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      He Break Dances. He Pole Dances. He Sings Like an Angel.

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      The Polish countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski has the credits you’d expect for a fast-rising classical music star, and some others you might not.LONDON — When foreign stars visit the Glyndebourne opera festival in the countryside outside London, it’s common for them to participate in some time-honored English rituals, like sipping Pimm’s on the lawn or nibbling on a scone for afternoon tea. But when the young Polish countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski arrived to perform the title role in Handel’s “Rinaldo” in 2019, he announced his presence differently: by break dancing on the terrace in front of an audience in ball gowns and tuxedos, as well as a photographer or two.Judging by Orlinski’s Instagram account — 123,000 followers and counting — this wasn’t an isolated incident. To promote his Metropolitan Opera debut in Matthew Aucoin’s “Eurydice” last fall, he flexed his breaking skills in Lincoln Center’s plaza, and the company’s publicity team filmed it in slow motion. During a recent stint at the Royal Opera House here, Orlinski posted a picture of himself on that hallowed stage doing a so-called Slav squat (if you’re over 30, Google it) with the hashtag #LetsBarock.“Dude, these pics are so FIRE,” one commenter wrote.Sure, Orlinski, 31, has the credits you’d expect for a fast-rising star: a recording deal with Warner, a bustling recital schedule, and appearances at prestigious European opera houses and festivals. But then there’s the taste for hip-hop and streetwear, trumpeted on Instagram, and the branding deals and crossover tracks, including a 2020 collaboration with a trio of Polish rappers and pop stars for Pepsi. Though classical music is diversifying, it’s hard to think of another singer who lists break dancing awards alongside concert prizes on their résumé.Whatever is going on, it’s clearly working. Last fall, Gramophone magazine put Orlinski on the cover. The headline was “A Countertenor for Our Times.” This month, he will embark on a North American recital tour — traveling from Georgia to the West Coast and ending in Canada — performing a mixture of baroque arias and Polish song.Julia Bullock and Orlinski in “Theodora” at the Royal Opera House in London.Camilla GreenwellOver lunch in London last month, there were faint smudges of tiredness under his eyes, but he was fidgety with energy. Orlinski’s chief reason for being in town was “Theodora,” a keenly anticipated debut in a rarely staged piece. Based on the story of an early Christian martyr and a notorious flop for Handel when it debuted in 1750, the oratorio had been retooled for a post-war-on-terror, #MeToo world by the British director Katie Mitchell. Theodora (sung by the American soprano Julia Bullock) was portrayed as freedom fighter plotting to plant a bomb at the embassy of her Roman overlords. When the scheme was foiled, the heroine was held captive in a lap dancing club and sexually assaulted.Orlinski appeared as the boyish Didymus, a Roman security guard who converts to Theodora’s cause and comes to her rescue. Though he attracted favorable reviews, some audience members seemed a little shocked at a scene in which he exchanged clothes with Bullock, then performed a solo pole dance wearing her spangled dress and platform heels.“It could have been hilarious, but it wasn’t,” Orlinski said. “People were completely on board.” And he admired the production for its feminist foregrounding of Theodora’s story, he added. “The concept is so good and so well argued,” he said.Characteristically, Orlinski was also keeping several other plates spinning while in London. One was the debut of a film tied to a forthcoming recording of Vivaldi’s “Stabat Mater.” Somewhere between an art-house short and a high-concept music video, it featured Vivaldi’s score in full, overlaid on scenes resembling a Polish remake of “The Sopranos,” in which Orlinski plays a man bent on revenge after his friends die in a gangland killing.Orlinski on set for a film tied to a forthcoming recording of Vivaldi’s “Stabat Mater,” in which Orlinski plays a man bent on revenge after his friends die in a gangland killing.Jakub Czapczy?ski/DOBRO Sp. z o.o.Another project was a concert at Wigmore Hall alongside the period group Il Pomo d’Oro, with repertoire drawn from another recent disc, this one featuring early 18th-century Italian works. Somewhere amid all this, he was preparing for the American tour.Was he managing to get any rest? He closed his eyes momentarily. “I am not sleeping much for the last 10 years,” he said.As a child growing up in Warsaw in the 1990s, a musical career looked unlikely. Though Orlinski’s family is artistic — his father is a graphic designer, his mother an artist — the idea of becoming a professional singer barely crossed his mind, he said. Even though he’d been singing with an amateur, all-male choir since age nine, he mostly spent his time listening to rap, skateboarding and learning parkour.Unlike England or Germany, Poland has almost no countertenor tradition, in which adult male vocalists sing at altitudes usually reserved for boy altos or mezzo-sopranos. Though pioneering soloists such as James Bowman, David Daniels and Michael Chance helped revive long-forgotten operatic countertenor roles in the 1980s and ’90s — many of them originally written for the castrati who dominated the 18th-century opera stage — the number of professional countertenors remains tiny.It wasn’t until his choir asked for volunteers to sing the high parts that Orlinski thought of trying it. To his surprise, the register suited him, and he entered Warsaw’s prestigious Fryderyk Chopin University of Music to study voice in 2009.One of his tutors there, Eytan Pessen, recalled his astonishment at hearing about the new student. “One day, the director of the program told me, ‘There is this strange, beautiful singer, I don’t know if you’ll like him. He’s a break dancer but he also wants to sing countertenor.’ But the voice was absolutely there.”Even so, Orlinski’s early attempts as a soloist faltered, hampered by a lack of confidence. “I would get 10 people turning up for concerts,” he said. “When I started singing countertenor, four of them would leave.”After graduating, Orlinski headed to Juilliard, then returned to Europe and began to pick up recital and opera work, making a name for himself in Handel, a composer he reveres.Orlinski onstage at Carnegie Hall in 2018.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesDespite his ebullient onstage presence, Orlinski has little of the vocal showiness of older countertenors like Philippe Jaroussky or Dominique Visse. Though it’s still developing, his voice is cool and pure in tone.“The color and timbre are so specific,” Pessen said. “It has this angelic, ethereal quality.”Orlinski’s breakthrough moment was a husky live performance of Vivaldi’s “Vedro con mio diletto” from the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2017, which was broadcast on Facebook Live by the France Musique radio station then uploaded to YouTube. It has been viewed 8.4 million times — far more than might be expected for an obscure baroque aria.Later videos advertised Orlinski’s virtuosity: In footage recorded at a Moscow recital last year, he offers a rendition of Purcell’s “Strike the Viol” so decorated with vocal filigree that it practically sounds like bebop.Bullock, his co-star in “Theodora,” says she admires the freedom Orlinski finds within the structures of period performance. “He’s so inventive with his vocalism,” she said. “There’s this great element of improvisation.”Orlinski is far from the first classical musician to leverage social media, but, coming from a generation that grew up online, he does it with a charming playfulness and lack of self-importance. A zany video posted for the new year saw him playing the recorder deliberately badly, which generated more than 10,000 likes. For Valentine’s Day, he posed wearing a fitted T-shirt and holding an outsized bunch of flowers. (Judging by the comments beneath, his well-developed biceps are a big part of the appeal.)His Wigmore Hall recital, in February, was notable for the youth and ardor of its audience. There were three encores, and in the CD-signing line afterward, one woman, a fan from Instagram, was seen clutching a notebook she’d bought on Amazon whose cover read, “Sorry I Wasn’t Listening, I Was Thinking About Jakub Jozef Orlinski.”“Someone’s really making money off of me,” Orlinski joked.“I am not going to be, like, 60 and still sing as a countertenor,” Orlinski said.  “There are hundreds of open doors.”Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesBuilding a fan base in this way is still unusual in a classical environment, he conceded, but he was enthusiastic about reaching people who might not have encountered this music before.Yet Orlinski said there were costs to being so easily accessible to the public. “Some of them are a little weird,” he said. “There are a lot of DMs on Instagram.” Inappropriate messages? He grimaced. “There was a period where it was happening a lot.”While his concert and opera schedule is booked through 2024, Orlinski said he wasn’t sure where he would go in the longer term. “When I look at the list of things I already did, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is crazy. I’m 31,’” he said. “At the same time, I am just 31.”Following tradition and available repertoire, most countertenors focus on early music, with occasional forays into contemporary repertoire. But, as with so much else, Orlinski is reluctant to follow the formulas.The new Polish-themed disc — recorded with a regular collaborator, the pianist Michal Biel, and out in May — features songs by Szymanowski and Mieczyslaw Karlowicz: plush, late-Romantic repertoire most countertenors never go near.He wasn’t even sure he would remain in classical, or even stay in his current vocal range, he said. “I already talked with my management about that. I told them right away, ‘I am not going to be, like, 60 and still sing as a countertenor.’”What else would he do? Perhaps run a music festival or make movies, he said, or maybe he’d drop down to baritone range and sing pop. “There are hundreds of open doors.”Things were moving so fast, he said. “Like with the Met and the Royal Opera House, it was so far away,” he added, with a trace of disbelief. “I knew about those projects in 2018, and it’s already gone.” More

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      Review: A Soprano’s Sound Floods the Met in ‘Ariadne’

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      Lise Davidsen unleashed rare grandeur of tone throughout her range in the title role of Strauss’s opera.“Did you see ‘Ariadne’ last night?” a friend wrote to me on Wednesday. “If you were in Brooklyn, you still may have heard it.”I had seen it, and I knew immediately that by “it” he meant “her”: the soprano Lise Davidsen, who as the title character of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” filled the mighty Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday in a way few singers can.Unleashing floods throughout her range, from gleaming, solar high notes to brooding depths, Davidsen offered a nearly supernatural turn in a role out of Greek legend. The radiating, shimmering, ever so slightly metallic overtones that halo her voice make her sound arrestingly powerful and visceral. You feel it as almost physical presence — pressing against your chest, raising the hairs on the back of your neck. Given Strauss’s paring down of his orchestra in “Ariadne” to chamber size, this is the rare occasion when the woman onstage sounds grander at her peak than the forces in the pit do at theirs.It was one of the brilliant ideas of this composer and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, to hold their leading lady largely in reserve in a backstage prologue depicting her as an unnamed Prima Donna taking part in the preparations for a nobleman’s evening entertainment. Things turn chaotic when word comes down: Because of time constraints, the somber drama in which she is to star will not play back to back, but simultaneously, with a troupe of clowns. A collision — and union — of hilarity and sublimity ensues.Brenda Rae, left, as Zerbinetta and Isabel Leonard as Composer in “Ariadne” at the Metropolitan Opera.Marty Sohl/Met OperaThe unleashing of an Ariadne in the opera proper is always a thrill for being so tantalizingly delayed — all the more so with Davidsen, 35, a soft-spoken, witty, even daffy presence in the prologue, suddenly endowed with a queenly stature that she fills and overflows. In the role that first brought her international notice a few years ago, she comes off as timeless without losing her youthfulness, penetrating even at more intimate volume than full cry.The conductor Marek Janowski also charted the transition from a lively sound in the prologue to a suaver, more sumptuous one, moving with nimble energy throughout. The baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle was a vigorous, characterful Music Master; the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, a delicate, subtly rending Composer.It was too bad that as Zerbinetta, the clowns’ ringleader, the soprano Brenda Rae made less of an impression. Rae performs with charming vivacity, and the part — a kind of Straussian Ado Annie — is more congenial for her than was Poppea in Handel’s “Agrippina” at the Met in 2020. But she still sounded pale. Zerbinetta’s quick-witted coloratura should hold its own next to Ariadne’s spacious majesty, admittedly a next-to-impossible task on Tuesday.Davidsen’s voice still seemed to be ringing in the theater the following evening, when another soprano, Aleksandra Kurzak, offered a more modest performance, in her role debut as Puccini’s Tosca.At the Met on Wednesday, the soprano Aleksandra Kurzak sang the title role in Puccini’s “Tosca” for the first time.Ken Howard/Met OperaFlirtatious and spirited in the first act, Kurzak found her instrument pressed to, and past, its limits in the high — eventually homicidal — drama of the second. Her real-life husband, the tenor Roberto Alagna, sounded sometimes fresh and sometimes worn as Tosca’s passionate lover, Cavaradossi. Bringing out piquant details all over, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, luxuriated in the score — a bit too rhapsodically, as momentum kept slackening.This “Tosca,” entertaining even if imperfect, was an opera. The “Ariadne,” thanks to Davidsen, was an enactment of all that opera can do to us and our bodies, how helplessly in thrall to the human voice we can be.Davidsen has already been exciting at the Met in Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” and Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” But her singing is so lavish in its scale that it can swamp even semi-realistic plots. It seems ideal for Wagner’s more mythic works, and thrives in Ariadne’s opulent stylization; here is a role Davidsen was truly born for.Ariadne auf NaxosThrough March 17 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan. And “Tosca” continues there through March 12; metopera.org. More

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      Anna Netrebko, Diva With Putin Ties, Is Out at the Metropolitan Opera

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      The Met said she would not appear for two seasons, and possibly more, after declining to comply with its demand that she repudiate her public support for Putin.Anna Netrebko, the superstar Russian soprano, will no longer appear at the Metropolitan Opera this season or next after failing to comply with the company’s demand that she distance herself from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as he wages war on Ukraine.The end of Ms. Netrebko’s engagements, which the Met announced on Thursday, came after the opera company, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said it would no longer hire artists who support Mr. Putin. While Ms. Netrebko has in recent days issued statements critical of the war, she has remained silent on the Russian president, whose re-election she has in the past endorsed.“It is a great artistic loss for the Met and for opera,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in a statement. “Anna is one of the greatest singers in Met history, but with Putin killing innocent victims in Ukraine there was no way forward.”Ms. Netrebko did not immediately respond to a request for comment through her representatives.While the announcement on Thursday encompassed only two seasons, Mr. Gelb said in an interview on Thursday that it seemed unlikely Ms. Netrebko would ever come back to sing with the company.“It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which she will return to the Met,” he said.Ms. Netrebko’s break with the Met, where she has sung nearly 200 performances over the past 20 years and became the reigning prima donna, was a stunning turnaround for one of the world’s biggest opera stars. She has expressed support for Mr. Putin at times over the years, and in 2014 she was photographed holding a flag used by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine.Her departure from America’s largest performing arts institution came amid a broader backlash against some Russian artists for their ties to Mr. Putin — one that has raised difficult questions about how far arts organizations should go in requiring public declarations from artists.Earlier this week, Valery Gergiev, the star Russian maestro who has long been closely associated with Mr. Putin, was removed from his post as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic after he refused to denounce the invasion of Ukraine.Mr. Gergiev has publicly supported Mr. Putin, including with concerts at home and abroad. In 2008 he led a concert in South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia, and in 2016 led another in Palmyra in Syria, after it was retaken by Syrian and Russian forces. His international performances have all but dried up since Russia invaded Ukraine.As criticism of Ms. Netrebko’s ties to Mr. Putin grew, she abruptly canceled appearances at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Zurich Opera and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany. Her public statements have alternated between condemning the war and saying it was wrong to ask Russian artists to denounce their government.On Tuesday, Ms. Netrebko posted a picture on Instagram of herself with Mr. Gergiev, smiling after a concert. Then, in a separate post, she wrote: “As I have said, I am opposed to this senseless war of aggression and I am calling on Russia to end this war right now, to save all of us. We need peace right now.” Both posts were later deleted.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 5Anna Netrebko. More

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      Valery Gergiev and Anna Netrebko's Putin Ties Threaten Their Careers

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      The Russian conductor Valery Gergiev and the diva Anna Netrebko have lost engagements because of their ties to Putin, as geopolitics and music collide once again.A conductor, perceived to be aligned with the opposition in wartime, pushed from his podium in disgrace.Another, two decades later, offered a prestigious position, only to withdraw under pressure after protests of his ties to a despised foreign regime.The first, Karl Muck, a German-Swiss maestro, led the Boston Symphony Orchestra until he was arrested and interned, in what is now widely viewed as a shameful example of anti-German hysteria at the start of World War I.The profound musical legacy of the second — Wilhelm Furtwängler, who never joined the Nazi Party but was essentially its court conductor, dooming his appointment to the New York Philharmonic — still struggles to emerge from his association with Hitler.How will we think of Valery Gergiev a century from now?One of the world’s leading conductors, he has in just the last week lost a series of engagements and positions, including as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic, for not disavowing the war in Ukraine being waged by his longtime friend and ally, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.The swift unraveling of his international career — and the decision of Anna Netrebko, a Russian diva who is one of the biggest stars in opera, to withdraw from performances amid renewed attention to her own ties to Mr. Putin — raises a host of difficult questions.What is the point at which cultural exchange — always a blur between being a humanizing balm and a tool of propaganda, a co-opting of music’s supposed neutrality — becomes unbearable? What is sufficient distance from authoritarian leadership?And what is sufficient disavowal, particularly in a context when speaking up could threaten the safety of artists or their families?Mr. Gergiev, with his quasi-governmental role as general and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, is closer to Furtwängler than to Muck. He has endorsed Mr. Putin in the past and promoted his policies with concerts in Russia and abroad. But when he has spoken — he has remained silent through this latest firestorm — he has tended to sound like Furtwängler, who longed to focus only on scores and said, “My job is music.”The legacy of the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler has been tainted by his association with Hitler.Teldec“Am not politician, but exponent of German music, which belongs to all humanity regardless of politics,” Furtwängler wrote in 1936, in clipped telegram style, withdrawing under pressure from the New York Philharmonic post.Classical music likes to think of itself this way: floating serenely above politics, in a realm of beauty and unity. Its repertory — so much of it composed in the distant past — seems insulated from present-day conflicts. What can Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony do except good?But politics and music — a field in which Russian performers have long been stars — have swiftly collided since the invasion of Ukraine. The Mariinsky Orchestra’s tours have been canceled. On Sunday, the Metropolitan Opera announced that it would no longer engage with performers or other organizations that have voiced support for Mr. Putin. Presenters in the United States, Germany, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands have announced the cancellations of performances by some artists who support Mr. Putin.Ms. Netrebko had engagements at the Bavarian State Opera canceled, and then announced that she planned to “step back from performing for the time being,” withdrawing from her upcoming dates at the Zurich Opera.The Russian diva Anna Netrebko and Mr. Gergiev appeared together with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2018.Lisi Niesner/ReutersThe artistic director in Zurich, Andreas Homoki, noted some of the complexities, welcoming a statement that Ms. Netrebko made opposing the war but suggesting that her failure to condemn Mr. Putin put her at odds with the opera house’s position. But Mr. Homoki took pains to note that his company did not “consider it appropriate to judge the decisions and actions of citizens of repressive regimes based on the perspective of those living in a Western European democracy.”In her first public statement on the war, in an Instagram post Saturday morning, Ms. Netrebko — who has long been criticized for her ties to Mr. Putin, and was photographed in 2014 holding a flag used by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine — initially seemed to be issuing the kind of statement that had been lacking from Mr. Gergiev.“First of all: I am opposed to this war.” So far, so good.“I am Russian and I love my country,” Ms. Netrebko went on, “but I have many friends in Ukraine and the pain and suffering right now breaks my heart. I want this war to end and for people to be able to live in peace.”Though she conspicuously didn’t mention Mr. Putin, Ms. Netrebko’s words were simple and tender, a needle — love of her country and empathy for another — seemingly threaded.But unfortunately for those of us who have cherished her as a performer, there was more. In the next slide, she added that “forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right.”“I am not a political person,” she wrote, echoing the Furtwängler perspective. “I am not an expert in politics. I am an artist and my purpose is to unite people across political divides.”She then added to her Instagram story, alongside heart and praying-hands emojis, a text that used an expletive in reference to her Western critics, and said they were “as evil as blind aggressors.”So much for threading the needle. And a series of posts over the following days, which were later deleted, only muddied the waters further.What could have smoothed over criticism instead inflamed it. The politically outspoken pianist Igor Levit, who was born in Russia, did not mention Ms. Netrebko by name in his own Instagram post on Sunday morning, but wrote, “Being a musician does not free you from being a citizen, from taking responsibility, from being a grown-up.”“PS,” he added: “And never, never bring up music and your being a musician as an excuse. Do not insult art.”Ms. Netrebko performs at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2014.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThe Met, where Ms. Netrebko is scheduled to star in Puccini’s “Turandot” this spring, seemed to have her in mind — along with a producing partnership with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow — when it made its announcement on Sunday.“While we believe strongly in the warm friendship and cultural exchange that has long existed between the artists and artistic institutions of Russia and the United States,” the company’s general manager, Peter Gelb, said in a video statement, “we can no longer engage with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him.”It’s true: Ms. Netrebko is not a politician, expert or otherwise. In this she is unlike Mr. Gergiev, who has repeatedly and explicitly worked as a government propagandist, leading battlefield concerts in South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia, in 2008, and in Palmyra after that Syrian site was retaken by Syrian and Russian forces in 2016. In Ossetia, he even led Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony, completed during the German siege of that city in World War II and as charged a musical memorial as there is to Russian suffering.Mr. Gergiev conducting in Palmyra, after the ancient city was retaken by Syrian and Russian forces in 2016.Olga Balashova/Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, via Associated PressBut Ms. Netrebko is certainly a political actor — the kind of “political person” she denies being. Again and again in the past, she has voiced her political opinions, publicly if vaguely. (She said that she had been caught off-guard when she was handed the separatist flag in that 2014 photograph with a separatist leader, which was taken after she gave him a donation for a theater in a region controlled by separatists; that donation, she claimed at the time, was “not about politics.”)Ms. Netrebko can hold whichever flag she wants, of course. But she should not be surprised that there are consequences. In January 2015, after her Met performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Iolanta” under Mr. Gergiev’s baton, a protester climbed onto the stage during her curtain call and unfurled a banner that called them “active contributors to Putin’s war against Ukraine.”The Met, which opened a performance this week with the Ukrainian national anthem, has left vague the way it intends to police its new test. But I hope the company will look at the existing record rather than requiring new, public words from artists who may have legitimate reasons of safety to remain silent about Mr. Putin and his actions. Eliciting — coercing, some might say — affirmative statements hardly seems the right way to oppose authoritarianism.Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4A city is captured. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Wagner

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      Rian Johnson, Patti Smith, Alex Ross and others offer favorite highlights of a composer best known for his sprawling length.In the past we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas, Bach, the organ, mezzo-sopranos and music for dance.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the music of Richard Wagner, with very short tastes of his very long operas. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Rian Johnson, filmmakerThe problem with isolating a piece from any of Wagner’s operas is insidiously twofold: You’re going to miss (for my money) the real source of its power, and you’re not going to realize you’re missing it because the music is so damn good. Take the prelude from “Das Rheingold.” Put on good headphones, close your eyes, and it’ll transport you, I guarantee.But it wasn’t meant to live in a vacuum. Wagner is a storyteller, and when the piece sits in its proper place in the pre-curtain dark, birthing you from a pinprick of light into the blinding sun of elemental harmony whose theft will launch an epic, tragic saga of gods and betrayal and love — well, that’s the real stuff.“Das Rheingold”Vienna Philharmonic; Georg Solti, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Katharina Wagner, Bayreuth Wagner Festival artistic directorI grew up with the music of my great-grandfather, but until today the “Liebestod” is my favorite passage of “Tristan und Isolde.” Isolde expresses her deepest feelings and sings the most beatific passage with great euphoria. Birgit Nilsson, in the recording under Karl Böhm from the 1966 Bayreuth Festival, testifies to the dramatic power and passion of her performance, the size and fullness of her voice, the beauty and purity of her intonation, and her brilliant stage acting. She is rightly considered one of the most important singing personalities of her era.“Tristan und Isolde”(Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Michael Cooper, Times editorThis is the five minutes (well, the scene) that made me fall in love with Wagner. When I first heard it in a college music survey course I was already an opera fan, but I knew little about Wagner other than his antisemitism, his reputation for tedium and bombast, and, of course, Bugs Bunny and “Apocalypse Now.”This was not what I was expecting: The sheer beauty of the orchestra and the unexpected tenderness of a father’s loving, lullaby-like farewell to his daughter was a revelation. I became obsessed that year, investing in a whole “Ring” cycle (not cheap in the pre-streaming era); buying Ernest Newman’s book “The Wagner Operas” to guide me; and scoring a seat in the second-to-last row of the top tier at the Metropolitan Opera. This was the gateway drug to what became a not-too-unhealthy addiction.“Die Walküre”Hans Hotter, bass-baritone; Vienna Philharmonic; Georg Solti, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Simon Callow, actor, director and ‘Being Wagner’ authorThe death of Siegfried, the hero in the “Ring” who was to have saved the world, draws out of Wagner an astounding panoply of orchestral sounds of infinite majesty and splendor. It also represents the climax of the system of leitmotifs — melodic and rhythmic fragments associated with particular aspects of characters and their emotional history. Wagner weaves them into the texture with cumulative power so that it is as if Siegfried’s entire past passes before our ears — his energy, his idealism, his passion, so that one feels that an entire life is being commemorated. At the same time, we mourn what might have been. The sense that we shall not look on his like again is deeply affecting.“Götterdämmerung”English National Opera Orchestra; Reginald Goodall, conductor (Chandos)◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerYou might think of Richard Wagner as the composer of gods and myths, of the end of the world and a love that destroys — and you would be right. But if his sheer ambition makes him someone to be repulsed by and swept away with, in not quite equal measure, he was capable, too, of tenderness of the most affecting kind. His “Siegfried Idyll,” initially a private birthday gift to his second wife, Cosima, was first performed by a small ensemble at their home on Christmas morning in 1870; in the later, expanded orchestration we hear more often now, its ending is a touching depiction of blissful contentment — the warmest, most humane music he ever wrote.“Siegfried Idyll”Berlin Philharmonic; Rafael Kubelik, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Alex Ross, New Yorker critic and ‘Wagnerism’ authorWagner’s “Ring” is, simply put, a study in the futility of power, with the god Wotan as its chief exhibit. The crux of his fall comes at the beginning of his epic monologue in Act II of “Die Walküre,” after his wife, Fricka, has demolished his delusions. He cries, “O heilige Schmach!”: “O righteous shame! O shameful sorrow! … Infinite rage! Eternal grief!” Wagner’s orchestra delivers the sound of power grinding itself to pieces, with monstrous dissonances piling up over a drone of C. In Joseph Keilberth’s great 1955 “Ring” from Bayreuth, Hans Hotter is a howling pillar, magnificent in collapse.“Die Walküre”Hans Hotter, bass-baritone; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra; Joseph Keilberth, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Patti Smith, performerI have chosen Waltraud Meier’s exquisite performance of the “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde.” I was privileged to attend the premiere of the opera in December 2007 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Conducted by Daniel Barenboim and directed by Patrice Chéreau, it was the most beautiful and moving production of Wagner’s great romance I have experienced.Waltraud Meier is a fine actress as well as being one of our great singers. In this piece, she projects the full range of Isolde’s devotion, desire, madness and loss. She brought to her performance humility and expertise, comprehending fully the meaning of transcendent love.Backstage, I saw her in the shadows. She was yet spattered with Tristan’s blood and still contained in her countenance something of Isolde.“Tristan und Isolde”Waltraud Meier, soprano; Teatro alla Scala Orchestra; Daniel Barenboim, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times writerDo Wagner’s operas feature almost endless melodies? Certainly. But he knew how to write conflict, too — sometimes even in short bursts. Take this climactic scene from Act II of “Lohengrin.” The plot is complex, but even if you don’t know what’s being said, you can feel the heat of the moment: the sorceress Ortrud, near the entrance to a church, barring the arrival of Elsa, there as a bride-to-be. The townspeople in the chorus gasp as these Real Housewives of Antwerp go at it regarding the comparative status of their mates; you may feel yourself in rapt league with those assembled voyeurs as you listen to the mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig and the soprano Elisabeth Grümmer.“Lohengrin”Vienna Philharmonic; Rudolf Kempe, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Celia Applegate, historianCompassion is at the core of “Parsifal,” Wagner’s last and, for many, greatest opera. The music of the prelude connects all living things in its embrace. It’s not heavenly music. It’s music of this world, expressing suffering, struggle, the inevitability of death and the peace of understanding and acceptance. Its slow tempo and gorgeous sounds draw you almost into a trance. But somehow, too, you feel the presence of all things on this earth — and our responsibility to care about it and for it.“Parsifal”Berlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Morris Robinson, bass“Das Rheingold” is just going along, with ebbs and flows, when suddenly, without warning, this incredibly loud, obtrusive, majestic musical theme “debos” its way into the score. Everyone — within the story and in the audience — realizes that something massive and potentially destructive is about to make an appearance.I’m thinking Incredible Hulk vibes, except Wagner has created a pair of Hulks, the brother giants Fasolt and Fafner. Having played Fasolt several times, I can assure you that the theme music brings the moment into focus, and also gets the singers pumped to go out and mentally invest in their characterization. I make it my goal to ensure that my vocal quality immediately following this fabulous introduction matches the intensity and volume of Wagner’s fabulous orchestration, which consists of extremely heavy brass and pulsating, pounding timpani.“Das Rheingold”Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; James Levine, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorOne word associated with Wagner is “cinematic,” in part because of his innovations at the Bayreuth Festival Theater — where the stage, surrounded in darkness, is given the focus of a silver screen, and where the hidden orchestra’s sound fills the auditorium like a Dolby system. But I also see film in his patient moments of diegetic music, such as when Tannhäuser returns from the orgiastic Venusberg, freshly earthbound. The orchestra fades, first to a clarinet solo, then seamlessly to an English horn, standing in for the pipe of a shepherd, who sings an a cappella ode until pilgrims pass through with a hymn. Wagner weaves the pipe and chorus, beautifully but with a sense of naturalism: The orchestra doesn’t even come back until Tannhäuser, overwhelmed by what he sees, exclaims, “Praise to You, almighty God!”“Tannhäuser”Ying Fang, soprano; Johan Botha, tenor; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus; James Levine, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Javier C. Hernández, Times classical music and dance reporter“Der Fliegende Holländer” is the opera that launched Wagner’s career. He was 29 when it premiered in Dresden, and it is generally regarded as his greatest early achievement, with hints throughout of the dramatic intensity and musical flow that would come to characterize his later works. The rousing “Sailor’s Chorus” from the third act shows his early mastery of grand orchestral and choral sound.“Der Fliegende Holländer”Vienna State Opera Chorus; Berlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Stephen Fry, actor in ‘Wagner and Me’Who’d present a single block from a pyramid to give a picture of all Egypt? The epic scale of Wagner is surely his signature quality. But here goes: The last five minutes of “Tristan und Isolde” offer one of the most astonishing moments in all art. Echoing the great pounding of the sea by which she stands, Isolde sings herself to death by way of a shattering musical climax. The orgasmic passage is known as the “Liebestod”: love-death. Its ravishing, horrifying rise and fall still astounds. Finally, it levels out across the sands in an exquisite release.“Tristan und Isolde”Kirsten Flagstad, soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra; Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor (Warner)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorFive minutes to make you love Wagner, and hate him. At the end of his sprawling comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg,” a speech from the kindly shoemaker protagonist, Hans Sachs, takes a dark swerve as Sachs warns of foreign invaders who seek to contaminate “holy German art,” his praise of which is taken up by a fervid crowd — a communal celebration turned nationalistic rally. This stirring choral melody was perhaps the first bit of Wagner I loved. But it is one of the moments in his work that for me now mingles thrill and nausea. Here it is conducted in Vienna in 1944 by Karl Böhm, whose complicity with the Nazis was profound.“Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”Vienna State Opera Chorus; Vienna Philharmonic; Karl Böhm, conductor◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Review: ‘Don Carlos’ Finally Brings French Verdi to the Met

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the sprawling masterpiece, which is being presented by the company for the first time in its original language.Wait, I know I’ve seen this opera before, you may have been thinking as you opened your program at Lincoln Center on Monday evening. It’s the one with the prince in love with his stepmother, right? And his jerk of a father, and that big duet with his friend, and the Spanish Inquisition?But there it was, in black and white: “The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Don Carlos.’”Rarely has a single letter been as significant as that final “s.” The opera that audiences here have seen — the one that has been staged at the Met more than 200 times — is “Don Carlo,” its libretto in Italian. The performance on Monday, though, was being given in the work’s original French.In either language, it is Verdi’s largest, shadowiest masterpiece — and particularly somber on Monday, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continued and the evening opened with the audience rising in silence for a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem by the Met’s chorus and orchestra. Center stage was Vladyslav Buialskyi, a young Ukrainian bass-baritone making his company debut in a tiny role, his hand on his heart.This is, after all, an opera that opens with the characters longing for an end to fierce hostilities between two neighboring nations, their civilians suffering the privations caused by the territorial delusions of a tiny few at the top. The geopolitical battles fueling the plot’s private agonies seemed more vivid than usual as David McVicar’s new production was unveiled.A new production, sure, but a Met premiere? That’s dubious, since almost all of the music will be familiar to anyone who’s heard “Don Carlo” there over the past four decades.But it is nevertheless a milestone for the company to be finally performing the work in the language in which it premiered, at the Paris Opera in 1867. Verdi worked with inspired diligence to shape his musical lines to metrical rhythms subtly different from Italian. For this adaptation of Schiller’s freely ahistorical play, set at the 16th-century Spanish court of Philip II, he painted the sprawling canvas of French grand opera in his own brooding colors.Alas, “Don Carlos” was a mixed success in France, and Verdi continued to revise it over the next two decades, as it premiered and was revived in Italy. (And since this was a time when librettos were commonly translated into the language of the audience, it was performed in Italian, as “Don Carlo.”) The eventual result was a smorgasbord of versions, from which opera companies can now freely take elements.But as Will Crutchfield recently wrote in The New York Times, those versions boil down to essentially two: “The first is the one premiered in Paris, plus or minus some pieces added or cut before and after. The second is the recomposed score premiered in Milan in 1884, with or without restoration of the 1867 Act I — set in France and introducing the vexed love of Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois.”Yoncheva, center left, hand in hand with Etienne Dupuis as Rodrigue in the spectacular auto-da-fé scene that places “Don Carlos” in the French grand opera tradition.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met has more or less done the 1884 version since a landmark production there in 1950 reintroduced the opera to the standard repertory after decades of neglect. The piece had circulated largely in Italian, and was done in New York exclusively in that language. The big news came in 1979, when a new Met staging restored that 1867 Act I. Hence the five-act form in which “Don Carlo” — with tweaks here and there — has been presented ever since.And always in Italian. When Yannick Nézet-Séguin led a new production in 2010, it was in Italian, and when that production was revived, it was in Italian — even as major houses around the world had broken with that tradition.But Nézet-Séguin suggested that he wanted to conduct the piece in French. Now, as the company’s music director, he has made it so. It speaks to his passion for the score that this is the first opera in his still-young Met career for which he is leading a third run, and his conception of it — long-breathed, patient, light-textured — embodies the vast elegance of French grand opera.Those qualities are crucial in supporting a triumphant turn in the title role by Matthew Polenzani, singing Carlos for the first time in either language. Polenzani is not the swaggering, trumpeting Franco Corelli-style tenor generally associated with the part — though he rises, stylishly, to fiery intensity — but rather a vocalist of refinement, inwardness and melancholy.And throughout the work French conveys all of that better than Italian. The classic duet of brotherhood between Carlos and his friend, Rodrigue, the Marquis of Posa, is a loudspeaker announcement in Italian, as “Dio che nell’alma infondere.” In French, as “Dieu, tu semas dans nos âmes,” it feels far more intimate, a cocooned moment on which the audience spies. Particularly in this performance, with the smooth-toned, seductive baritone Etienne Dupuis as a Rodrigue uniquely able to draw close to him the hapless, isolated Carlos.As Élisabeth, who is betrothed to Carlos before being married to his father as part of the peace settlement between France and Spain, the soprano Sonya Yoncheva lacks tonal richness, but her slender, focused voice penetrates, and it fits her interpretation of the character as coolly dignified, even chilly, enough to endure the sacrifices she has made.The mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, her high notes blazing and her chest voice booming, with just a slight loss of ease in between, sings with generosity and acts with liveliness as the princess Eboli, whose unrequited love for Carlos inspires her vengeance, then her contrition. As the implacable Grand Inquisitor, the bass-baritone John Relyea has stony authority.Jamie Barton as the vengeful then contrite princess Eboli.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDupuis, standing, with Eric Owens as King Philippe ll, the tyrannical but melancholy ruler of Spain in the opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe only weak link is the bass-baritone Eric Owens as King Philippe, his voice dry and colorless, his face and presence inexpressive, problems that also dogged his recent Met performances in “Porgy and Bess.” He renders one of the most nuanced characters in opera — a man of tremendous power, vulnerability, anger and confusion — a cipher.The silky, articulate bass Matthew Rose is luxury casting as the monk who — stick with me — might actually be Charles V, Philippe’s father, who is (at least presumably) recently dead. Why isn’t Rose singing Philippe?This is the safe, dependable McVicar’s 11th Met production, with two more (“Medea” and “Fedora”) to come next season. His “Don Carlos” is spare, straightforward, largely traditional and largely neutral, dominated by grimly rough, curved, looming stone walls pocked with semicircular openings, as if the characters — costumed in richly embroidered black — were wandering through a catacomb.I wish McVicar and Nézet-Séguin had restored the first act’s opening section, performed at the Met from 1979 to 2006, which shows Élisabeth among the suffering people of France. It deepens the conflict she faces not long after, when she is forced to decide between her duty to them — the marriage to Philippe that will end the war — and her love for Carlos.At least that crucial first act is here. There is a case to be made for doing the opera in Italian, as it will be when this staging is revived next season. But that revival will also revert, for the first time since the early 1970s, to the four-act version, a dismal decision that the Met should reconsider.Carlos’s physical distance from Élisabeth is contrasted with his closeness to Rodrigue throughout the performance in David McVicar’s staging.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMcVicar does offer a few welcome idiosyncrasies. An acrobatic jester figure, his face painted skull-white, restores to the auto-da-fé scene some of its intended spookiness. And, after contrasting Carlos’s physical distance from Élisabeth with his closeness to Rodrigue all evening, McVicar ends the opera with the dying Carlos being greeted by his already dead friend, who lowers the prince to the stage in what feels very close to implying posthumous, well, union.The scoring of that moment is the most obvious of the handful of ways in which this performance diverges from how the opera has been heard at the Met since at least the 1950s. The 1884 ending, a fortissimo blast over which Élisabeth’s voice soars, has red-meat appeal, particularly if your soprano has a boffo high B.But that is otherwise an all-too-thrilling conclusion to a bitter, ambivalent opera that ends better in the 1867 version’s sober quiet, with monks softly chanting about Charles V being reduced to mere dust. It is the sound of history drifting on, past any and all human lives, played and sung here with the delicacy and gravity that made this a special night for Nézet-Séguin and his company.Don CarlosThrough March 26 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Metropolitan Opera Says It Will Cut Ties With Pro-Putin Artists

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      The decision comes as arts institutions seek to distance themselves from some Russian performers amid the invasion of Ukraine.The Metropolitan Opera said on Sunday that it would no longer engage with performers or other institutions that have voiced support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, becoming the latest cultural organization to seek to distance itself from some Russian artists amid Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said that the Met, which has long employed Russians as top singers and has a producing partnership with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, had an obligation to show support for the people of Ukraine.“While we believe strongly in the warm friendship and cultural exchange that has long existed between the artists and artistic institutions of Russia and the United States,” Mr. Gelb said in a video statement, “we can no longer engage with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him.”Mr. Gelb added that the policy would be in effect “until the invasion and killing has been stopped, order has been restored, and restitutions have been made.”The Met’s decision could affect artists like the superstar soprano Anna Netrebko, who has ties to Mr. Putin and was once pictured holding a flag used by some Russian-backed separatist groups in Ukraine. Ms. Netrebko is scheduled to appear at the Met in Puccini’s “Turandot” beginning on April 30.Ms. Netrebko has tried to distance herself from the invasion, posting a statement on Saturday on Instagram saying she was “opposed to this war.” She added a note of defiance, writing that “forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right.”It was unclear if her statement would satisfy the Met’s new test.The company’s decision will also likely mean the end of its collaboration with the Bolshoi, including on a new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” that is scheduled for next season. The Met was relying on the Bolshoi for the staging’s sets and costumes, but now it might have to change course.“We’re scrambling, but I think we’ll have no choice but to physically build our own sets and costumes,” Mr. Gelb said in an interview on Sunday evening.He added that he was saddened that the Bolshoi partnership, which began five years ago, would likely come to an end — at least for the moment.“It’s terrible that artistic relationships, at least temporarily, are the collateral damage of these actions by Putin,” he said.Understand Russia’s Attack on UkraineCard 1 of 7What is at the root of this invasion? More

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      ‘Don Carlo’ or ‘Don Carlos’? Verdi Comes to the Met in French

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      On Monday, the company performs the much-revised masterpiece for the first time in its original language.For the first 80 or so years of its life, Verdi’s “Don Carlos” was a problem opera on the margins of the repertory. Audiences saw it only sporadically; almost everyone who wrote about it described an uneven “transitional” work, a troubled experiment on the eve of the composer’s final masterpieces: “Aida,” “Otello” and “Falstaff.”Today, this sprawling, packed epic — based on the tumults of 16th-century Spain under Philip II as filtered through two different plays — is part of every opera lover’s basic nutrition. The Metropolitan Opera has a lot to do with that: In 1950, Rudolf Bing made the bold choice to revive the work for the opening night of his first season as general manager. The Met was the first house in the world to make “Don Carlos” standard repertory.And yet the company has never performed its original words. That changes on Monday, when Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads a new David McVicar staging of the opera, sung at last to the French libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle. What took so long?The answer starts with the opera’s complex history. Paris, when Verdi went there in 1866 with his nearly finished score, was Europe’s cultural capital, and required the longest, grandest operas. Verdi — accustomed to writing three-hour works and now given the chance at a four-and-a-half-hour extravaganza — overshot the mark. The general rehearsal on Feb. 24, 1867, clocked in at five hours, 13 minutes.The general rehearsal for the premiere of “Don Carlos” in Paris in 1867 lasted more than five hours, forcing cuts to be made under pressure.Sepia Times/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesBut performance start times were inflexible at 7:30 p.m., and the last trains for the suburbs left at 12:35 a.m. People needed time to get to the station. This meant a lot of cutting under pressure.One legacy of Napoleon’s civil service reforms: Parisian functionaries were trained never to throw away a piece of paper. So when scholars got serious about “Don Carlos” a century later, they could reconstruct that cut music from handwritten orchestra parts, draft librettos, rehearsal reports and the like. (Andrew Porter, the longtime music critic of The New Yorker, was the unofficial leader of this brigade.)Some of that music is significant and beautiful, and has been restored in some modern productions. But in his time, Verdi went in the opposite direction: cutting still more music, tweaking some of it and eventually producing a thorough (and much shorter) revision. The upshot: five or even more iterations of “Don Carlos” for performers to choose among today, and infinite chances for confusion in discussing them.Simplification may help: There are essentially two versions. The first is the one premiered in Paris, plus or minus some pieces added or cut before and after. The second is the recomposed score premiered in Milan in 1884, with or without restoration of the 1867 Act I — set in France and introducing the vexed love of Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois. The Met is including Act I, as it has done since 1979. For the other acts, it plans on a mixture: mostly the revisions of 1884, but with selected restorations from 1867. For instance, the opera is set to end with a quiet reprise of the monks’ chant, which was changed in 1884 to a fortissimo outburst.It has to be emphasized, because many still assume otherwise: All these versions are in French. There is no Italian version of “Don Carlos,” only an Italian translation, just as there was for “Carmen” or “Mignon” when those were done at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. In that era, the idea of opera as drama was taken seriously, and intelligibility was essential.Jussi Bjorling and Delia Rigal starred when the Met opened its 1950-51 season with a landmark production of the opera.Sedge LeBlang/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesThe only exception: Italians singing in Italian were heard everywhere, just as today American pop music is enjoyed worldwide in English. That’s why the Met opened its doors with Gounod’s “Faust” in Italian and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” had its London premiere in Italian. But why did “Don Carlos” hang on so long beyond those as a quasi-Italian work? Because it was not a hit in Paris, and vanished from the repertory there within two years. Verdi hoped to relaunch it with his revision, but it was not wanted; Paris had fallen in love with “Aida” in the meantime. At La Scala, “Don Carlos” was more successful. It stayed at the fringes of the Italian repertory, and spread exclusively from there.Translations, though necessary in a world that wanted to understand what was being sung, are never as good as original texts; it’s just too hard to find words that convey the right thought and fit the notes decently and elegantly. The “Don Carlos” translation (by Achille de Lauzières, supplemented by Angelo Zanardini for the 1884 revisions) has the further problem of sounding ornate and old-fashioned compared with the French.Porter used to make this point by juxtaposing Élisabeth’s reminiscence of Fontainebleau, “mon coeur est plein de votre image,” with Elisabetta’s “ver voi schiude il pensiero i vanni.” The French he translated as “my heart is full of your image”; the Italian, as something like “t’ward thee my thought unfurls its pinions.” An open-and-shut case for the superiority of the original.Or is it? The same type of comparison could make us prefer the French text of “La Traviata,” and nobody wants to hear that argument, because it wouldn’t be “the original.” What we see here is not so much the problem of translation as the fact that Italian libretto-writing in the 1860s still followed a highly inflected poetic code built over centuries, while French texts had become simpler and more straightforward — more modern, if you like. The translators could easily have written “pieno ho il cor dell’immagin vostra.” It fits the poetic meter, and is also faithful to the French; it just isn’t the way they wanted to write. (Yet.)Jonas Kaufmann sang Don Carlos when the Paris Opera performed the work in French in 2017.Agathe Poupeney/Paris Opera BalletAnd there is another undiscussed problem, having to do with the way meter shapes melody. The technical details would take too long to explain, but it’s obvious at a glance that the rhythms of “Grow old along with me” and “Do not go gentle into that good night” are not going to generate the same kind of tune. Verdi had a lifetime of experience imagining melodies for lines of seven, eight or 10 syllables — but not nine syllables, which traditional Italian poetry did not use, and French did.A very clear example comes in that somber chant of the monks, heard at the beginning of Act II and recalled in the last act. The instrumental statements make perfectly clear what Verdi thought the rhythm was, and the Italian translation — supplied in “ottonario” (eight-syllable) meter — allows it to be sung that way. But in the original French an extra syllable has to be tucked in, irregularly and somewhat awkwardly, in every second bar. The same problem affects the tenor aria, and again the translators provide the familiar verse-form from Verdi’s comfort zone, instead of the “novenario” he had to set in Paris.This, however, is devil’s advocacy. Yes, the opera is better overall in French — but it is a subtle superiority. It shows up not in obvious “gotcha” errors, but in the accumulation of many moments when the dramatic situation is precise in the original and fuzzy in the translation, where the phrases breathe naturally as Verdi wrote them and have to be rearranged or interrupted in Italian. It probably affects the singers more than the listeners, but the cumulative impact can be profound.An example: King Philip and the Grand Inquisitor are discussing, with exquisite caution, the inflammatory behavior of Philip’s son Carlos. What punishment for his rebellion? asks the priest. “Tout — ou rien,” replies the king: “all — or nothing.” In Italian, to preserve those three lonely notes, he answers instead “mezzo estrem” (“extreme measures”). He means the choice between putting his own son to death or allowing him to flee. God himself, observes the holy man, once chose the former.It is all chilling in either language. But the Italian is blunt, and the French is sharp. Multiply that by a hundred, and you have more than reason enough for the Met’s big change after a century of translation. It’s time.Will Crutchfield, the artistic director of Teatro Nuovo, has conducted “Don Carlos” in both Italian and French. More