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

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

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      It’s the Highest-Profile Challenge of an Earnest Tenor’s Career

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      Matthew Polenzani, a Met Opera stalwart known more for sweetness than swagger, stars in a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”Matthew Polenzani wanted to make something clear: He just isn’t a powerhouse tenor like Mario Del Monaco or Franco Corelli, two 20th-century greats.“If you’re looking for an animal, Corellian or Del Monaconian sound — yeah, then you hired the wrong person,” Polenzani said in an interview at the Metropolitan Opera during a break in rehearsals for Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” in which he is singing the title role for the first time.“It’s completely valid to get swept away by that,” he added. “But that’s not who I am, and that’s OK. I do what I do.”What Polenzani, 53, does is bring warm, vibrant sound, keen intelligence, fine musicianship and subtle feeling for style to a wide range of repertory: lyric Mozart roles, florid bel canto star turns, fervent Verdi and Puccini characters, and some weightier challenges, like the protagonist of Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.” He has been a Met mainstay since his 2001 breakthrough at the house singing Lindoro in Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri,” racking up hundreds of performances with the company, and next season he will star on opening night alongside Sondra Radvanovsky in the Met’s first production of Cherubini’s “Medea.”Some writers and opera fans find him lacking in that classic swaggering, charismatic, even animalistic tenorial tone and presence. “Though he has the vocal goods, he doesn’t have the requisite spark,” the critic Anne Midgette wrote when Polenzani sang Nemorino in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” at the Met in 2012.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview that those who mistake Polenzani’s “lack of external flamboyance” for lack of presence miss the point.“Matthew has rock-solid artistry, and the most limpid, beautiful voice,” Gelb said.Polenzani in rehearsal for “Don Carlos,” which is being performed at the Met for the first time in its original five-act French version.Diana Markosian for The New York TimesBut it’s certainly true that the title role in “Don Carlos” — which is being performed, starting Monday, for the first time at the Met in its original five-act French version — is not usually sung by singers who describe themselves, as Polenzani does, as lyric tenors. So the expectations are enormous as Polenzani takes on Carlos, in perhaps the highest-profile production of his long Met career.In the interview, he admitted feeling pressure at tackling the daunting assignment — a complex character, loosely based on the historical 16th-century heir to the throne of Philip II of Spain.“I can honestly say I wouldn’t have minded singing it once somewhere else, without this spotlight,” Polenzani said, adding: “I’ve resisted setting myself in one category, though, because the breadth of my career has been wide in terms of the repertory I’ve sung. You can have a valid argument for any part you want to sing, if it’s in your soul.”And he praised his colleagues, including the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is conducting, as well as the orchestra and chorus; a cast that also includes Sonya Yoncheva, Étienne Dupuis, Jamie Barton and Eric Owens; and the production’s director, David McVicar, who will also stage “Medea” next season.At its 1867 premiere in Paris, the five-act “Don Carlos,” adapted from a play by Schiller, was deemed too long. Verdi reluctantly agreed, and oversaw a number of revisions, as well as an Italian translation as “Don Carlo.” For decades, in the most sweeping intervention, the work’s first act was often cut, and the four remaining acts usually given in Italian.In 2010 at the Met, Nézet-Séguin led the five-act version (in Italian). Ever since, he has been angling to present the French “Don Carlos” at the house. As the plans for this new staging formed, Nézet-Séguin thought of Polenzani for the title role, even though he had never sung it, in either language.“Matthew Polenzani is one of the greatest tenors of our time,” Nézet-Séguin wrote in an email. “Matthew was perfect for Don Carlos because it’s a role of infinite nuance and subtlety, with such a varied range of emotion and expression, which would play exactly to Matthew’s qualities.”In 2012, Polenzani opened the Met’s season as the humble Nemorino in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn his youth Polenzani never imagined becoming an opera singer, let alone a star tenor at the Met. He grew up in Wilmette, Ill., the son of music-loving parents. (Rose Polenzani, his sister, is a folk singer and songwriter.) Polenzani appeared in some high school musicals and fronted a pickup band called Empty Pockets.He got a scholarship to Eastern Illinois University to study music education, aiming to teach high school. It was “a cornfield with a university in its center,” he said. “I was nowhere artistically.” A master class with the bass-baritone Alan Held, who sang often at the Met, got him thinking about opera. With the support of his teachers he entered the graduate program at the Yale School of Music, and took an extra year there.“It’s lucky I stayed,” he said: He met Rosa Maria Pascarella, a mezzo-soprano, who became his wife. He was accepted into the young artist program at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and from then on steadily progressed in a career that has included regular appearances with the world’s major houses.Since his Met debut in 1997 he has sung 41 roles there, though quite a few were smaller parts during his yeoman years. But Polenzani has been crucial in several significant new productions, starring as Tamino when Julie Taymor’s staging of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” was introduced in 2004, and as Alfredo when Willy Decker’s surreal take on Verdi’s “La Traviata” arrived at the house on New Year’s Eve in 2010. He starred in another New Year’s gala in 2012, the Met premiere of Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda.”A highlight came in 2017 when, in a revival of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s boldly stylized production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” Polenzani made the title role his own, blending virile heft with Mozartean elegance, and delivering a fearless account of the impassioned aria “Fuor del mar.”He now lives just north of New York City, in Pelham, with his wife and three sons, having survived tragedy: the loss, on Christmas Eve 2005, of their first child, Alessandra, who was 16 months old. For a long time after, Polenzani said, “trying to figure out why you have to get out of bed is the first battle.”“You are walking in a tunnel,” he said, “it’s endless black, and you can’t see your hand in front of your face.”Polenzani (in purple shirt) was acclaimed for his appearance as Nadir in Bizet’s “Les Pêcheurs de Perles.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow his family is thriving. One of the most charming moments of the Met’s At-Home Gala, early in the pandemic in April 2020, came when Polenzani, accompanying himself at the piano, sang a sweet-toned, wistful account of “Danny Boy.” At the end, you could hear his family cheering upstairs.“Don Carlos,” he said, comes at “a good time for me in my career. The part is not exactly heavier or more dramatic than others I’ve sung,” though, he added, “it’s certainly longer, especially in this version.”There is a “certain air of refinement to the French version,” he said, that suits him vocally. “It’s a little raucous, less raw, which is not to say less emotional — quite the opposite.”Also, he said, “The way we’re looking at it, Carlos is an antihero.” The crisis the character goes through begins in that often-cut first act, set in Fontainebleau, France, when Carlos meets the woman he is supposed to marry as part of a peace treaty: Elisabeth of Valois, the daughter of the French king. They quickly fall in love, but then word arrives that the Spanish king, Carlos’s father, has decided to marry her instead. Their vexed relationship energizes the tragic political epic that follows.“What we miss without the Fontainebleau act,” Polenzani said, “is the moment of falling in love,” adding, “If we don’t see them fall in love — and this is true of so many operas, like ‘Bohème’ and ‘Traviata’ — then we don’t care so much if it doesn’t work out in the end.”McVicar has emphasized Carlos’s similarities to Hamlet, and the emotional damage that has resulted from his broken relationship with Elisabeth and his unloving father. This nuanced take on the character is in keeping with Polenzani’s usual approach, in which he plumbs characters for their internal motivations and complexities.What most distinguishes his portrayals goes hand in hand with his modest yet superb vocal artistry: the earnestness and authenticity that he exudes onstage. Earnestness is difficult to learn or feign; it is a quality that a performer — or a person, for that matter — simply has.“I don’t think about it ever,” Polenzani said. “What I think about is trying to be as firmly in whichever character’s shoes I’m in.”“I work at being earnest in that way,” he added. “I want to be as honest as I can be.”This came through poignantly in the Met’s production of Bizet’s “Les Pêcheurs de Perles,” which opened at the Met on New Year’s Eve in 2015. As the humble fisherman Nadir, Polenzani sang the aria “Je crois entendre encore” like an enraptured young man recalling an impossible love.He shaped the gently rising phrases with sublime sadness and tender radiance, capping the final one with a ravishing pianissimo high C that few tenors — past or present — could match. Talk about stage presence and inhabiting the moment in opera: The ovation was tremendous. More

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      Review: Beethoven Returns for the Age of Black Lives Matter

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      Heartbeat Opera’s powerful take on “Fidelio,” as an indictment of mass incarceration, has been revived and revised for a post-2020 world.Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” is hardly a fixed text. He wrote several possible overtures for it and reworked the score substantially over the course of a decade. But its meaning never changed: the heroism to be found in devotion, love and freedom in the face of injustice.In 2018, the daring and imaginative Heartbeat Opera — an enterprise that, while small and still young, has already contributed more to opera’s vitality than most major American companies — took the malleable history of “Fidelio” one step further, adapting the work as a moving indictment of mass incarceration.That production has now been revised for a revival that opened at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last weekend, ahead of a tour that continues through the end of the month. Already inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this “Fidelio” is now permeated with it, and the adaptation is even more powerful.Bannister, left, as Stan, an imprisoned Black Lives Matter activist, and Griffin as Leah, his wife, who plots to free him.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesIn Beethoven’s original singspiel — a music theater form in which sung numbers are set up by spoken scenes — a woman named Leonore disguises herself as a man, Fidelio, to infiltrate the prison where her husband, Florestan, is being held for political reasons. She aims to free him from execution while exposing the crimes of his captor, Pizarro.Ethan Heard, a founder of Heartbeat, adapted “Fidelio” for the company and collaborated with the playwright Marcus Scott on the new book. Their revision tells the story of a Black Lives Matter activist named Stan — sung by Curtis Bannister, a tenor of impressive stamina — who has been imprisoned for nearly a year, and whose wife, Leah, given an affectingly agonized lower range by the soprano Kelly Griffin, is at a breaking point as she struggles to free him.She gets a job as a guard at the prison; her strategy to reach Stan in solitary confinement (much as in Beethoven’s original) is to ingratiate herself with a senior guard (here Roc, sung with both charm and dramatic complexity by the bass-baritone Derrell Acon) and court his daughter (here Marcy, smooth-voiced yet strong in the soprano Victoria Lawal’s portrayal). In this telling, there is no need for the cross-dressing: Marcy and Leah are both queer. And, crucially, all of these characters are Black, a fact that looms before guiding the awakenings of Marcy and her father as they face their complicity in a racist system that, Leah says, is designed to punish “people whose only mistake was being poor and Black.”Corey McKern, who plays a Trump-like Pizarro, with Acon, a senior prison guard.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe spoken text is in English throughout, while the arias remain in their original German — a testament to the timelessness of Beethoven, though the production’s surtitles take some liberties with the translation. (As an excuse for briefly letting the prisoners out into the sun, Roc sings that it’s the king’s name day, but the titles say that it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day.)Radically transformed, too, is the score, arranged by Daniel Schlosberg for two pianos, two horns, two cellos and percussion, with the multitasking (and nearly scene-stealing) Schlosberg onstage, conducting from the keyboard. Expressive cellos reveal the characters’ thoughts, and the horns add an aura of muscularity and honor. The most substantial interventions are in the percussion, with drum hits deployed to dramatic effect and a whiplike slap adding terror to Pizarro’s murder-plotting “Ha, welch’ ein Augenblick.”The soprano Victoria Lawal as Marcy, who awakens to her complicity in a racist system of mass incarceration.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesNot all the changes from 2018 were necessary, or wise. Starting with the venue: This production originated in a black box space at Baruch Performing Arts Center, which fit the chamber scale of the music and emphasized the cinder-block claustrophobia of Reid Thompson’s set. At the Met, the show floats on an expansive stage and struggles with poor acoustics.And the text has lost some of its grace, with pandering references to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and President Donald J. Trump’s infamous call for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” A casualty of these lapses is the baritone Corey McKern’s Pizarro, who is something of a Trump stand-in, a caricature among nuanced, human characters.You could almost forgive that at “O welche Lust,” the famous prisoners’ chorus, still the emotional high point of the production and now a coup de théâtre. For the stirring number, Leah unlocks a chest — a metaphor for the prison gates — to release a white screen, on which a video is projected, featuring 100 incarcerated singers and 70 volunteers from six prison ensembles. The camera often lingers on individual faces, to an effect not unlike that of Barry Jenkins’s filmmaking, the way his sustained close-ups invite intimacy and, above all, sympathy.A hundred incarcerated singers and 70 volunteers from six prison ensembles, recorded and projected onstage, sing the famous prisoners’ chorus “O welche Lust.”Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesFor curious audience members, Heartbeat has shared letters from some of the participants. They range from endearing — Michael “Black” Powell II’s “German was hard!!” — to profound, such as this from Douglass Elliott: “Most of us are victims of our circumstances who when faced with adversities chose the wrong direction with our actions. This choir makes us feel that ‘normal’ feeling for a short time every week. We are accepted as humans, not looked at as numbers.”Beethoven’s triumphant finale could have been an insult to the contemporary reality Heartbeat’s production aims to conjure. So after Stan is freed and Pizarro defeated, Leah awakes at the same desk where, in the opening, she has had a frustrating phone call with a lawyer. This twist, that it was all a dream, is of course a tired trope, but what follows isn’t.After a moment of despair — her happiness felt so real — she stands, steps to a spotlight at center stage and holds up her phone, assuming the pose of her husband’s activism, with which the production began. An ambivalent closing scene, it is an honest reflection of our time: of the mixed successes of Black Lives Matter, yes, and of the only possible way forward.FidelioPerformed at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Manhattan, and touring through Feb. 27; heartbeatopera.org. More

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      A Shape-Shifting Opera Singer, With a Debut to Match

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      Marlis Petersen, one of the greatest acting talents in opera, prepares for Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case” in Berlin.BERLIN — You might know her as the world-famous diva Emilia Marty. Or as Ellian MacGregor — maybe even Eugenia Montez or Elsa Müller. It’s an open question in Janacek’s operatic thriller “The Makropulos Case,” about the twilight of a woman who has adopted an assortment of identities throughout her unnaturally long life.Her real name is Elina Makropulos, born 337 years ago on Crete and still going, thanks to an elixir her father tested on her as a teenager. She’s not so different from Marlis Petersen, the soprano playing the part in a new production that premieres at the Berlin State Opera on Sunday.OK, Petersen is a mere 54. But like Emilia, she comes from Greece, and is currently inhabiting just the latest in a long line of personas. There are few singers with Petersen’s dramatic ferocity and intelligence — who understand that opera is, fundamentally, theater.“In the beginning of my career, the singing was most important,” she said in a recent interview at the Berlin opera house. “Then the music became as important as the text, and then came playing the role. And I wouldn’t say it’s 33-33-33. It’s three times 100.”She loves, she added, to linger in and study the psychologies of women. It’s what has made her, despite a voice on the slender side, one of today’s greatest singer-actors — a small club with the likes of Barbara Hannigan, Asmik Grigorian and Karita Mattila — and a director’s dream.“She’s in this extra class of singer,” said Claus Guth, who is directing the new “Makropulos Case.” “This is to a certain degree people with an energy and a little craziness, in a positive way. I would tell Marlis, ‘We do everything upside down and on the moon,’ and she would say, ‘Let’s go for it.’”Petersen playing the changeable diva Emilia Marty in the Berlin State Opera’s new production of Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case.”Monika RittershausPerhaps surprisingly, Petersen never studied acting beyond basic movement in school. “It’s like a gift from nature that I have,” she said. “It came to me by God.”Opera, too, was more of a random discovery than a deliberate plan. Born in Southern Germany, Petersen said music was “a big nothingness” in her house while she was growing up. She learned piano and flute, but didn’t hear much classical music; she listened to pop, but her parents considered a lot of it dirty, like her treasured ABBA cassette tape.Still, they were supportive, and Petersen’s piano teacher exposed her, she recalled, to “everything from Bach to Hindemith.” In a school music class, her voice was noticed, which led to singing in a church choir and learning the sacred repertory of Schubert, Mozart and more. When she was 15, her parents took her to her first opera, Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” She fell asleep.“I didn’t understand anything,” Petersen said. “I came late to opera, actually.”That happened when she studied voice in Stuttgart, financing her education in part by performing in a cover band called Square on weekends. Petersen played keyboard and sang hits like Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love” and Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” With a keyboardist colleague, she would do gigs that included performing “Starlight Express” on roller skates.“It was good training, because the nights were long and there was a bit of toughness involved,” Petersen said. She imitated the voices of the original singers, a skill that paid off later when she entered a competition with categories for classical repertory, then chansons and musical theater. She won the top prize in both, channeling Barbra Streisand in “Yentl” for her show tune.But once she turned 25, she focused entirely on opera. She joined the ensembles of houses in Nuremberg and Düsseldorf. As a light coloratura soprano she sang roles like Ännchen in “Der Freischütz” and Oscar in “Un Ballo in Maschera.” Then, in 2003, she went freelance.Petersen began to develop a more personal repertory, and signature roles. There was Susanna in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” whom she saw as a “quick, funny and inventive” kindred spirit. And the title antiheroine of Berg’s “Lulu,” which she sang in about 10 runs before retiring it at the Metropolitan Opera in 2015. That role, notorious for the complexity and extremity of its music and psychology, was, she said, “the big thing in my life.”There is a little of Lulu in Petersen’s Emilia Marty — the chilly pragmatism and canny manipulation — but she said that this debut has been a challenge. Her colleague Ludovit Ludha, however, who is singing Albert Gregor, Emilia’s pawn, in the production, said that when he first rehearsed with her, he asked her whether she was sure she had no Czech in her blood, she navigated the language so well.“In each rehearsal I was crying,” he added. “It’s basically unprofessional from my side, but she’s so impressive.”Guth’s staging is also tailored, in part, to Petersen. Handsomely designed and stylized, the production has a crucial intervention: a white void, occupied by Emilia in the opening and between acts.Claus Guth’s “Makropulos Case” staging includes a white space that Emilia Marty inhabits between the acts.Monika Rittershaus“There is no single moment where Emilia is alone,” Guth said, “She’s always playing a role. So I invented a special room for her, where we see the emptiness of someone who is going for 300 years through life.”Without music or text, these interludes depend entirely on Petersen’s silent acting. Dressed in a slip and mostly bald, with patches of wiry white hair, she wears Emilia’s true age on her face and throughout her body as she wearily dons the costume for the coming act. The scenes that follow are long decrescendos; always, by the end, her energy is depleted.“This,” Guth said, “is a very specific quality that only Marlis can give me.”Barrie Kosky, who directed her role debut as the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Bavarian State Opera last season — a production she returns to this spring — said that in the rehearsal room, “there’s never anything less than 100 percent,” adding: “There may be marking high notes, but there’s no marking with acting.”He recalled that in preparing the first act of “Der Rosenkavalier,” she began to eagerly eat a croissant when it was brought into the scene. She told him that if her character had been having sex all night, she would be starving.“I thought,” he said, “there is a God in the theater, and he’s given us Marlis Petersen.”Many of Petersen’s latest triumphs have been at the Bavarian State Opera, where last summer she was named Kammersängerin, designating a special relationship with the company — “an old title, but a lovely surprise,” she said. There, she found a partner in the conductor Kirill Petrenko, the house’s former music director, with whom she sang in “Lulu,” Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” and Strauss’s “Salome.”Around the time she was learning that opera, she bought a Harley-Davidson, which she named Salome. “I wanted to give her — yes, her — a fiery name,” Petersen said. The motorcycle is in Munich right now, but she otherwise keeps it with her in Greece, where she has lived since 2009: first in Athens, then in a house she built on land she has long owned in the Peloponnese.“I cry when I come home,” she said. “Whenever I board the plane, the tears begin. I need the sun as an inspiration.”Home is where she also keeps busy with her second calling: olive oil. Her region, she said, produces olives that are second only to those on Crete, and with the harvest on her property she makes oil that she sells, and gives away to friends. (Kosky has a small collection at his apartment in Berlin.)The label? In a coincidence that might remind you of “The Makropulos Case,” it’s called “Diva’s Elixir.” More

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      To Lure Back Audiences, Spoleto Festival Plans an Ambitious Season

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      The performing arts group in Charleston, S.C., will host 120 events in May and June, its first full season since the start of the pandemic.After two years of disruptions brought on by the coronavirus, Spoleto Festival USA, the renowned arts group in Charleston, S.C, announced on Friday an ambitious season that it hopes will bring audiences back to live performances.The season, the first under Spoleto’s new general director, Mena Mark Hanna, will feature more than 120 opera, theater, dance and music performances across 17 days in May and June. The highlights include the world premiere of “Omar,” an opera by the musician Rhiannon Giddens about a Muslim man from West Africa who was enslaved and transported to Charleston in 1807.Hanna, the first person of color to lead Spoleto in its 45-year history, said the group hoped to offer a platform to overlooked artists.“We want art to be more than something that expresses received traditions, or something that is a reinforcement of a received canon,” Hanna, the son of Egyptian immigrants, said in an interview. “We want art to have this potential to bridge differences through its transformational power.”Other highlights include the premiere of “Unholy Wars,” an opera by Karim Sulayman, the Lebanese American tenor, which tells the story of the Crusades from a contemporary Arab American perspective, drawing on music by early Baroque composers. “The Street,” a new work for harp by the composer Nico Muhly will have its American premiere at the festival, featuring text by the librettist Alice Goodman.The pandemic forced the cancellation of the Spoleto Festival in 2020. Last year, the festival returned with a pared-down season; ticket sales were down 70 percent compared with before the pandemic amid lingering concerns about the virus.Hanna said he was optimistic audiences would return in force this year as the Omicron variant recedes. The festival plans to require audience members to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, and to wear masks.“This is truly about us saying to the world, ‘We have wanted this, we have needed this,’” he said. “That sense of collective catharsis is something that we missed and, even more now than ever, need because of the virus.”He noted that one of the planned works this season is a new production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” led by the director Yuval Sharon, that unfolds in reverse, with one if its main characters, Mimì, dying of tuberculosis at the outset of the opera. The reordered opera ends with cheerier scenes of friendship and revelry from the first act.“The first act is really about renewal and love and youthfulness,” Hanna said. “I see that as a metaphor of moving away from the darkness of the pandemic.” More

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      Hans Neuenfels, Opera Director with a Pointed View, Dies at 80

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      A leading proponent of “director’s theater,” his productions had a provocative stamp that often provoked outrage.Hans Neuenfels, a German director and writer whose provocative, iconoclastic productions made him one of the pioneers of modern operatic stagecraft and the frequent target of audience and critical outrage, died in Berlin on Sunday. He was 80.The cause was Covid-19, his son, the cinematographer Benedict Neuenfels, said.Mr. Neuenfels was among the founding fathers, and arguably the leading exponent, of what came to be known as Regietheater, or “director’s theater,” in which the director’s vision tends to dominate the work.He abandoned performance traditions to interpret operas in light of the present, and aimed to force audiences to engage with what they saw — which they often did with riotous booing. His style earned him the title of enfant terrible of the German opera world.He came to prominence with a production of Verdi’s “Aida” for the Frankfurt Opera in 1981 that portrayed the enslaved heroine as a modern domestic servant — mop, bucket and all.“Mr. Neuenfels’s notions can be inferred from the final duet,” John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote. The temple vault in which Aida usually died turned, in this “perverse but striking” production, into “the Egyptian wing of a museum that becomes a gas chamber.”From then on, critics habitually accused Mr. Neuenfels of violating the works he directed, rather than shedding light on them.The writer and composer James Helme Sutcliffe sputtered in Opera magazine that a “La Forza del Destino” by Verdi at the Deutsche Oper in 1982 was a “coldblooded murder,” an “atrocity” that represented little more than “a puppy rubbing its master’s nose in his own excrement.”Little escaped Mr. Neuenfels’s critical eye. A former altar boy, he made religion a frequent target. In his staging of “Il Trovatore” in Berlin in 1996 Christ descends from the cross, his crown of thorns entwined with twinkling lights, to dance with colorfully dressed nuns.The soprano Karita Mattila as Fiordiligi during a dress rehearsal of a Neuenfels production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” at the Salzburg Festival in 2000.  Jacqueline Godany/AlamySexual imagery became graphic and inescapable, gratuitously so to some viewers. Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in Salzburg in 2000 found sadomasochism latent in the drama; the soprano Karita Mattila delivered her defiant aria, “Come scoglio,” holding leashes attached to men dressed in leather, chains and dog heads. His magic flute in Mozart’s opera of that name was a 3-foot phallus.But Mr. Neuenfels’s interest in opera was genuine, and he developed a deep knowledge of it. He all but abandoned the straight theater of his training and early work for the opera house and the music that transfixed him, writing librettos for operas by Adriana Hölszky and Moritz Eggert and arranging his own “Schumann, Schubert and the Snow,” a chamber opera for the Ruhr Triennale in 2005 that set a fictional meeting of the composers to their songs.“Each libretto mainly interested me in terms of information,” Mr. Neuenfels wrote in his 2009 book “How Much Musik do People Need?” “The main thing, I said to myself, is that it seduced the composer into music.”Hans Neuenfels was born on May 31, 1941, in Krefeld in northwest Germany, the only child of Arthur and Marie (Frenken) Neuenfels. He started writing as a child, and immediately had a capacity to shock.“At the age of 9 I wrote my first poems and stories, which I read to my parents,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2013. “I remember my father running out of the room because he didn’t like my story.” He later published a novel and made several films.Mr. Neuenfels studied at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen from 1960 to 1964, and at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, where he met the actress Elizabeth Trissenaar. Frequent stage collaborators, they married in 1964, the year Mr. Neuenfels made his debut as a theater director in Vienna. He had built a significant reputation by the time they jointly began an association with the Schauspiel Frankfurt in 1972, and he continued to prefer working freelance; a spell in charge of the Volksbühne, a prominent theater in Berlin, from 1986 to 1990 was troubled by financial problems.Mr. Neuenfels knew little about opera before his debut directing one (“Il Trovatore” in Nuremberg in 1974), he wrote in a 2011 autobiography, “Das Bastardbuch.” But during his cigarette-and beer-fueled preparations, he wrote, Verdi’s music “enveloped me, penetrated me, wove itself into me so that I was convinced it would run through my veins.” He saw no similar passion in the stagings he began to watch; they made opera a “senseless and purposeless undertaking,” he surmised, aiming for no broader relevance.Mr. Neuenfels resolved to change that. Four productions followed for the Frankfurt Opera, a hotbed of radicalism in the 1970s and ’80s, including the infamous 1981 “Aida.” He also directed Schreker’s “Die Gezeichneten” and Busoni’s “Doktor Faust,” showing an early taste for otherwise ignored dramas.As sympathetic critics saw, there was a certain integrity to much of Mr. Neuenfels’s work, which became more apparent as younger generations of directors became more extreme still. Mr. Rockwell wrote in 2001 that a “Die Fledermaus” at the Salzburg Festival was “in poor taste” and a “seething nest of hypocrisy, cruelty, sexual perversion and incipient Nazism,” but granted that it was “at least seriously intended.”Perhaps no production made Mr. Neuenfels’s underlying sincerity plainer than his rat-infested “Lohengrin” for the Bayreuth Festival in 2010, which, like the Patrice Chéreau “Ring” decades before it, was booed vigorously at its premiere but eventually became a beloved classic. At its last appearance in 2015, the Times critic Zachary Woolfe called it a “model of operatic direction.”Even when Mr. Neuenfels did not deliberately court controversy, though, it tended to find him.His production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” at the Deutsche Oper caused little stir at its premiere in 2003, despite his addition of an epilogue in which the title character pulled out the decapitated heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad.In 2006, however, the Oper canceled a planned revival. The Berlin police said the performances might pose a security risk because months earlier, a Danish newspaper had run caricatures of Muhammad, leading to worldwide protests.The cancellation provoked weeks of debate and was condemned by both Muslim leaders and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and an opera fan, who said that “self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practice violence in the name of Islam.”Mr. Neuenfels refused to cut the scene. The performance was reinstated and passed without incident.Mr. Neuenfels noted that the fiasco showed that opera had something to say. “It’s very good,” he told The Wall Street Journal, “that a government would be moved to comment on the situation, which says something about the role of opera and art in general.”Along with his son, Mr. Neuenfels is survived by his wife and two grandchildren.In his 2011 interview with Deutsche Welle, Mr. Neuenfels was asked whether he had to wrestle deeply with “Lohengrin,” a drama that often poses problems for directors.Responding that his Wagnerian work had at one point been “almost ecstatic,” he reflected that “directing really takes you to the absolute limit — it’s almost impossible in a sense. But once you’ve gotten there, it’s a really magnificent and unique experience. Every staging should take the director to the brink of insanity.”“And then,” he added, “comes the next one.” More

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      A Conductor in Demand, and in Control

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      MUNICH — Let’s get this out of the way: Don’t expect Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla to be the music director of a major American orchestra any time soon.“At the moment, I will be much more content to be a simple freelancer,” Gražinytė-Tyla, 35, said in a recent interview at the Bavarian State Opera here, where she was preparing a new production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.”It’s an unusual statement coming from a young conductor in demand, especially one whose current appointment — as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Britain — concludes this spring. Even more unusual since Gražinytė-Tyla, along with the likes of Susanna Mälkki, is often mentioned as a leading contender to fill vacancies on the horizon at top American orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic.But as administrators search for a conductor of her stature, as well as for someone to tip the scale of gender balance in the United States — where there won’t be any female music directors among the country’s 25 largest orchestras until Nathalie Stutzmann starts with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season — Gražinytė-Tyla is a defiant rarity: an anti-careerist who has resisted industry pressure in favor of artistic and personal fulfillment.Her star might be on the rise, but she is keeping it on a short leash. Gražinytė-Tyla designed her calendar this season so that it was dominated by “The Cunning Little Vixen” — both in concert, as in Birmingham, and staged, as in Munich. She has retained a remarkable amount of control over her schedule, ensuring time for family: her partner and two sons in Salzburg, Austria, with a third child on the way. (The Birmingham orchestra recently announced that, because of the pregnancy, she would no longer conduct her planned final concerts in June.)“She’s very in tune with herself,” said Barrie Kosky, who directed the new “Vixen,” which runs through Feb. 15. “She’s very sure her decisions are the right decisions for her. She couldn’t care less about all the tra-la-la.”Born to a family of professional musicians in Lithuania, and finding early success with the baton, Gražinytė-Tyla (pronounced grah-zhin-EE-tay teel-AH) was teed up for the typical life of a conductor: jet-setting hustle and steppingstone appointments — leading, perhaps, to a prestige podium.But she also long had a streak of independence. She began to study music formally at 11 against the wishes of her parents, who wanted to spare her the difficulties of an artistic life. Although experienced as a singer, she wasn’t a trained instrumentalist, so she joined the only school program that was available: conducting. She was a natural and, at 16, took first prize at a Lithuanian competition.Gražinyte-Tyla rehearsing at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. “She’s very in tune with herself,” said the stage director Barrie Kosky.Roderick Aichinger for The New York Times“I remember thinking, Oh no, what am I going to do now?” Gražinytė-Tyla said. “There was this pressure, and I knew it would be so hard to maintain that level. It was a huge challenge, but also a mix of joy and responsibility.”The pressure didn’t end there. Completing her studies, adding Tyla (the Lithuanian word for silence) to her professional name, and winning the Salzburg Young Conductors Award, she was then given a fellowship with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she would go on to serve as an assistant, then associate, conductor. She first appeared with the C.B.S.O. in summer 2015, and by the following January had been appointed its music director.The speed of all that, Gražinytė-Tyla said, “puts you into shape and can give you a good kick to do something fast.” But, she added, it also made her value an introspective pause. “I think it is incredibly important to stay very aware of what is happening inside, because a person shouldn’t be a machine, and shouldn’t be a little part of this big mechanism that says, ‘You go this way and this way.’”“People are different,” she continued. “But I think I need time where I am not studying or conducting or traveling or rehearsing to just be a whole human being.”A breakthrough came during a conversation with the violinist Gidon Kremer. She recalled him telling her that her career would always feel like it had two different doors. Behind one would be record labels, managers, festivals and a variety of conflicting demands; behind the other, “all your dreams are there, and your imagination, and the things you can go for and explore.”She has opened both doors. Insistently private, she speaks strategically, at times even euphemistically, about her home life. Her partner hasn’t been publicly identified beyond having a job with the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg; in the interview, she referred to family time as “human relations.”Yet she did take the job in Birmingham, which has a high profile and a reputation as a star-maker, with such recent music directors as Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons. A recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon followed her appointment. In both cases, she was a first: as a woman on the Birmingham podium and as a female conductor with that storied label. Those milestones were noted publicly, Gražinytė-Tyla said, but only in passing.“This is something that our generation has to be incredibly grateful for,” she said, referring to the struggles of female conductors. “There have been a lot of painful memories for our colleagues in the past, and I have had some small experiences myself, but nothing in the amount that someone in Susanna Mälkki’s generation had to go through.” (Mälkki is 52.)Gražinytė-Tyla was warmly received by the players in Birmingham, said Oliver Janes, a clarinetist with the ensemble. “She has this rehearsal technique where you forget you’ve ever played a piece before,” he added. “And once you’ve completely forgotten how it goes, you feel like you’re starting again.”She also, he said, gave the orchestra — and its public — a jolt. At their first BBC Proms appearance under her direction, they encored with Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty,” and the moment it ended she shouted to the audience inside the vast Royal Albert Hall in London, “See you in Birmingham!”She has released several Deutsche Grammophon recordings with the orchestra, including as part of a benchmark pairing of symphonies by the often overlooked Mieczyslaw Weinberg — a reflection, she said, of her tendency to take a project-based approach to conducting. Just as there will be more Weinberg to come, she is in the midst of a “Vixen” immersion.“I am totally aware that this is a complete luxury,” she said. “Some people see the profession of a conductor as: You have to be incredibly fast and know all the repertoire. These are fantastic qualities. On the other hand, for myself I only can say I believe less and less I could be such a type of conductor.”Over time and multiple performances, she added, “Vixen” has revealed its “incredible jewels and connections” to her. Janes, the clarinetist, said that in Birmingham, she knew every corner of the text, to the point where, “if all the singers went ill, she could do the whole concert and sing every part.”When Kosky started planning the Munich production with Gražinytė-Tyla, he said, she wanted their first conversation to be about text, “which delighted me from the top of my head to my toes.”“I said to her, ‘That’s all the work,’” he added. “The work itself is how the text is propelled by the music. She breathes the text, and she breathes with the music. Without that in Janacek, you’re dead.”“At the moment, I will be much more content to be a simple freelancer.”Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesText was central even at her recent rehearsals with the Bavarian State Opera’s orchestra. Standing at the podium, her small frame belying a deep voice that commands as easily as it lets out booming laughter, she alternated between straightforward notes and explaining scenes in detail — especially in relation to Kosky’s staging. She later did the same when the cast joined for the sitzprobe, the first meeting of the singers and instrumentalists.The tenor Jonas Hacker, singing the role of the Schoolmaster, said that Gražinytė-Tyla’s directions tend to be “very color-motivated” and that she “breaks things down into tiny segments,” which, he added, comes from the score itself: “Janacek tends to be so fragmented, she’ll just take a few bars and figure out really what is the text saying and what its mood is, and really taking the time.”Throughout, Kosky said, he has remained convinced that she is “a theater person, which to me is so fundamental.”“There aren’t many opera conductors in the world,” he added. “You can be a great symphony conductor and be a lousy opera conductor. And there is an absolute shortage of genuinely talented opera conductors. It’s a bit of a worry; get your truffle pig out at the moment. But Mirga is one of them.”Gražinytė-Tyla hasn’t announced future performances beyond a brief revival of “Vixen” during the Munich Opera Festival this summer. But for now, she is confident that whatever follows will not be a long-term post with any orchestra.“The luxury to focus on the ‘Vixen’ — I think it will remain a very important point for me to deal with certain repertoire in the rhythm I feel is the right one, right now, for me,” she said, adding with a hearty laugh: “I’m not sure the big orchestras will be interested in having me if I say I’ll do only ‘Vixen’ for the whole season.” More

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      Review: In ‘Intimate Apparel,’ Letting the Seamstress Sing

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      Lynn Nottage’s play about a Black woman in 1905 becomes an opera, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon, that forefronts voices ignored by history.We begin with joyful ragtime, that musical theater fallback for telling Black stories of the early 20th century.But the sound is muffled, distorted. The party is elsewhere in the boardinghouse where our heroine, Esther, a shy, plain woman of 35, sits in her room sewing corsets and camisoles for socialites and streetwalkers. She is too serious and too ambitious to descend to the parlor and cakewalk with the revelers.So is “Intimate Apparel.” In musicalizing Lynn Nottage’s play of the same title, Ricky Ian Gordon, working with a text by Nottage herself, wants more for Esther than a quick dance and a slick tune. A woman so bent on betterment in an age that makes it almost impossible deserves the most serious and ambitious musical treatment available — and gets it in the knockout Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, that opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Monday.That the play was excellent to begin with was no guarantee of a viable libretto. But looking back on its 2004 Roundabout Theater Company premiere, starring Viola Davis as Esther, you can see that “Intimate Apparel” already had the necessary ingredients for a powerful opera: spine, scope and poetry.The spine remains neatly articulated. The first scene quickly establishes that Esther (Kearstin Piper Brown) has the discipline and drive to make a career of her handiwork; with the savings she sews into the lining of her crazy quilt she plans one day to open a beauty salon. The scene also establishes her pride, as she rejects the last-chance men who come to the parties given by her landlady, Mrs. Dickson.“Pride’ll leave you lonely,” Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich) warns.We next meet two of her clients, whose lives express in contrasting ways the limitations Esther hopes to escape. Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) has every luxury a white woman of privilege could want, including the pink silk crepe de chine corset that Esther brings to her boudoir for a fitting. But Mrs. Van Buren, trained only to be a wealthy man’s wife, has no options when her husband loses interest.Though poor and Black, Mayme (Krysty Swann) is likewise at men’s mercy for her few luxuries — which, amusingly, include the same corset as Mrs. Van Buren’s. (“What she got, you want,/What you got, she want,” Esther comments.) Instead of an absent husband Mayme has johns who are often vile or violent, yet she is closer to Mrs. Van Buren than either might like to think.Brown and Arnold Livingston Geis as Mr. Marks, a fabric salesman, in the opera at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEsther’s friendship with the women is more than professional but nevertheless circumscribed by class and race. (She has never entered Mrs. Van Buren’s house through the front door, and presumably never entered a brothel at all.) Her third professional friendship is even more delicate. Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis) sells fabric on Orchard Street, saving the most beautiful bolts for her. Though he is the only man ever to recognize and encourage her gift, he is literally untouchable: an Orthodox Jew.But he is not the only man to flirt with her. Esther is surprised — and then, almost against her will, gratified — to receive a letter from a Barbadian laborer working on the Panama Canal. It seems that George Armstrong (Justin Austin) is looking for a pen pal to counter, with beautiful words, the filth and harshness of his job. As Esther can neither read nor write, she depends on Mrs. Dickson to tell her what George is saying; and then on Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme to forge suitably Cyrano-like replies.I will say no more about the plot except that at the end of Act I Armstrong arrives in New York to marry Esther, who wears an exquisite dress made with fabric she bought from Mr. Marks. If she is not what might have been expected from their correspondence, neither, she gradually realizes, is he. In Act II we learn why.Many plays sewn so tightly unravel completely as they stretch toward their crisis. Not “Intimate Apparel”; with its eye on the big picture, it maintains both its integrity and its tension to the end. Never stinting on detail — or, apparently, period research — Nottage forces the audience to keep sight of the larger pressures pushing all her characters into situations they must eventually escape more explosively.I focus on the story because it is usually the problem with opera, as books are with musicals. Nottage has cut perhaps half of her play to make room for Gordon’s music, and in doing so has made the smart if painful choice to retain only what is most narrowly tailored to the plot and yet most allusive. What we call poetry in opera is not really the verse (though Nottage’s libretto is lightly rhymed where necessary) but the rich texture of everything doing double duty.Courtship by mail: Brown and Justin Austin as George Armstrong.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSo too with Gordon’s lush yet intricate score, which soars into the timeless atmosphere of operatic writing (though he calls his hybrid works “operacals”) while always regrounding us in the specifics of period and character. In numbers like “No One Does It for Us,” repeated choruses do more than ram home lovely melodies; they underline the similarities between Esther and Mayme, who sing it. And it is not for nothing that George’s letter arias from Panama are typically accompanied by a ghostly chorus of other men, as if to question their strange intimacy.None of these smart choices would matter if the performers could not make hay of them, but Sher has assembled and tuned an unusually fine cast of opera singers who can actually act. Brown is especially heartbreaking as Esther — and astonishingly tireless in a huge role. (Chabrelle Williams takes over for the Wednesday and Sunday matinees.) Her scenes with Geis as Mr. Marks are so gentle and rich in subtext you don’t want them to end. But all six leads are terrific, and the ensemble of eight other singers performs dozens of roles, each quickly and perfectly etched.Sher’s staging in the 299-seat Newhouse, on a simple turntable set by Michael Yeargan, is a marvel of constant movement that never feels busy, and the costumes by Catherine Zuber are exquisite even when plain. As always, it is a joy to hear an opera in an intimate space with acoustics so clear and natural — the sound is by Marc Salzberg — that the captions projected on the walls of the set are rarely needed. And though the voices are prioritized in Gordon’s orchestration for two pianos, the presence of the instruments, on platforms above the stage, is not incidental. As played on Friday evening by Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, they seemed to have dramatic roles of their own, representing not only the need of women, especially Black women, for emotional independence, but also the world of 1905 that forbids it.In that sense “Intimate Apparel” — even more as an opera than as a play — is an act of rescue. When Esther tells Mrs. Van Buren, as they write the first letter to George, “My life ain’t really worthy of words,” she means that she isn’t special enough to be made permanent on paper. That isn’t true; as Nottage and now Gordon have shown, she is worthy of even more. She is worthy of music that is finally worthy of her.Intimate ApparelThrough March 6 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More