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      A Queen of 19th-Century Opera Gets New Attention

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      Pauline Viardot, born 200 years ago this weekend, was a famous singer, as well as a composer whose music is being salvaged from obscurity.Toward the end of her life, the opera diva Pauline Viardot took stock of her vast social network. She wrote a three-page, multicolumn list of everyone she had ever met, worked with or loved.She ended up with over 300 names, a who’s-who of 19th-century icons: composers like Rossini, Liszt and Schumann; novelists like George Sand, Victor Hugo and Ivan Turgenev, her lover; Giuseppe Mazzini and Napoleon III.Viardot entertained many of them at the weekly salons she held at her home in Paris. Classical musicians have rarely connected so widely with important figures of the day; the closest American parallel might be Leonard Bernstein, who hobnobbed with presidents and Hollywood glitterati.But like Bernstein, Viardot — born exactly 200 years ago, on July 18, 1821 — was far more than a Zelig. One of the supreme singers of her time, she was also a prolific composer, whose music is slowly being salvaged from obscurity; a savvy entrepreneur; a gifted visual artist; and a highly respected voice teacher.Born Michelle-Pauline-Ferdinande-Laurence Garcia, in Paris, Viardot was an heir to a musical dynasty. Her father, Manuel Garcia, was an international opera star and the first Count Almaviva in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.”Born in Spain, Garcia never stayed in one place for long, moving his wife and three children — Viardot’s older sister, Maria Malibran, became another of the century’s reigning divas — to Italy, Paris and London. And then in 1825, when Viardot was 4, to the United States, where his family and troupe introduced Italian operas, sung in their original language, to the American public.Viardot’s musical talents emerged early. She took piano lessons with Liszt and developed a girlhood crush on him. As a young woman, she played duets with Chopin, a friend. But when she was 15, her mother dashed her dreams of becoming a concert pianist, declaring that Pauline would pursue the family trade: singing opera.She made her debut in 1839 in London as Desdemona in Rossini’s “Otello,” then hit her stride four years later when she brought the house down at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow as Rosina in “The Barber of Seville.”“Ravishing, velvetlike notes rang out, of the sort that no one, it seemed, had ever heard,” an audience member later recalled, adding, “Instantly an electric spark ran round the audience.”Viardot photographed in the title role of Gluck’s “Orfeo,” a part she took when Berlioz resurrected the opera in 1859.Sepia Times/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesWhen she was 18, she met and married the historian, art critic and theater director Louis Viardot, 21 years her senior. In a reversal of gender norms, he resigned from his post as director of the Théâtre Italien in Paris after their wedding to focus on Pauline, her career and, ultimately, their four children.With a voice of uncommon range and flexibility, Viardot became famous on Europe’s major stages in signature roles that included Zerlina and Donna Anna in “Don Giovanni,” Adina in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” and the title role in Bellini’s “Norma.”“Her technical skill alone is immense; in the completeness of her chromatic scale she is, probably, without a rival,” said an article published in Fraser’s Magazine, a London journal, in 1848.But, the writer went on, “the principal feature which characterizes her is the dramatic warmth of her impersonations. She throws herself heart and soul into a part.”Toward the end of her life, Viardot took stock of her vast social network, a list that included Bellini, Liszt and Victor Hugo.MS Mus 264 (367)/Houghton Library, Harvard UniversityComposers sought her out for important premieres: She was the first Fidès in Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète” and Charles Gounod’s first Sapho. When Berlioz resurrected Gluck’s “Orfeo” for the Parisian stage in 1859, Viardot was the diva for whom he rewrote the title role. A decade later, Brahms chose her as the soloist for the premiere of his Alto Rhapsody.After retiring from the opera stage in 1863, Viardot continued singing in concerts and being what we’d call today a macher. She owned the original manuscript of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” which composers including Fauré and Tchaikovsky made pilgrimages to see. In 1869, she wrote an effusive letter to Richard Wagner congratulating him on a performance of “Die Meistersinger.” But his notorious anti-Semitic essay, “Judaism in Music,” published under his name the following month, soured the relationship, and Wagner and his wife, Cosima, began referring derisively to Viardot as a “Jewess.” (She was not Jewish.)Following her father, who was a gifted composer as well as a brilliant singer, Viardot put significant time and energy into composing. Her work is not nearly as widely known as that of Robert Schumann, Liszt, Saint-Saëns or others in her social circle. But her music was deeply appreciated by her contemporaries, with one person going so far as to compare her talent to Schubert’s. Clara Schumann referred to her as “the greatest woman of genius I have ever known.” A fierce advocate for her students, she died, just a month shy of her 89th birthday, in 1910.Today, her works are enjoying a resurgence among scholars and performers — part of a wave of interest in long-neglected composers like Amy Beach, Florence Price, Clara Schumann and others.Viardot wrote hundreds of pieces, the majority of them songs for solo voice and piano. Her first was “L’Enfant de la montagne,” published when she was just 19 in a collection organized by Meyerbeer, Paganini and Cherubini. Like so many of her songs, she was its major advocate, using it to show off her vocal skills in concerts in Leipzig, Germany, and other cities.Her songs have more recently become popular fare for prima donnas including Annick Massis, Cecilia Bartoli and Aude Extrémo. They range from playful and virtuosic (“Vente, niña, conmigo al mar”) to hauntingly beautiful (“L’Enfant et la Mère” and “Hai luli”). The publisher Breitkopf und Härtel has released a new critical edition of some of the songs on texts by Pushkin, Fet and Turgenev. (Viardot’s Russian was superb.) She also wrote works for piano and violin, the instrument of her son, Paul Viardot. Her other three children, also musicians, performed her compositions, too.True to her specialty, Viardot also wrote operas. These were mostly performed by her students and children in her home, with piano accompaniment, but at least one, “Le Dernier Sorcier,” was orchestrated and performed in 1869 in Weimar Germany.Shannon Jennings as Marie, the Cinderella character in Viardot’s opera “Cendrillon,” which is enjoying a rare revival at Wolf Trap Opera in Virginia.Angelina Namkung, via Wolf TrapWolf Trap Opera in Virginia has revived her “Cendrillon” just this weekend. Viardot wrote both the music and words for this chamber operetta about Cinderella, a fanciful interpretation of the fairy tale by Charles Perrault.“Her music is both challenging and wonderfully singable,” Kelly Kuo, the production’s conductor, said in an interview. “You just know that it was written by someone who really understood what she was doing.”Among the guests at the 1904 premiere of “Cendrillon” were the editor and musician Salvatore Marchesi and his wife Mathilde, an influential voice teacher. Finding Viardot’s music charming, they wrote of their certainty that it would have “a successful run through the world.” Although somewhat delayed, their prediction is perhaps beginning to come true.“Viardot,” Kuo said, “is a perfect example of an artist who should be much better known today.”Hilary Poriss is an associate professor of music at Northeastern University and the author of “Gioachino Rossini’s ‘The Barber of Seville,’” forthcoming from Oxford University Press. More

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      BAM’s Fall Season Kicks Off With a Beach Opera

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      “Sun & Sea,” which won top honors at the Venice Biennale in 2019, will make its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall.The Brooklyn Academy of Music is bringing the beach to you.The star of its fall season, announced Thursday, is a theatrical installation — a surreal opera set at an indoor imitation beach — that paints a portrait of sunbather tranquillity with menacing undercurrents (did you catch the aria about a boyfriend drowning in the ocean?). The production, “Sun & Sea,” which will open at BAM Fisher and run for two weeks before touring the country, won the top prize when it debuted in the Lithuanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. This will be the American premiere.“It’s an incredible spectacle,” David Binder, BAM’s artistic director who saw it in Venice, said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “The beachgoers are just passing the day away as things are coming to an end.”Those attending will watch from a 360-degree balcony as 13 singers and approximately 25 local community members who act as beachgoers scroll on their phones, play cards and fill in Sudoku puzzles. In Venice, lines stretched down the canal and around the piazza to see it. In a New York Times review of that installation, Joshua Barone wrote that the opera, created by the filmmaker and director Rugile Barzdziukaite, the writer Vaiva Grainyte and the artist and composer Lina Lapelyte, has a “haunting simplicity that insinuates itself into your memory and, possibly, your opinions.” The audience watched from above on the upstairs mezzanine of a warehouse, he wrote, “as if observing animals at a zoo or creatures under a microscope.”“Within a single hour of dangerously gentle melodies, it manages to animate a panoramic cast of characters whose stories coalesce into a portrait of an apocalyptic climate crisis that goes down as easily as a trip to the beach,” Barone wrote.The fall season continues with creations by artists from Japan, Brazil and Portugal, all of them New York premieres.Later in September, the Japanese sound artist ASUNA will perform his site-specific sound installation, “100 Keyboards,” in which the same note is simultaneously played and sustained on 100 battery-operated toy keyboards arranged in a circle, creating waves of overlapping notes until they climax to what BAM calls “a singular resonant reverberation.”In October, the Portuguese playwright-actor Tiago Rodrigues will stage his collaborative theater experiment “By Heart,” in which 10 audience members are asked to memorize a poem. It will be his first performance in the United States since being appointed the next director of France’s Avignon Festival, the storied annual arts festival that turns the city into a giant theater each July.“The theme is that if we can remember words or texts by heart, they can never be taken away, or suppressed, or censored, or destroyed,” Binder said. “It’s very simple, but also deeply political.”It will be followed in November by the Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll’s dance piece “Cria.” Ripoll and the 10-member group Suave, an all-Black company that includes transgender performers, will mix funk, samba and break dance with passinho, the dance craze that grew out of Rio’s favelas, in the company’s first United States performance. It is billed as an experience that “relocates the wild exuberance of adolescence.”While BAM typically announces its fall season all at once, Binder said that, this year, additional programs will be announced on a rolling basis as details are finalized.“There’s just a huge appetite, I think, for artistic adventures right now,” he said. “And I’m so excited to see how artists respond to that hunger.” More

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto on Life, Nature and ‘Time’

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      The musician and artist, currently undergoing cancer treatment, unveils a music-theater work about dreams, reincarnation and humanity’s struggle.Ryuichi Sakamoto is in Tokyo for the summertime rainy season. A New York resident for over 30 years, the Oscar-winning composer has been in Japan since last November — not because of the pandemic, but because of a diagnosis of rectal cancer, discovered just after he went into remission after several years of treatment for throat cancer.Despite his health problems, Sakamoto has been as prolific as ever, participating in concerts, exhibitions and most recently an opera, “Time,” which premiered last month at the Holland Festival.“Time” is part of Sakamoto’s ongoing exploration of “asynchronism,” music arranged outside traditional time structures. Introduced on his 2017 album “async,” the concept was conceived as he recovered from his first bout with cancer — an experience that he has said newly honed his ear to the beauty of everyday sounds, both natural and man-made, sun showers and singing bowls.Without conductor or tempo markings, “Time” is a “Mugen Noh,” a subset of Noh theater based on dreams. Created in collaboration with the visual artist Shiro Takatani, this dreamscape unfolds on a stage filled with water and a screen displaying weather systems, cities and empty space.“Time” unfolds on a stage filled with water and a screen displaying weather systems, cities and empty space.Sanne PeperCrossing and recrossing the stage with her sho, an ancient Japanese wind instrument, Mayumi Miyata represents nature. The dancer and actor Min Tanaka is a frail symbol of humankind, struggling to build a road across the water. Summoning visions of rising sea levels, “Time” — like our new century — presents a premonition that also feels like a memory: At the end of time, we all return to the same sea.Sakamoto spoke about the piece on a recent video call. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.At what point in the production of “Time” did you find out your cancer had returned?I worked on “Time” for four years after “async,” and I was diagnosed with rectal cancer last year. It’s a long treatment. I’m in the middle right now, and will go back to the hospital for surgery in the fall. It’s been a year since I left New York; I don’t know when I can come back.Were you originally planning to perform in the opera?I was thinking of making an original instrument for it. I still have this idea for the future.I was using the word opera in the beginning, but I’ve stopped using it. It’s a combination of installation and performance — a theater piece.It seems quite deeply connected to “async.”The conceptual idea behind “async” was my doubt about synchronization, and that led me to think about time itself. If you know my work from the past, I zigzag. But the things I got from making “async” were so huge that I didn’t want to lose them. I really wanted to develop them. The album was so spatial, like music for an installation, so the development would be an installation of performers together. That was the original idea for “Time.”“Time” is a Mugen Noh — it has no tempo — so it does seem like the perfect landscape to explore these ideas.Time is so natural to our society that we don’t doubt it. But because I’m a musician, I deal with time all the time. When we compose, we have to think about how to manipulate sounds in time.Crossing and recrossing the stage with her sho, an ancient Japanese wind instrument, Mayumi Miyata represents nature.Sanne PeperThere are no instruments onstage, except the sho.Only the sho, which I have been fascinated by since I was a university student. I disliked all other Japanese traditional music, and even other traditions, like kado [flower arrangement] or sado [tea ceremony]. I hated it all, except gagaku [court music], which is like aliens’ music to me.Miyata, who represents nature, crosses the water so easily, while Tanaka — “mankind” — is so feeble.Woman and sho, they represent nature. Tanaka wants to create a straight road in the water — in time — to get the other side, but he fails. He goes insane and dies in the water at the end.What is humanity trying to reach at the end of the road?That’s mankind’s nature. A bit like Sisyphus: just a natural passion to make a road, to conquer nature.The road-building scenes interrupt a series of stories: a dream from the work of the writer Natsume Soseki; a traditional Noh play; the butterfly dream from the text Zhuangzi. How did you choose these?In our dreams, all properties of time are destroyed. In the Noh story “Kantan,” a man is looking for enlightenment and takes a nap. It just takes five minutes, but in his dream, 50 years has passed. Which is reality? The five minutes or the 50 years? And then in the butterfly dream, we have the philosopher Zhuang Zhou. Does the butterfly dream he is Zhuang Zhou, or does Zhuang Zhou dream he is a butterfly? We cannot tell.The dancer and actor Min Tanaka is a frail vision of humankind, struggling to build a road across the water.Sanne PeperBy freeing time musically, do you feel it slow down?The theme of “Time” is to insist that time doesn’t exist, not that it’s passing slowly. Watching the streaming premiere, I sensed that one hour ago was just a minute ago, or some moments were repeated. At least I could feel another kind of time.You’ve also been painting on ceramic pieces (“2020S”), using found objects, and making installations (“Is Your Time”), and you currently have a large retrospective in Beijing, with a lot of visual work. What provoked this turn toward the visual arts?Maybe the big moment was the opera I composed in 1999, “Life.” It included visual images, moving images and some texts — all those visual elements were the main characters of that opera.And that was your first collaboration with Takatani?Yes, and the next thing we did was to deconstruct “Life.” We deconstructed all the visual images, and the sound, too, to create an installation in 2007. That was a big moment.I guess you’ve always worked in the visual arts — you’ve worked so closely with filmmakers on soundtracks.Strange, you know, I didn’t think about films. Films are more narrative, more linear. Unfortunately, a linear structure is in time; it has a beginning, middle and end. I don’t want to go back to that. This is why I’m fascinated by installation. Installation doesn’t have to have a beginning or end. The best installation, I think, is just listening to rain.And you have a tremendous rainstorm at the end of “Time,” followed by the crashing of a wave in slow motion. What sea were you thinking of?Man wants to conquer nature — the water — but he must fail, so he must die by water. I needed a huge flood, maybe a tsunami, to represent the violent power of water. Also, almost all ethnic groups have some memories of a big flood. Maybe we all have some deep memory about surviving a flood.I think a lot of people will wonder if this opera is primarily about climate change.Climate change is the most vivid conflict between mankind and nature so of course it is included. But it’s not the main focus. I wanted to create a myth about mankind and nature.It’s very similar to Soseki’s dream, in which a woman returns as a flower growing from her own grave. I’ve read a few interpretations. To some it represents Soseki’s struggle with the modern world.It is my belief about reincarnation. Because she promises she will be back in 100 years, and she’s back as a flower. You know, I always wanted to be buried in the ground, so that my body would become the nutrition of other living things. And in Soseki’s story, the woman becomes a flower. It’s so beautiful.I love your interpretation.Very romantic, no? More

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      The Fate of the Met Opera’s Fall Season Lies in Its Orchestra Pit

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      The company has reached deals with the unions representing its chorus and stagehands. Now, to reopen in September, it needs to make a deal with its musicians.When the Metropolitan Opera’s stagehands finally returned to work last week after an agonizingly long furlough that was followed by a seven-month lockout as they negotiated a new contract with pay cuts, they found a time-capsule backstage.The wings were crammed with the mammoth sets of the operas that were in rotation when the pandemic forced the Met to abruptly close its doors on March 12, 2020: “Der Fliegende Holländer,” “Werther,” and “La Cenerentola,” which had been scheduled to open that night. All had to be carted away and placed in storage so the company could begin preparing to reopen in September after the prolonged shutdown.The stagehands returned after reaching a deal in a dramatic all-night bargaining session earlier this month in List Hall, the small auditorium where the Opera Quiz is held during the Met’s Saturday matinee radio broadcasts. Management and representatives of the stagehands’ union, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees — all of whom were required to be vaccinated to attend negotiating sessions — talked through the night, capping the deal with a 7 a.m. handshake.“We were coming down to the wire,” said James J. Claffey Jr., the president of Local One. “If talks had dragged on any longer it may have been impossible to prepare the opera house for a September opening.”James J. Claffey Jr., president of Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, outside Lincoln Center in May.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe deal with the stage hands, which followed one that was struck in May with the union representing the Met’s chorus, soloists, dancers, actors and stage managers, increases the likelihood that the Met will be able to reopen on schedule after one of the most trying periods in its history. But a significant obstacle remains: The company has yet to reach a deal on the pay cuts it is seeking from the musicians in its orchestra, who went unpaid for nearly a year after the company closed.“The Met has a simple decision to make,” Adam Krauthamer, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which started negotiating with the opera company more than three months ago, said in a statement. “Do they want to continue to have a world-class orchestra? If so, they will need to invest accordingly.”The Met, which said that it lost $150 million in earned revenue during the pandemic, and is concerned that it could be some time before its box office revenues return to prepandemic levels, has said that it needs to cut the pay of its workers in order to survive. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, initially sought to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent, which the company said would effectively cut take-home pay by around 20 percent. (Last week, the Met learned that it would receive $10 million from the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, an expected boost from the federal government that has been delayed by bureaucratic mishaps.)In the stagehands’ absence, the opera house fell into some disrepair. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThe first of the Met’s three major unions to reach an agreement on a new contract was the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents chorus members, soloists, dancers and stage managers, among others. The salary cuts fell far short of the management proposal — under the agreement most types of employees will initially see 3.7 percent cuts to their pay — but the deal saves a significant amount of money by moving members to the union’s health insurance plan and reducing the size of the full-time regular chorus..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The details of the agreement with Local One — including how long and lasting the pay cuts will be, and whether there will be changes to work rules or other cost savings — will not be released until July 18, when the union’s members vote on whether to ratify it.In the stagehands’ absence, the opera house fell into some disrepair. Some wheels on the wagons that haul sets and scenery had gone flat. The hydraulics system was in serious need of maintenance. At one point during the shutdown, two scenic backdrops fell to the ground.The Occupational Safety and Health Administration received notice that the backdrops had fallen, as well as a report of mold at the base of the orchestra pit, according to a letter from the agency to the Met. The Met said it had responded to the government inquiry and that the case had been closed; it denied that there had been mold in the orchestra pit.The company typically spends its summer preparing for the new season, including by holding technical rehearsals of new productions, adding to the pressure to reach a deal with the stage hands.But the successful negotiations did not entirely stave off delay and cancellation. Because the stagehands are starting work later than normal, the Met’s technical rehearsals must be moved from the beginning of August to the end of the month; as a result, the Met has decided to cancel one of its fall season operas, “Iphigénie en Tauride” which was supposed to run from Sept. 29 through Oct. 15, the company said. The season is scheduled to open on Sept. 27 with “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first time the Met is mounting an opera by a Black composer.The orchestra pit at the Met during the pandemic shutdown.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe Met said in a statement, “We’re pleased that our stagehands will now be immediately returning to work and that we have a clearer path to opening our season on schedule in September.”The deal reached with the American Guild of Musical Artists is likely to set the pattern for the amount of cost savings with other unions. Part of the guild’s deal included a provision that if the other unions struck deals that save the Met less money, proportionally, than in the guild’s contract, the guild will recoup the money back. That means the Met’s negotiators will feel limited in how much they can offer the other unions.Still, not all guild members are happy with the deal. Soloists, who will see their pay cut by a significantly higher percentage, largely voted against the plan, but their opposition was not enough to forestall ratification.While the pressure was on the stagehands to return to work as soon as possible, the musicians have more breathing room. At the core of these negotiations is a battle to maintain the work rules that musicians have fought for over decades. The relationship between the company and the union members was tested during the pandemic, when players went without pay for nearly a year and some were forced to move out of the New York City area to save money or to contemplate selling their prized instruments.If the Met, which works with 15 unions, can attain agreements with the three major locals, it will have a clear path to reopening on schedule, but there will likely still be more negotiating to be done. The unions that represent scenic artists and box office staff also have contracts up for negotiation.Carl Mulert, the national business agent for Local 829 of United Scenic Artists, said that the negotiations will start out from a place of tension after the Met outsourced some of the union members’ work overseas and across the country as a result of the stagehand lockout.“The Met has so alienated people and so angered the people who have dedicated their lives to this organization that it’s going to be even harder to make a deal,” he said. “The good will we might have had eight months ago is gone.” More

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      A Festival Has a Monumental Premiere (and Some Other Operas, Too)

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      At the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, it was hard for even beloved classics to live up to the elegant intensity of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — I mean it as high praise when I say that at this summer’s edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, none of the operas come close to Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premiered here on July 3.Ushering new work into the world is perhaps an operatic institution’s most difficult task. This is an art form so stubbornly lodged in the past that it always feels like a miracle when a “création,” as the French call it, succeeds.And “Innocence,” which explores the aftermath of a deadly school shooting, does more than succeed. With riveting clarity and enigmatic shadows, and through a range of languages in different registers of speaking and singing, it captures both the promise and darkness of cosmopolitanism itself.It is a victory for Saariaho and her collaborators, and for the Aix Festival and Pierre Audi, its director since 2018. He managed to hold rehearsals with just a piano last summer, when all festival performances were canceled because of the pandemic, and to shift the premiere seamlessly to this year.“I have a long career in commissioning,” Audi told The Times recently. “And this is one of the five greatest pieces that I’ve ever been involved with.”It is hard for even the most beloved works in the repertory, some of which are on offer at Aix through July 25, to measure up to that. It felt symbolic that a moment that was devastating in “Innocence” — a character crushing a handful of cake onto another — returned as a silly, passing bit of slapstick the following evening in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”The carnivalesque staging of Mozart’s “Le Nozzi di Figaro.”Jean-Louis FernandezLotte de Beer’s “Figaro” production is an intentional, endearing mess — an eclectic, attention-deficit explosion practically vibrating through different aesthetics, as though on a candy high. The overture is staged as traditional, raucous commedia dell’arte; the first act is a raunchy multi-cam sitcom, on a set that gradually (and literally) collapses into a demented carnival amid the confusions of the Act II finale, complete with human-height penises strolling around.After intermission, though, the curtain rises on almost nothing — a bed inside a cube defined by white neon bars — and the acting is equally restrained and gloomy. Then the fourth and final act enacts a kind of utopian, queer-feminist knitting collective led by a minor character, Marcellina, the cast draped in garments of Day-Glo yarn. Out of the bed, which has come to be the site of male authority and adultery, an enormous, inflatable fairy-tale tree slowly grows.Thomas Hengelbrock led the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble in a crisp but sensuously phrased reading of the score. Lea Desandre was a bright, alert Cherubino; Jacquelyn Wagner, a Countess cooler than the norm.In the title role of Barrie Kosky’s staging of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Christopher Purves was also different than the norm, at least at the start. In the first scene, Purves’s Falstaff is shown not as the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit, but as a careful master chef, sensitively relishing his creations — and with, at best, a dad bod.Christopher Purves’s incarnation of Falstaff is not the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit. As a careful master chef, he relishes his creations.Monika RittershausWhile Falstaff is often likable, Kosky’s implicit promise is that we’ll admire him, too. This never quite happens, as the production settles into a more well-worn groove, abounding in this director’s trademark vaudevillian touches: men pulling off wigs and dancing in skirts, the works. The title character’s seductions are barely more sophisticated than in a thousand “Falstaff” productions; the merry wives of Windsor’s revenge, little crueler.The conductor, Daniele Rustioni, led the orchestra of the Lyon Opera with a pacing that was genial but less than diamond-precise. The voices, including that of the game, hard-working Purves, were a touch too small for the roles. The test of a “Falstaff” is the effect of the great final ensemble fugue; here the sequence was pleasant rather than cathartic.There was musical catharsis to spare in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” with a supreme cast and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted with lithe flexibility by Simon Rattle. But Simon Stone’s staging — an almost comically realistic evocation of contemporary Paris, from a high-rise apartment to a Métro car — is perplexing, as it purports to explain the brunt of the plot as a woman’s fantasies after learning her husband is cheating.From left, Dominic Sedgwick, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” directed by Stone, who moved the opera to modern-day Paris. Jean-Louis FernandezPerhaps intentionally, but still frustratingly, the production’s line between reality and fantasy keeps getting blurrier, until it’s hard to know who’s really betraying whom, who’s getting stabbed and who survives. But if Nina Stemme’s voice has lost a touch of sumptuousness, she’s never been better as Isolde — singing fearlessly, and ardently invested in the production. Stuart Skelton sings rather than barks Tristan, a tenor’s Everest, and Franz-Josef Selig is a commandingly melancholy Marke.Aix has long been notable for placing smaller pieces, including new ones, amid canonical titans and grand-scale premieres like “Innocence.” In an enormous former ironworks at Luma — the new art complex in Arles, about 50 miles from Aix — “The Arab Apocalypse” was created as part of the festival’s heartening commitment to connecting southern France and the greater Mediterranean world.But based on Etel Adnan’s direly expressionistic poems about the Lebanese civil war, with music by Samir Odeh-Tamimi and a sketched staging-in-the-round by Audi, “Apocalypse” was dreary — the score alternating between shivering and pummeling, the action busy but bland.“Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory” was a grab-bag of early Baroque Italian music, with rich helpings of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Luigi Rossi and more. Silvia Costa tried to corral this gorgeous material into a kind of stylized pageant, a loose trajectory of war, mourning, society-building, more war, more building.From left, Julie Roset, Valerio Contaldo and Etienne Bazola in “Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory.”Monika RittershausHer images were more mystifying than evocative. But the performance, led by Sébastien Daucé, was musically exquisite, with eight superb young singers ideally blending purity and passion, and 13 members of Ensemble Correspondances filling the jewel-box Théâtre du Jeu de Paume with the visceral force of a symphony orchestra.Audi’s ambitions are to expand Aix, implicitly taking on the Salzburg Festival in Austria, which opens at the end of July, and is classical music’s most storied summer event. (While Salzburg is redoubtable, the mood, clothing and ticket prices in Aix are significantly more relaxed.)The program of concerts — which, in Aix, has long been an afterthought to opera, but is a Salzburg powerhouse — will grow, as will the scope of the festival’s productions. With “Tosca,” Aix’s first Puccini, in 2019, it declared that it could cover the red-meat Italian hits. In addition to Luma, Audi has his sights on other unconventional spaces in the region.Commissions are also central to his agenda; “Innocence” is resounding proof. Seeing it a second time, on Saturday, confirmed the initial impression of its intensity and restraint, its emotional pull and intellectual power.The production — like “Tristan,” directed by Stone — keenly depicts both the shocking reality of the central tragedy and its surreal reverberations, which carry years into the future. I question only one directorial intervention: The shooter, a student at the school, is eventually shown onstage, played by a silent actor, even though he is not in the libretto.This dilutes the mystery of the piece, in which all the characters revolve around, and run from, a figure who is absent, a kind of god against whom everyone’s innocence (and culpability) is measured. When he appears in the flesh, the opera’s impact wavers.But only slightly. This is a quibble with a staging that, in general precisely, aligns with an elegant yet savage work. While recalling the starkness of Greek tragedy, “Innocence” is also among the first operatic barometers of our globalized age’s travails. More

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      Review: A Composer Creates Her Masterpiece With ‘Innocence’

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      Kaija Saariaho’s grand yet restrained new opera about a tragedy and its reverberations is the most powerful work of her five-decade career.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — “Innocence,” the new opera by Kaija Saariaho, begins in soft, somber gloom. A shadowy mist of cymbal rises off long, sepulchral tones down in the basses and contrabassoon, before a keening fragment of bassoon pierces the quiet with melancholy song.It’s just a few seconds of music, but a mood has been established — comprehensively, unforgettably, yet subtly. Before we know the plot of “Innocence,” we feel it: Something dark and deep has happened, from which memory vibrates into an uncertain future, etched with mourning.We keep feeling it over the hundred minutes that follow, as we come to know intimately a tragedy and its reverberations. Grand yet restrained, a thriller that is also a meditation, “Innocence” is the most powerful work Saariaho has written in a career now in its fifth decade.Appearing through July 12 here at the Aix-en-Provence Festival (and streaming on arte.tv on Saturday) after its planned debut in 2020 was canceled, it would be the premiere of the year even in a normal season — even if its audience were not so hungry for real, big, important, live opera after so many months largely without. It deserves to travel far beyond an already global itinerary: Helsinki, Amsterdam, London, San Francisco, the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Magdalena Kozena, standing at left next to Jukka Rasilainen, with Pursio at right, is a waitress at the wedding with a connection to the family.Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceThis is undoubtedly the work of a mature master, in such full command of her resources that she can focus simply on telling a story and illuminating characters. Unlike so many contemporary operas, “Innocence” — featuring the mighty London Symphony Orchestra, conducted with sensitivity and control by Susanna Malkki — doesn’t feel like a sung play with a more or less disconnected, elaborately self-regarding orchestral soundtrack.In fact, during the performance I attended, on Tuesday, I periodically tried to listen exclusively to the instrumental lines and their interplay, but despite the obvious virtuosity and density of the score, my ears kept lifting back up to the stage, to the lucid, inexorable action, the integrated theatrical whole. Porous and agile; simmering beneath and around the voices; and only occasionally, briefly exploding, this is music as a vehicle for exploring and intensifying drama. It is complex, yet confident enough to exist not merely for its own sake.With a libretto by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen, and translation work on more than a half-dozen languages by Aleksi Barrière, “Innocence” is set in 21st-century Helsinki, where there has been a deadly shooting at an international school. The action continually shifts back and forth between a recollection of the disaster, by six students and a teacher who went through it, and a wedding party happening 10 years later.It quickly becomes obvious that the two events are linked. The groom is the shooter’s brother, and his family, which has been ostracized and is desperate to move beyond what happened, has kept the whole thing from the bride. (If that wasn’t enough, there’s a reason a waitress has been skulking around, jaw clenched, on the nuptial sidelines: She is the mother of one of the victims.)There is ample operatic precedent for an innocent young woman guided blindly by her lover into a world of violence and deception: Think of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” “Innocence” recalls those, as well as the ferocious economy of Berg’s “Wozzeck” and Strauss’s “Elektra” in its relatively modest, intermissionless length.Lucy Shelton, at top, as a teacher, and, from left at bottom, Beate Mordal, Julie Hega, Simon Kluth, Camilo Delgado Díaz and Marina Dumont as students affected by a school shooting.Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceBut “Innocence” is very much of our time, and — in its play of multiple languages and registers of speaking and singing — very much itself. Saariaho gave it the working title “Fresco”; it was inspired, she has said, by “The Last Supper,” from which she derived the size of the cast (13 soloists) and the piece’s broader questions of culpability and the linked yet separate experiences of people who have shared a trauma.Members of the wedding party sing: the groom, a tenor, in boisterous exhortations; the bride, a soprano, with sweet lyricism. A priest, the only friend the family has left, murmurs ominously about the faith he has lost.The surviving students and teacher, on the other hand, speak — though in precise rhythms artfully tailored to their respective languages of Czech, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Greek and English. The waitress’s daughter, Marketa (a memorably rapt Vilma Jaa), appears as a kind of phantom, singing in the eerily plain style of Finnish folk music. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir chants offstage, a hint of a world beyond the fevered hothouse of the plot. All these disparate vocal worlds are linked by the orchestra, which wraps around the singers lightly and sleekly — never explicitly underlining them, never competing.The cast matches Saariaho’s score in its commitment and discipline, its refusal to fall into overplaying or Grand Guignol. As the waitress, Magdalena Kozena is a laser beam of pain; as the mother of the groom, Sandrine Piau conjures the uncanny effect of a voice thinned to a thread by suffering.Saariaho’s past operas — starting with the stylized medieval parable “L’Amour de Loin” (2000) — were mostly collaborations with the director Peter Sellars, who lends even canonical works the abstraction of ritual. Here, though, she benefits from a hypernaturalistic staging by Simon Stone, whose style anchors “Innocence” in reality without stinting its surreal fluidity. (Chloe Lamford’s rotating, ever-mutating two-story set, an anxiety-inducing amalgam of school and restaurant, is a crucial player in the drama.)The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability — and sickening surprises — of ancient Greek drama. Varying degrees of guilt slowly seep outward from the shooter to encompass even seemingly blameless characters. A gun was inadvertently provided; suspicious behavior went unreported; a boy was mercilessly teased and assaulted.This is not an unfamiliar plot, and like any superb opera, “Innocence” would seem flat if its text were delivered as a play. That it instead has brooding nuance is thanks to the music; the varieties of vocalization; Saariaho’s intimation, even as she delivers a clear story, that there is much beyond what is enunciated. Opera, as it always has been, is here a home for emotions that could come across as flatly, implausibly extreme, but which are rendered newly mysterious and natural.Kozena and Farahani in the opera. The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability — and sickening surprises — of ancient Greek drama. Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-Provence“Innocence” also gains depth from the politics and history from which it has emerged. Watching events of this kind, in this period, unfold in and around an international school, it is hard not to think of Europe itself, and of its formation as a union in the wake of unspeakable violence. There was a dream that trauma would prove unifying; we have witnessed the gradual realization that the opposite is true. In transitioning from the before times — native languages and folk song — into the lingua franca of English and musical modernism, this onstage society seems to have gained little. Certainly not the ability to fully integrate new members, to function.Yet the opera’s final moments are not without a certain hopeless hopefulness. The students describe small steps they’ve taken to move beyond the tragedy; the vision of the daughter asks the waitress to stop buying her birthday presents, to let her go. The music seethes sadly at this, but the dissonance passes through a sublime moment of consonance — courting sunshine — before drifting back into tension, then transpiring upward into pure shimmer, almost toneless. It is both through and beyond music, then, that Saariaho arrives at an ending that is, if not happy, strangely, completely exhilarating.InnocenceThrough July 12 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, France; and livestreamed on arte.tv July 10; festival-aix.com. More

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      The ‘Prince of Opera’ Bids Munich Farewell

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      The charismatic and canny Nikolaus Bachler, who has kept the Bavarian State Opera a world capital of music theater, is stepping down.MUNICH — Half an hour before the opening of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” Nikolaus Bachler took a final stroll backstage.Bachler — who has run the Bavarian State Opera here since 2008, during which time it has been the world’s opera capital for artists and audiences alike — stopped by the dressing room of his Isolde, Anja Harteros, asking whether she had slept well the night before. With a traditional “toi toi toi,” he wished her good luck.He waited to check in on Jonas Kaufmann, who was singing Tristan, because through the door he heard the conductor Kirill Petrenko — the company’s music director during much of Bachler’s tenure and a crucial ingredient of his success — giving some last-minute notes.Then more blown kisses and “toi toi toi” wishes, and Bachler took a seat in his box alongside the proscenium. He looked out at the audience, which, though dotted with chessboard-like spaces for social distancing, was as full as possible after a year of uncertainty about capacity and closures. The lights dimmed. Petrenko stepped onto the podium; paused briefly, as if in prayer; and gestured for the first note.By the opening night of “Tristan und Isolde,” the opera house was able to fill about half of its seats because of coronavirus safety measures.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesWith that, the end of an era began. The house that Bachler built with Petrenko — one of artistic excellence, destination programming and, during the pandemic, fearless advocacy — will soon undergo a major shift. “Tristan” is the last new production for Petrenko, who is now the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Bachler’s tenure concludes with this year’s Munich Opera Festival, an end-of-season marathon that has adopted the bittersweet theme “Wendende Punkte”: “Turning Points.”In the fall, the house will be managed by Serge Dorny, most recently chief of the Lyon Opera in France, and under the baton of Vladimir Jurowski. Many of Bachler’s artistic and administrative colleagues will leave, some following him to his new post, running the Salzburg Easter Festival.“We are now looking into a future that is maybe less, shall we say, written,” Kaufmann said in an interview. “You see the list of international stars — compared with not only the house’s history, but other houses of this rank — and Bachler somehow made it into one that everyone wished to be a part of.”The tenor Jonas Kaufmann, left, with the soprano Anja Harteros in “Tristan.”Wilfried HöslAudiences, too, were eager. Before the pandemic, the company’s ticket sales hovered around 98 percent capacity. Wolfgang Heubisch, the Bavarian culture minister during Bachler’s early years in Munich, said that the house was an important contributor to the city’s economy, and that “we as an audience were always excited about the next performance.” (The company is supported by extravagant government subsidies, in 2019 to the tune of 71.8 million euros, or $85.2 million, from Bavaria and the city of Munich — nearly two-thirds of its budget.)“You can sum it up in a nutshell,” Heubisch added. “Nikolaus Bachler was a true stroke of luck for Munich and the State Opera.”It is rare for the leader of an opera company to be described in these terms. In Paris and New York, for example, such managers have recently been openly criticized by colleagues and embroiled in labor disputes. Elsewhere, they may be respected, but are seldom described with the loving language that singers, directors and others use for Bachler. But he is confident it’s time for change.“You shouldn’t stay too long,” said Bachler, who is 70 but has the appearance and energy of someone much younger. “I got a lot of offers for other opera houses, but it was clear for me not to go into another big institution.”By departing now, he can look back on his achievements without feeling like he ended stuck in routine, which he considers “against art.” He is proud of his insistence on marrying the prestige of directors and singers, with high-profile names from top to bottom on most billings and small roles taken by a superb ensemble of rising artists.Bachler gained the respect of directors by not interfering too much in their work. (“My job is to take the consequences and learn from the failures,” he said.) And he won over the world’s most important singers with a personality that they have described as nurturing, honest and committed. For example, he made the Bavarian State Opera the home company of Kaufmann, who despite being raised and trained in Munich had only sung a handful of times in the house before Bachler joined.When they first met, Kaufmann recalled, Bachler asked why he didn’t want to sing in Munich. “On the contrary,” Kaufmann responded, “I would love to.” He just wasn’t getting any work there under Peter Jonas — Bachler’s predecessor, whose risk-taking laid the groundwork for what followed — and Kaufmann eventually moved to Zurich.Bachler changed that, quickly casting Kaufmann in a variety of parts, including his sensational role debut as Wagner’s “Lohengrin” alongside Harteros in 2009. Since then, Kaufmann said, “I believe we haven’t gone a year without a new opening, and Klaus has been there to help and support me.”The baritone Christian Gerhaher described Bachler as “the prince of opera”; Dmitri Tcherniakov, who directed this season’s new production of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” called him “the king of Munich”; and the soprano Marlis Petersen, onstage this summer in “Salome,” said he was “the Ariadne thread” running through each production.Among those who believe in Bachler the most may be Petrenko, a publicity-shy conductor with a monastic style, who said in an email that Bachler “is living proof that trust is possible in our profession.”Kirill Petrenko, the music director during much of Bachler’s tenure, has been an essential ingredient of the house’s success.Wilfried HöslThe two met in the late 1990s, when Bachler was at the Volksoper in Vienna. Petrenko had come recommended by an agent and was brought on as an assistant conductor. Bachler was stunned by his talent, and they developed an odd-couple relationship — Bachler the charismatic public face and Petrenko happy to let his work speak for itself.When Bachler started at the Bavarian State Opera, he prioritized bringing in Petrenko as a guest and scheduled a run of Janacek’s “Jenufa” for him. Later, when Kent Nagano’s contract was set to expire, Bachler persuaded Petrenko to become the company’s music director, even though at the time, having held a similar post at the Komische Oper in Berlin, the conductor was ready to be a freelancer.Petrenko has routinely drawn the loudest applause after performances — even during a 2018 run of “Parsifal,” when he was bowing alongside stars like Kaufmann, Gerhaher and the soprano Nina Stemme. In a news conference before his final season, he said, “My time here was and will be the highest thing that can happen to an artist.”If Bachler appears to charm everyone in his orbit, it may come from his background as an actor. (That’s also his guess for why he has enjoyed such success as an administrator: He approaches the job from the perspective of an artist.) Born to a middle-class family in Austria, and raised in a musical home, he took an early liking to theater — sometimes acting out Catholic Mass as if he were a priest.He thought he would study medicine, but on a lark applied to the Max Reinhardt Seminar for acting in Vienna and was accepted. His career as a performer took him to a troubled theater in Berlin, where he was vocal about how it could improve. So he was asked to be its artistic director.“I said yes because for me it was like acting,” Bachler said. “My new role was ‘the artistic director.’”More administrative work followed, including as the leader of the Vienna Festival, the Volksoper and the Vienna Burgtheater. From that distinguished playhouse, he returned to opera in Munich.Tcherniakov said that “as a true actor, he virtuously uses different masks to communicate.” And Bachler believes that he still approaches his job from that angle.“I feel I am the last inheritance of Molière,” he said. “I would go home and steal my mother’s chair if I needed it onstage.”Bachler backstage after “Tristan,” where he congratulated the cast between their curtain call bows.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBachler runs his house with subtle command. Observed over the first week of the festival, when his workdays can easily stretch beyond 12 hours, his meetings were conversational yet efficient and never ran more than a half-hour. He wandered through the building for check-ins because, he said, it’s best to not wait until problems arise to solve them, and while “in a meeting people don’t ask so much, in front of the toilet they are much more honest.”Before the “Tristan” opening, he gave a brief address to donors, and he hosted politicians and power brokers in his box over Champagne and canapés during the first intermission. During the second act, he took a short break in his office; more socializing would come in the next intermission.Despite the hectic schedule, Bachler’s job can be lonely. He said that he thinks often of when Germany once won the World Cup. The broadcast was full of fireworks and the players celebrating — but then the camera panned to the team’s famed coach, Franz Beckenbauer, walking alone on the field.“This is exactly what I feel,” Bachler said. “I have a lot of closeness with people, but it’s always about work. You have to accept it.”But that closeness became truly familial during the pandemic. Bachler never accepted closure as an option, first by continuing rehearsals for Marina Abramovic’s project “7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” even when Abramovic’s hotel closed and she was put up in Kaufmann’s apartment near the theater.Then the company started putting on “Montagsstücke,” which amounted to weekly variety shows — chamber performances and even a reading by Bachler — broadcast from the empty theater.“Suddenly,” he said, “there was so much energy in the house, and so much value in the work.”Eventually, orchestra, singers and staff were able to gather in large enough numbers to livestream new productions without an audience. All the while, Bachler was working with physicians and scientists on research — including a study showing that with safety measures in place, zero coronavirus cases could be traced to the house — that he took to politicians in an effort to bring back traditional programming as soon as possible.“Bachler,” Gerhaher said, “was a wonderful defender of the arts in these horrible times.”Bachler said his job, while busy, can also be lonely. “You have to accept it.”Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBachler is already at work on fund-raising for his debut season in Salzburg. He also had a hand in the succession plan for the Bavarian State Opera, initially assembling the team of Jurowski and Barrie Kosky, who is concluding his tenure at the Komische Oper. In the end, Kosky chose to go freelance.His appointment in Salzburg caused a minor scandal in the classical world; the Easter Festival’s administrators brought Bachler on while also pushing out the conductor Christian Thielemann. The two will share leadership duties for the 2022 edition, which Bachler said has not been as awkward as people might expect: “All these intrigue things, they vanish immediately when you start to work.”His impact in Salzburg — which will coincide with a return to Vienna, where he has friends and family — won’t be fully seen until 2023. Some familiar faces will appear, like Kaufmann. But he also plans to bring a different orchestra-in-residence every year, a break from tradition, and perhaps to integrate the Felsenreitschule venue (a stalwart of the older and far larger Salzburg summer festival) and add dance to the programming.“I like the idea of going from this huge thing to 10 days,” Bachler said. “How to make, in such a short time, an identity, and what I can do if I can concentrate only on this.”But first, he still has to get through his final Munich Festival — including another new production, of Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” and a star-studded, livestreamed farewell concert.And “Tristan.” After Harteros sang the closing “Liebestod” on opening night, Bachler rushed backstage, congratulating the performers between their curtain call bows. He smiled at Petrenko, and the two hugged.“It was quite a good finale,” Bachler whispered into the conductor’s ear.“No,” Petrenko responded. “It was a turning point.” More

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      Opera Roars Back With Dueling Wagner Premieres

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      After a long absence of large-scale productions, there are two major new “Tristan und Isolde” stagings running in Germany and France.If you were watching closely, opera never truly disappeared during the pandemic.Some companies performed in empty houses, hoping to reach audiences at home. A few took the risk of an early reopening, and were forced to abruptly cancel their shows if a coronavirus test came back positive. Composers began to skip the stage entirely and write for streaming platforms.But now opera as we remember it — starry opening nights, full orchestras and choirs, cheers coming from over a thousand people in formal wear — is back. It’s still rare in the United States, but not in Europe, thanks to rising vaccination rates, newly opened borders and relaxed safety measures. And, after a long absence of large-scale productions, there are two of Wagner’s immense “Tristan und Isolde,” with A-list singers and creative teams to match, running at the same time in Munich and Aix-en-Provence, France.In a binge driven by deprivation, I saw them back-to-back: Sunday in Germany, and Monday in France. On the surface, the shows share virtually nothing, except maybe a belief in the timelessness of a wood-paneled interior.But both are excellently conducted — by Kirill Petrenko at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and by Simon Rattle, leading the London Symphony Orchestra at the Aix-en-Provence Festival — though in different ways that demonstrate the interpretive elasticity of Wagner’s score. And the two productions are the work of directors known for their radical approaches to classics: Krzysztof Warlikowski and Simon Stone.In Aix, the title roles are being performed with ease by two “Tristan” veterans, the tenor Stuart Skelton and the soprano Nina Stemme; in Munich, the stars Jonas Kaufmann and Anja Harteros are making their debuts as the doomed lovers.Jonas Kaufmann, left, as Tristan and Anja Harteros as Isolde in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s new production at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.Wilfried HöslWarlikowski approaches the opera with shocking, if disappointing, restraint for a director who typically layers his productions with provocations. His staging (which will be livestreamed on July 31) is relatively straightforward, with legible metaphors and a concept guided by Freud’s death drive, which was theorized long after Wagner wrote his work yet is prefigured throughout, as in Isolde’s Act I exclamation “Todgeweihtes Haupt! Todgeweihtes Herz!”: death-devoted head, death-devoted heart.Freud is ever-present. The set changes — within a frame of three sleekly wood-paneled walls designed by Warlikowski’s collaborator and wife, Malgorzata Szczesniak — but two furniture pieces remain fixed: at one side of the stage an analyst’s divan, where Tristan recounts his childhood trauma, and at the other a glass cabinet filled with deadly instruments.Warlikowski’s melancholy Tristan and Isolde are bound for death, no love potion required, from the start. They attempt suicide in each act and are, perhaps, traumatized by the bloody history that precedes the opera’s action. And they aren’t alone: The young sailor who sings the first line, here the gently voiced tenor Manuel Günther, blindly wanders in his underwear and a childishly crude crown and cape, his wounded eyes wrapped in bandages. Recovery proves impossible for some. In the final scene, at “Hier wütet der Tod!” (“Here death rages!”) from Tristan’s servant Kurwenal — the bass-baritone Wolfgang Koch, with a ferocity out of place in this production — characters simply collapse, as if happy to welcome their fate.In the pit, Petrenko led a patient prelude, letting its searching melody of desire waft organically. But then he paused, in breathtaking silence, before the orchestra’s first outburst of passion, which gave way to an evening of erotic intensity, druglike though never unwieldy. His Act III prelude had the thick texture of molasses, entrapping and hopeless.Death looms over Warlikowski’s production, in which Tristan and Isolde attempt suicide in each act.Wilfried Hösl Kaufmann and Harteros never quite rose to the level of the orchestra, or at times the assured sound of their colleagues Okka von der Damerau, as Brangäne, and Mika Kares, as King Marke. Kaufmann’s Tristan was a soft-voiced one, more fragile than heroic. And Harteros brought an unusual lightness to her role, delivering a “Liebestod” occasionally difficult to hear and marred by troubled intonation.They were at their best near the end of the marathon love duet in Act II: Harteros achieving a delicate beauty as she considered the “and” of the phrase “Tristan and Isolde”; and Kaufmann calm yet crushing as he sang the morbidly romantic words that introduce the “Liebestod” theme.In Aix, Skelton and Stemme’s performances reflected their growth in these roles over the years — Skelton especially, who didn’t merely survive Tristan’s punishing Act III monologue, as he did at the Metropolitan Opera in 2016, but delivered it with herculean grit and shattering dramatic acuity.With a cast that includes a mighty Jamie Barton as Brangäne and Franz-Josef Selig, vigorous but touching as Marke, and with the London Symphony propulsive and clear under Rattle’s baton, Aix’s “Tristan” is, musically speaking, an achievement. (The production will be broadcast on France Musique and Arte Concert on July 8, with streaming to follow on Arte.)Rattle’s conducting was less sensuous than Petrenko’s, but it had a fiery command of the drama amid an insistence on precision. Unfortunately the prelude, one of the most effective mood-setters in opera, was difficult to focus on as Stone’s staging lifted the curtain to reveal a party inside a fashionable Paris apartment with — you guessed it — wood-paneled walls. Wagner’s music of teeming passion and longing underscored the sounds of clinking glasses and crinkling gift wrap.Like many of Stone’s productions, this one — designed by Ralph Myers — features a set so realistic and thoroughly furnished it would be called “turnkey” on an HGTV show. The purpose of it, here, is to juxtapose it with fantasy in what amounts to “Tristan” by way of “Madame Bovary.”During that opening party, a woman spies her husband kissing another woman in the kitchen, and reads incriminating texts on his phone. With a flicker of lights, Stone’s hyper-realism turns surreal: The view outside is no longer a Parisian cityscape but the open sea. Escaping into an old romantic tale like Emma Bovary, the woman imagines herself at the center of the Tristan myth.From left, Dominic Sedgwick, Stemme and Skelton in Simon Stone’s production, which blends hyper-realism with fantasy.Jean-Louis FernandezThese reveries continue with each act — in ways that, at best, crowd the opera and, at worst, betray it. As the lights flicker in a design office overlooking the hill of Montmartre in Act II, the windows reveal a moonlit sky; when, in Act III, the woman and husband ride the Métro to a night at the theater, joined by a young man — in her fantasies, the jealous lover and tattler Melot (Dominic Sedgwick) — the train car appears to pass through real stations and a verdant countryside.No one dies in this “Tristan,” but when the woman returns to reality with the “Liebestod,” she removes her wedding ring, hands it to her husband and abandons him in the train as she walks off with the young man.That ending, like other moments in the production, was as puzzling as it was exasperating — why not let her leave alone and empowered? Yet from the pit came, at last, the resolution of the “Tristan” chord, a serene send-off from the London Symphony. It was a potion of its own, almost enough to inspire forgiveness.Perhaps that colored my gaze as, during the curtain call, I looked around and saw, for the first time since March last year, a full house. It was a privilege to be there, as it had been in Munich. I had my critical quibbles, but the sentimental side of me felt like Nick Guest in “The Line of Beauty,” seeing the ordinary as extraordinary and marveling at the fact of grand opera at all — in the light of the moment, so beautiful. More