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      Review: For Armory Recitals, a Modest but Memorable Return

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      Paul Appleby and Conor Hanick presented a song program focused on cycles by Beethoven and Berg.The past few weeks have brought heartening signs that classical music is coming back to New York after the devastating pandemic closures of the past year and a half. The Metropolitan Opera reopened the doors for an inspiring performance of Verdi’s Requiem on Sept. 11. The New York Philharmonic inaugurated its new season last week.On Monday evening a much more modest, but no less meaningful, return took place when the tenor Paul Appleby and the pianist Conor Hanick presented a song recital in the elegantly intimate Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory.Just over 90 people, a near-capacity crowd for the salon-like space, attended this intelligent and beautifully performed program of German lieder — lasting two hours, with an intermission, just as concerts generally used to before everything stopped. The program repeats on Wednesday, and two more artist pairs fill out the fall in the space: Will Liverman and Myra Huang next month, and Jamie Barton and Warren Jones in November.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAppleby is best known for opera, including the title role in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” and David in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” which he sings next month at the Met. Yet he has long been devoted to the song literature, including many new and recent works.This Armory program arose from his desire to pair two song cycles, Beethoven’s “An die ferne Geliebte” and Berg’s “Altenberg Lieder” — both of which, as he wrote in program notes, “address ways of coping with unfulfilled wishes, with dreams that did not come true.” To place these cycles in context, he performed selected songs by Schumann and Schubert that also grapple with loss and pain and offer coping mechanisms — including, as Appleby put it, “numb nihilism.”Both cycles were historically momentous. Beethoven’s set of six songs, from 1816, offered a template for the 19th-century German song cycle. The poems, by Alois Jeitteles, present a protagonist thinking of his lost home, his distant beloved, his unfulfilled love. The songs flow from one to the next, giving the cycle the sense of a unified, if episodic, narrative. Appleby sang the tender pieces with warmth and heartache, and brought almost eerie vitality to moments of heady nostalgia. Hanick, a brilliant pianist more often heard in thorny contemporary scores, played with crispness, nuance and grace.Berg’s 1912 work, which sets five short texts by the German writer Peter Altenberg, was originally written for mezzo-soprano and lush orchestra. The public reaction when two of the songs were introduced at a concert in Vienna was so hostile that their aggrieved composer never had them performed again. But the work pointed the way to a new 20th-century musical language. Appleby and Hanick performed a version with a piano reduction that allowed the tenor — with a relatively lighter, lyric voice — to bring out subtleties in the vocal lines. And Hanick’s playing was a revelation of clarity and bite.There were lovely accounts of all the Schubert and Schumann works. I was especially gratified to hear these artists call attention to little-heard songs from Schumann’s later years, like the dreamy “An den Mond,” which opened the wonderful program, and the autumnal, harmonically tart “Abendlied,” which ended it.Paul Appleby and Conor HanickRepeats Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.com. More

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      A Cabaret Star and an Opera Star Walk Onto a Stage …

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      The punchline is “Only an Octave Apart,” featuring the unlikely collaborators Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo at St. Ann’s Warehouse.“This show has been 10 years in the making,” the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo said recently.He was talking about “Only an Octave Apart,” an undefinable event — A staged concert? A revue, maybe? — which he created with Justin Vivian Bond and which runs at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn from Tuesday through Oct. 3.On paper, the two seem to be unlikely collaborators. Bond, 58, is a throaty-toned pioneer of the alternative cabaret scene, both as a solo artist and as half of the duo Kiki and Herb. Costanzo, 39, is a classical star whose luminous voice takes him to opera houses and concert halls around the world. (In the spring, he’ll return to his body-waxed role as the titular character of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera.)But Costanzo’s voracious taste for collaboration has encompassed artists as disparate as the painter George Condo, the ballet dancer David Hallberg and the fashion designer Raf Simons. And Bond recently appeared in an opera, Olga Neuwirth’s “Orlando,” in Vienna in 2019.Costanzo is a countertenor who is returning to the title role in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBond is an alt-cabaret artist who rose to fame as half of the duo Kiki and Herb.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSo it’s not entirely implausible that they’ve ended up together at St. Ann’s, where their set list ricochets giddily from Gluck to Jobim to the Bangles, and the artistic team includes the director Zack Winokur (“The Black Clown”), the fashion designer Jonathan Anderson and the composer Nico Muhly on arrangements.Bond and Costanzo’s partnership is more organic than most “when worlds collide” projects, which often feel as if an enterprising impresario had pulled random names out of a hat and precipitately pushed the unlucky artists onstage.“We were seeing each other because we were friends, not because we were intending to collaborate,” Bond said, sitting with Costanzo after a recent rehearsal.Back in 2011, Costanzo was in the audience at Joe’s Pub for one of Bond’s cabaret outings. When Bond mentioned from the stage that the guest artist for an upcoming performance had just dropped out and there wasn’t a replacement, Costanzo leaned over to a friend and whispered, “Me!”The friend, the photographer and director Matthew Placek, also knew Bond and made the introductions. Costanzo nabbed the guest spot and prepared a Handel aria, but he was also keen to join voices on “Summertime.”“You said no,” Costanzo recalled to Bond in the interview. “Then right before the show started, I was practicing it and you were like, ‘All right, all right, we will do it as a duet.’”The inspiration for “Only an Octave Apart,” and the title number, came from a television special Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills recorded at the Met in 1976. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe combo was a success. “We sounded so good together,” Bond said. “Of course, that song’s problematic and we can’t sing it anymore, but it gave us an opportunity to see our chemistry onstage, which was really fun.”So much so that they are back for more, though the initial impetus was rather pedestrian: Costanzo wasn’t sure what to do next for his record company. “I just didn’t want to make ‘Scarlatti Cantatas’ or something,” he said. “I mean, they’re beautiful, but it’s been done.”Teaming up with Bond provided a creative solution. (And this won’t be their last partnership of the season. They will come together at the New York Philharmonic in January as part of the “Authentic Selves” festival that Costanzo is organizing.)The inspiration for “Only an Octave Apart,” and the title number, came from a pop-culture footnote: a television special that Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills recorded at the Met in 1976. A similar encounter of disparate influences and high and low culture (or at least what audiences associate with high and low), flavored with vaudevillian touches, will now be played out at St. Ann’s.At first, even the longtime Bond collaborator Thomas Bartlett — who is the show’s music director and producer of the album version of “Octave,” which comes out in January — was skeptical.“When the idea was pitched to me, it sounded a bit like a fun joke,” he said in a video call. “It didn’t occur to me that Anthony’s voice would make Viv’s voice feel rich and kind and wise in this way, and that Viv would make Anthony sound even more ethereal.”Bond, Costanzo and Bartlett came up with a wide range of material. Some of the songs are duets, like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s “Don’t Give Up.” Some are solos in conversation with each other, such as when an aria from Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” segues into the early-20th-century ditty “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.” Some are classics from the cabaret repertoire, like “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” And some are the kind of free associations in which Kiki and Herb used to specialize, like a surprisingly effective medley of “Dido’s Lament” — also by Purcell — and Dido’s “White Flag.”“We’re holding our own space, but we’re doing it together,” Bond said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDespite the mingling of their musical universes, the performers stay true to their respective styles. “We’re not crossing over,” Bond said firmly. “We’re holding our own space, but we’re doing it together.” They do not scat-sing Purcell, for example, and Costanzo does not imitate the disco singer Sylvester’s famous falsetto when the pair covers his track “Stars.”“I was like, how do I take an application of this voice and technique that feels honest and that sings the song?” Costanzo said. “I listen to opera singers try to sing pop and it’s so lame, because inevitably they wind up trying to sing some classical arrangement to a pop song.”During a recent rehearsal, Bond often left space for future improvisation. “I’m going to come out, they’re going to see me, I’m going to milk it for a moment,” Bond said at one point, describing an entrance. Costanzo, on the other hand, is used to the precision of classical music, where every note and step is carefully planned.“Sometimes my frustration with opera is that all spontaneity dies in pursuit of perfection,” he said. “I want to uphold and cherish the tradition, but in order to make it feel alive, it needs some kind of being in the moment and spontaneity.”“But it’s challenging because I am always looking for structure and Viv is always like, ‘Don’t box me in because it’s not going to be as good,’” Costanzo said.Still, Bond pointed out that there is a safety net. “I obviously don’t want Anthony to feel uncomfortable, or that he’s going to be in any way undermined or not feel that he’s going to be seen at his best, so we’ve been establishing points where things definitely have to happen,” Bond said.Working out the sound of a crow’s caw, the pair seemed ready for their spotlight — at the most stylish comedy hour ever. “I’ve never laughed so hard in the rehearsal process,” Winokur, the director, said.But if there are many jokes in the show, the performers are in on them.“Being a countertenor, whenever I open my mouth, even at the Met, people go, ‘Why is he singing like that?’” Costanzo said. “I go work with kids and they laugh the minute you start singing. Which I love, I welcome it, but I’m like a novelty in that way, which I enjoy exploiting.”“As a classical musician,” he added, “you can be gay or queer or whatever, and then you go do your show. You are not expressing yourself as much in that theatricality or your identity. You are embodying a character. This project feels like, for whatever reason, this real theatrical expression of who I am.”Bond suggested, “It’s expressing your artistry through a place of truth, as opposed to trying to make something that is artificial seem true.”Costanzo laughed and said: “See? Viv is so good!” More

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      Fake Rock Nearly Crushes Opera Star: Accident or Sabotage?

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      Feuding stagehands, falling props: It might sound like the plot of an opera, but in France it has been the subject of a court case.LONDON — The tenor Robert Dean Smith was lying onstage — eyes closed, pretending to be dead — when he felt something very close above him.Smith was appearing as Tristan in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in France, and he assumed that what he sensed looming was his colleague, the soprano Elisabete Matos, who was singing Isolde. She’d probably decided to alter the choreography and had come to stand over him, he thought.But when Smith opened his eyes, he saw a 467-pound fake rock hanging just inches from his face. “I panicked and just threw it out of the way,” he recalled of the 2015 incident in a telephone interview. He rolled out from underneath the object, and quickly got to his feet — which likely confused an audience that had watched Tristan die a short while before. (His co-star kept singing throughout.)The cause of this dangerous mishap was at first a mystery. But the reality turns out to be so bizarre that it could be an opera itself.Robert Dean Smith and Elisabete Matos onstage in “Tristan und Isolde” at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in 2015Partrice NinLast week, a court in Toulouse found a stagehand at the theater guilty of tampering with the computer system that controlled the prop rock’s descent. The production, which was directed by Nicolas Joel, intended for the object to stop about 30 inches above the tenor, and its continued descent at the performance in question was only stopped when another member of the technical staff realized something had gone wrong, according to a report in La Dépêche du Midi, a local newspaper.According to the prosecutors, the stagehand, Nicholas S., whose surname has not been revealed by French newspapers out of respect for his privacy, had long been in conflict with a rival stagehand, Richard R., whom he hoped would be blamed for the error. Two months before the incident, Nicholas S. had won a court case where he accused Richard R. of assault.Nicholas S., who denied the allegations that he had tampered with the computer system, was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence and made to pay a symbolic one-euro fine to the Théâtre du Capitole. His lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.Smith, the tenor, said he had never imagined someone had been trying to hurt him or had tampered with the equipment. “I’ve seen too many accidents onstage,” he said. “I’ve seen trapdoors open with people on them, and doors and walls fall down onto people.” Smith once cut his hand open while playing Don José in Bizet’s “Carmen,” because someone had forgotten to blunt the knife.In 2008, Smith was actually the beneficiary of such a mishap — making his Metropolitan Opera debut, as Tristan, after the tenor Gary Lehman was injured during a prior performance because of a prop malfunction. Lehman had been lying on a palette on a steeply raked section of the stage when the palette broke loose from its moorings and plummeted into the prompter’s box. Lehman hit his head and could not take part in the next performance.Given the frequency of accidents onstage, that the 2015 incident was the result of feuding stagehands was “just really bizarre and very unfortunate for the theater,” Smith said.After the 2015 performance, the tenor apologized to Matos for his part in ruining the show. After that, he said, he had tried to ensure he died onstage in positions where he could keep his eyes open to see if anything was coming.Constant Merheut contributed reporting from Paris. More

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      Review: In ‘Sun & Sea,’ We Laze Away the End of the World

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      Seemingly sweet yet insistently ominous, this opera installation turns a sandy beach into a spectacle of a changing climate.In May 2019, as the art world raced through the first preview day of the Venice Biennale, a tiny number of us set off for a naval base in the northeast corner of the city.There, inside a damp storehouse commandeered as an ad hoc pavilion for Lithuania, we ascended a scaffold and looked down on a startling sight: a large sandy beach. Beneath us, children played with buckets and shovels; dogs dozed and yapped; and a cast of more than a dozen sang of delayed flights and exploding volcanoes to a spare, insistently catchy electronic score.No one had pegged this as a highlight of the biennial. But it quickly became clear that it was a masterpiece of culture in a changing climate: a dismayingly rare subject for art, given its urgency. Three days later “Sun & Sea” (the title, like the music, is only superficially benign) won the show’s top prize, the Golden Lion, even as its three young Lithuanian creators — the director Rugile Barzdziukaite, the librettist Vaiva Grainyte and the composer Lina Lapelyte, working with the Italian curator Lucia Pietroiusti — hustled to secure funding to finish the run.Looking down from a mezzanine, you see the beachgoers sing solos or duets of a few minutes apiece, interrupted sometimes by errant children or a flying beach ball.George Etheredge for The New York Times“Sun & Sea” is now on tour, though the pandemic has not made it easy. The beach re-emerged earlier this summer in an empty Bauhaus swimming pool outside Berlin; in a warehouse in Piraeus, Greece; and in the orchestra level of an 18th-century Roman theater. It arrived this week at the BAM Fisher in Brooklyn, where its largely Lithuanian cast (some of whom have been with “Sun & Sea” since its first presentation at the national gallery in Vilnius in 2017) has been beefed up with New York-area supernumeraries who have substantially upped the beach’s tattoo quotient.Compressed into the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s black box theater, the opera has lost some of its vertiginous impact. And its reveries of carefree international travel have the slight feel of a prepandemic time capsule. But “Sun & Sea” remains one of the greatest achievements in performance of the last 10 years: wry, seductive and cunning in ways that reveal themselves days or years later. This is a performance that makes the extinction of the species feel as agreeable as a perfect pop song, and as unforgettable, too.The New York run is sold out, though standby tickets are available, and tickets are going fast for subsequent stops in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Bentonville, Ark. Here it’s being performed for five hours each day, and ticket holders can enter at half-hour intervals and stay as long as they wish. (The score runs in a loop of a bit over an hour.)“Sun & Sea” looks at climate change nondirectionally, immersively, with the same casual unconcern as most holidaymakers (or, frankly, most legislators).George Etheredge for The New York TimesLooking down from a mezzanine, you see the beachgoers sing solos or duets of a few minutes apiece, interrupted sometimes by errant children or a flying beach ball. Two lovers debate what time to wake up to get to the airport the next day. An older woman reads the multilingual label on her sunscreen tube. A nouveau riche mother (the soprano Kalliopi Petrou, on a chaise longue) extols her recent Australian family vacation, the free piña coladas and the coral with its “bleached, pallid whiteness.”Only gently, distantly, do these characters perceive that the summers are a little hotter than before, that the waves are a little scarier. A young woman with a yoga mat and a self-help book (Nabila Dandara Vieira Santos, lying on a beach towel) marvels at the red sundresses, the green plastic bags, the fish-killing algal blooms: “O the sea never had so much color!”This episodic structure, as well as its repetition over hours, is central to the force of “Sun & Sea” — which looks at climate change nondirectionally, immersively, with the same casual unconcern as most holidaymakers (or, frankly, most legislators). Soloists often sing the same melody two times, once with banal lyrics about their day at the beach, and once tending toward the poetic, the cosmic, the climatic.George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York TimesOne perpetually irritated beachgoer (the mezzo-soprano Egle Paskeviciene) sings an aria about tourists who won’t clean up after their dogs; later, to the same octave-leaping melody, she marvels that last Christmas “it felt like it could be Easter!” A corporate workaholic (the tender bass Vytautas Pastarnokas, in maroon swim trunks) sings steadily on the beat with the score’s pulsing monotone — first about the difficulties of relaxing, and then, later, about the “suppressed negativity” that pours out “like lava, like lava, like lava, like lava.”The whole cast sings an adagio Vacationers’ Chorus — “You should not leave your children unobserved!” — that’s reset, at the tail of the opera’s hourlong cycle, with Grainyte’s most poetic invocation of habitat change. “Eutrophication!” the beachgoers sing. “Our bodies are covered with a slippery green fleece; our swimsuits are filling up with algae.”Then the first chorus repeats. Fun follows on fear, fear follows on fun, neither with any great impact on the other. The world heats up, and the singers slather on more sunscreen. The forests burn on the other coast, and we queue for brunch with smoke in our eyes. Barzdziukaite, Grainyte and Lapelyte are among the few artists ready to engage with climate change at this scale, with this seriousness: not as a single coming disaster, but an entire epoch in which pleasures and disasters will bump up against one another and the end never comes.Through the audience’s omnipresent cameraphones, our critic writes, “this episodic opera gets further chopped into shareable snippets.”Jason FaragoGrainyte’s lyrics still invoke “our northern flatland,” a Schengen area idyll reached by discount European air carriers, though the beach at BAM has been New Yorkified in places: nestled in the sand, alongside a Lithuanian word-search booklet, are bodega takeout trays and a tote bag from the Park Slope Food Co-op. Not that the translation to New York has been seamless. BAM Fisher is the wrong venue for “Sun & Sea,” with the singers and supernumeraries crammed on too small a sandbar, pinned up against ugly gray walls.And the mezzanine is low, placing us too close to the singers and denying us the bird’s-eye — or drone’s-eye — view of the beachgoers so important to Barzdziukaite’s staging. “Sun & Sea” is choreographed to be seen overhead, from a forensic distance, as if we were sun gods looking down on our wayward creation. Yet that protective distance gets intentionally negated by new conditions of performance spectatorship: above all, by the phones wielded by the majority of spectators. (We might say that one working definition of performance art, as distinct from opera or theater, is that audience members are allowed to use their phones.)By placing us over the singers, Barzdziukaite sets up the perfect shot; she is, after all, a film director, and has used the same perspective in documentaries about habitat decay. First in Venice, then in Rome, and now again here, I watched my fellow audience members cradle their phones in their hands throughout the performance, as if compelled by the aerial view. They held them parallel to the stage below, so that the screen filled entirely with sand.By placing us over the singers, the artists have set up the perfect cameraphone shot.George Etheredge for The New York TimesBy design, then, this episodic opera gets further chopped into shareable snippets, or else merely into pictures we can scroll through later, as if they were our own holiday snaps. Though it’s a bit diminished at BAM, this overwhelming achievement of “Sun & Sea” endures: It brings our ecological disquiet and our technological derangement into registration, turning the opera’s endless vacation into our own. We have become new people, with new eyes and ears, in a new climate, and we are still just lazing away the days.Sun & SeaThrough Sept. 26 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; 718-636-4100, bam.org. More

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      Avec 'Oedipe', Wajdi Mouawad sonde les fractures du passé

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      Pour sa mise en scène l’opéra de Georges Enescu, le libano-canadien Wajdi Mouawad sonde les traumatismes de la compagnie — et les siens. “Quand on est soi-même complètement fracturé, on construit”.The New York Times traduit en français une sélection de ses meilleurs articles. Retrouvez-les ici.PARIS — Peu avant le début des répétitions pour sa mise en scène de l’“Œdipe” d’Enesco à l’Opéra de Paris, Wajdi Mouawad a une idée qui s’avère insolite. Il rédige un lexique de toutes les références obscures du livret — comme “l’eau de Castalie”, une source sacrée de Delphes — et l’envoie au chœur.Wajdi Mouawad, qui a 52 ans et dirige le Théâtre national de la Colline à Paris, est alors stupéfait d’apprendre que c’est la première fois que les choristes reçoivent un tel document. Quand il rencontre les techniciens de l’Opéra pour leur expliquer l’histoire de cet “Œdipe”, une curiosité composée dans les années 30 qui s’inspire du mythe grec, leur réaction est la même, se souvient-il dans un entretien: les metteurs en scène prennent rarement la peine de leur accorder beaucoup d’attention.“C’est étrange, parce qu’on me dit : ‘c’est formidable, tu dis bonjour’, ” confirme-t-il. “J’ai l’impression d’arriver dans un monde traumatisé qui maintenant trouve que son traumatisme est la normalité.”Traumatisme : le mot pourrait résumer ces dernières années à l’Opéra de Paris,volontiers frondeur. Fin 2019 et début 2020, les grèves provoquées par la perspective d’une réforme des retraites ont creusé un déficit de 45 millions d’euros, sur un budget de près de 230 millions d’euros. Et encore, c’était avant que la pandémie n’oblige à annuler plus d’une année de productions. (Des spectacles ont eu lieu en septembre et en octobre de l’année dernière, mais la compagnie a dû attendre fin mai pour reprendre sa programmation régulière.)L’“Œdipe” qui débute lundi à l’Opéra Bastille, la plus vaste scène de la compagnie, inaugure une nouvelle ère. Il s’agit de la première production commandée par Alexander Neef, le nouveau directeur général de l’Opéra de Paris nommé il y a un an.Le choix de Wajdi Mouawad ne doit rien au hasard. Avant d’arriver à Paris, Neef a dirigeait la Compagnie nationale d’opéra de Toronto où il a co-produit les premiers pas de Mouawad dans l’univers de l’opéra. C’était “L’Enlèvement au sérail” de Mozart, en 2016, qu’Alexander Neef qualifie d’ “une des expériences les plus gratifiantes que j’aie connue avec un metteur en scène.”“Sa force en tant qu’artiste, c’est qu’il a vraiment à cœur de travailler avec les gens,” explique Alexander Neef lors d’un entretien dans son bureau. “Avec “Œdipe”, j’espérais qu’il arrive à ressouder la compagnie. Il faut presque lui demander de ne pas être trop gentil.”Le retour d’ “Œdipe” sur la scène parisienne s’est fait attendre. Unique opéra de Georges Enesco, l’œuvre a été créée en 1936 au Palais Garnier. Elle n’a jamais été reprise à l’Opéra de Paris depuis cette date, alors que d’autres compagnies d’opéra s’y sont récemment intéressées. La première production nord-américaine a eu lieu en 2005 à l’université d’Illinois. En Europe, Achim Freyer a offert une mise en scène applaudie au Festival de Salzbourg il y a deux ans, sous la baguette d’Ingo Metzmacher que l’on retrouve à Paris.Wajdi Mouawad, au centre, lors d’une répétition d’ “Oedipe” à l’Opéra de Paris.Eléna Bauer/Opéra national de ParisPlus que la qualité de l’oeuvre, Alexander Neef pense que ce sont les accidents de l’histoire qui expliquent le manque d’intérêt pour cet “Œdipe” en dépit de critiques élogieuses au moment de sa création. En 1936, le New York Times rapportait les propos du compositeur et critique français Reynaldo Hahn évoquant une œuvre “grandiose, élevée, minutieusement élaborée, toujours imposante et qui force l’admiration.”“Après 1945, sa musique est passée de mode,” avance Alexander Neef à propos de la partition d’Enesco. “Pour beaucoup de compositeurs après l’Holocauste, la musique tonale n’avait plus lieu d’être.”Quand Alexandre Neef lui a proposé le projet, Wajdi Mouawad s’est avant tout intéressé au livret. Le metteur en scène a beaucoup fréquenté la légende d’Œdipe: en trente ans de carrière, il a monté l’ “Œdipe roi” de Sophocle trois fois. Et en 2016, il a même écrit une pièce intitulée “Les Larmes d’Œdipe”, qui relie la tragédie à la situation politique actuelle de la Grèce.Edmond Fleg, le librettiste d’ “Œdipe”, a largement puisé dans “Œdipe roi” et “Œdipe à Colonne”, du même Sophocle, pour les troisième et quatrième actes de l’opéra. (Le premier et le deuxième explicitent le contexte de la pièce.) “C’est un peu résumé, mais ce sont les mêmes répliques,” confirme Wajdi Mouawad. “Je me suis dit que j’avais de la place pour raconter cette histoire.”Composer des histoires est une priorité de toujours pour Wajdi Mouawad, qui est né au Liban en 1968. Sa famille a fui la guerre civile quand il avait dix ans, s’installant d’abord en France puis au Québec.“Quand j’essayais de comprendre la guerre du Liban, soit on me disait qu’il n’y avait rien à comprendre, soit on me disait : ‘c’est à cause des autres’,” se souvient-il. “Je manque tellement de récits.”Après une formation d’acteur à l’École nationale de théâtre du Canada à Montréal, Wajdi Mouawad se fait remarquer avec une tétralogie épique intitulée “Le Sang des promesses”, qui fait le tour du monde. Composée de quatre volets, “Littoral” (1999), “Incendies” (2003), “Forêts” (2006) et “Ciels” (2009), la pièce joue sur les thèmes du traumatisme intergénérationnel, de la guerre et de l’exil.Son travail a fait découvrir le théâtre contemporain à nombre de milléniaux francophones. À son retour à Paris en 2016, à la direction du théâtre de la Colline, Wajdi Mouawad se démarque du goût européen actuel pour les productions non linéaires et très conceptuelles. Lisa Perrio, une actrice qui a travaillé plusieurs fois sous sa direction, le confirme : “Il aime le dramatique, le pathos, et ça marche.”“C’est la chose la plus dure de ma vie que j’aie eu à jouer,” ajoute-t-elle, “parce que ça te demande tellement d’émotion.”Pour Wajdi Mouawad, le postmodernisme est un luxe incompatibe avec certains traumatismes. “Je suis le post-modernisme,” dit-il. “La guerre du Liban, il n’y a pas plus post-moderne. La déconstruction, c’est un truc de riches. Quand tout va bien, on déconstruit. Quand on n’a pas les moyens – quand on est soi-même complètement fracturé – on construit.”“Quand tout va bien, on déconstruit,” dit Wajdi Mouawad. “Quand on n’a pas les moyens – quand on est soi-même complètement fracturé – on construit.”Julien Mignot pour The New York TimesEn mars, un an après le début des perturbations causées par la pandémie, la Colline est un des premiers théâtres français à être occupé par des manifestants. Les étudiants et les travailleurs de la culture exigeaient le soutien du gouvernement et le retrait de la réforme de l’assurance-chômage. Très vite, le mouvement s’est étendu à plus de cent théâtres.Contacté par téléphone, Sébastien Kheroufi, un des premiers élèves-comédiens à s’être installé à la Colline, dit que Wajdi Mouawad est un des rares metteurs en scène de renom à avoir réservé un accueil chaleureux aux occupants . “Un soir, il n’a pas hésité à rester avec nous plusieurs heures après ses répétitions parce qu’on avait besoin de parler,” se souvient-il.La levée de l’occupation fin mai reste toutefois une source de frustration pour Wajdi Mouawad. Avec son équipe, il a proposé aux étudiants de rester pour la réouverture et de prendre la parole avant les spectacles. Wajdi Mouawad espérait aussi créer une troupe permanente de jeunes comédiens à qui il offrirait des contrats à l’année.Christopher Maltman, center, in a rehearsal of “Oedipe” at the Paris Opera.Elisa Haberer/Opéra national de ParisIls ont fini par refuser “parce que l’idée venait de nous et qu’ils ne voulaient rien nous devoir,” juge-t-il aujourd’hui. Un coup dur pour cet homme qui a horreur de la hiérarchie et n’a pas hésité à rédiger une lettre ouverte dépitée dans laquelle il revient sur l’ “échec” de toutes les parties engagées dans l’occupation.Puis, début septembre, au beau milieu des répétitions d’ “Œdipe”, François Ismert, son dramaturge de longue date, est décédé. “C’était vraiment quelqu’un de solaire, d’atypique,” dit ce dernier. Ismert l’avait ouvert à Sophocle dans les années 1990, “et pas que”, se souvient-il. “À tout le reste, sans jamais être dans un rapport paternaliste.”À l’approche de la première, cette disparition continue de se faire sentir. Mais le metteur en scène tâche de donner un sens au chaos.“Je sais que tout est en ruines,” soupire-t-il avant de rejoindre le studio de répétition. “Mais il faut bien en faire quelque chose, de ces ruines.” More

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      With a Rare ‘Oedipe,’ the Paris Opera Pulls Together

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      Staged by the playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad, Enescu’s opera helps inaugurate a new era for the storied company.PARIS — Ahead of rehearsals for his staging of George Enescu’s “Oedipe” at the Paris Opera, the playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad did something unusual. He put together a glossary of all the obscure references in the libretto — like “the water of Castalia,” a sacred spring in Delphi — and sent it to the chorus.Mouawad, 52, who runs the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris, was taken aback to find the choristers had never received anything like it. When he approached the company’s technical crew to explain to them the story of “Oedipe,” a rarity from the 1930s based on the Greek myth, their reaction was similar, he said in an interview — few directors ever bothered to pay them much mind.“It’s odd, because I hear, ‘It’s wonderful, you say hello,”” Mouawad added. “I feel like I’m stepping into a traumatized world that now believes its trauma is the norm.”Trauma is not a bad way of describing the past few years at the fractious Paris Opera. In late 2019 and early 2020, labor strikes over a pension policy overhaul resulted in a 45 million euro deficit in a budget hovering around 230 million euros. And that was before the pandemic forced the cancellation of over a year’s worth of performances. (While some performances took place in September and October last year, the company didn’t resume its regular schedule until late May.)So “Oedipe,” which opens at the Opera Bastille, the company’s larger theater, on Monday, may just inaugurate a new era. It is the first production that was commissioned by Alexander Neef, who took over as the Opera’s general director last year.It is no coincidence that he turned to Mouawad. In his last job, leading the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, Neef co-produced Mouawad’s first stab at opera, a 2016 production of Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio,” that Neef calls “one of the most satisfying experiences that I’ve ever had with a director.”“His strength as an artist is that he really wants to work with humans,” Neef added in an interview in his office. “With ‘Oedipe,’ my hope was that he would pull the whole company together. Sometimes, you almost need to encourage him not to be too nice.”The return of “Oedipe” to the Paris stage has been a long time coming. Enescu’s only opera, it had its premiere at the company’s smaller, ornate Palais Garnier in 1936, but has never been revived there, even as other opera houses took a belated interest in it. The North American premiere took place at the University of Illinois in 2005, while Achim Freyer directed an acclaimed staging at the Salzburg Festival two years ago, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, who will return to the score in Paris.Mouawad, center, during a rehearsal for “Oedipe.”Eléna Bauer/Opéra national de ParisNeef believes the course of history, rather than quality, explains the long lack of appetite for “Oedipe,” which earned positive reviews upon its premiere. The New York Times reported in 1936 that the French composer and critic Reynaldo Hahn had described it as “imposing, lofty, minutely elaborated” and “always compelling admiration.”“After 1945, I think the music had fallen out of fashion,” Neef said of Enescu’s lush score. “For a lot of composers writing after the Holocaust, it couldn’t be tonal music anymore, for a long time.”When Neef first approached him, Mouawad was less concerned with the score than with the libretto. The legend of Oedipus was familiar to him: In his 30-year career, Mouawad has staged Sophocles’s “Oedipus the King” three times. In 2016, he also wrote a play, “The Tears of Oedipus,” that tied the character’s plight to modern Greek politics.The librettist of “Oedipe,” Edmond Fleg, closely based the third and fourth acts on “Oedipus the King” and another play by Sophocles, “Oedipus at Colonus.” (The first and second acts flesh out the plays’ background.) “It’s slightly summarized, but the dialogue is essentially the same,” Mouawad said. “I thought I would have space to tell this story.”Storytelling has long driven Mouawad, who was born in Lebanon in 1968. When he was 10, his family fled the civil war, moving first to France, then to French-speaking Quebec.“When I tried to understand the Lebanese civil war, I was either told that there was nothing to understand, or that it was the fault of others,” Mouawad said. “There was a gaping lack of stories in my life.”After training as an actor at the National Theater School in Montreal, Mouawad rose to prominence with an epic tetralogy, “The Blood of Promises,” that has been produced all over the world. Composed of “Littoral” (1999), “Scorched” (2003), “Forests” (2006) and “Skies” (2009), it delved into intergenerational trauma, war and displacement.His work has served as an introduction to contemporary theater for many French-speaking millennials. Even after he moved back to Paris in 2016 to direct the Théâtre de la Colline, Mouawad steered clear of the prevailing European taste for nonlinear, highly conceptual productions. Lisa Perrio, an actress who has worked with Mouawad several times in recent years, said that “he loves drama, pathos, and it works.”“When everything is fine, you deconstruct,” Mouawad said. “When you can’t afford it — when you yourself are completely fractured — you build.”Julien Mignot for The New York Times“His work is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to perform,” she added, “because it requires so much emotion.”To Mouawad, postmodernism is a luxury beyond the means of those who have experienced deep trauma. “I myself am postmodernism,” he said “There is nothing more postmodern than the Lebanese war. Deconstruction is a rich person’s thing. When everything is fine, you deconstruct. When you can’t afford it — when you yourself are completely fractured — you build.”In March, a year into the disruption caused by the pandemic, the Théâtre de la Colline was one of the first French theaters to be occupied by protesters. Students and arts workers demanded government support and the withdrawal of changes to unemployment benefits. The movement soon spread to over 100 playhouses.Sébastien Kheroufi, who was among the drama students who first entered La Colline, said in a phone interview that Mouawad was one of the few high-profile directors to extend the occupiers a warm welcome. “One night, he even stayed with us for several hours after his rehearsals because we needed to talk,” Kheroufi said.Yet the end of the occupation, in late May, left Mouawad frustrated. He and his team offered the students the opportunity to stay on for the reopening and speak before shows; Mouawad also hoped to start a permanent youth company, offering year-round contracts to young actors.Christopher Maltman, center, plays the title role in “Oedipe.”Elisa Haberer/Opéra national de ParisThey ultimately said no, Mouawad now speculates, “because the idea had come from us, and they didn’t want to owe us anything.” It was a blow for the hierarchy-averse Mouawad, who reflected on the “failure” of all parties of the occupation movement in a despondent open letter.Then, in early September, just as rehearsals for “Oedipe” were in full swing, Mouawad’s longtime dramaturg François Ismert passed away. “He was such a luminous, atypical person,” Mouawad said. Ismert had introduced him to Sophocles in the 1990s — “and not just that,” he said. “To everything else, without ever being paternalistic.”The loss loomed over the approaching premiere. Days before, though, Mouawad remained intent on sifting through the chaos.“I know everything is in ruins,” he said, before returning to the rehearsal room. “But we have to make something of those ruins.” More

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      A Climate Opera Arrives in New York, With 21 Tons of Sand

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      “Sun & Sea,” an operatic installation that won the top prize at the Venice Biennale, is being staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.On a rainy morning last week, a beach arrived at the front door of a theater in Brooklyn.Or at least the raw ingredients for one: 21 tons of sand, packaged in 50-pound bags, 840 of them. Wheeled into the BAM Fisher on pushcart dollies, they were unceremoniously dropped onto the theater’s tarp-covered floor with a dull thud.Once opened and spread around, the sand would form the foundation of “Sun & Sea,” an installation-like opera that won the top prize at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and has emerged as a masterpiece for the era of climate change. Neither didactic nor abstract, it is an insidiously enjoyable mosaic of consumption, globalization and ecological crisis. And its next stop is the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it opens on Wednesday and runs through Sept. 26.Over 20 tons worth of sand were brought to the BAM Fisher for the production in 50-pound bags.George Etheredge for The New York Times“The way it delivers its ideas, it’s totally surprising,” said David Binder, BAM’s artistic director. “It disarms you and lures you in. That’s not the way we’re used to receiving work about the issues of our day — what we’re all facing in this summer of fires and floods and what we’ve done to the planet.”For the work’s creators — Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte — the reception of “Sun & Sea,” only their second collaboration, has been something of a Cinderella story, as they said in a recent video interview. But as much as it is a fairy tale, the work is the fruit of a friendship that began in the Lithuanian town where they all grew up.Barzdziukaite eventually became a director; Grainyte, a writer; Lapelyte, a musical artist. In working together, they were attracted to opera, they said, because it provided “a meeting place” for their individual practices. As a trio, Grainyte added, “we can listen to each other and dive into this process without fighting or dealing with egos.”The sand was used to create an indoor beach for “Sun & Sea,” which uses the setting for a musical meditation on climate change and globalization.George Etheredge for The New York TimesTheir first project was “Have a Good Day!,” which traveled to New York for the Prototype festival in 2014. Like “Sun & Sea” it approached its subject — the thoughts of supermarket cashiers, and cycles of consumption — with a light touch. The cast of 10 singers, all women to evoke a typical store in Lithuania, shared stories that charmed until, in their accumulation, they took on the nauseating excess of the photographer Andreas Gursky’s similarly themed “99 Cent.”“The idea was to have this zoom-in approach using micro narratives,” Grainyte said, “but also being conscious that we also belong to this part of buying and selling circles.”It was important to the three creators that, while bitterly ironic, “Have a Good Day!” was not polemical. “We tried to really avoid the ‘one truth’ because it’s never black and white,” Lapelyte said. “That goes the same with ‘Sun & Sea.’ When we talk about the climate crisis, it’s never coming with one view.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times“Sun & Sea” is more ambitious: still subtle, intimate and haunting, but sprawling in scale. From a sliver of sand, Barzdziukaite, Grainyte and Lapelyte extract broad implications. The beach, after all, is a battleground of the Anthropocene that both embraces and defies nature. It’s a destination deemed worth flying around the world, expelling tons of carbon, to simply lounge on — though not without a heavy dose of sunscreen to avoid a burn, or worse.The characters in Grainyte’s libretto, which is both plain-spoken and poetic, are overworked and over-traveled, both self-righteously against technology’s intrusion in their lives and welcoming of it. Their stories are told as monologues and vignettes, broken up by choruses of sinister serenity.Often, the characters are oblivious. “What a relief that the Great Barrier Reef has a restaurant and hotel!” one woman sings. “We sat down to sip our piña coladas — included in the price! They taste better under the water, simply a paradise!” Her husband seems unaware that his burnout isn’t so different from that of the earth itself as he sighs melodically, “Suppressed negativity finds a way out unexpectedly, like lava.”“Sun & Sea” in Venice, where it won the top prize at the Venice Biennale in 2019.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesSome characters find beauty in the horrors of modern life. “The banana comes into being, ripens somewhere in South America, and then it ends up on the other side of the planet, so far away from home,” one sings. “It only existed to satisfy our hunger in one bite, to give us a feeling of bliss.”Another, in the most unforgettable image of the opera, observes:Rose-colored dresses flutter:Jellyfish dance along in pairs —With emerald-colored bags,Bottles and red bottle caps.O the sea never had so much color!“We didn’t want to be too declarative,” Barzdziukaite said. “At some point, Vaiva was taking off all the words which were dealing with ecological issues directly.” The final work amounted to about half of what was written.George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York TimesWhat they didn’t want was to give the impression that they were climate activists. “It would be unfair to say that,” Grainyte said. “If we were activists, we wouldn’t create this work that is traveling the world.” (The production, like many in the performing arts, isn’t the most eco-friendly: For the BAM presentation, all that sand was transported by truck from VolleyballUSA in New Jersey to Brooklyn.)But that doesn’t mean “Sun & Sea” avoids responsibility by design. Political art is a spectrum, and its creators are aware that they are wrestling with unwieldy and urgent topics; they just want their opera to “activate,” as Lapelyte put it.Crucial to that effect are, beyond the text, the music and visual presentation. The electronic score — earworm after earworm — provides minimal accompaniment for the singers, and was written to reflect the ease of leisure.After “Sun & Sea” closes, the sand will be vacuumed up, sanitized and repurposed.George Etheredge for The New York Times“We wanted it to be quite poppy, that it would remind you of a song that you know well but you can’t say which,” Lapelyte said. “And at the same time it’s very much reduced to very few notes, and it’s also repetitive like a pop song.”The action, while largely improvised by volunteers who flesh out the cast, is obsessively managed by Barzdziukaite. Participants are asked to arrive wearing specific colors (mostly calming pastels). While the roughly hourlong opera is sung in a loop, they are instructed not to seem to be acting, nor to acknowledge the audience. For the performers, the experience shouldn’t be any different from a trip to the beach.“We are very much using this documentary approach in every aspect,” Barzdziukaite said. Observant audience members might notice how casually plastic fills the space; a pair of partially buried headphones, or some abandoned toys, will be familiar sights.George Etheredge for The New York TimesIn Venice, audiences left “Sun & Sea” to be confronted by countless cheap souvenirs and towering cruise ships. When the run ended, the city was flooded. Heavy rain will also have preceded the piece’s arrival in Brooklyn, with the storm carrying the remnants of Hurricane Ida having killed over 40 people in New York and three neighboring states. None of this is lost on the creators, who find themselves wrestling with what it means to make subtle art in a world whose natural disasters increasingly have the heavy-handedness of agitprop.“I feel like I’m living in a dissonance and asking myself what’s next and how I should behave,” Grainyte said.Those who attend the BAM production might find themselves asking similar questions. They won’t see tchotchkes crowding Venetian shops, but perhaps on the way home they will take another look at the garbage on the subway tracks or the shelves of miniature Empire State Buildings in Midtown.If there’s any waste they shouldn’t be worried about, it’s all that sand. After “Sun & Sea” closes, it will be vacuumed up, sanitized and repurposed as a beach volleyball court, maybe, or as a playground. But probably never again as an opera.Sun & SeaWednesday through Sept. 26 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      Teresa Zylis-Gara, Plush-Voiced Polish Soprano, Is Dead at 91

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      She took on a wide range of roles in her long international career, which included a stretch as a stalwart of the Metropolitan Opera in the 1970s.Teresa Zylis-Gara, a Polish soprano who displayed a plush voice, impressive versatility and beguiling stage presence during a three-decade international career that included a stretch at the Metropolitan Opera during her prime in the 1970s, died on Aug. 28 in Lodz, Poland. She was 91. Her death was announced by the Polish National Opera. In her early years, Ms. Zylis-Gara was essentially a lyric soprano who excelled in Mozart and other roles suited to a lighter voice. But as she developed more richness and body in her sound, she moved into the lirico-spinto repertory, which calls for dramatic heft along with lyricism, including the title role of Puccini’s “Tosca,” Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” and Elisabeth in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”Her repertory ranged from the Baroque, including works by Claudio Monteverdi, to 20th-century fare by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. She also championed the songs of her countryman Chopin, works that had been surprisingly overlooked.To some opera fans and critics, Ms. Zylis-Gara’s voice, though beautiful, lacked distinctiveness. And in striving for refinement, she was sometimes deemed overly restrained. Peter G. Davis of The New York Times described this mixture of qualities in a mostly glowing review of her performance as Pamina in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” at the Met in 1970.Her “cool, silvery voice does not possess a wide range of color nor any special individuality,” Mr. Davis wrote, “but it is a lovely thing to hear in itself, and she sculpted Mozart’s melodies gracefully and stylishly.” In addition to “naturally feminine warmth and charm,” Mr. Davis said, she “interjected a pleasant note of humor into her early scenes and a genuine tragic pathos later on.”Two years later, reviewing a Met production of Verdi’s “Otello” presented on tour in Boston, the critic Ellen Pfeifer wrote in The Boston Globe that Ms. Zylis-Gara’s Desdemona was “a spirited and mature young woman instead of the usual adolescent clinging violet.” Her singing, Ms. Pfeifer added, “was beautiful, ample in size, with the requisite transparency and flexibility.”In a revealing 1974 interview with The Atlanta Constitution, Ms. Zylis-Gara spoke about the risks of being too emotional in performance. At the time, she was in Atlanta to sing the title role of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly,” and she recalled crying onstage during one particularly intense scene while performing the role as a student.“It was terrible,” she said. “When you cry you can’t sing. Since that time I’ve never allowed myself to get this far, but it’s still a danger for me.”Ms. Zylis-Gara in the title role of Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” at the Met in 1981. The tenor Giuliano Ciannella sang Des Grieux, Manon’s lover.J. Heffernan/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesTeresa Geralda Zylis was born on Jan. 23, 1930, in Landwarow, Poland, now Lentvaris, Lithuania, near Vilnius. She was the youngest of five children of Franciszek and Jadwiga Zylis; her father was a railway worker, her mother a homemaker.After the postwar political reconstitution of the region, the family settled in Lodz, Poland, in 1946. The 16-year-old Teresa decided to devote herself to singing and began nine years of study with Olga Ogina.She won first prize in the 1954 Polish Young Vocalists Contest in Warsaw, which led to engagements with Polish National Radio and, in 1956, her professional debut with the Krakow Opera in the title role of “Halka,” by the 19th-century Polish composer Stanislaw Moniuszko, a staple of the Polish opera repertory. Further prizes during the next few years in Toulouse, France, and in Munich led to engagements with opera houses in Oberhausen, Dortmund and Düsseldorf in West Germany.Determined to advance her career, she made professional decisions that affected her personal life, as she explained in the 1974 interview.She had married Jerzy Gara, the director of a technical school in Lodz, in 1954. The next year their son, also named Jerzy, was born. But it proved “impossible to be a wife, mother and artist of international fame all at one time,” she said.“I chose to be the artist,” she added. “I accept my choice and everything that has happened in my private life as a result.”When her son was 6, she left him in the care of her own mother in Lodz and settled in Germany to pursue her career, which quickly prospered. (Her marriage ended in divorce.)“It is something special to have a talent,” she said. “It brings a responsibility with it.” She added, referring to her son, “I saw sometimes he was not happy; and this is difficult.”He survives her, as does a granddaughter.Ms. Zylis-Gara in 1968, the year Donna Elvira in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” became, as she put it, her “destiny role.” Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMs. Zylis-Gara had a significant breakthrough in 1965 when she sang an acclaimed Octavian in a production of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, which led to her debut with the Paris National Opera the next year. In 1968, a banner year, Donna Elvira in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” became her calling card — or, as she put it in a 1969 interview with The Los Angeles Times, her “destiny role.” She sang Elvira for her debuts at the Salzburg Festival (with Herbert von Karajan conducting), the San Francisco Opera and, in December, the Met.Of the San Francisco performance, the Los Angeles Times critic Martin Bernheimer wrote that Ms. Zylis-Gara “sang a Donna Elvira that easily withstood comparison with the finest recent exponents of that difficult role, Sena Jurinac and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.”At the Met, the cast included the formidable Cesare Siepi as Giovanni and Martina Arroyo as Donna Anna. In a 2015 article in Opera News in which various opera professionals were asked to pick their favorite “diva debuts” at the Met, Ms. Arroyo chose Ms. Zylis-Gara’s Donna Elvira. “She sang so well, a pure voice just right in style — one of the very best Elviras,” Ms. Arroyo said.The Met’s general manager, Rudolf Bing, promptly engaged Ms. Zylis-Gara for future bookings. She went on to sing 232 performances with the company over 16 seasons, taking on 20 roles, including the Marschallin in “Rosenkavalier,” Wagner’s Elisabeth and Elsa (in “Lohengrin”), Puccini’s Mimi, Butterfly and Desdemona, and Tchaikovsky’s Tatiana.Through the 1980s, Ms. Zylis-Gara continued to sing in the world’s major houses. In later years, she divided her time between a home in Monaco and visits to her native land, sat often on competition juries, and eagerly taught emerging singers. Asked in a 2009 Opera News interview whether she would ever say farewell to opera, she asserted that this “would never take place!”“The stage lights won’t dim for even a second,” she said, “since I transmit to my gifted pupils all my artistic soul, my knowledge and my experience.”Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw. More