that Lord, a 19-year-old former racehorse, has made for years. (He also has a number of other notable roles, including recurring appearances on the television show “The Gilded Age,” and was made up as a zebra in “The Greatest Showman.”) John Allegra, his owner and onstage handler, said, “Anyone, really, could drive this horse.”Allegra owns 45 horses on a farm in Connecticut, many of whom are frequent performers. He had two in a recent revival of “Aida,” whose Triumphal Scene is one of the most animal-centric in opera. “When the horses hear those horns,” Allegra said. “They’re ready.”Backstage at “Bohème,” as Act I got underway, and snatches of arias drifted backstage, the animals and their handlers slowly got their costumes together. Allegra put on his hat and 19th-century period coat for a walk across the stage. Martyn Blackmore, who was leading Wanda, also got into costume. Gregory Warren, who plays Parpignol, appeared in his clown-like makeup and tested out the toys in Wanda’s cart, to see which were attached and which weren’t, so he could distribute them to the children onstage.Donald Maxwell, left, as Alcindoro, with Aleksandra Kurzak as Musetta entering the Café Momus scene.Dina Litovsky for The New York Times“Animals and children,” Warren said. “Having them onstage really changes things up. That’s one of the best things about live performance, that it changes every night.”Wanda’s hat was put on, as was a colorful cloth, blue and gold with purple fringe, that covered her back. Like an experienced starlet, she was unfazed by all the adjusting and fussing. Lord nibbled at her hat, and occasionally the two nuzzled. But Wanda mostly stared into space, her large donkey eyes swiveling.Then everyone sprang into action. “Donkey coming down,” someone yelled, urging people to get out of the way, as the animals were led into the wings. A team of stagehands and handlers attached Lord’s hansom cab, and Musetta and her paramour loaded into it, with their prop shopping packages. A cabby stood on top with a whip, and Allegra, dignified in his period dress, stood at his side.The handler Max Torgovnick, center, with Wanda and, at left, Lord.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThe cue finally came, and Wanda led the way out of the wings. She emerged into the commotion of music and crowds, Parpignol peddling his wares, and Mimì and Rodolfo falling in love against the backdrop of the wild, colorful display. It was Wanda’s fleeting moment in the lights.Just as quickly, she ambled across the stage into the wings on the other side, where she was unclipped, undressed, unharnessed, ready to make her way to Wallkill, before she does it all again on Friday.But first: time outside, and hay.“After the show,” Novograd said, “she always gets treats.” More

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      The ‘Hamlet’ Chord: A Composer’s Music of Indecision

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      Brett Dean, whose adaptation of the classic play is at the Metropolitan Opera, discusses the four notes that embody Hamlet’s dilemma.One of the boldest things about Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn’s “Hamlet,” which runs at the Metropolitan Opera through June 9, is the way that it treats some of the most famous lines in English.Moments into the piece, we meet Hamlet (the tenor Allan Clayton at the Met), muttering a bare fragment of his monologue, “… or not to be. / … or not to be. / … or not to be.” When the time comes for the great soliloquy, though, it takes a strange form. Jocelyn, the librettist, uses text from the untraditional first quarto version of the play, and rather than “To be, or not to be,” Hamlet sings: “… or not to be. / … or not to be. / … or not to be. To be. Ay, there’s the point.”If the libretto mutes some of the prince of Denmark’s turbulent vacillation, the music restores it. High from the balcony boxes whisper tuned gongs, a pair of percussionists playing pianissimo and extremely delicately, one alternating from a B to an F and back, the other from an F sharp to a C sharp.Write the notes out as a single chord, and you draw a tower of fifths wavering over a tritone in the bass. It’s an awkward, dissonant and dark set of intervals that feels like it needs to move, like it must make a choice — though not necessarily urgently, and not in any certain direction.Meet the Hamlet chord, a musical embodiment of the title character’s dilemma. In an interview, Dean explained the dramatic function it plays and discussed his score more broadly. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.There have been many settings of “Hamlet,” from full operas, to overtures, to incidental music. What did you think was most important to bring into your opera from the play?Of course this was all in collaboration with Matthew Jocelyn, who had the first and arguably the hardest job. Matthew said that the thing to remember is that there is no such thing as “Hamlet.” Any “Hamlet” you see has had a lot of decision-making that’s gone into working out the Hamlet story that it wishes to tell, from the three different versions that were published in his lifetime, one of which is very contentious, the first, “bad” quarto.So Matthew got us both to write down the six most important things that we thought had to be part of our Hamlet, and then a second set of six, and then we compared. One thing that was clear from the very start was that it was to be, or not to be — sorry — a domestic story, a family drama, not busying ourselves with geopolitical worlds.The tenor Allan Clayton, on the table, as Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe score seems to be very explicitly atmospheric; it’s sometimes as if you can almost taste the weather around the castle.One thing that was very important to me was definitely a sense of atmosphere, but in creating an atmosphere it was important that the whole space of the theater resound — that it should feel like being inside Hamlet’s head.I managed that in a couple of ways. One was to have two groups of instruments up in the gods, a mirrored trio on either side of clarinet, trumpet and percussion, and the other was to have a group of singers, which I refer to as the semichorus, with the orchestra, creating a link between the sung world of the stage and the instrumental world of the pit. The musicians who are upstairs make all sorts of sounds with all sorts of things, including stones that are cracked together. There’s an earthiness about a lot of the sounds they make. There’s a primal aspect to the sound that takes you out of just being in an opera house.This sense of theater was important. Neil Armfield, the director, said that you have to take into account that in this piece where so much happens, where there’s so much intrigue and so much philosophy, it’s only when the players arrive that there’s truth — and, for Hamlet, genuine love — in the air. It’s only in theater that we come to the real McCoy, as it were.Within the orchestra, a lot is made of this one chord. Could you describe it to me?It’s only four notes, but you can do a lot with four notes. Wagner’s “Tristan” chord is only four notes as well, although it resolves to another chord of four notes. Although it wasn’t conscious, I swear to God, there are similarities between my so-called “Hamlet” chord and the “Tristan” chord, in that they both have the same augmented fourth — a tritone — at the base of it, F and B.My chord is based on a pair of open, perfect fifths going upward: B, F sharp, C sharp, which is this very open sound, not unknown in American music — it’s that vista music, Copland and so on. But as soon as you color it, destabilize it with the F and the tritone at the bottom, it becomes very different.The chord in “Dust”(Metropolitan Opera)via Brett DeanWhere did that idea come from?It was a passing moment in an earlier piece of mine called “Dispersal.” I heard a performance of it just prior to starting work on “Hamlet.” There was this moment with a big buildup that landed on that chord, set in brass, as a kind of fanfare, and it captivated me as a moment of highest tension.The thing about this chord is that it has that sense of needing to move somewhere else. I started playing around with it, and, indeed, the piece starts just with an open fifth, the B and the F sharp. B also is a prominent note in the score. It’s bang in the middle of Allan’s register; it’s bang in the middle of the treble stave; it’s called H in German.We last spoke for a story about the influence of Berg’s “Wozzeck” and, like that opera, your “Hamlet” has a big crescendo on a B as well.Yeah, there were these things emerging. So it starts with the first open fifth, which has this kind of Wagnerian, “Rheingold” feeling to it, setting up an open expanse, then, not long into it, the low F natural comes in against the F sharp above, which really disturbs it. The chorus sing “Dust, quintessence of dust” on that chord, even before Hamlet has sung his first opening lines.The chord building at the start of the opera(Metropolitan Opera)That’s how it started, and then I worked on ways it wants to expand. Wagner mapped out all his progressions almost to the word of where his motives went. For me, it was a lot more instinctive; there’s a lot of my process that is, well, “We’ll see where this goes.” It was, though, a place to return to.There’s another example where I add a low C natural and turn it into this breathless and restless ostinato: In Scene 6, after the performance of the play, when Claudius storms out and Hamlet realizes he’s caught his man, he sings, “Now could I drink hot blood.” Then it returns in the point in the final scene, where he sings “the point envenomed, too” and has decided that Claudius is going to meet his maker. There it’s this push that spurs him on.The chord as an ostinato(Metropolitan Opera)via Brett DeanCould you sum up its dramatic function as a whole?The thing about the chord is that because of its need to move — not necessarily to resolve in the “Tristan” chord way — it seemed to encapsulate that the situation demands action. But Hamlet is undecided what that action should be, which is somehow his tragedy. More

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      Review: After 36 Years, a Malcolm X Opera Sings to the Future

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      Anthony Davis’s “X” has stretches of incantation that, in person, turn it into something like a sacred rite.DETROIT — “When a man is lost,” sings Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s wife, “does the sky bleed for him, or does the sunset ignore his tears?”The start of a smoldering aria, these words may be the most poetic and poignant in Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.” Especially poignant because, for several decades, “X,” too, has been ignored.The work, with a libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer’s cousin, from a story by his brother, Christopher Davis, premiered in the mid-1980s, first in Philadelphia and, officially, at New York City Opera. And then … largely silence.For the past 36 years, it has been more talked about than heard. (An excellent studio recording from 1992 is now out of print.) And it was obvious, at the opening of a new production on Saturday at the Detroit Opera House, what “X” gains from being taken in live: Its stretches of incantation turn into something like a sacred rite.In these passages, over carpets of complex, repeating rhythms in the orchestra, the ensemble chants short lines — “Africa for Africans,” “Betrayal is on his lips,” “Freedom, justice, equality” — again and again, building and overlapping. The opera is at its best in these long swaths of music poised between churning intensity and stillness. Without copying the prayer practices of Malcolm’s Muslim faith, the work evokes them.Bringing “X” back to the stage is a coup for Detroit Opera, which has recently rebranded itself after 50 years as Michigan Opera Theater, inaugurating a new era under the artistic leadership of Yuval Sharon.Sharon came to prominence as the founder of the experimental Los Angeles company the Industry, and he is swiftly bringing ambitious, inventive programming to Detroit, like a “Götterdämmerung” in a parking garage and a “La Bohème” whose four acts are played in reverse. The field is noticing what he’s up to: As part of a widespread effort to belatedly present more works by Black composers and librettists, this “X” will travel to the Metropolitan Opera (in fall 2023), Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Omaha and Seattle Opera.In biopic style, the libretto sketches an outline of a short but eventful life: the murder of Malcolm’s father when Malcolm is a boy in Lansing, Mich.; his mother’s mental breakdown; his move to live with his half sister in Boston, where he falls in with a fast crowd and ends up in prison; his jailhouse conversion to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam; the success of his Black nationalist ministry; his rift with Muhammad over tactics; his pilgrimage to Mecca; and the glimmers of a more universalist ideology of peace and racial unity, which he barely gets a chance to expound before his assassination in 1965, at just 39.Clint Ramos’s set for Robert O’Hara’s production evokes the Audubon Ballroom in New York, where Malcolm was killed, while introducing an element of sci-fi Afrofuturism.Micah ShumakeAll this is conveyed in the heightened register of opera. Even the dialogue is pithy and exalted: “I come from a desert of pain and remorse.” The music is varied and resourceful; Davis won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his most recent opera, “The Central Park Five,” but “X” is a deeper score.It begins in a mournful, noirish mood, the moments of anxiety flirting with blues and subtle swing. Guided sensitively by the conductor Kazem Abdullah, the music goes on to swerve from punchy modernism to lyrical lushness, from peaceful worship to nervous energy and stentorian forcefulness.An essay in the program describes how Davis’s original contract specified that “the word ‘jazz’ should not be used in any connection with this piece,” though an innovation here was to embed an improvising ensemble within a traditional orchestra. This works smoothly, as when a saxophone aptly depicts Malcolm’s new life in big-city Boston, or when a wailing, longing trumpet accompanies prayer in Mecca. The prisoners’ choral dirge is heated by squeals of brass, smoking underneath; along with Betty’s enigmatically tender aria, this is the most intriguing music of the opera.The new production, directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), has a unit set, by Clint Ramos, that evokes the partly ruined Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, where Malcolm was killed. (The mountain pass mural painted on the back wall of the ballroom’s stage depicts an idyll that seems like it’s almost taunting the opera’s characters.)Above hover some big, swooping curves, used as a projection screen for textures, animated designs and a scrolling list of names of victims of white violence, before and after Malcolm. The staging is inspired by Afrofuturism, the attempt to conceive new — often fanciful, sometimes celestial — circumstances for a people suffering under crushing oppression.“Imagine a world where Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line is a spaceship,” O’Hara writes in a program note, referring to the “Back to Africa” movement in which Malcolm’s parents participated. But it is when the curves take on the literal flashing lights of such a ship that things turn a bit risible, conjuring the vessel in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” more than noble dreams of escape and revision.More effective is the introduction of four male dancers — their sinuous choreography is by Rickey Tripp — who snake through the production, sometimes as guardian angels looking over Young Malcolm (Charles Dennis), sometimes as squiggly punctuation to scenes. The spare flexibility that O’Hara introduces mostly works, even if the libretto’s specificity of place and situation gets sacrificed in this more abstract vision. Malcolm’s basic progress is still clear — less so the particulars of where he is and to whom, exactly, he’s speaking. The result, not unpleasantly, is more dream ballet than CNN.In the production, four dancers — their sinuous choreography by Rickey Tripp — snake through the production, sometimes as guardian angels looking over Young Malcolm (Charles Dennis), here with his mother (Whitney Morrison).Micah ShumakeMalcolm, though, still wears his distinctive browline glasses. He is played here with superb control by the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, steady, calm and committed in both his physical presence and grounded voice, with a fiery core that seethes in his main aria, “I would not tell you what I know,” at the end of Act I.As Malcolm’s mother and his wife, the soprano Whitney Morrison sings with mellow strength. Charming as Street, who spiffs up Malcolm in Boston, the tenor Victor Ryan Robertson largely handles Elijah Muhammad’s muscular high lines but strains to convey his magnetism.“X” sometimes hypnotizes but sometimes sags. Like Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” about Gandhi’s early years in South Africa, the opera is conceived as a steadily progressing account of a historical figure’s ideological evolution, dispensing with traditional dramatic tension. The main human conflict, between Malcolm and Elijah, is only lightly touched on; it’s not the plot.“Satyagraha,” though, fully gives itself over to stylization, its Sanskrit text detached from the action, its scenes pageantlike. The music and libretto of “X,” by contrast, keep promising crackling drama without quite delivering; there can be a sense of falling between the stools of trance-like repetition and standard storytelling.Scattered throughout are interludes that musically feel like vamping and that offer little obvious pretext for action. After so many years, the creators seem to have perceived the need to do something with these expanses — “We have added a few lines of singing in places that were musical interludes,” Thulani Davis writes in the program — but they remain, and sap the energy.Still “X,” for all its obvious admiration for its subject, is admirably resistant to mawkishness or melodrama, particularly in avoiding an operatic death scene: At the end, Malcolm takes the podium in the Audubon Ballroom and briefly greets his audience in Arabic. Then there’s a blackout as gunfire rings out.For all the talk of spaceships and a better tomorrow, it is an inescapably stark conclusion. There will always be gifted, visionary boys and men, the work seems to say in this new staging, but their futures are hardly assured.X: The Life and Times of Malcolm XThrough May 22 at the Detroit Opera House; detroitopera.org. More

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      Review: ‘Hamlet’ Boldly Engulfs the Metropolitan Opera

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      Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn’s adaptation of the classic play is both traditional and innovative, elegant and passionate.An opera composer would need the epic gifts and epic gall of a Richard Wagner to consider an adaptation of “Hamlet” and think: “Yup, I’ve got this.”“My initial response,” Brett Dean has ventured more modestly, “was to say no, that I couldn’t possibly tackle something that big.”But about 10 years ago, Dean put aside his reservations and began to tackle the play, with Matthew Jocelyn by his side as librettist. And, boldly slashing and reconfiguring Shakespeare’s text while setting it to a score assured in both crashes and whispers, they tackled it to the ground.Now at the Metropolitan Opera, Dean and Jocelyn’s “Hamlet” is brooding, moving and riveting. These two artists have put a softly steaming small choir in the orchestra pit, and musicians in balcony boxes for fractured fanfares. And, through acoustic means and groaning subwoofers alike, they have put the agonized characters nearly inside your bloodstream.It’s a work both traditional and innovative, elegant and passionate — a hit, to quote the play badly out of context, a very palpable hit.From left, Sarah Connolly (Gertrude), Rod Gilfry (Claudius), Clayton, William Burden (Polonius) and Rae, with John Relyea on the ground.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Hamlet” was already admirable in the 1,200-seat, jewel-box theater at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. It premiered there in 2017, just 50 miles from the Globe in London, where the original play was performed some 400 years ago. When a work succeeds in such an intimate space, there’s no guarantee that it will have the same impact in the nearly 4,000-seat Met.But “Hamlet” doesn’t merely fill the Met. It engulfs the enormous house. This transfer is no compromise or pale echo; when it opened on Friday, the two-act opera felt more powerful and coherent than it did five years ago.At Glyndebourne, the piece made a coolly virtuosic impression, coming off more as a clever meditation on the play than as a deep or affecting inhabiting of it. But it was dazzling musically, and no less so at the Met. From its first sepulchral rumble in the dark to the lonely ending — papery wrinkles of snare drum; a cello solo high and yearning enough to mimic a viola; quietly breathless winds — Dean’s score contains multitudes and mysteries.As the story progresses, there are violent explosions and simmering fogs of sound, out of which the voices emerge, emoting at their extremes but ineffably human, too. Electronic auras seem to swirl around the audience, aided by the two antiphonal groups in the balcony boxes on either side of the proscenium — each with a percussionist, clarinetist and trumpeter.Those percussionists are abetted by three more in the pit, handling an army of instruments usual and not, including temple bells, junk metal, glass and plastic bottles, aluminum foil, newspaper, and a drum called, aptly, a lion’s roar. This is an opera that blasts and scrapes, flickers and droops, with growling aggression giving way to delicate twinkling.Conducted by Nicholas Carter, in his company debut, the Met’s ensemble was as focused and rich on Friday as the London Philharmonic Orchestra had been at Glyndebourne.But whether it was a change in my perception or the grander new surroundings, or both, the union of Dean’s score and Jocelyn’s libretto — a spirited yet deadly serious mash-up of the play’s different versions — now felt more convincing. The opera seems to have grown into itself. Without losing its patient, ritualistic grimness or its games with theatricality, it has stronger narrative propulsion. What seemed episodic in 2017 now comes across as a taut dramatic arc, the text sometimes stylized — characters tend to stammer repetitions of key lines — but the storytelling clear, lean and always supported by the agile music.Rae performing Ophelia’s mad scene.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA crucial factor in that clarity is Neil Armfield’s savage, exhilarating production, which originated at Glyndebourne but has effortlessly scaled up for the Met; bigger, in this case, really is better. The singers’ faces are caked in floury white, like Kabuki actors rushed into service before being fully prepared. Alice Babidge’s aristocratic costumes float ambiguously between our time and the 1960s, and Ralph Myers’s set — lit by Jon Clark with flooding daylight and mournful sunset — is a manor-house ballroom that fragments and rotates to become a theater’s backstage. These characters, we are not allowed to forget, are performers, too — but that bit of detachment only redoubles the poignancy of their struggles.Making his Met debut in the title role, the tenor Allan Clayton is the same disheveled, melancholy presence he was in England. Barely leaving the stage during the performance, he is covered in sweat by the end. But the strains the score forces toward the edges of his range feel more intentional now, even beautiful; his tone is sometimes plangently lyrical, sometimes sarcastically sharp. Without losing the character’s desperation, Clayton now makes Hamlet more persuasively antic and wry — more real.Relyea, right, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, appearing to Clayton.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDepicting the ghost of Hamlet’s father — a ferocious, ecstatic invention, sung by the stony-toned bass-baritone John Relyea — Dean is not above creepy, effective horror-movie effects. The baritone Rod Gilfry and the mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly conjure the luxuriant sternness of Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle and his father’s killer) and Gertrude (his mother and, fatally, Claudius’s new wife).Dean and Jocelyn give us an Ophelia more forthright and forceful than fragile flower, but that unseen choral haze from the pit hovers around the poised, subtle soprano Brenda Rae from the beginning, a premonition of insanity. When she testifies in front of Claudius and Gertrude about Hamlet’s odd behavior, we don’t just hear the bronzed resonance of a temple bowl; we somehow feel ourselves inside its claustrophobic metallic emptiness, too.Ophelia’s mad scene, with Rae in mud-soiled underwear, matted hair and a men’s tailcoat, pounding on her chest as she sings to make the notes tremble, is eerie without overstatement. As her avenging brother, Laertes, the tenor David Butt Philip is ardent; as her officious father, Polonius, the tenor William Burden avoids caricature. The whole vast company is strong, including the onstage chorus, an implacably unified mob of nobility at fever pitch.Though cutely portrayed as toadyish countertenor twins by Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and Christopher Lowrey, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern struggle to serve much musical or dramatic purpose. (They were trimmed for Ambroise Thomas’s French “Hamlet” of 1868, the only other operatic version still in wide circulation.) But so sure is Dean’s imagination and execution that you accept as part of his theatrical world even the elements that you might not have chosen for yours.And so many of his ideas are inspired, like adding the forlorn country lilt of an accordionist (Veli Kujala) to the scene in which Hamlet corrals a traveling troupe of actors to put on an evocation of his father’s murder. Later, the whistling of the gravedigger (Relyea, who also sings the chief of the players’ troupe) passes with miraculous restraint into the orchestra, until the solemnity of the ensemble is cut through with sardonic grunts of brass and more windy wheezes of accordion.This is a long score — two hours and 45 minutes of music — and its pace conspicuously slows during a blood bath finale that unfolds with painstaking, even painful, deliberation. But to live within such a confident vision as Dean and Jocelyn’s, and to feel it live around and in you, is the pleasure afforded by great art. Who would want that to end any sooner?HamletThrough June 9 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Teresa Berganza, Charismatic Star of the Opera Stage, Dies at 89

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      The Spanish mezzo-soprano was internationally acclaimed for her dramatic performances in the works of Mozart, Rossini and Bizet.Teresa Berganza, a Spanish mezzo-soprano and contralto renowned for her roles in the operas of Rossini and Mozart and especially for the title role in Bizet’s “Carmen,” died on Friday in Madrid. She was 89.Her family confirmed the death in a statement to the newspaper El País.A dramatic figure with flashing dark eyes, Ms. Berganza was acclaimed as a coloratura mezzo and contralto, with a vocal register that was warm at its lower range and supple at its higher end. Her vast repertoire as a recitalist included German lieder, French and Italian art songs and, most notably, Spanish music — zarzuelas, arias and Gypsy ballads — which she consistently championed.In addition to exuding charisma and sensuality, Ms. Berganza embraced a disciplined, analytical approach to her roles. “For the most part, she sings exactly what is written in perfect pitch and accurate rhythm,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in a review of Ms. Berganza’s performance in Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” at the San Francisco Opera in 1969. He lauded her as “one of the most gifted of coloratura singers.”Ms. Berganza viewed her growth as a diva as a deliberate progression from Rossini to Mozart and finally to Bizet. “Rossini for his technique, agility, and Mozart for his style, his soul,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Un Monde Habité par le Chant” (“A World Inhabited by Song”), written with Olivier Bellamy and published in 2013. Only after feeling confident about works by those composers did she attempt “Carmen” — with great success. The conductor Herbert von Karajan declared her “the Carmen of the century.”Teresa Berganza Vargas was born in Madrid on March 16, 1933, to parents who reflected Spain’s deep divisions on the eve of its civil war. Her father, Guillermo Berganza, an accountant, was an atheist who favored left-wing causes. Her mother, Ascensión Vargas, a homemaker with two older children, Guillermo and Ascensión, was a deeply religious Roman Catholic, a monarchist and a supporter of the future dictator Francisco Franco.Encouraged by her mother, Teresa aspired to become a nun when she was an adolescent. She attended the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid, where she hoped her piano, organ and vocal studies would prepare her to lead a convent choir or teach music at a religious school.It was her voice tutor, Lola Rodríguez Aragón, who convinced her that she was too talented to retreat from a secular life. Under her instruction, Teresa won first prize for voice at the conservatory in 1954. She continued to consult and practice with Ms. Rodríguez Aragón throughout her career.Ms. Berganza also met her future husband, Félix Lavilla, a piano student, at the Madrid conservatory. He became her longtime accompanist at recitals. They had three children, Teresa, Javier and Cecilia, but their marriage ended after two decades.Ms. Berganza turned for spiritual guidance to José Rifá, a Spanish priest who had long admired her singing. He quit the priesthood to marry her, and he regularly introduced himself as Mr. Berganza. They divorced after 10 years.Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Berganza made her operatic debut as Dorabella in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 1957 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France. In 1958, she made her first appearance at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala as Isolier in Rossini’s “Le Comte Ory.” The next year she debuted at Covent Garden in London as Rosina in Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” which would become one of her signature roles. Critics delighted in her rich, fluid contralto voice, which easily handled the complex embellishments demanded of Rossini heroines.In 1967, Ms. Berganza made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” It would become yet another popular role for her.For years, Ms. Berganza declined offers to perform the lead in “Carmen,” saying that she found the complexity of the character too intimidating. She finally agreed to take it on in 1977, at the King’s Theater in Edinburgh. In preparation, she studied the 1845 novella“Carmen,” by Prosper Mérimée, on which the opera was based, as well as the libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy.She then spent weeks in southern Spain interviewing women living in the caves outside Granada to, as she put it, “better understand Gypsy life.” Rejecting the more traditional portrayal of Carmen as a prostitute, she chose to play her instead as a rebellious Gypsy. “She speaks with her heart, her body, her guts,” Ms. Berganza wrote in her autobiography.Reviewing a Carnegie Hall recital in November 1982. the Times critic Donal Henahan wrote, “The Berganza voice, always a wonder of suppleness and dark polish, has now become, if anything, more excitingly robust and dramatic.”Ms. Berganza in 2013. She continued to perform into her 70s.Alberto Aja/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Berganza, he added, had also become a superior actor. He praised her intense reading of Joseph Haydn’s “Arianna auf Naxos,” a cantata that demands frequent sudden changes in emotional expression, which she followed with a witty rendering of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Nursery” cycle, in which she alternately portrayed the child and the nurse.In the days leading up to a stage performance, Ms. Berganza would go to extremes to protect her voice. When her children were still young, she wore a scarf over her mouth to remind them she wasn’t supposed to speak. Instead, she wrote notes to answer their questions or give them instructions. At night, fearful of tobacco smoke, she avoided restaurants.When she was performing away from Madrid, she began each day singing warm-ups in her hotel bathroom. “If the notes are not there, I am in agony the whole day,” she said in a 2005 interview with Le Figaro.Fittingly, Ms. Berganza’s last opera performance, at age 57, was in “Carmen” at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, not far from the former tobacco factory that was the setting for the Carmen story. Plácido Domingo conducted and José Carreras played the role of Don José, the jilted lover who kills Carmen, in that 1992 production.Ms. Berganza would continue to give recitals into her 70s.She insisted she had no regrets about not having been born a soprano, which would have given her the opportunity for many more leading stage roles. She preferred being a mezzo, she said, just as she favored the more mellow sound of a cello over a violin. “If I could not sing,” she wrote in her autobiography, “I would want to be a cellist.” More