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      The Uncertain Future of South Carolina’s “Porgy and Bess” House

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      When George Gershwin visited a cottage in Folly Beach, S.C., in 1934, “Porgy and Bess” came to life. But will it remain a historic artifact or become just another beach house?The scholars, preservationists and historians had been strategizing for about an hour inside the salon of the charming cypress cottage they were trying to save.They all agreed that magic had been conjured in this very spot nearly a century ago. That’s when the writers DuBose and Dorothy Heyward invited the composer George Gershwin to visit their retreat, nicknamed Follywood, on the cozy barrier island of Folly Beach.Gershwin was writing an opera based on DuBose Heyward’s novel “Porgy,” which was adapted into a play co-written with his wife. The story depicted Black life in Charleston, S.C., and the Heywards thought Gershwin should see firsthand the place, people and culture he was writing about. Although Gershwin composed some of the music in New York, his South Carolina visit resulted in eternal anthems like “Summertime.”“That does bring up the elephant in the room,” said Harlan Greene, an author and historian who has done extensive research on the Heywards and the opera. He looked at those around him in mid-March, taking note that there were no Black people among the hopeful preservationists. “Here we are, a bunch of white people in a very diverse economy and you know, cultural appropriation.”The historic Folly Beach house stands out among more modern constructions. Elizabeth Bick for The New York Times“Porgy and Bess” is largely celebrated as the Great American Opera. It is also weighted by the country’s historical baggage. The opera is an elevated piece of culture that explores the dynamics of segregated African Americans; in depicting Blacks as fully formed people nearly a century ago — and not as mammies or Mandingos by performers wearing blackface — it was an outlier. Yet it also faced significant criticism for reinforcing degrading stereotypes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Strauss’s ‘Salome’ Gets a New Staging at the Metropolitan Opera

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      In his company debut, the director Claus Guth takes a psychological approach, surrounding the title character with six versions of her younger self.The first sound in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Salome” isn’t the wriggle of clarinet that begins Strauss’s score. It’s the tinkle of a music box, while a little girl plays with a doll at the lip of the stage. Projected on the curtain behind her is a giant image of herself, slowly twirling.She suddenly gets angry at the toy and begins beating it against the ground. Even before the orchestra squirms in, Claus Guth’s grimly effective staging has made clear its preoccupations: childhood, dancing, violence.Guth, one of Europe’s busiest directors and making his Met debut with this production, is also fascinated by multiple versions of the self. Starring the soprano Elza van den Heever — simultaneously innocent and hardened, sounding silvery yet secure — this “Salome,” which opened on Tuesday, gives its title character not one youthful double, but six.The group of Salomes, progressing in age from perhaps a kindergartner to the 16-year-old played by van den Heever, is dressed in matching dark frocks, giving hints of “The Shining” and Diane Arbus photographs.Guth, placing the action in a dour black mansion around the turn of the 20th century, has shifted from ancient to modern times Strauss’s 100-minute, one-act adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play. “Salome” depicts, in decadent music inspired by the flowery language of the Symbolists, the biblical princess who was drawn to and rejected by John the Baptist and who demanded that he be decapitated by her depraved stepfather, King Herod.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For His Met Opera Debut, a Director Takes On ‘Salome’

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      The director Claus Guth, wearing a scarf and coat, was pacing the frigid auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera during a recent rehearsal of Strauss’s “Salome,” going over lighting and visual cues. It was only a few days before opening night, and he was optimistic.“New York can carry you on an enormous, beautiful energy,” he said. “It’s an adrenaline — not a stressful feeling, but a sensation of being alive.”Guth, 61, who was born in Germany and has spent most of his career in Europe, has won acclaim for his experimental, exacting approach to operas new and old. Now, he is bringing those sensibilities to his Met debut, directing a new production of “Salome” that opens on Tuesday.Elza van den Heever, in black, and Peter Mattei in “Salome,” an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s decadent play in which the title character demands the head of John the Baptist.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesInspired partly by Stanley Kubrick’s film “Eyes Wide Shut,” Guth has infused the opera, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s decadent retelling of the biblical story, with elements of a psychological thriller. Menacing figures walk around in ram masks on a black-and-white stage. A naked woman appears and disappears. A girl strokes a doll’s hair before pulling out its arms and hitting it violently against the ground.Guth said he wanted to highlight the suffocating rules of the Victorian society portrayed in Wilde’s play. He focuses on telling the back story of Salome, the 16-year-old princess and stepdaughter of King Herod, portraying her as a victim of abuse and trauma who becomes obsessed with John the Baptist, eventually demanding his head.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: As New York’s Opera Scene Empties, Another Rises Upstate

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      R.B. Schlather’s vibrant staging of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” playing in the Hudson Valley, is a bright spot in a bleak landscape for Baroque work.New York City Opera had recently shuttered when the director R.B. Schlather started to present Handel operas in a white-box gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan about 10 years ago. Those spare, surreal stagings of “Alcina” and “Orlando” felt like an elegy for City Opera’s innovative productions, and for its devotion to Handel — most famously, a landmark 1960s “Giulio Cesare” starring Beverly Sills.Now, as Schlather’s vibrant vision for “Giulio Cesare” plays at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y., the landscape for opera — especially Baroque opera — is even bleaker in New York City, two hours south by train.The Metropolitan Opera, whose 4,000-seat theater isn’t a natural fit for early music, does less than it used to, and it’s become more or less the only game in town. City Opera was revived in name, but as a wan shadow of its former self. The Brooklyn Academy of Music used to be a destination for revelatory Baroque stagings by the likes of Les Arts Florissants; no more. Lincoln Center, ditto. Carnegie Hall presents Harry Bicket’s English Concert in a single Handel performance a year — on May 4 it’s, yes, “Cesare” — but unstaged, in concert.Upstate, Schlather has been unfurling a series of Handel productions with the terrific period-instrument ensemble Ruckus; “Cesare,” running through May 2, comes on the heels of “Rodelinda” at Hudson Hall in 2023. It is a precious bastion of an ever rarer breed.His directorial style in dealing with this composer’s works has gotten clearer with experience. “Alcina” and “Orlando” were always quirky, often thrilling and sometimes bewildering. But this substantially yet intelligently trimmed “Cesare” — with intermission, it’s just under three hours — is a stylishly straightforward account of a story of vengeance and lust set amid Julius Caesar’s campaign to conquer both Egypt and Cleopatra. Hudson Hall has a proscenium, but Schlather’s set pushes the action downstage in front of it with two angled walls painted iridescent black. Under Masha Tsimring’s stark, shadow-throwing lighting, those walls twinkle like a starry sky.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Houston Grand Opera, ‘This Is a Good Time’

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      On a recent morning at the Wortham Theater Center, home of Houston Grand Opera, the orchestra was playing through the intense score of Missy Mazzoli’s 2016 opera “Breaking the Waves.” Led by the conductor Patrick Summers, the players fine-tuned eerie glissando slides and dug into Mazzoli’s creaking, scratching effects.At the same time, a few floors down, the young bass Alexandros Stavrakakis was at a coaching session, trying to find depths in the often dry Landgraf in Wagner’s “Tannhaüser.” Stavrakakis was singing his role for the first time, like the rest of the “Tannhaüser” cast — a bold move for a Wagner opera at a major company.It was a reminder of another moment when old and new came together in Houston. In 1987, the Wortham opened with a pairing that was also a kind of manifesto: Verdi’s “Aida” and the world premiere of John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” a statement that opera’s past and present could surge toward the future in Texas.At that point, it had been just over 30 years since Houston Grand Opera’s scrappy beginnings, but it already had a reputation for being the rare American company fully invested in fostering new American work.It has been an early adopter of populist innovations like above-the-stage translations and outdoor simulcasts. It has shown resilience, too: Displaced for a season when the Wortham was flooded by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the company moved to a convention center and didn’t miss a performance.Now, at 70, it continues to be a model for the field.With many opera companies in a doom loop of shrinkage caused by rising costs and stagnant (or worse) earnings, Houston has proved an exception. Driven by creative leadership and generous donors, its programming budget has risen steadily. By this summer, its endowment will have increased to nearly $120 million — almost double what it was five years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mozart’s ‘Figaro’ and ‘Magic Flute’ at the Metropolitan Opera

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      Joana Mallwitz is in calm, stylish command making her debut with Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” running in repertory with “The Magic Flute.”The size of the Metropolitan Opera can daunt even experienced artists. From the podium to the stage feels like a mile, and the proscenium is of yawning width and height. No opera benefits from chaos, but some pieces need especially precise discipline to make their impact — so they need conductors who can corral big forces across those sprawling distances.It’s impressive when a veteran baton makes it all work. More so when it’s a newcomer like Joana Mallwitz, who made her Met debut this month leading Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” the kind of farcical comedy that quickly goes off the rails without a firm hand on the reins.On Friday, midway through this season’s long run — lasting, with cast changes, through May 17 — Mallwitz was in calm, stylish command from the brisk overture on. Throughout the evening, she kept the orchestra sounding light and silky, allowing it to blend (instead of compete) with the charming singers.The yearning winds that play during Cherubino’s aria “Non so più” are the echo of the character’s teenage longing, and Mallwitz guided those winds to soar more than usual, bringing out true sweetness and a hint of ache. Cherubino’s second big number, “Voi che sapete,” was accompanied with elegant clarity, each plucked pizzicato note in the strings present and unified without being overemphasized.There was spirit and forward motion in this “Figaro.” But Mallwitz didn’t fall into the classic young conductor trap of shoving the performance toward extremes of tempo and dynamics (loud and fast, mostly) to convey intensity. In the long, zany, ebbing-and-flowing finale of the second act, she patiently paced the action, releasing tension then building it again, for an overall effect far zestier than if she’d merely kept her foot on the gas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Hudson, N.Y., Even the Opera Is Locavore

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      The director R.B. Schlather gathered the cast of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” for a quick pep talk before running through the opera last weekend. Not all the costumes were ready, and not everyone in the orchestra could be there, but they were about to see whether the show they had been rehearsing for several weeks even worked.“You’re getting to go through this thing for the first time,” Schlather told them, speaking also to the creative team and crew of his new “Cesare” production, which opens at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y., on Saturday. “Don’t worry. I encourage you today to just go for it.”There was a bit of applause from the balcony: The rehearsal was open to the public, and some locals had shown up to get a taste of the work in progress. Staff of the production and hall left their perches to say hello to people they knew, some of whom were just passing through with their to-go coffees, shopping bags and dogs.Boundaries between artists and audiences aren’t always so porous, but in Hudson, locals are as represented onstage as off. Partly out of necessity, but also because of Schlather’s ethos, opera here is something more like community theater, executed at the level of a major company.R.B. Schlather, center, the director of “Cesare,” talking to musicians, from left, Coleman Itzkoff, Clay Zeller Townson and Elliot Figg.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesSome of the “Cesare” performers are commuting from a residency at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park nearby; others are just driving in from their houses. When they come together, it’s in a luxurious way that would be unimaginable 120 miles south in New York City. The artists have more freedom and, crucially, more time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Khovanshchina’ Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant

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      Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina” has been added onto by Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. Now, another composer gets to have his say.Instead of finishing his masterpiece “Khovanshchina,” Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk.That’s fiction: a scene from “Moscow-Petushki,” a 1969 satire by the Soviet writer Venedikt Yerofeyev. But, said the composer, musicologist and author Gerard McBurney, who completed a new version of “Khovanshchina” that premieres at the Salzburg Easter Festival on Saturday, the moment shows the mythic place of the unfinished opera in Russian history.“Yerofeyev, writing to an audience who had probably never been into the opera in their life — they know this story about this great genius who is the emblematic Russian failure,” McBurney said in an interview.In real life, Mussorgsky “embarked on this monstrous piece which was supposed to sum up the whole disaster of Russian history from beginning to end,” McBurney added. “And he couldn’t finish it.”A scene from Simon McBurney’s production, which will travel to the Metropolitan Opera.Inés BacherMcBurney has created a new, completed “Khovanshchina,” and he joins a long line of composers and musicologists who did the same. Mussorgsky died in 1881, leaving key scenes in the final act unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov made the first performance edition of the opera (which Mussorgsky preferred to call a “musical folk drama”), and it premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in 1886. In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev enlisted Stravinsky (and possibly Ravel) to prepare another version for performance in Paris, and Shostakovich reorchestrated the score for a 1959 film.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More