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      Carlisle Floyd, Whose Operas Spun Fables of the South, Dies at 95

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      His celebrated works drew from the musical traditions of revival meetings and country hoedowns, telling stories of intolerance.Carlisle Floyd, the composer-librettist whose operas explored the passions and prejudices of the South in lyrical tales that drew on rural fundamentalism, the Great Depression, the aftermath of the Civil War and other regional themes, died on Thursday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was 95. His death was announced by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.The son of an itinerant South Carolina preacher, Mr. Floyd grew up with the music of the South: revival meeting hymns, square dance fiddlers, rollicking country hoedowns and folk songs. He wrote them into many of his operas, whose plots were largely derived from classics of literature, featuring social outcasts and narrow-minded neighbors who ostracized them.Mr. Floyd said his exposure to religious bigotry early in life had shaped his operatic themes. “The thing that horrified me already as a child about revival meetings,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “was mass coercion, people being forced to conform to something against their will without ever knowing what they were being asked to confess or receive.”His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.With hymns, square dances and arias simulating folk songs, “Susannah” leapt to national renown at the New York City Opera under Erich Leinsdorf in 1956. It won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award, was entered at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 as an outstanding example of American opera, and over the years became a favorite of regional companies, one of the most performed operas of the American musical stage.Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.American audiences flocked to regional performances of Mr. Floyd’s work, especially “Susannah” and “Of Mice and Men.” But New York critics were negative about his music, if not his storytelling. In 1999, four decades and some 800 regional performances after it opened, “Susannah” was finally performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Valhalla of grand opera in America.Renee Fleming as Susannah Polk and Samuel Ramey as Olin Blitch in the Met Opera’s 1999 production of “Susannah,” composer Carlisle Floyd’s best-known work.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Amiable, direct, wholly without guile, Carlisle Floyd’s American heroine and the work that bears her name arrived at the halls of grand opera on Wednesday night, looking like some lonely tourist lost in the vastness of Grand Central Terminal,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.He added: “The piece is perfect in size and difficulty for the regional opera house or the amateur production, but lesser singing, I suspect, reveals its thinness even more. Mr. Floyd has a nice way with hoedowns, countrified modal melody and drumroll crescendos, but there is amazingly little going on at the musical end of this opera.”Other critics disparaged his operas as narrowly drawn. But Mr. Floyd insisted that his stories reflected larger realities and that his characters — insular people fearful of outsiders and anyone different — were universal. And he scoffed at perceptions of his music as folk opera, implying that its tonal country sounds were naïve.“A lot of critics don’t like to acknowledge that there are no absolutes in taste, which is intensely personal and which governs a composer’s choice of idiom,” he told Opera News in 1999.Mr. Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, at the New York City Opera in 2003. From left: Rod Nelman as George Milton, Anthony Dean Griffey as Lennie Small and Peter Strummer as Candy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Floyd never sought to join the New York-Northeast musical establishment. He devoted much of his life to teaching, starting at Florida State University in 1947, and over 30 years wrote most of his operas in Tallahassee. From 1976 to 1996, he was a professor at the University of Houston, where he wrote several of his last operas, including “Cold Sassy Tree,” based on a novel by Olive Ann Burns about the romance between an aging widower and a young northerner that scandalizes a small Georgia town.His last opera, “Prince of Players,” was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in March 2016, months before his 90th birthday, and was performed by the Little Opera Theater of New York at Hunter College in February 2017.Adapted from a Jeffrey Hatcher play (and subsequent 2004 film) about Edward Kynaston, one of the last actors of Restoration England to play female roles, “Prince of Players” centers on Kynaston’s crisis in 1661, when Charles II declares that all female roles on London stages must be played by women.Reviewing the Houston production, Opera News said it revealed “Floyd’s deep understanding and sympathy for issues that pervade our culture today — the complexities and subtleties of gender identity, sexual preference and their social consequences — played out in a story from 17th-century England.”Anthony Tommasini, in a review of the New York production for The Times, said: “It’s miraculous that a composer whose reputation dates to his 1955 ‘Susannah,’ one of the most performed American operas, is still working with assurance and skill.”Carlisle Sessions Floyd was born in Latta, S.C., on June 11, 1926, one of two children of Carlisle and Ida (Fenegan) Floyd. He and his sister, Ermine, were schooled in a succession of South Carolina towns where their father was a Methodist preacher. Their mother nurtured Carlisle’s creative instincts, giving him piano lessons and encouraging him to write short stories.After graduating from high school in North, S.C., he entered Converse College in Spartanburg in 1943. He studied music and piano under the composer Ernst Bacon. In 1945, when Mr. Bacon became director of the music school at Syracuse University, Mr. Floyd followed him there and earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1946.He began teaching at Florida State and was soon composing. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree at Syracuse. His first two operas sputtered, but “Susannah,” his third, thrived. It opened at Florida State in 1955, and its New York City Opera premiere was hailed a year later. Ronald Eyer, in Tempo, called it an “unadorned story of malice, hypocrisy and tragedy of almost scriptural simplicity.”In 1957, Mr. Floyd married Margery Kay Reeder. She died in 2010. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Floyd’s only non-American subject, an interpretation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 1958.After a long gestation, “Of Mice and Men” opened at the Seattle Opera in 1970. It was widely performed by regional repertory companies. But when it finally landed at the New York City Opera in 1983, Donal Henahan of The Times said it “failed ultimately because it is a feeble score too dependent on gray declamatory lines and melodramatic clichés of the sort that no longer turn up even in television serials.”Composer/librettist Carlisle Floyd, right, talks with conductor Patrick Summers about the music for Floyd’s upcoming opera “Cold Sassy Tree” during rehearsals Thursday, April 6, 2000, in Houston. “Cold Sassy Tree,” set to open Friday, April 14 in Houston, is Floyd’s latest and perhaps final opera.BRETT COOMER/Associated PressIn 1999, David Gockley, then general director of the Houston Grand Opera and a longtime admirer of Mr. Floyd’s work, told Opera News that New York reviewers were unfair to composers like Mr. Floyd.“Carlisle Floyd is America’s foremost opera composer,” Mr. Gockley was quoted as saying. “If you’re not part of the Northeastern establishment, specifically the New York scene, you have no status. Because Floyd always lived and taught in Florida or Houston, he has been regarded as a regional figure, when in fact he is a national one.”Mr. Floyd, who lived in Tallahassee, received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at the White House in 2004. In 2008 he was named, along with the conductor James Levine and the soprano Leontyne Price, as among the first honorees of the National Endowment for the Arts for lifetime achievement in opera.“Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, the Authorized Biography” by Thomas Holliday, was published in 2013. More

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      Review: After a Met Opera Milestone, ‘Boris’ Brings Another

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      The company is performing the terse, original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” for the first time.You may have heard about the widely publicized landmark with which the Metropolitan Opera opened its season on Monday: Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first work by a Black composer. Flying under the radar is the less momentous but still significant milestone that followed on Tuesday, when the company finally performed the original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”Opera is littered with competing editions and unclear authorial intentions. Does the Giulietta act go before or after the Antonia act in “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”? Do you sing Verdi’s masterpiece in Italian as “Don Carlo,” or — as the Met will do for the first time in its history late this winter — in the original French, as “Don Carlos”?But probably no major work is as vexed as “Boris Godunov.” Mussorgsky had never written an opera when he created this often brusque, raw, darkly sober, oddly spare score about a troubled czar and his troubled country. We’re not entirely sure why it was rejected by the imperial theater directorate, but the main reason may have been a banal one: The piece lacked a major female character.The scene of Boris’s coronation as czar in this revival of the Met’s spare production, new in 2010.Richard Termine for The New York TimesSo Mussorgsky gamely (perhaps even happily) revised, adding material — including Marina, a leading lady of sorts — and taking chunks out; a version of that version premiered in 1874. Then, after Mussorgsky’s death, his friend Rimsky-Korsakov took it upon himself to reorchestrate, rejigger and sometimes recompose the work to make it more colorful and less idiosyncratic. This seems scandalous to us, but without Rimsky “Boris” would never have entered the international repertory early in the 20th century.Over the past 50 years or so, as part of a general vogue for presenting art as its creators envisioned, Rimsky’s glittering interventions fell from grace in favor of Mussorgsky’s starker orchestrations. But his revised, post-1869 version has remained the norm. Or, more precisely, an amalgam: The available options have served as a kind of grab bag, with scenes and passages kept or left out at will, and ordered in various sequences. (That all this is possible speaks to how strange and episodic the work is, as well as to how compelling it remains in almost any form.)It was therefore not unusual that, when the Met’s current production premiered in 2010, it could contain, among other choices, both the act set in Poland (from Mussorgsky’s revised version) and the scene at the Cathedral of St. Basil, which had been cut after 1869. This was a sprawling, two-intermission affair of almost four and a half hours.Maxim Paster, center, and Aleksey Bogdanov, just left behind him, are two of several singers making their Met debuts in this production.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe 1869 version, still a rarity, runs about half that, in a single act of seven scenes presented at the Met without intermission. (The edition being performed is by Michael Rot.) This is by no means an abbreviated “Boris.” But conducted with cool, efficient clarity and seriousness by Sebastian Weigle, it is certainly a lithe evening, a sour shot of a demanding, easily manipulated populace and the leader that the crowd alternately acclaims and reviles: the title character, privately tormented by guilt at having come to power by murdering the 8-year-old heir to the throne.Lithe, too, is the Met’s nearly set-less staging, which the director, Stephen Wadsworth, took on at the last minute back in 2010 and which works well in this version, allowing for fluid scene changes and reflecting the austerity of Mussorgsky’s original vision. His orchestra acts not as a Wagner-style character in its own right, nor as an melodic interlocutor. (There aren’t many melodies.) Instead, it serves as a propelling undercurrent and atmosphere for exposed vocal lines tailored to the rhythms of Russian speech — anticipating Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” which borrows audibly from “Boris,” and Janacek. Adroitly handled, the technique allows the opera to be talky while flowing ever forward.And this was a cast of sonorous, articulate singing talkers, led by the production’s star from 2010, the bass René Pape, his voice as burnished and secure as ever as Boris. If Pape’s tonal pleasures have often seemed to come at the expense of vivid characterizations — as in his beautiful, bland Gurnemanz in Wagner’s “Parsifal” — he fits the restraint of this conductor, chorus and production.This staging is the occasion for several accomplished Met debuts: the bass Ain Anger, commanding as the monk Pimen, who predicts Boris’s downfall; the tenor David Butt Philip, bright yet brooding as Grigory, who proclaims himself Dmitry, the believed-to-have-been-killed rightful heir to the throne; the baritone Aleksey Bogdanov, firm and forthright as the nobleman Shchelkalov; and the tenor Maxim Paster, bronze-toned and cynical as Prince Shuisky.David Butt Philip (left, against wall) plays a monk pretending to be the heir to the Russian throne who falls in with Varlaam (Ryan Speedo Green, arm raised), a vagrant monk.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, the best singer in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” has equally rich, unforced power here as the drunken monk Varlaam. The mezzo-soprano Tichina Vaughn, as a piquant inn hostess, and the tenor Miles Mykkanen, as the plangent Holy Fool who haunts Boris, are both excellent.Should we prefer the 1869 original? I actually find the revised version’s ending — the angry mob, bent on revolution, is yet again flipped into cowed fervor, this time by the false Dmitry — to be more effective and haunting than the curtain falling on Boris’s death, particularly in Pape’s all too mellow performance here. But I don’t miss the Polish act, which has always seemed a bit out of place in its deployment of operatic conventions. And the work’s general pessimism seems better suited to its original terseness than to more epic scale.My answer — today, at least — is yes.Boris GodunovThrough Oct. 17 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: Sounds and Styles Playfully Collide in ‘Only an Octave Apart’

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      This show brings together two convention-inverting artists: the cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond and the opera singer Anthony Roth Costanzo.“Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be normal?” Justin Vivian Bond, the doyenne of downtown cabaret, asks the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo a few songs into their show, “Only an Octave Apart,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse.The gag, of course, is that both Bond and Costanzo — whose pristine and ethereal voice has been heard at venues like the Metropolitan Opera and the Palace of Versailles — are utterly singular artists.Bond, 58, is a veteran and pioneer of alternative live performance, polished in appearance but satisfyingly rough in voice and manner, a diva whose response to having seen it all is both a yawn and a wink. Costanzo, 39, who will return to the title role in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Met this season, has demonstrated a voracious appetite for mashing up disciplines. Perhaps that is in response to the limited countertenor repertoire, “music written before 1750 or after 1950,” as he has said.Their teaming up came about by chance and circumstance, they banter in “Only an Octave Apart.” Costanzo recalls seeing one of Bond’s shows at Joe’s Pub and professing instant fandom; Bond remembers thinking Costanzo was hot. They became fast friends, and their relationship led to the St. Ann’s performance, which takes its name from a TV special the soprano Beverly Sills and the actress Carol Burnett recorded at the Met in 1976, in a campy meeting of so-called high and low culture.Conceived with and directed by Zack Winokur, “Only an Octave Apart” feels like something between “Honey, I Shrunk the Opera” and oversized cabaret. Or an operatic highlight reel wedged into a freewheeling stage revue. Or an improvised set of concept singles. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. The uneasiness of its hybrid form is part of the point, and reflective of its stars’ convention-inverting talents.Costanzo, left, and Bond in the show, which teases out the obvious humor and dissonant beauty in their sounds.Nina WesterveltA ventriloquist-style number inspired by “Singin’ in the Rain,” for example, plays off their bucking of gendered expectations: Costanzo sings from behind the curtain while Bond lip-syncs, aligning his countertenor with Bond’s high-feminine presentation. Then they switch. (“Act butcher!” Bond barks.)The show finds both obvious humor and a dissonant beauty in combining sounds. Under Thomas Bartlett’s brilliantly agile music direction, nimble arrangements by Nico Muhly and Daniel Schlosberg flit seamlessly from plucked strings to erotic disco beats. The stars’ voices at times collide to strange, glorious effect (as in a languid take on Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March”); or they playfully intersect in ways that throw their differences into sharp relief.Bond thrills most in haunting ballads that animate the eerie exigencies of isolation (“Me and My Shadow”) and the melancholy in holding onto hope (“I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”). Cutting a glamorous figure beneath worshipful lighting by John Torres, Bond issues an enchanting warble, its gravelly depths echoing with comfortable wisdom.Costanzo also dazzles in solos that showcase his rich yet delicate voice, which glints and swoops like intricately painted blown glass. Before performing Lizst’s arresting art song “Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh,” Costanzo explains that it’s about despair, from poetry that Goethe is said to have carved into stone as he died alone.If the show speaks to the moment, it does not seem by design. The organizing principle of non sequiturs (“We’ve sung about flowers and water, now how about leaves?”) is charming to a point, though ultimately comes at the expense of assurance and momentum.Bond, a seasoned stage personality, is at ease riffing off the cuff and ribbing an insider crowd — but feels rather far away peering over the nine-piece orchestra, with a hand shielding the glare. Costanzo’s element is vocal storytelling; he’s less at ease, however, as a co-host, even though he’s clearly game.Their self-mythologizing repartee (an avant-garde legend and an opera star walk into a bar …) keeps the audience at a guarded remove, while the songs yearn for connection. It’s a paradox starkly rendered in fabric by the first of Jonathan Anderson’s costumes, velvety-soft, floor-length gowns that jut out at harsh angles, like front-turned bustles whose bell curves have been replaced by blunt machetes.Bond and Costanzo are extraordinary artists, though it’s not until the night is nearly over that they allow us to see them as vulnerable ones, too. “Only an Octave Apart” was meant to be a live show, then an album; the pandemic forced them to work in reverse. They poured themselves into creating this odd and beguiling record, they say, over the worst of the past year.Now onstage, they seem electrified, their nerves raw and frayed, dazed to be in communion again — in other words, more like the rest of us than they’d dare to let on.Only an Octave ApartThrough Oct. 3 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 90 minutes. More

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      Packing Your Purse (or Pockets) for a Night at the Opera

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      When I was in graduate school in Manhattan, my friend Bernard and I went to the opera without eating supper.Bernard and I had met at a fancy food market in SoHo where we both had part-time jobs behind the bread station. I was going to be a famous writer and he a famous set designer. But in the meantime, we spent our bread wages on the cheapest Family Circle tickets at the Metropolitan Opera, then hummed the arias from “Eugene Onegin” and “La Bohème” while we sliced seven grains and stacked up the baguettes.Our shift lasted past dinnertime, and the sandwiches and flutes of Champagne at the intermission bars were beyond our students’ budget. So we always came packing snacks — hearty, filling bites that could sustain us through “Götterdämmerung” but were small enough to stash inside my vintage beaded purse.Ready for intermission with, from left, brownie shortbread bars, almond-stuffed dates and hand pies. Don’t forget the napkin.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanIn nice weather, we munched egg salad sandwiches and homemade chocolate truffles perched at the edge of the fountain in Damrosch Park adjacent to Lincoln Center. When it was stormy, we would eat leaning against the rails of the balcony, watching fancy patrons savor their intermission baked alaskas at the Grand Tier restaurant below, assuming that one day in the distant future, that would be us.That distant future has arrived, and I’m still toting intermission nibbles to the Met in the same vintage purse. I plan to continue this season as well (the Met reopens Monday). But these days, I’m accompanied by my husband, Daniel, whose essential contribution is a (possibly illicit) flask full of bourbon or pre-mixed Manhattans tucked into his pocket.By now we could spring for sandwiches and Champagne at the bar, or even the Grand Tier, but we rarely do. My picnics, which are made to order — and, I think, a much more fun way to pass the 30 to 40 minutes of an average Met intermission — have become part of the opera ritual. And this year, picnicking offers another advantage: pulling your mask down to eat outside at Damrosch Park can be a Delta variant-savvy way to go.Ms. Clark with the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. Before his days of starring as Akhnaten at the opera, he picnicked on a bench, too.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOver the years of Falstaffs and Salomes, I’ve learned a few best practices when it comes to packing these petite opera tidbits.The first and foremost is to minimize the mess by avoiding sloppy, saucy morsels. I like to think of opera snacks in the same way that I’d choose hors d’oeuvres for a party. Neat, self-contained finger foods that can be nibbled in one hand while you hold a drink in the other work best, preferably things that taste good at room temperature.I’m partial to small tea sandwiches stacked with onion, cucumbers or smoked salmon for the first intermission, followed by some kind of sweet bite — say, almond-stuffed dates or homemade brownie shortbread bars, for a sugar jolt — to get me through that final act. Phyllo pastries filled with anything from ground lamb and feta to butternut squash and mint, or all manner of sweet or savory hand pies, could also work well.Then there are maki rolls, as long they’re filled with vegetables or something cooked. You don’t want raw fish sitting under your seat for the entire 100 minutes of the first two acts of “Don Carlos.”At top: savory options, including hand pies, kimbap and tea sandwiches. Below, the sweet: truffles, stuffed dates and brownie shortbread bars. On the side, a tin of sea salt and a flask, for washing it all down.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanThe countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who is reprising his star turn as Akhnaten in the 2021-22 season, used to bring homemade kimbap or avocado-cucumber maki to eat on a bench in the park back when he was a student, and these are an excellent option that you can either make or buy.“I certainly picnicked a lot when I used to attend the opera as a youth,” he said. “As a performer, backstage picnicking is a whole other level of intrigue with meals that will make you sing well but not look zaftig in your costume.” (Perhaps particularly because Mr. Costanzo spends part of Akhnaten with almost no costume at all.)Once you’ve decided which snacks to bring, you should consider the packing vessel (you’ll want something that can fit in a small purse or bag). That old plastic yogurt container may work just fine, but a cute and colorful bento box or metal tiffin container is a lot snazzier to set atop your lap. And a thin linen napkin can save your opera finery from splashes and drips.One thing you must avoid is ever going to the opera hungry. The mid-20th century writer Joseph Wechsberg describes the consequences at the Viennese opera house in his epicurean memoir, “Blue Trout and Black Truffles.”Egg salad sandwiches have the protein to sustain you.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanMr. Costanzo has to snack smartly backstage, given his revealing costume.Winnie Au for The New York Times“Sometimes my stomach would start to make rumbling noises just as the tenor sang a pianissimo, and everybody looked at me. Some well-fed people made ‘shsh-t!’ It was very embarrassing,” Mr. Wechsberg wrote.His response was to bring raw bacon sandwiches sprinkled with paprika to munch during the first act of “Die Walküre.”“While Siegmund and Sieglinde sang their beautiful duet about sweet Love and Spring, the sweet scent of paprika seemed to descend, like light fog, all over the fourth gallery.”It’s best to bring the sort of finger foods that can be nibbled in one hand while you hold your drink (or your food stash) in the other.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOf course, eating in the auditorium during the opera at the Met is always forbidden, and especially now. But eat paprika-sprinkled sandwiches at the second interval, and the sweet scent will carry you most of the way through Act III.Bernard and I once made one of Mr. Wechsberg’s opera sandwiches, though I admit that after much deliberation, we cooked the bacon before showering on the paprika, and stuffed it all in between slices of sourdough, courtesy of the fancy food shop where we worked.We were still wrapped in our light fog of paprika as Brünnhilde fell to dreaming in her magic ring of fire, our bellies content, all our senses alert, our hearts full.If only my past self could see what a culinary gift was passing down to future me. And an entire tier of opera patrons has been saved from indiscreet rumblings during the pianissimos. More

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      ‘Aria Code’ Explores the Meaning Behind the Music

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      The podcast hopes to extend the appeal of opera, “an art form that comes with a fair bit of baggage,” to a larger audience.For many fans, the highlight of any opera is a standout aria, like “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” or “Vesti la giubba” from Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.”But there’s more to these works than one intense tune, and many listeners are turning to opera-themed podcasts to better understand the layers of this emotion-filled art form.One such podcast among many is “Aria Code,” a collaboration by the classical music radio station WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera in New York and hosted by Rhiannon Giddens. A singer, composer and musician originally from North Carolina, Ms. Giddens studied opera at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and helped found the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band in which she sang and played fiddle and banjo.Rhiannon Giddens, a singer, musician and composer, said she jumped at the chance to host “Aria Code,” in part because of “the sheer universality of opera.”Karen Cox for The New York Times“Aria Code” uses the tagline “The magic of opera revealed, one song at a time” and humorous episode titles like “Once More Into the Breeches: Joyce DiDonato Sings Strauss” and “Breaking Mad: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.”The series has expanded its audience in this, its third season: Downloads of the podcast have increased more than 20 percent from season 2, according to its co-creator and lead producer, Merrin Lazyan.The podcast has also helped the Met reach its audience while the opera house was shut down for nearly 18 months by the Covid-19 pandemic. (The opera officially reopens on Monday, although it played host to an audience on Sept. 11 for a live performance of Verdi’s Requiem.)Gillian Brierley, assistant general manager of marketing and communications at the Met, said by email that the podcast was one way the Met was “reaching out not only to opera lovers but also to new audiences, bringing to life the range of emotions in opera through vivid storytelling and interviews as well as treasured recordings from our audio archives.”The seed of the idea for “Aria Code” came from Ms. Lazyan, who studied classical voice performance at the Royal College of Music in London. At WQXR in 2017, she suggested a segment in which a Met artist would explain the “Queen of the Night” aria from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” scored using the Met’s archival recordings. But colleagues saw wider potential, proposing a series “that could potentially open up an art form that comes with a fair bit of baggage to a wider audience,” she wrote in an email.Merrin Lazyan, the show’s co-creator and lead producer, planted the seed for the podcast with an idea in 2017.Rick StockwellAs the format evolved, Ms. Lazyan said, a team from WQXR and WNYC Studios (the podcast division of New York Public Radio) hit upon including multiple guests and people from outside the opera world to make the topics more relevant to modern lives. (Episodes conclude with a recorded Met performance of the selected aria.)“We realized that the best version of this show would be one that delights existing opera fans, but is also accessible to an audience that’s new to opera, or perhaps even skeptical of it,” she said. “We didn’t want to water it down, but we did want to break through the barriers.”In choosing an aria for an episode, Ms. Lazyan works closely with the Met. “Prepandemic,” she said, “all of the selected arias and artists were featured in the Met’s current onstage season, and we did our best to align episode releases with their production schedule. This year, we chose arias from both their canceled and upcoming seasons.”To keep “Aria Code” interesting, producers aim for a mix of well-known operas and what Ms. Lazyan called more obscure gems, along with a variety of voice types and even languages.“When it comes to the other guests on the show — the musicologists and dramaturges, the scientists and doctors, the athletes and writers and more — I choose them,” she said, sometimes with input from Ms. Giddens and others.Finding the right host was also key, she said, calling Ms. Giddens a “dream host for so many reasons.”“It was important to us to find someone who understands and appreciates this music, but is not necessarily an opera insider,” Ms. Lazyan said, but a guide for “lifelong opera lovers, people who are curious but have only dipped a toe in, and people who thought it was all a bunch of senseless caterwauling.”Ms. Giddens’s “focus in her own music is on excavating the past and telling bold truths about our present,” Ms. Lazyan said, “which is exactly what ‘Aria Code’ aims to do as well.”Ms. Giddens in the studio at WQXR, which produces “Aria Code” with the Metropolitan Opera.Max Fine/WQXRMs. Giddens said she jumped at the chance to host in part because of “the sheer universality of opera — these deeply emotive stories reflect the best and the worst of human nature, done with mind-bending talent and artistic collaboration.”She added that she has always been interested in equal access to the arts. “If given the chance,” she said, “people who hate the idea of opera could actually love it, if exposed to it in the right way.”That’s not always easy. “Helping listeners connect to the emotion within opera can be a challenge offstage,” Ms. Lazyan conceded.“For some arias, the sheer athleticism of opera performance is front and center,” she said. “Singing is such a personal and internal process, and it can be difficult to verbalize the nuanced inner workings of an artist’s technical and interpretive approach.“But hearing a singer describe how hitting the high note at the end of an exuberant coloratura passage feels like being up in the heavens among the stars, and simultaneously hearing that final high note ring out like a bell as the singer is talking about it, makes this process immediate and thrilling for listeners.”Other arias “welcome a much more personal and intimate kind of storytelling,” Ms. Lazyan said. “For those, I seek out guests with a personal experience that parallels the events or the emotional heart of the music.”For “Madama Butterfly,” the psychotherapist Kyoko Katayama “told the story of her mother, whose love affair with an American G.I. who abandoned her, pregnant, in Japan was an uncanny parallel to the abandonment and betrayal of Cio-Cio San in the opera,” Ms. Lazyan said.“Throughout the episode, you hear Kyoko’s story in parallel with the ‘Butterfly’ story. You hear how deeply personal it is, and that really opens the door to a different way of feeling the power of this music.”While the music and its composer can be the main draw, what about the librettists who fashioned the words?“Aria Code” certainly doesn’t ignore them, but the opera director Keturah Stickann, based in Knoxville, Tenn., puts them squarely in the spotlight in another podcast, “Words First: Talking Text in Opera.” She highlights librettists, she said by email, “because I feel like they sort of disappear when talking about a work. I like to make sure we say their names.” More

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      The Podcasts Opera Pros Tune To

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      Many favor shows about classical music, of course, but they also listen to shows about pop songs, “The Moth” and Conan O’Brien.“Aria Code” is an increasingly popular podcast. But what else do opera professionals listen to? Here are some recommendations. (Their comments, by email, have been edited and condensed.)Merrin Lazyan, co-creator and lead producer of “Aria Code”:I’ve enjoyed the podcasts produced by Glyndebourne Opera and LA Opera, as well as the new one from San Francisco Opera called “North Stage Door.” The Met’s other podcast, “In Focus,” is a great source of information about the history and context of various operas.Another music podcast that I enjoy, which features some opera but isn’t opera-specific, is “Soul Music” from the BBC. It’s a little like “Aria Code,” in that each episode includes several people talking about a single song and capturing its emotional resonance. But when I’m out for a run, there’s no Maria Callas or Marian Anderson, just Madonna and Michael Jackson.Sondra Radvanovsky, a co-host of the “Screaming Divas” podcast, performing in a recital in Spain in 2019.David Borrat/EPA, via ShutterstockKeri Alkema, Ms. Radvanovsky’s co-host on “Screaming Divas,” onstage in “Tosca” in London in 2016.Robbie Jack /Corbis, via Getty ImagesNicky Spence, tenor who will sing the role of Laca in “Jenufa” starting Tuesday at the Royal Opera House in London:Opera singers are often plagued with earworms of the music we’re in the midst of learning or performing, so I often take solace in the world of spoken-word podcasts. I’m a huge fan of Jess Gillam’s podcast “This Classical Life,” where she chats casually about classical music in a really accessible way with a fellow young musician. They don’t try to make classical music hip, but they are very cool with some great content. It’s the perfect gateway into the genre.Another lovely, informative podcast is “AA Opera!” headed by two young ladies — Ash and Avi — who manage to interview the starriest names in opera but make it sound like you’re just sitting at their kitchen table, which joyfully demystifies the concept of opera’s being grand.My guilty aural treat is “Screaming Divas” with opera royalty Sondra Radvanovsky and Keri Alkema. They take on my favorite folk in interview including Jamie Barton, Ben Heppner and Kate Lindsey as they pick through everything from popular culture, turning left at sex toys and of course, opera!Cori Ellison, an opera dramaturge who is a member of the Vocal Arts faculty at the Juilliard School and has appeared on “Aria Code” and other podcasts:“Aria Code” is absolutely top of the heap, intriguingly and beautifully curated, with high production values. “He Sang She Sang” is a slightly older but also terrific opera podcast by the radio station WQXR [co-hosted and produced by Ms. Lazyan]. Also very worthwhile are the “OperaHERE” podcasts by the Michigan Opera Theater and podcasts by the English National Opera; Opera North from Leeds, England; “The In-Tune A-Z of Opera” by the BBC; LA Opera; Seattle Opera; Minnesota Opera; and Glyndebourne in Sussex County, England.Charlie Harding, left, and Nate Sloan, co-hosts of “Switched on Pop.”Ellyn JamesonGillian Brierley, assistant general manager of marketing and communications at the Met:“Switched on Pop,” produced by Vulture, is a great music podcast that analyzes pop songs, interweaving musicological tidbits in a very approachable way. They had a great four-part mini-series with the New York Philharmonic called “The 5th” about Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in celebration of the composer’s 250th birthday.“Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” is among the non-music podcasts favored by the soprano Amy Burton.Team Coco/Earwolf, via Associated PressAmy Burton, New York-based soprano who has sung at the Met and the White House and teaches at Juilliard and the Mannes School of Music:Opera can be intimidating to people who don’t speak foreign languages, or who are put off by the grandeur and scale of it all — the gigantic forces, the lengthy evenings, the audacity of the emotions expressed. “Aria Code” could really help people find their way into the art form. And for those who already love opera, it may provide a deeper understanding.However, my tendency after a day of teaching opera singers is to listen to podcasts about subjects other than music. By listening to poets, comedians, filmmakers and other artists, I feel it recharges my batteries creatively, both as a singer and a teacher. I wish I could recommend other music podcasts, but in my free time my focus is more on language — “The Writer’s Voice,” “The Plot Thickens,” “The Moth,” “Coffee Break French” — and “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” because I need laughter. More

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      Oedipus Takes to the Stages in Berlin

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      Four interpretations of the Greek myth have been produced in the German capital, all with resonances for our moment.BERLIN — “The city reeks with death in her streets,” the chorus laments in Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.” Thebes is in the grip of a deadly plague. The king summons a prophet to divine the will of the gods, who accuses the monarch, “You are the cursed polluter of this land.”The theme of nature striking back, revolting against unnatural acts, is one that resonates 20 months into the Covid-19 pandemic and after a summer of climate-change-related extreme weather events, including flooding in Germany, deadly heat waves in Canada and fires in Greece.All that may help explain why, at the beginning of the theater season in Berlin, Sophocles’ tragic hero, the original mama’s boy, has been center stage in a quartet of new productions at some of the city’s leading companies.Arguably the most eagerly awaited was Maja Zade’s new play, “ödipus,” a contemporary reworking of the myth, which premiered at the Athens Epidaurus Festival this month and recently transferred to the Schaubühne. Michael, a young employee at a German chemical company, is dating his much older boss, Christina. Their relationship begins to fray over the handling of an investigation into a chemical spill, and Michael learns that the accident also caused the death of Christina’s first husband. Several revelations later, Michael puts two and two together and realizes that — spoiler alert — he killed his father and slept with his mother.The Kazakh director Evgeny Titov’s surreal production of “Œdipe” is far and away the most brutal of Berlin’s Oedipal offerings.Monika RittershausAny hint of ancient Greek cosmology is scrubbed clean from Zade’s version. The most explicit reference we get to myth in Thomas Ostermeier’s sleek and sterile production is a small statue of a sphinx perched on a kitchen counter. Jan Pappelbaum’s sparse set, framed by neon lights, has a sitcom-like realism. The dialogue, dispatched by the four-person cast around the kitchen table or a backyard grill, is stiff and largely functional. The actors struggle more against a poorly made play than they do against fate.The only one who succeeds is Caroline Peters as Christina, who, even more than her young lover, is the center of Zade’s play. Peters shows her talent for transcending mediocre dramatic material just as she did in the recent Schaubühne production of Simon Stone’s “Yerma.” At the climax of the production, she explains the awful truth to Michael. Her face is projected in close-up on a screen (the only time that the intermittent video serves a purpose), allowing us to register her every twitch during the lengthy speech. She pulls off the tricky monologue like a doctor steeling herself to give a patient a terrible diagnosis, putting aside her bedside manner because there’s no way to sugarcoat a revelation this horrific.Along with the gods and fate, Zade’s play also dispenses with the chorus, a mainstay of Greek drama, who provide a collective counterpoint to the individuals at the center of the drama. Chanting in unison, they also fill in background information and comment on the action, serving as something of a conduit between the main actors and the audience.This chorus, on the other hand, assumes center stage in the Deutsches Theater’s highly ritualistic “Oedipus,” a largely faithful production of Sophocles’ play directed by Ulrich Rasche. The contrast in tone and style with the down-to-earth realism of Ostermeier’s production could not be more striking.Rasche has devised an extremely precise mode of Maschinentheater, a theatrical approach that relies heavily on elaborate scenic elements and stagecraft. His industrial and dark productions derive much of their sweaty vitality from intense physical performances and droning music. His “Oedipus” is based on an 1804 translation by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, whose language is archaic and pungently lyrical. The cast, treading in place on a constantly rotating stage, enunciates the text crisply and with studied intensity.The Deutsches Theater’s highly ritualistic “Oedipus,” a largely faithful production of Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” directed by Ulrich Rasche. Arno DeclairNico van Wersch’s score includes an electric bass, Moog synthesizer and microtonal keyboard. The chorus chants in unison, creating a percussive atmosphere that harmonizes with the concentric rings of color-changing fluorescent lights that tilt from the ceiling. The effect is arresting for the first hour, but then quickly turns soporific. Rasche takes his time — just shy of three hours — and the slow-moving production is maddeningly deliberate.Music played an even more prominent role in Berlin’s second pair of Oedipal productions.The British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage was a 20-something upstart in 1988 when he wrote “Greek,” which recently opened the Deutsche Oper Berlin’s season. This short, two-act opera is many things, including a scathing political and social commentary about Thatcher-era England and a self-conscious sendup of opera as an art form that, at its origin, sought to resurrect the spirit of ancient Greek drama.A spunky and potty-mouthed comic strip opera, “Greek” transposes the action from ancient Thebes to East London. Oedipus becomes Eddy, an angry young working-class man looking to better himself while fleeing a horrible fate predicted by a carnival fortune teller that has become a running gag in his family.In the Deutsche Oper’s parking lot (a corona-averse location also used last year for a reduced production of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold”), four singers pranced and strutted in the young German director Pinar Karabulut’s cartoonishly campy production, wearing colorful variations on ancient Greek garb, down to orange, purple and green curly wigs and beards. There’s a fair amount of spoken text, which the members of the all-American cast dispatched with exaggerated cockney accents when they weren’t belting out the eclectic score, which careens from dance hall crudeness to poignant lyricism.Dean Murphy in the British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Greek,” staged in the parking lot of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Eike WalkenhorstTurnage’s irreverent work is one of the more recent musical versions of the Oedipus myth, a list that includes Stravinsky’s 1927 “Oedipus Rex” and the Doors’ “The End.” Among the most powerful is George Enescu’s 1936 opera, “Œdipe,” an underperformed 20th-century masterpiece that recently opened the Komische Oper Berlin’s season. (In a rare coincidence, a new production of the opera also kicked off the season at the Paris Opera.)The Kazakh director Evgeny Titov’s surreal production is far and away the most brutal of Berlin’s Oedipal offerings. The set resembles a derelict madhouse and is frequently awash in blood, from the tragic hero’s difficult birth to his transfiguring death in Colonus. In between are graphic depictions of Laius’ disembowelment and of Oedipus putting out his own eyes.Enescu’s musical language fuses various early modernist styles with traditional Romanian melodies and harmonies, which the orchestra of the Komische Oper, under the baton of its general music director, Ainars Rubikis, performs with assurance and intensity. The lengthy title role features ample Sprechgesang, a vocal style halfway between song and speech. The British baritone Leigh Melrose’s searing performance is as much a dramatic feat as it is a musical achievement. Of all the Oedipuses haunting the German capital, his is the most affecting, tragic and believable.Enescu began writing “Œdipe” shortly after Sigmund Freud first theorized the Oedipus complex, and the composer’s Oedipus is an archetype of modern man who, despite his quest for knowledge and self-understanding, is blind to himself, incapable of outrunning destiny and the agent of his own destruction.Is it any wonder that some of today’s leading theatermakers have turned to this 2,500-year-old existential detective story as we grapple with the catastrophes affecting our bodies and our planet? Like the ancients, we get the myths we deserve, not the ones we want.From left, Renato Schuch, Caroline Peters and Christian Tschirner in “ödipus,” by Maja Zade, directed by Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne Berlin.Gianmarco Bresadolaödipus. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Schaubühne Berlin, through Sept. 26.Œdipe. Directed by Evgeny Titov. Komische Oper Berlin, through Sept. 26.Oedipus. Directed by Ulrich Rasche. Deutsches Theater Berlin, through Oct. 17. More

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      Carmen Balthrop, Soprano Known for Joplin Opera Role, Dies at 73

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      After winning a vocal competition in 1975, she starred in “Treemonisha,” which ended up on Broadway. She also sang for a senator.The soprano Carmen Balthrop made her Metropolitan Opera debut on April 6, 1977. Thirteen days later she made an entirely different sort of debut, in a hearing room of the United States Senate.That day Ms. Balthrop, still early in a career that would take her to opera and concert stages all over the world, was one of a number of people testifying at a meeting of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in support of funding for the arts.It was a dreary and underattended meeting, with Senator Mark O. Hatfield, Republican of Oregon and the subcommittee chairman, the only member of the panel present. Dreary, that is, until Senator Hatfield, skeptical of the funding request, challenged Ms. Balthrop’s assertion that opera singers were a disciplined and hard-working lot.“He said, ‘Come on, are you really that disciplined?’” she told Knight-Ridder afterward. “And he said he’d like to hear some of the results. I said, ‘Why, certainly.’”She stood up and sang “Signore, ascolta” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”“He was delighted and declared a recess,” she said, “and later on, we got the money.”Ms. Balthrop, a noted Black star when opera was still early in its efforts to become more diverse, died on Sept. 5 at her home in Mitchellville, Md. She was 73.Her husband, Patrick A. Delaney, said the cause was cancer.Two years before that impromptu Senate performance, Ms. Balthrop’s career took off after she wowed audiences at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in April 1975, winning that competition. During the finals, she had sung that same “Turandot” excerpt, as well as “Che sento? O Dio!” from Handel’s “Julius Caesar,” performances that had been broadcast live on National Public Radio.“The announcement of Miss Balthrop’s victory brought cheers from the audience, which had clearly approved of her singing,” The New York Times reported.Later that year she landed perhaps her most prominent role, the title character in “Treemonisha,” Scott Joplin’s folk opera about an 18-year-old Black girl who is trying to lead her people to a better life. The opera, written before World War I, was not produced in Joplin’s lifetime, but in 1972 a version of it was staged in Atlanta, and three years later the Houston Grand Opera mounted a production with Ms. Balthrop in the lead.The opera was performed in Houston seven times as part of a free opera series, with thousands attending. At the final performance, the opera’s finale, “A Real Slow Drag,” was reprised three times for the enthusiastic crowd.That production moved to Broadway. At the time, Elizabeth McCann was managing director of Nederlander Productions, which brought the show to New York. (Ms. McCann died this month.) She told The Times that the ability of Ms. Balthrop, who was then 27, to portray a teenager was a large part of the reason.“Carmen Balthrop, who plays the title role, is just tremendous,” she said. “The part needs an enchanting and innocent girl with strength. How often do you get a combination like that?”Ms. Balthrop as Pamina in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.” She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the role in 1977.James Heffernan/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesCarmen Arlene Balthrop was born on May 14, 1948, in Washington. Her father, John, worked in the printing office of the Department of Justice, and her mother, Clementine (Jordan) Balthrop, was a homemaker.As Ms. Balthrop often told the story, she set her career goal early — when she was 8. Her father had a hobby: In the basement of the family home, he would tinker with radios and televisions. She had an assigned Saturday chore: to clean the house while her mother went to the market.“One Saturday I was running the vacuum cleaner, and I turned it off because I heard something very unusual coming from the basement,” where her father was testing a radio and speakers, she told “The Opera Diva Series,” a web interview program, in 2011.“I went to the top of the steps and I called out,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Daddy, what’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s opera.’”Specifically, it was the voice of Leontyne Price, the groundbreaking Black soprano.“Something was awakened in me,” Ms. Balthrop said, “and I began from that moment on to try to re-create that sound myself.”She graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington in 1967 and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland in 1971. The next year she received a master’s degree in music at the Catholic University of America.Her Met debut in 1977 was in “Die Zauberflöte,” in which she sang the role of Pamina. She performed with numerous other opera companies and symphonies, including Washington Opera, Deutsche Oper of Berlin and Opera Columbus in Ohio, where in 1999 she performed the title role in the world premiere of “Vanqui,” an opera about the travels of the souls of two slaves composed by Leslie Burrs and with a libretto by John A. Williams.Ms. Balthrop began a career as a teacher at the University of Maryland in 1985. She also filled administrative roles there, including coordinator of the voice and opera division.A marriage to Dorceal Duckens ended in divorce. In addition to Mr. Delaney, whom she married in 1985, Ms. Balthrop is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Nicole Mosley; her daughter with Mr. Delaney, Camille Delaney-McNeil; and three grandchildren.In a blog entry on the University of Maryland website, Ms. Balthrop once wrote of being surprised by Ms. Price, who turned up unexpectedly at a rehearsal when Ms. Balthrop was preparing to perform in San Francisco.“There was no one in the hall,” she wrote of their encounter. “I was standing there with the voice that inspired me to sing. Every time I think about it, I just well up, because I don’t think people get to meet their idols very often.” More