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      James Maraniss, Librettist of Long-Silent Opera, Dies at 76

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      A Spanish scholar who taught for more than four decades at Amherst College, he waited, along with the composer, 32 years for “Life Is a Dream” to be staged.James Maraniss, a Spanish scholar who wrote the libretto for an opera that was finished in 1978, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 but was not fully staged for another decade, died on Jan. 9 at his home in Chesterfield, Mass. He was 76.The cause was a heart attack, his brother, David, said.Mr. Maraniss, a professor of Spanish and European studies at Amherst College, had never written a libretto when the composer Lewis Spratlan, a faculty colleague, approached him in 1975 to collaborate on an opera based on Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s early 17th-century drama “La Vida es sueño” (“Life Is a Dream”). The piece had been commissioned by the New Haven Opera Theater in Connecticut.Excited at how Calderon’s vivid writing quickly conjured musical images in his mind, Mr. Spratlan told Mr. Maraniss the news about the commission — not knowing that Mr. Maraniss was an expert on Calderon’s work.“It was a wonderful happenstance that this was the case,” Mr. Spratlan, now retired from Amherst’s music department, recalled in a phone interview. The two men, friends and neighbors in adjoining apartments in a campus house, soon started working together and completed the three-act opera in 1978. That year, Mr. Maraniss also published “On Calderon,” a study of the writer’s plays, including “La Vida es sueño,” which is about a prince in conflict with his father, the king.Mr. Maraniss’s familiarity with Calderon’s rhythms and language animated the libretto.“Jim managed to take extremely elaborate 17th-century Spanish, the equivalent of Elizabethan English, with very exalted levels of diction, and rendered it into modern English that preserved all the grandeur of Golden Age Spanish,” Mr. Spratlan said.By the time they were finished, though, the New Haven Opera Theater had gone out of business, and no other opera company would produce it. Frustrated for many years, Mr. Spratlan finally raised money for concert performances of the second act in early 2000, first at Amherst, then at Harvard. Mr. Spratlan nominated himself for the Pulitzer for music and won.Still, “Life Is A Dream” did not receive a full production until 2010, at the Santa Fe Opera.In his review in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini described the libretto as “elegantly poetic,” and said that Mr. Maraniss and Mr. Spratlan “honor Calderón by adhering closely to the philosophically ambiguous play, considered the ‘Hamlet’ of Spanish drama. Sometimes too closely.”A scene from the Santa Fe Opera’s production of “Life Is a Dream,” by the composer Lewis Spratlan and Mr. Marannis, colleagues at Amherst.Ken HowardDavid Maraniss said that his brother didn’t complain about the long wait for a full production.“But that libretto meant as much to Jim as anything he had done in his life,” Mr. Maraniss, a journalist and biographer who won a Pulitzer in 1993 for his coverage of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign for The Washington Post, said in a phone interview. “I can’t say the waiting was as torturous for Jim as it was for Lew, but it was a great feeling of relief when it was finally produced.”James Maraniss and Mr. Spratlan won the 2016 Charles Ives Opera Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.James Elliott Maraniss was born on March 22, 1945, in Ann Arbor, Mich. He moved several times with his family before settling in 1957 in Madison, Wis., where his father, Elliott, a journalist who had been fired from his job as rewrite man at The Detroit Times after an informant identified him as a Communist, found work at The Capital Times. His mother, Mary (Cummins) Maraniss, was an editor at the University of Wisconsin Press.After graduating from Harvard in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish literature, Mr. Maraniss earned a master’s there in the same subject. He then began work on his Ph.D in Romance languages and literature at Princeton University. It was granted in 1975.Following several months working for Wisconsin Gov. Patrick Lucey on Native American and migrant worker issues, Mr. Maraniss was hired at Amherst in early 1972 where he remained until he retired in 2015. He taught Spanish culture and literature in Spanish.Until recently, he had been working on a translation of “Don Quixote.”In addition to his brother, Mr. Maraniss is survived by his wife, Gigi Kaeser; his daughter, Lucia Maraniss; his sons, Ben and Elliott; his stepson, Michael Kelly; and his sister Jean Alexander. Another sister, Wendy, died in 1997.Mr. Maraniss in 2015, the year he retired from Amherst College after teaching there since 1972. Amherst CollegeAfter his work on “Life Is a Dream,” Mr. Maraniss wrote the Portuguese lyrics to James Taylor’s 1985 song “Only a Dream in Rio” and translated fiction and essays in the 1990s by Antonio Benitez-Rojo, a Cuban émigré and a major voice in Caribbean literature who was a professor of Spanish at Amherst.“I was bored with being an academic until I began a new life as his translator,” Mr. Maraniss said in an obituary of Mr. Benitez-Rojo, “and in a sense his presenter to the English-speaking world, to share that degree of his power, which was that of a great art.” More

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      A Day of Divas

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      Two star sopranos, Renée Fleming and Sonya Yoncheva, held court in two of New York’s grandest venues on Sunday.A little imperiousness? A lot of extravagance? A touch of the supernatural?You could try to come up with the recipe for a diva, but you just know one when you see it. Or hear it: In an appraisal of André Leon Talley this weekend, the New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman described his words as those “of a diva, uttered at a time when divas were going out of style.”Out of style, perhaps, but not out of existence. In fact, I read that appraisal on Sunday as I was getting ready for a day of rare diva alignment, with two star sopranos holding court in two of New York’s grandest venues: Renée Fleming at Carnegie Hall in the afternoon, and Sonya Yoncheva at the Metropolitan Opera in the evening.If you were looking for evidence of the demise of the diva — at least of the stereotypical variety — it’s true, neither of these seemingly genial, generous women came across as imperious. And clutch your pearls: Fleming didn’t even change gowns at intermission.But divadom still shows signs of life. It’s in tiny things, like this sentence in the program at Carnegie: “Ms. Fleming’s jewelry is by Ann Ziff for Tamsen Z.” And at the Met, when Yoncheva sang the phrase “ta première larme” (“your first tear”) in a Chausson song, she slowly raised her hand to her face, as if she really believed she was wiping that larme away. Sometimes, even in opera, it’s the gesture that makes the diva.In a gesture of becoming modesty, Fleming shared a reasonably crowded stage for the most prominent part of her concert: the New York premiere of “Penelope,” an account of the wife who waits very, very patiently for Homer’s Odysseus to return from the Trojan War.The soprano Renée Fleming, center, was joined on Sunday at Carnegie Hall for the New York premiere of André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s “Penelope” by (from left) the pianist Simone Dinnerstein, the Emerson String Quartet and the actress Uma Thurman.Chris LeeLeft unfinished at the death of its composer, André Previn, in 2019, the piece was stitched together from manuscript sketches and drafts of Tom Stoppard’s text. The 40-minute result is as talky as a Stoppard play but far less sparkling or affecting. Its tone mostly pseudo-archaic, this is pretty much just an “Odyssey” in extreme digest, lightly backed by the Emerson String Quartet and the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.There are so many words that many of them were assigned to be spoken, to shorten the running time. Thus the title role was split between a singer and an actress (at the premiere three years ago and here, the movie star Uma Thurman).Thurman is a natural at intoning amid the wispy thatches of underscoring, and she sometimes tries to inject some attitude into the dry libretto. But it’s never quite clear why the role has been divided. Couldn’t a single performer just shift between speaking and singing? The bifurcation works only to dilute interest in both parties.Fleming is game, even if she doesn’t get to take lyrical flight: The soprano part is almost entirely recitative — sung narration — and never blossoms into aria or gives us any real sense of Penelope’s character or emotions. There are reminders of Previn’s stylish facility, as when a quietly swirling little quartet interlude slips into a minor-key whisper of “Here Comes the Bride” before modulating, almost quicker than you can hear it, into gentle satisfaction. But mostly the music seems scant and exhausted trying to keep up with Stoppard.It followed intermission; earlier, the Emerson played Barber’s 1936 Quartet, dedicating it from the stage to Roger Tapping, the superb Juilliard Quartet violist, who died last week. Dinnerstein rolled out the deliberate arpeggios and rushing surges of Philip Glass’s “Mad Rush,” and accompanied Fleming in a set of five songs altogether more memorable than “Penelope.” The first, Grieg’s lively “Lauf der Welt,” didn’t play to this singer’s mellow strengths, but his “Zur Rosenzeit” very much did.Fleming is 62, but there is still considerable richness in the middle of her voice, and her dips into low notes were done cleanly, without the syrupy scooping for which she was once often criticized. In the wistful quiet of “Zur Rosenzeit” she was moving, almost vaporizing the second syllable in “meinem Garten” (“my garden”) for the touching effect of the past vanishing as she remembered it. Fauré’s “Les Berceaux” had discreet, dusky power.And she was earnestly impassioned in “Evening,” Kevin Puts’s new setting of a Dorianne Laux poem, most charming in a middle section with a Joni Mitchell vibe: a deliberate, repetitive piano riff anchoring a free and easy vocal line. (Fleming takes the Meryl Streep role in Puts’s coming operatic adaptation of “The Hours.”)Yoncheva’s solo recital on the Met stage was a sign that she had swiftly risen to become one of the company’s core artists.Ken Howard/Met OperaAt the Met, Yoncheva was given one of the dearest gifts the company can bestow on a valued artist: a solo recital on its stage. And at 40, she has become valued with dizzying swiftness. Though she jumped into a few memorable revivals starting in 2013, it was only when she opened the 2015-16 season, in Verdi’s “Otello,” that she cemented her place in this house; at the end of February, she will star in a new production of “Don Carlos.”On Sunday she displayed the ease with which she can fill even the vast Met with an encompassing mood: darkly nostalgic and death-haunted, as you’d expect from her melancholy repertory. Even her sensuality brooded, compellingly joyless; Malcolm Martineau’s relative effervescence at the piano placed her gifts in high relief.Her voice is supple but lean. It feels like an instrument, in the most literal sense: a vehicle of expression rather than a remarkable sound in its own right. It has a low center of gravity and a quality of intimacy; Yoncheva gives the sense of singing to herself even when she’s not being soft.As she began with a set of French songs by Duparc, Viardot, Chausson, Donizetti and Delibes, her high notes were thin and stiff. Indeed, throughout the evening those notes above the staff were a problem, mostly when she had to rise to them through a long musical line. Stabbed out of the air, loud ones had startling fullness and clarity.But from the first number — Duparc’s “L’Invitation au voyage” — her interpretive intentions were intriguing, as she stretched the poem’s vision of “luxury, calm and delight” into a clear, forbidding premonition of the afterlife. With Yoncheva, details are everything: In Duparc’s “Au pays où se fait la guerre,” the repetitions of “son retour” (“his return”) at the end of each verse had a different gauzy texture, subtly increasing the complexity and tension of the illusion that a lover will come back.A silvery sheen to “printemps” in Chausson’s “Le temps des lilas” gave a brief impression of dewy spring; there was grandeur in Donizetti’s “Depuis qu’une autre a su te plaire” without overkill. The Spanish-style ornaments in Delibes’s “Les filles de Cadix” weren’t dashed off for smiles, but were sung with intensity, turning what could be a throwaway number into an unlikely burning drama.In a second half of Italian songs, Yoncheva was dreamy in Puccini, though her voice wanted greater size and juiciness to fill out her epic conception of “Canto d’anime.” In works by Martucci, Tosti and Verdi, her phrasing had confidence and style, a carefully constructed but persuasive evocation of naturalness; though she had a music stand in front of her throughout the evening, she sang with focus and commitment.Tosti’s “Ideale” was particularly striking, its finale building from faintness to climax. Warmly received, she moved to classic arias for encores: a refreshingly unsappy “Donde lieta uscì” from “La Bohème”; a genuinely sexy, insinuating “Carmen” Habanera; and “Adieu, notre petite table” from “Manon,” tenderly mused.Oh, and she spent the first half in a black gown, billowing above the bodice, and the second in white — shiny satin throughout, a dream of a diva. More

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      One Opera Opening Would Make Any Composer Happy. He Has Two.

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      Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Intimate Apparel” and “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” are premiering in New York almost simultaneously.When the composer Ricky Ian Gordon saw Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” on Broadway in the early 1970s, it was unlike anything he’d watched on a stage.“He was creating this musical theater that felt like foreign film to me,” Gordon said in a recent interview. “And I wanted to make something in the theater that felt like foreign movies.”“That’s what ‘Follies’ was: a musical about broken lives and disappointment,” he continued, adding an expletive for emphasis. “I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”Gordon, now 65, did go on to create art inspired by those subjects — in the process becoming considerably better known in the world of opera than theater.In a coincidence caused by pandemic delays, not one but two of his operas are opening nearly simultaneously before this month is out, and both involve the darkness Gordon adored in “Follies.” “Intimate Apparel,” at Lincoln Center Theater, for which Lynn Nottage adapted her own play, deals with lies, deceptions and thwarted dreams in the story of a Black seamstress in 1905 New York. And “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” presented by New York City Opera, is based on a semi-autobiographical Giorgio Bassani novel about the fate of privileged members of the Jewish community in Ferrara, Italy, who were tragically blind to what awaited them during World War II.It’s a highly unusual situation for a living composer: To have two of your operas playing at once in New York, your name usually has to be something like Puccini, whose “Tosca” and “La Bohème” are both running this January at the Metropolitan Opera.“One new opera demands an enormous amount of attention, but two is downright invasive,” Gordon said. “It is incredibly stressful, no matter how often I meditate, but it is also enormously fulfilling, and thankfully, pride-building. It is also strange to be going back and forth between the Lower East Side in 1905 and Ferrara in 1945, but thank God for the IRT.”From left: Krysty Swann, Kearstin Piper Brown and Naomi Louisa O’Connell in “Intimate Apparel,” for which Lynn Nottage has adapted her play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo fully grasp Gordon’s career, it is important to travel back a little less far than that, to the years that bridged the turn of the 21st century, when it appeared as if he would be among a new generation of composers rejuvenating the American musical. Drawing inspiration from Ned Rorem and Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Scott Joplin, he was often lumped in a similarly arty cohort that included fellow composers Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa and Jason Robert Brown.Songs by all four were included on Audra McDonald’s debut solo album, “Way Back to Paradise,” a hybrid of musical theater, avant-pop and art song that came out in 1998 — and, in hindsight, announced a changing of the guard that ended up not happening, as more mainstream rock and pop styles conquered Broadway.Gordon’s subtly lyrical harmonies slowly worked their way into your subconscious, and he suggested emotion rather than hitting the listener with it. That was not what musical theater wanted.“They always called us ‘children of Sondheim,’ ” Gordon said. “He opened a door, but it wasn’t an open door — it was just the door for Sondheim to walk through.”“People started saying that we didn’t write melodies and beats,” he added, then shot out a joking expletive, as if responding to the charge. “Every one of us writes melodies and writes rhythm, but in the language we grew up on and that we evolved out of.”Born in 1956, Gordon was raised on Long Island; he was — as Donald Katz documented in “Home Fires,” a much-praised 1992 book about the Gordon family’s middle-class aspirations and frustrations — once in line to inherit his father’s electrical business. But he discovered opera when he was eight, stumbling onto The Victor Book of the Opera at a friend’s house.“My memory of it is like a Harry Potter moment, like there was smoke and light behind this book,” he said.He was also open to pop, and in his early teens became “transfixed, mesmerized, completely and overwhelmingly obsessed with Joni Mitchell,” as he put it in a story he wrote about her last year for Spin magazine. The story is drawn from a forthcoming memoir that grew out of a writing group Gordon started with some poets and novelists during the pandemic; self-examination is not new to him, and he is candid about his past struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction and eating disorders.He initially enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University as a pianist, but ended up a composer, obsessed with bringing words to musical life. “If I’m setting a poem to music, I memorize it and I let it marinate and live inside of me,” he said. “I love singers, so I want to give them something to act. Even if it’s a song, it should be like a little mini opera.”By the 1990s and early 2000s, he was straddling various forms and genres. He wrote the song cycle “Genius Child” for the soprano Harolyn Blackwell, and his first opera, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” a meditation informed by the AIDS epidemic, premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1996. But his work also appeared Off Broadway, including such musical-theater projects as “Dream True,” a collaboration with the writer and director Tina Landau, and the Proust-inspired show “My Life With Albertine,” which opened at Playwrights Horizons in 2003 with a then-unknown Kelli O’Hara in the title role.After being touted as part of a new generation of musical theater composers, Gordon found more of a home in the opera world.Sarah ShatzThat show, alas, did not go over well, even if Ben Brantley praised the score’s “lovely, intricately layered melodies” in his review for The New York Times.Gordon was proud of “My Life With Albertine” and its failure hurt him deeply. “I thought I needed to face facts: The musical theater right now is not where I am going to flower,” he said. “I had written to all these opera companies that I wanted to do opera, so the next thing I did was ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ with Minnesota Opera. Suddenly, I felt this was where I could do what I do. Now I’m at Lincoln Center, where musicals are usually done, but I’m doing my opera here.”Gordon was, indeed, happily chatting away in an empty room at Lincoln Center Theater, where “Intimate Apparel” — which was well into previews when the first pandemic lockdown came, and now opens Jan. 31 — had just wrapped up a rehearsal in the Mitzi E. Newhouse space.Suddenly, voices piped in from a monitor: A matinee of the musical “Flying Over Sunset” had begun at the Vivian Beaumont Theater above. Coincidentally, that show’s lyrics were written by Michael Korie, Gordon’s librettist on “The Grapes of Wrath” and now “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” which City Opera is presenting with the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, starting Jan. 27.Doing “Intimate Apparel” at Lincoln Center Theater was not a given. It is part of the company’s joint commissioning program with the Met, and the other works from that program that have reached the stage, like Nico Muhly’s “Two Boys” and the recent “Eurydice” by Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl, have been produced at the opera house.“It was really time for Lincoln Center Theater to get the benefit of one of these shows,” Paul Cremo, the Met’s dramaturg, said in an interview. “We thought that with the intimacy of the play, it would really benefit from that space, where some audience members are just six feet away from the characters. And Ricky wrote a beautiful orchestration for two pianos.”Gordon “was a really lovely guide through this process,” said Nottage, left, and the two are at work on other opera.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesWhile Gordon was working on a small scale, for just a couple of instruments, Nottage was tasked with expanding her play, which consists mostly of two-person interactions, into a libretto that would bring together larger groups of characters and make use of a chorus. (Bartlett Sher directs.)“I shared with Ricky what I was listening to and we spoke a lot about what the texture and the feel of the piece should be,” Nottage said. “He’s very deeply invested in Americana music and, in particular, ragtime. What he does really beautifully is weave all of these traditional forms together without it feeling like pastiche. He was a really lovely guide through this process.” (The pair got along so well that they are now at work on a commission from Opera Theater of St. Louis with Nottage’s daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber.)The musical style of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” draws from a different well. “It’s my Italian opera,” Gordon said. “I just thought of putting myself in the head of Puccini, Verdi, Bellini. It’s very different from ‘Intimate Apparel,’ which is very American.”Anthony Ciaramitaro and Rachel Blaustein in rehearsal for “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” about Jewish Italians on the cusp of World War II.Sarah ShatzOne major difference is size: The “Finzi-Continis” score has been arranged for a 15-piece orchestra for the City Opera run and can be expanded for larger ensembles, especially as there are tentative plans to produce it in Italy.“It’s absolutely, unabashedly melodic, just beautiful sweeping melodies,” said Michael Capasso, the general director of City Opera, who is staging the production with Richard Stafford.The two Gordon projects illustrate both the composer’s ecumenical tastes and his versatility. “Ricky sounds like Ricky,” Korie said in an interview, “but he’s not afraid to do what classical opera composers did, or what Rodgers and Hammerstein did for years, and what composers in theater still do, which is they allow themselves to immerse themselves in the sounds of other characters, other times, other places.”From left: Gordon with Michael Korie, the librettist of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” and Richard Stafford, who is staging the production with Michael Capasso.Sarah Shatz“Finzi-Continis” keeps with his early desire to make something in the theater that felt like foreign movies: Gordon has long been a fan of Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award-winning film version, from 1970. But rewatching it a few years ago hit him especially hard.“I think there was something about the juxtaposition of personal pain and universal pain — I suddenly saw what made that story so tragic,” he said. “I couldn’t even endure it.”So he called Korie to suggest they adapt Bassani’s book.It’s not a coincidence that both “Intimate Apparel” and “Finzi-Continis” are set in the past, because most of Gordon’s work is. “In some way I’m a memorialist,” he said. “I very often write from a place of grief.”Yet, asked by email what she thought was his signature style, Kelli O’Hara unexpectedly answered: “Joy. I don’t think the subject matters are always joyous, but the music-making is the healer. So yes. Joy.”And, indeed, Gordon chuckled when he said: “I’m lucky that I’m activated by my unhappiness rather than paralyzed. I’ve never been able to sit still because I never felt like I had done enough, I never felt important enough. It has caused me enormous pain but it made me never stop writing. And I’m glad I didn’t shut up.” More

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      He Was an Important Conductor. Also a Great One.

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      Hans Rosbaud was renowned as a modern-music specialist. But newly released archival recordings demonstrate his gifts were far broader.There is precisely one famous story about Hans Rosbaud — though, like its subject, it is not quite as famous as it ought to be.This Austrian conductor was asleep at his home in March 1954 when the telephone rang. On the line was a producer at Hamburg Radio, a little desperate. Could Rosbaud come to cover for the injured Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, and oversee the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” a gargantuan opera unperformed since being left unfinished in 1932?Rosbaud had never seen the score. His mind likely drifted to the 1930s: Back then Schoenberg had told Rosbaud forebodingly that he had “not imposed at all any reserve concerning difficulties of execution” in writing the opera. He clearly assumed no one would dare perform it.When was the premiere scheduled, Rosbaud asked the radio producer, fearfully? In exactly one week.This was a difficult prospect, but not the impossible one it would have been for almost anyone else. “One is almost forced to apply the word genius to Hans Rosbaud’s masterful control of the work,” The New York Times later reported of the performance. Genius enough, indeed, that the broadcast was released on record in 1957, the year Rosbaud led the staged premiere of “Moses und Aron” in Zurich — surpassing “even himself,” as a critic wrote.The recording still holds up, a fire coruscating through its lucidity. Had Schoenberg lived to hear it, he might have repeated the thanks he had offered Rosbaud in 1931 for a performance of his “Variations for Orchestra,” when he wrote in awe at having heard his work performed “with clarity, with love, with design.”Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron”NDR Symphony Orchestra, 1954 (Sony)No musician of Rosbaud’s generation did more to canonize its avant-garde. Igor Stravinsky offered a letter of recommendation for “this high-minded musician, this aristocrat among conductors.” Paul Hindemith was a classmate and lifelong friend. Anton Webern was a house guest.“When a composer speaks of Rosbaud the conductor,” Pierre Boulez wrote of the man to whom his masterpiece, “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” is dedicated, “he is speaking in the first place of a friend.”Joan Evans, a musicologist and Rosbaud biographer, has listed 173 premieres that he gave from 1923 until his death in 1962, the beneficiaries running from Fritz Adam to Bernd Alois Zimmermann by way of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Gyorgy Ligeti and Luigi Nono. The Musical Times of London eulogized him simply as “the greatest conductor of contemporary music.”Webern’s “Sechs Stücke” (Op.6, No. 4)SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1957 (Universal Music France)But this “dream figure” who would “always give the future the benefit of the doubt,” as Boulez wrote, chafed at his formidable reputation.“I am not a modern music specialist,” Rosbaud told a German newspaper in 1956. “In Aix-en-Provence I am characterized as a Mozart expert; in Munich, I am regarded as a specialist of Bruckner. It is dangerous to classify musicians in this manner.”Particularly so, for Rosbaud’s own fate. His public stature has never approached the private respect in which musicians held him, in part because of his advocacy for music that has never really caught on. Quiet and scholarly, this “grim, Lincolnesque” man, as a writer once described him, seemed to be the antithesis of a celebrity maestro. His major positions were not with big-name symphonies, but less-prominent radio ensembles. He made few commercial records, superb though those few were. He had no interest in fame.Few conductors, then, have more to gain from an opening of the vaults. More than 700 of Rosbaud’s performances have been languishing in archives, most of them at SWR, the successor to Southwest German Radio in Baden-Baden, his artistic home after 1948.Rosbaud leading his radio orchestra in Baden-Baden, his artistic home after 1948.SWRSince 2017, SWR has released 59 CDs from those tapes, in a project that covers Rosbaud’s work in composers from Mozart to Sibelius. Much remains still to materialize, not least what should be essential boxes of 20th-century music. But despite variable, usually mono sound, what has already emerged is plenty to prove he was far more than his legend. Without question one of the most important conductors of his century, Rosbaud was also one of the finest.He saw his task as primarily to help composers state their own case. But unlike others who have aimed for a similar interpretive modesty, Rosbaud’s approach was never clinical or didactic. It always had at its core that love that moved Schoenberg. His Bruckner had humanity as well as structure; he took Haydn seriously, early and late alike; his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were not just intelligible, but blazed with intensity.Claudia Cassidy put her pen on Rosbaud’s typical style in 1962. “Rosbaud gave us a blueprint,” this ordinarily truculent Chicago Tribune critic wrote after hearing him lead Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” “Not the kind that lies inert on the drafting table, but the kind that sets skyscrapers soaring, flings bridges into space and sends imagination spinning into orbit.”Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1957 (SWR)Rosbaud had music in his blood. He was born in Graz, Austria, on July 22, 1895, to Anna Rosbaud, a piano teacher who had taken lessons from Clara Schumann. A single mother who died in 1913, Anna never told her four children who their father was; Arnold Kramish, the biographer of Hans’s brother, Paul, traced their paternity to Franz Heinnisser, at one point the choirmaster of the Graz cathedral.Growing up in a musical family, if a destitute one, Hans played at least four instruments. He attended the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, and his first appointment as a conductor came in 1921. He later recalled getting used to “the whistling, ranting and raging” with which audiences would greet his Hindemith, Stravinsky and Schoenberg with the Mainz Symphony in Germany.Rosbaud’s main task in Mainz was to run its music school, and he continued this educational approach to his career after 1929, as conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Rosbaud gave talks on the orchestral instruments, writing pieces like a fughetta for three bassoons as illustrations, and he lectured on Wagner before giving act-by-act broadcasts of the “Ring.” Bartok, Stravinsky and other composers came to perform; Schoenberg spoke on his “Variations,” with Rosbaud giving examples, and also sent in thoughts on “Brahms the Progressive.”Stravinsky, left, and Rosbaud, who was one of that composer’s most devoted interpreters in the Germany of his era.SWREven before Hitler took power in 1933, Rosbaud’s tastes were drawing the attention of what he told Stravinsky was a “chauvinistic movement.” Forced to enlist a family friend in Graz as a fake father to demonstrate his Aryan ancestry, Rosbaud found his once-lauded support for a certain strand of new music now brought him trouble, not least when a disgruntled subordinate reported him to the Gestapo in 1936 for seeing music “in a Jewish sense.” He reassured banished composers that he remained on their side, and tried, without success, to find a job in the United States. He left Frankfurt in 1937 for Münster.Rosbaud despised Nazism, and he likely knew that Paul, his brother, was spying on the German nuclear program for Britain. Still, Hans put his abilities to work for the Nazis, reconciling himself to that service with small acts of resistance. To Berlin, he seemed sound enough to be appointed general music director of occupied Strasbourg, a city that the Nazis sought to turn into a colony for their idea of German art, in 1941. But Rosbaud endeared himself to the Alsatians, speaking French, protecting the musicians and acting with sufficient decency that even Charles Munch, the fiercely antifascist Strasbourgian conductor, thought him beyond reproach.Despite Rosbaud’s work in occupied territory, the American military rushed to clear him in denazification proceedings. Shorn of any unfortunate ideological associations in either his politics or his aesthetics, he was general music director in Munich before 1945 was over: a brief, frantic tenure that saw him give Beethoven and Bruckner cycles in bombed-out halls, and reconnect German musical life to its international context, with Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Stravinsky given pride of place.That work would go on, but not primarily in Munich. An offer in 1948 from Baden-Baden could not be refused, coming as it did with the opportunity to imagine an ensemble from scratch and to fulfill a special mandate for new music, which after 1950 included the Donaueschingen Festival, a hotbed of the avant-garde. An energetic Beethoven Violin Concerto with Ginette Neveu from 1949, as well as a lacerating Hartmann Second and a courageous Messiaen “Turangalîla” shortly after, show that Rosbaud quickly brought the orchestra to a high standard.Haydn’s Symphony No. 104SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1952 (SWR)But he never aspired to the ensemble virtuosity of the more commercially-driven orchestras of the day. His vivacious 1957 account of Haydn’s “London” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic might be crisper than his 1952 and 1962 efforts in Baden-Baden, but what matters about them all is how their warmth and drive enliven Haydn’s structures, without drawing attention to themselves.The joys of what SWR has unearthed are subtle, not sensational. Those who need grand statements in their Beethoven might be disappointed, whatever the grinding insistence of his Fifth Symphony, the liquid flow of his Sixth, the effervescence of his Eighth. Those who want bombast in their Tchaikovsky will doubt his unmissable Fifth, so full of dark psychological shadows that it is almost redolent of Mahler. And in Mahler, Rosbaud’s early advocacy for whom was characteristic of a conductor so often half a beat ahead of his time, he comes close to ideal.“Mr. Rosbaud does not cut it to pieces or disguise it by ‘interpretation,’” Cassidy wrote of a Mahler Ninth in Chicago in December 1962, in words that also apply to Rosbaud’s Baden-Baden recording from 1954. “He gives it clarity, precision and understanding, which is to shed light on it without blinding its mysteries.”Mahler’s Symphony No. 9SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1954 (SWR)The Chicago Symphony, where Rosbaud had long spells as a guest conductor between 1959 and 1962, considered him to succeed Fritz Reiner as music director. This offered American recognition for the first time, and a chance to develop a craft honed not just in Baden-Baden, but also in Zurich, where he held positions with the Tonhalle Orchestra, and in Aix-en-Provence. There he directed the annual summer festival from 1948, leading operatic Mozart that Virgil Thomson once called “perfection” in its “animation and orchestral delicacy,” and venturing into Gluck and Rameau.But Chicago was not to be. Rosbaud had been weakening since kidney surgery several years before, and after that Mahler Ninth and a brief stop in Baden-Baden, where he gave a serene farewell with Brahms’s Second, he died on Dec. 29, 1962, near Lugano, Switzerland. He was 67. More

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      Maria Ewing, Dramatically Daring Opera Star, Dies at 71

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      She sought to incorporate acting techniques in her singing rather than settle for predictable staging. Uncertainty about her heritage inspired her daughter, the actress Rebecca Hall, to make the film “Passing.”Maria Ewing, who sang notable soprano and mezzo-soprano roles at leading houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, beginning in the mid-1970s and whose ambiguity about her racial heritage helped drive her daughter, the actress and director Rebecca Hall, to make the recent movie “Passing,” died on Sunday at her home near Detroit. She was 71.A family spokeswoman said the cause was cancer.Ms. Ewing was a striking presence on opera stages, where she strove to bring an actor’s skills and sensibilities to her roles rather than simply stand and sing.“I’ve watched how actors work and work at it,” Ms. Ewing, who was once married to the director Peter Hall, told The Orange County Register of California in 1997, when she was appearing in L.A. Opera’s production of Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora.”“I don’t mean to criticize or underestimate the importance of beautiful vocalism, which alone can move people,” she added. “But why is it that opera so often becomes predictable in terms of staging?”There was certainly nothing staid about her performance, under the direction of Mr. Hall, in the title role of “Salome,” first seen in Los Angeles in 1986 and restaged in other cities, included London. In the initial production she ended the Dance of the Seven Veils wearing only a G-string; in later ones she dispensed with even that. (She is not the only Salome to have ended the dance in the all-together; Karita Mattila did so at the Met this century.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge,” she told The Register. “You go to the precipice and lean over it. You have to. A role like Salome, you are completely on the edge. You’re over it, in fact.”Though critics had sometimes frowned on her leading roles — her attempt at the title role in “Carmen,” also under Mr. Hall, at about the same time drew some harsh notices — her “Salome” was generally acclaimed. John Rockwell, reviewing a return engagement in Los Angeles in 1989 for The New York Times, called it “the most arresting, convincing overall account of this impossible part that I have ever encountered.”Ms. Ewing as Poppea in Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1984. The production was by the noted director Peter Hall, Ms. Ewing’s husband. Dennis Bailey performed the part of Nerone.Guy Cravett/ThornEMIWhenever Ms. Ewing performed, critics almost invariably commented on her exotic looks. Those were in part a product of a mixed racial heritage that Ms. Ewing tended not to dwell on, even with her daughter, who was raised in England.“When I was growing up, my mother would say things to me like, ‘Well, you know we’re Black,’ and then another day she’d say, ‘I don’t really know that,’” Ms. Hall recounted in an episode of “Finding Your Roots,” the PBS genealogy program, filmed last year and broadcast just last week.“She was always extraordinarily beautiful,” Ms. Hall told Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of the program, “but she didn’t look like everyone else’s mother in the English countryside.”Her mother identified as white, she told Professor Gates, but in interviews over the years Ms. Ewing also alluded to possible Black and American Indian ancestry. Ms. Ewing’s father, Norman, for years presented himself as an American Indian, but the researchers on “Finding Your Roots” determined that this was a fabrication; a DNA test of Ms. Hall done for the program showed that she had no Indian background. Her grandfather had in fact been Black.“You, my dear, are indeed a person of African descent,” Professor Gates told Ms. Hall.This was more than a curiosity for Ms. Hall. She had for some time been developing a film based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing,” about two light-skinned Black women, one of whom passes as white. Part of what interested her about the novel, she said in interviews, was the nagging suspicion that the story was relevant to her own family.“When I asked questions to my mother about her background in Detroit and her family,” Ms. Hall told The New York Times last year, “she left it with an, ‘I don’t want to dwell on the past.’”The film, Ms. Hall’s first feature as a director, premiered in November and has been widely praised as one of the year’s best.Maria Louise Ewing was born on March 27, 1950, in Detroit. Her father was an engineer at a steel company and her mother, Hermina Maria (Veraar) Ewing, was a homemaker.Ms. Ewing studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music. About 1975 she made her debut at the Cologne Opera, and in October 1976 she made her Met debut as Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”“At the moment some combination of nerves and artistic immaturity holds her Cherubino short of the very best,” Mr. Rockwell wrote in his review. “But she is a singer of enormous potential.”That same month found her on the Carnegie Hall stage, one of two singers in a Mahler program by the New York Philharmonic conducted by James Levine.“The voice is one with a good deal of color, and of course Miss Ewing will grow into the music,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The Times.Among her early Met roles was Blanche in John Dexter’s 1977 staging of Poulenc’s “Dialogues der Carmelites.” She was slated for a road production of that opera in Boston in 1979 when fog grounded the plane that was supposed to deliver her from New York to Boston for an 8 p.m. curtain. At 4:30 p.m. she climbed into a cab, which delivered her to the Hynes Auditorium at 8:55; the curtain went up at 9:05. The fare: $337.50, not including a $47.50 tip.In addition to her dramatic roles, Ms. Ewing stood out in comedies like Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.”Ms. Ewing’s daughter Rebecca Hall, left, is a noted stage and film actress. They attended the funeral of Ms. Ewing’s former husband, Peter Hall, in 2017. Also pictured is Leslie Caron, who was also married to Mr. Hall.Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Give any ‘Così’ Kiri Te Kanawa’s patrician Fiordiligi, Maria Ewing’s lovably dopey Dorabella and Donald Gramm’s subtly understated Don Alfonso and you will have yourself a night at the opera,” Donal Henahan wrote of the Met’s production in 1982.In 1987 a dispute with Mr. Levine over a revival and telecast of “Carmen” led her to withdraw from Met performances.“I cannot work with a man I cannot trust, and I cannot work in a house that he is running in this fashion,” she said at the time.But she would eventually return; her final Met performance was in 1997 as Marie in Berg’s “Wozzeck.”She and Mr. Hall married in 1982 and divorced in 1990. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three sisters, Norma Koleta, Carol Pancratz and Francis Ewing; and a granddaughter.In 1996, when she was singing a concert with the Philharmonic, The Times asked Ms. Ewing about that famous dance in “Salome.”“It was my own idea to do the dance naked,” she said. “I felt that it was somehow essential to express the truth of that moment — a moment of frustration, longing and self-discovery for Salome. For me, the scene wouldn’t work any other way.” More

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      Love, Trust and Heartbreak on Two Stages

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      The musical “Hadestown” and the opera “Eurydice” aim to offer new twists on a Greek myth. But when it comes to their heroine, they only go so far.When Orpheus turned around to look at Eurydice during the closing performance of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” at the Metropolitan Opera, the audience’s collective gasp seemed to shake the grand theater. I recalled another time I heard such a gasp: from the character of Eurydice near the end of “Doubt Comes In,” a song in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.” Then, too, the audience gasped along with her.A lifelong classics nerd, I was surprised both times by the reaction: Does the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice really require a spoiler alert?The myth has been kicking around for over two millenniums, after all. Orpheus, the greatest musician of all, marries Eurydice, who dies when she’s bitten by a snake on their wedding day. He descends to the underworld, where the god of the dead offers him another chance at love: He can leave with Eurydice, but only if he walks ahead and never turns around. Here’s that spoiler: Orpheus looks, and Eurydice is damned to Hades forever.For such an old — and short — story, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is still frequently told and adapted, much like that of another famous ill-fated couple, Romeo and Juliet. Operatic renditions by Monteverdi and others date back to the early 1600s. Renowned filmmakers like Jean Cocteau created their own narratives in the 20th century.In 1922, Rainer Maria Rilke used the tragic story as a launchpad for his deeply ruminative 55-poem cycle “Sonnets to Orpheus.” Countless other poets have followed suit, many revising the myth to give its sad dead wife a voice — perhaps in a contemporary vernacular, as in Carol Ann Duffy’s “Eurydice,” or in the measured verse and elevated diction of A.E. Stallings’ “Eurydice’s Footnote.”And of course there’s Ruhl herself, who created a revisionist mythology in her 2003 play “Eurydice,” which she adopted into the opera’s libretto.Modern-day adaptations like “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” reveal more than just the imaginations of their creators; they reflect a gender politics that gets to the core of how men and women are mythologized, who has agency and whose stories are most valued.Morley, as Eurydice, surrounded by the dead.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLet’s face it: Orpheus has always been the star of the myth. Eurydice is simply the young bride. She has no background and no future; she only serves as the vehicle of tragedy for Orpheus.Both “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” interrogate that starring role. In both, Orpheus remains a genius musician who, though in love with Eurydice, is preoccupied with his art above all. Her death is a touch of bad luck — you never know when a venomous snake will slither underfoot on your wedding day. But both adaptations draw a line of causality from Orpheus’s behavior to Eurydice’s death.Perhaps, the productions suggest, Orpheus was the original slacker musician boyfriend, so concerned with his next big hit that he neglected the love who inspired his best work. But Eurydice doesn’t merely get dragged down into the underworld; in both versions she’s tempted by the offer of something she wants.In Aucoin and Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” the new bride wanders off from her own wedding party. She’s bored and missing her dead father, who has been secretly trying to write to his beloved daughter from the underworld. In comes Hades, the ruler of that realm, as sleazy as a back-alley hustler, to manipulate her grief; he baits her with one of her father’s letters.In Anais Mitchell’s “Hadestown,” the seduction is twofold: financial and sexual. Orpheus and Eurydice are trapped in some otherworldly version of the Depression era. In the lurid “Hey, Little Songbird,” Hades draws in Eurydice with promises of security and comfort, while undermining Orpheus, mocking him as a starving artist: “He’s some kind of poet and he’s penniless?/Give him your hand, he’ll give you his hand-to-mouth./He’ll write you a poem when the power’s out.”But the pressure goes further; in Patrick Page’s beguiling performance, Hades is explicitly predatory, exploiting Eurydice’s feelings of displacement and neglect in her relationship.That each of the two Eurydices actively makes a choice, as opposed to being passively buffeted by fate, is telling. But the result in both cases is still tragic.Whether it’s via a gradual transformation, as in “Hadestown,” or an abrupt change, as in “Eurydice,” our heroine loses her sense of self. In the underworld of “Hadestown,” Eurydice joins Hades’s army of souls, forgetting her identity like the deceased around her. Her counterpart in “Eurydice” also forgets Orpheus, her own name and even how to read; she meets her dead father but is unable to recognize him at first.Reeve Carney, foreground center, and Eva Noblezada, far right, as Orpheus and Eurydice in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already told you the spoiler, that the myth ends in death. Opera has an easier time going there; it’s difficult for a musical to pull off a somber ending — the upbeat finale that practically demands a standing ovation feels so much more typical for the form.And yet “Hadestown” bravely, if self-consciously, resolves that way, announcing that the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is an “old song” and “a sad song, but we sing it anyway.”“Eurydice” commits more explosively to woe in its stellar third act, after two acts of tedious exposition. Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father all end up in the underworld together, but they find no peace. Eurydice’s father, having lost all hope of reuniting with his daughter after her husband arrives to save her, takes another dip into the Styx, causing him to die a final death. Eurydice, having lost both her husband and father twice, follows her father into oblivion.So the grand tragedy of the piece isn’t contingent on Orpheus’s inconvenient rubbernecking and the implications about trust (though that’s in there too); it’s the ways death has riven these relationships. In trying to outmaneuver their mortality and reconnect with one another, Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father each arrive at an oblivion more desolate and lonely than what they’d known before.For all I appreciate about the way both productions offer Eurydice more agency, I do think they give her short shrift.“Hadestown” sticks to the plot of the classic, with some twists and embellishments. But in performance, the musical positions her as the more interesting half of the couple. As played by Eva Noblezada, she is a plucky, streetwise heroine — “no stranger to the world,” as one lyric goes. She may love a juvenile dreamer lost in his own head (Reeve Carney, with a beardless falsetto). But she’s practical; she’ll do what it takes to survive in a world of gross inequality, where Hades is an industrial fat cat and artists and workers are largely servile. If her death becomes the focal point over her character, that may be more the myth’s fault than the musical’s.“Eurydice” allows its heroine the power to decide: head back with her husband, or remain in the underworld with her father. She chooses to call to Orpheus — in effect separating from him and reuniting with her father.But even with this often intriguing revision, the opera still defines Eurydice solely by her relationship to men. Take the scene of their marriage proposal: Orpheus slyly ties a red string around Eurydice’s ring finger, and suggests using her to create his art — quite literally, making an instrument from the strands of her hair. She laments her father’s absence at the wedding itself, because, she claims, she was married to her father first. She doesn’t seem to exist outside of these men.When Eurydice dies the second time, vanishing without a trace, it’s as though she’s a figment of Orpheus’s imagination, more an archetype than anything else — the ill-fated lover, the tragic dead wife, another muse.Still gone at the turn of a head. More

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      Scrambling but Undaunted, the Met Opera Sings Through Omicron

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      The variant has upended Broadway, ballet and concerts. But the Met has yet to miss a performance, thanks to strict rules, fill-in artists and luck.The Metropolitan Opera had to scramble to find a replacement for its “Magic Flute” conductor after she tested positive for the coronavirus last month. When a wicked stepsister in “Cinderella” tested positive shortly before a performance in late December, the Met enlisted a soprano from another production to sing the role from the wings while a dancer acted it onstage.And earlier this week, when the star of its new production of “Rigoletto,” the baritone Quinn Kelsey, exhibited cold symptoms, the Met insisted on using an understudy, even though Kelsey had not yet tested positive for the virus and had just received some of the best reviews of his career.The Met’s prudence paid off. Kelsey later tested positive, and the rest of the cast had been spared a close contact.The Omicron variant has toppled a slew of Broadway shows, disrupted dance productions, postponed festivals, forced the cancellation of dozens of concerts, and closed the mighty Vienna State Opera for almost a week. But it has yet to stymie the Metropolitan Opera, the largest American performing arts organization, which has not missed a performance this season.Undaunted by the sharp rise in coronavirus cases, the Met has staged more than three dozen performances since late November, including productions of “Tosca,” “The Magic Flute,” “Cinderella” and “Rigoletto.” More than 3,000 people, who wore masks and showed proof of vaccination, filled the auditorium on New Year’s Eve. Rehearsals are in full swing for another two dozen performances this month, each involving hundreds of people: solo singers, orchestra players, chorus members, dancers, actors, stagehands, follow-spot operators, dressers and makeup artists, among many others.More than 3,000 people, who wore masks and showed proof of vaccination, filled the Met for the premiere of “Rigoletto” on New Year’s Eve.Richard Termine for The New York Times“We’re doing everything we possibly can to keep the Met open,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in an interview. “I’m determined not to cancel a performance.”The Met’s success so far in managing the surge can be attributed to a number of factors: strict health protocols, a robust system of understudies, the advantages that come from its structure as a large repertory company that mounts a different opera each day — and, to be sure, a dose of luck.“There’s a sense of, ‘We can do this!’” said Sarah Ina Meyers, who directed the revival of “The Magic Flute,” which completed a nine-performance run on Wednesday with the help of far more cover artists than usual. “We’re trying to lift each other up.”Still, Meyers added, after weeks of grappling with last-minute cast changes, drafting and then tearing up plans, “there is profound hope that we can go back to the normal level of crazy.”The Met’s health protocols are among the strictest in the performing arts. The company now gives all employees P.C.R. tests three times a week, recently began having singers wear face masks even at dress rehearsals, and soon will require employees and audiences to have received booster shots to enter its building.The company had a robust system of fallbacks even before the pandemic struck, since its singers must be at their physical best to fill its cavernous opera house without the aid of amplification, and illnesses, whether hay fever or flu, have always required last-minute substitutions. Unlike Broadway, where shows often assign one actor to serve as an understudy for multiple roles, the Met appoints at least one cover for every role, greatly reducing its chances of having to cancel.Being a huge repertory company helps, too. Since it stages a different opera each night, with several titles in rotation onstage and others in rehearsal at any given time, the Met has a large pool of singers and crew members to draw on when a crisis erupts.And since the company performs a great deal of standard repertory, often in productions that remain the same for years, when a singer falls ill it is usually possible to find another who already knows the part (and even the staging) well. There tend to be several days between performances of each title — so a mild illness might only require missing a couple of shows.By pushing forward, the Met’s leaders hope to signal that the opera house can get through the turmoil of the pandemic and beyond. “The fact that we are performing provides a beacon of hope to our audiences and to our donors,” said Gelb, who tested positive for the virus late last month and had to watch live feeds of several key rehearsals from home. “We just have to make sure we survive the pandemic.”Omicron came just as the company was beginning to feel more confident after losing over $150 million in anticipated revenues because of the pandemic. While ticket sales in the fall were overall about 10 to 20 percent below prepandemic levels, there were several successes: a popular new production, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the company’s first work by a Black composer; the staging of a six-hour work, Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” the longest in the Met’s repertory; and a revival of Puccini’s “La Bohème” that was a hit with audiences and critics.As Omicron began to spread, the Met moved to strengthen its virus-control measures. Since the beginning of the 2021-22 season, it has required employees and audience members to be fully vaccinated and to wear masks inside the opera house.Quinn Kelsey, standing, and Craig Colclough wore masks while rehearsing for “Rigoletto” last month.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThen P.C.R. testing of employees and artists increased to three times a week, from twice. The Met began to more strictly enforce a policy prohibiting employees with cold-like symptoms from entering the opera house, even if they have tested negative for the virus. It has also discouraged its employees from attending indoor social gatherings.The rules have been burdensome, especially for singers, many of whom find wearing masks while rehearsing awkward. But after going without stable work for much of the pandemic, as the Met and other institutions were closed, they have complied.“It’s uncomfortable, it’s something that we wish we didn’t have to do,” Kelsey, the Rigoletto, said of the masking requirement. “But at the end of the day it just means we’re that much closer, we hope, to putting all this mess behind us.”Even with the health protocols, the coronavirus has wrought havoc, sidelining singers, orchestra players, dancers, actors and stage hands. Since Thanksgiving, 124 people have tested positive for the virus among the Met’s stage crew, construction, wardrobe, wig and makeup, and costume departments, though most are now back at work.In the orchestra, eight people have tested positive; they, too, are largely working again. The Met has a pool of extra musicians who play regularly even when there are no illnesses, making substitutions relatively easy. (New York City Ballet, which halted its jam-packed “Nutcracker” schedule on Dec. 21, had instituted a rule that three connected virus cases within the company would spur a shutdown, to prevent further spread.)When Kelsey came down with cold-like symptoms this week, his cover, Michael Chioldi, jumped into action, getting fitted for costumes and going over technical cues just a few hours before the performance.“It’s been very stressful,” Chioldi said in a telephone interview from his dressing room shortly before his debut on Tuesday. “We’re just really, really hoping and praying that the Met stays open and that we can fill in when people go out, because inevitably people are going to get the virus.”Linda Gelinas (right, with Maya Lahyani in green and Stephanie Blythe) jumped in to act one of the stepsisters in “Cinderella” while Vanessa Becerra sang the role from the wings.Met OperaWhen the singer playing the stepsister in “Cinderella” became ill, the Met brought in a soprano, Vanessa Becerra, who happened to be taking part in “The Magic Flute.” She sang the role from the wings while Linda Gelinas, a former Met principal dancer who had not performed with the company in six years, acted it.With only a few hours to prepare, Gelinas studied videos and raced to memorize stage directions.“I thought it was a joke, but then I very soon realized, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re serious,’” Gelinas said. “Once the decision was made, we just went full speed ahead.”With Omicron infections still rising, it is unclear whether the Met can maintain its streak — and whether audiences will continue to turn out in large numbers. Attendance has been uneven in recent weeks. While it was 87 percent at the New Year’s Eve opening of “Rigoletto,” “Tosca” is expected to end its run this month at just 55 percent.But opera fans have celebrated the Met’s ability to remain a bastion of live music even as other venues have taken a pause.JunHyeok Lee, 27, a student at Baruch College from South Korea who attended the “Rigoletto” opening, said he felt privileged to be there at a time of uncertainty about the virus.“It’s a great blessing,” Lee said. “I’ll go every time unless the Met stops.” More

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      ‘Rigoletto’ at the Met Unites a Father and Daughter. Again.

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      Quinn Kelsey and Rosa Feola have earned raves playing a jester and his child in a new production of Verdi’s opera.Quinn Kelsey and Rosa Feola are used to playing father and daughter.It started in 2013, when Kelsey jumped into the title role of the cursed jester in Verdi’s opera “Rigoletto” in Zurich; Feola was in that production, too, as Gilda, the daughter Rigoletto has kept secret. Since then, they’ve sung those characters together, Feola recalled in a recent video call, “five, six, maybe seven times.”Now they are doing the parts in Bartlett Sher’s new staging of “Rigoletto” at the Metropolitan Opera, which opened on New Year’s Eve and moves the action to Weimar Germany. It’s a breakthrough for both singers. Feola, a soprano who made her Met debut in a revival of the old production in 2019, is returning to eager anticipation and the spotlight of a premiere. And Kelsey, a Met fixture in baritone parts for over a decade, is finally getting a true starring role — onstage and on Lincoln Center billboards.“Kelsey has always been an arresting artist,” Anthony Tommasini wrote in a review for The New York Times. “But this role shows off his full vocal and dramatic depth.”Tommasini added that Feola followed up her impressive 2019 debut with a performance in which “coloratura runs and trills emerged as integral extensions of the long-spun vocal lines. She captured Gilda’s innocence, but also the sensual stirrings and secret defiance that drive this over-protected young woman’s disastrous decisions.”Lisette Oropesa was originally cast as the production’s Gilda, said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. But when she asked to be released to take on a new role elsewhere, she suggested he hire Feola, who at the time hadn’t yet sung there. Then came her debut.“There are some singers you hear, and you know immediately that they are a major talent,” Gelb said. “We knew that with her.”In future seasons, she will broaden her Met repertory: Gelb hinted at “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “La Traviata” and a new production of Giordano’s “Fedora.”Daniele Rustioni, the “Rigoletto” conductor, has done at least 10 operas with Feola, and said that over the years he has seen her develop to give Gilda “360 degrees.”“She gives the tenderness, the desperation, the courage,” he added. “She’s not the poor Bambi in the forest.”Rustioni was pleasantly surprised by Kelsey, with whom he hadn’t worked before, calling him a great Rigoletto of our time who is “destined for great things.” He is, Gelb added, “one of our first choices when we think of Verdi baritones,” and his coming Met appearances include “Un Ballo in Maschera,” “Aida” and “Macbeth.”“He’s a Rigoletto of enormous cruelty and empathy,” Gelb said. “I think that Bart was really encouraging him to go for things in ways he hadn’t before. And he’s got all the qualities as a performer to deliver it.”Kelsey has been forced to miss at least three performances after testing positive for the coronavirus this week, but is expected to be back onstage on Jan. 15. (Michael Chioldi is singing in his place.) Kelsey and Feola, at their respective homes in New York for the run, spoke in the call about their work together and the new production. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.How have you grown in these roles together over the years?QUINN KELSEY The more these two characters can be comfortable with each other, the easier it is for the two of them to pull off this relationship. “You’re my daughter” and “You’re my father” — that’s easy to say, but it’s important to find the connection and build it right away. For us, it’s become easier and allowed us to explore new facets of our relationship.ROSA FEOLA In the first duet, when I say “Mio padre!” and he says “Figlia!” we just look at each other, and it’s enough. Because in our eyes we’ve already said everything. And at the end, when she dies, she says, “Mio padre, addio!” It’s a kind of “I love you so much, and there’s nothing more to say.” We have many things to say, even if we are not singing or speaking. That, for me, makes it very special.Has this production changed your understanding of the characters?KELSEY The more you perform the role, the more you can’t help but pay attention to what you’re saying, to the things that your colleagues bring to the production, that you weren’t always aware of. For me, it’s just been the idea of being more specific. You have to transition from evil to uneasy to scared to loving tenderness, all within the first 30 minutes, and this production has been about making specific decisions about when it all happens. Gilda is also older than normally portrayed, enough that she has a specific drive and vision.FEOLA She wants to be older. In the second act there is a new scene that Bart puts in: When she’s undressed in the duke’s room, she doesn’t feel something bad. She understands that to be the partner of that guy, she needs to accept it. Gilda is a strong woman. So at the end of the story, she decides the moment to put the knife in the hand of Sparafucile and make him kill her.KELSEY Bart gave us so much opportunity to really expand the structure of these two characters. Instead of Rigoletto being a bad guy and paying for it later, and Gilda being a delicate flower, we have been allowed to take it a few steps further.And with these dramatic challenges, if you don’t have the music underneath you as a perfect cushion, it’s so much harder to pull off. So the amount of detail extends to the orchestra and chorus behaving around us as part of a larger entity, which strengthens our ability to tell the story — more than I feel I ever have been able to.What does this production mean at this stage in your careers?FEOLA My debut at the Met with “Rigoletto” was already a big deal for me, as an Italian singer singing Verdi, one of the most beautiful operas of Verdi. And also this character, which I have sung since 2009 and studied with Renata Scotto. So I feel very comfortable with the timing, and making a new production at the Met of course means a lot.KELSEY I’m proud of the fact that I’ve has as much experience in this role as I have. I covered Rigoletto for the first time 15 years ago; I knew back then that I could sing it, but woof, that was work. It was a really sensitive thing, because Verdi baritones aren’t normally pursuing this role as early as I did, and if it hadn’t worked out I definitely would have put it away.But I’ve always had success, and it’s grown in me. So the fact that I’m in my early 40s and can come to the Met with the amount of experience that I’ve built up, to bring all of my tools and apply it to a new production — it’s like a perfect culture for a seedling. It’s the opportunity for something to germinate and grow as well as it ever could. I’m so pleased, and I know it will just get better. More