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      An Opera Screams for Human Dignity

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      Luigi Nono’s furiously political and prophetic “Intolleranza 1960” arrives at the Salzburg Festival.SALZBURG, Austria — “Intolleranza 1960,” Luigi Nono’s furious work of music theater, is a scream for dignity in the face of oppression, racism toward migrants and merciless ecological disaster. And that was 60 years ago.“Unfortunately things are still just as bad,” Nuria Schoenberg Nono, the composer’s widow and a daughter of the work’s dedicatee, Arnold Schoenberg, recently said with a weary laugh.Indeed, decades after its premiere — at a time when floods have ravaged parts of Europe and the pandemic has been seized upon by xenophobic authoritarians around the world — the piece could just as easily be presented as “Intolleranza 2021.”Its original title, which belies the work’s timelessness, will remain when it arrives at the Salzburg Festival here on Sunday. The production, directed by Jan Lauwers and conducted by the Nono veteran Ingo Metzmacher, may be the most terrifying, brash and cathartic operatic offering of the summer.Nono — an idealistic Italian composer who lived from 1924 to 1990 and was a chief midcentury musical innovator alongside his Darmstadt School colleagues Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez — has been a fixture in Salzburg for three decades now. This is largely because of the efforts of Metzmacher and Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director; in 1993, they staged the Nono masterpiece “Prometeo,” which he considered a “tragedy of listening,” and other works of his have steadily followed.“I regard Luigi Nono as one of the most important, significant, enriching figures in musical history,” Hinterhäuser said in an interview in his office, sitting under a portrait of the composer. “The figure of Nono is the artist who is not doing ‘l’art pour l’art.’ It is always related to our existence, to our life, to our human condition.”The set of Lauwers’s staging is minimal, featuring projections on the stone backdrop of the Felsenreitschule theater and the word “INTOLLERANZA” written across the stage.Maarten Vanden Abeele/SF“Intolleranza,” Nono’s first theatrical work, was written in response to political and social upheaval and premiered as part of the Venice Biennale in 1961. It has elements of opera yet rebels against the form — in part, Nuria Nono said, “because he was aware that he was writing in the country of Verdi and Puccini.”Instead, the “azione scenica,” or “stage action,” as Nono called it, has more in common with the “epic theater” of Bertolt Brecht. It unfolds — with at times whiplash momentum — as a series of episodes about a migrant seeking work in Italy and finding political demonstrations, torture, concentration-camp cruelty and societal absurdities, along with a lifesaving human connection in the form of a female companion and, at last, a life-ending flood.The scenes were inspired by current events, but Hinterhäuser said the sum of their parts transcended the particular situation of Italy circa 1960.“We could also be talking about ‘Fidelio,’” he said. “Great artworks have something prophetic, and there is something prophetic that liberates this piece. I’m not interested in daily politics and art; I’m interested in politics and art. And while art is not free from political elements, it needs to have another level of reflection.”Nono’s score is often, a bit unfairly, described as strident. The piece calls for a massive orchestra — in Salzburg, the Vienna Philharmonic, filling the pit of the Felsenreitschule theater and also flanking its stage with a battery of percussion. The cast is no smaller in scale: a full chorus, unaccompanied in the first and last scenes, and principal singers who perform at extremes of pitch and volume.“It’s an opera about a collective,” Hinterhäuser said. “It has to do with muscles — the choir, the cast, the 26 dancers we have in this production — and the rising up of the masses.”To reflect that, he brought in Lauwers, who directed Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” at Salzburg in 2018. In an interview, Lauwers described his work this summer as a continuation of his broader preoccupation over the past decade with theater focused almost entirely on people. This is why the set is virtually nonexistent here, and is mostly just projections on the towering stone backdrop of the Felsenreitschule, the word “INTOLLERANZA” written across its broad stage.Within that space, a cast of nearly 100 singers and dancers is almost always in motion and onstage for the work’s 75-minute running time. The tenor Sean Panikkar, who plays the emigrant protagonist, said that Lauwers has conducted rehearsals with an improvisational style, “which allows for freedom and play,” before arriving at a more narrowed focus.Lauwers’s approach has also involved conversations with the cast about how to comfortably portray, for example, a scene of prolonged torture that is nearly impossible to watch and hardly less difficult to perform.The tenor Sean Panikkar, left, as the emigrant protagonist.Maarten Vanden Abeele/SF“In the score, there are 22 minutes where Nono just says, ‘There is torture and screaming,’” Lauwers said. “At a certain point in rehearsals, some performers said: ‘We can’t do this. It’s emotionally too heavy for me.’ But we have to make it unbearable. This is the reality.”Yet some cast members saw that scene as an opportunity to build on the libretto. “Musa Ngqungwana, one of the soloists, wanted to shout, ‘I can’t breathe,’” Lauwers said. “The others were like, ‘Wow, are we going there?’ But in the libretto, it says, ‘I hear the noise of the tortured people.’ So I said, ‘Yes, it’s your freedom there if you want to say that, and I as a director am not going to say you can’t.”Compared with the improvisatory spirit of the staging, Metzmacher has been exacting with the score’s thorny rhythms and textures — which are foundational, he said, to the work’s emotional power. “The music is like thunder,” he added. “What interests me, though, is that Nono also has this hope and vision of love. I think it’s good that the music shocks, but on the other side, it has these incredible tender moments. It’s very suspended, delicate and ‘dolcissimo.’”Panikkar described the score as initially almost impossible to comprehend; when he first looked at it, he counted the number of high C’s, each requiring a different sound, and “thought it was insane.”“From the rhythmic structure, the brutal vocal passages and the physical demands of the staging,” he said, “it’s like a tornado that ravages everything in its path and then dissipates.”The premiere of “Intolleranza” was less a tornado than a battlefield. Far-right “agitators,” as they were called by The New York Times, disrupted the performance with shouts, whistles and stench bombs — and were met with equally passionate boos and cries — until they were removed by police.“They were also throwing down little pieces of paper,” Nuria Nono recalled. “I think I still actually have some of them.”A few years ago, she said, she was giving a tour of the Nono archive in Venice. When she arrived at the models and recordings of the “Intolleranza” premiere, one of the visitors said: “I was there! My father” — a right-wing fascist — “paid us to make a lot of noise.”But the show went on. And it ended, as the Times report noted, in “a triumph.” That’s because in “Intolleranza,” Nuria Nono said, “all the negative emotions and positive ones balance out.”“My husband cared very much about people dying and being tortured,” she added. “But in spite of all the ugly things that are happening, there are human relationships, and there is hope. In all his works, there is hope.” More

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      Robert Carsen Is Opera’s Most Reliably Excellent Director

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      If you’re an opera fan, chances are you’ve seen one of his productions. The latest, a Handel oratorio, is running at the Salzburg Festival.SALZBURG, Austria — “I personally don’t like the word ‘reliable,’” Robert Carsen said in an interview here recently. “It sounds so boring.”I had approached Carsen with a theory: that he might be the most, well, reliable director in opera. I meant it as high praise: His work is by no means repetitive, cautious or dull. But in more than 125 productions over three decades in the field, he has been peerlessly dependable.You can expect Carsen productions to be sophisticated, intelligently conceived and conceptually airtight. They connect with newcomers, while also leaving room for mystery and provocation. They are elegantly designed, even strikingly beautiful, yet not superficial. And always — reliably, you could say — their confidence reflects Carsen’s mastery of the material at hand.All this is evident in his staging of Handel’s oratorio “Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno,” which is running at the Salzburg Festival through Aug. 17. But it also can be clearly seen in the 10 more of his productions that I revisited on video this summer.If you’re an opera fan, chances are you’ve seen at least one of them. Carsen’s career has been varied — also including theater, exhibition design and fashion — but about 75 percent of it, he estimated, has been in opera. Carsen, 67, who was born in Canada but trained as an actor in London and made a home there until Brexit prompted him to move to Portugal, had his breakthrough in 1988 with a staging of the Boito rarity “Mefistofele,” an unwieldy and ironic take on “Faust,” for the Geneva Opera.It was no modest entrance: Carsen greeted the piece’s messiness with a spectacle of smoothly shifting registers of sincerity and sarcasm. The production traveled far beyond Geneva, and was revived by the Metropolitan Opera as recently as 2018.Christian Van Horn, center, in the title role of “Mefistofele,” revived at the Metropolitan Opera in 2018 after Carsen first staged it in 1988.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSince “Mefistofele,” Carsen said, he has never had a real plan for his career, but he has always been attracted to opera for its basic ingredients: concrete text and abstract music. “When the two come in harmony, you get this amazing experience,” he said. “Your head and your heart are engaged, satisfied and in dialogue with each other.”Carsen has his preferences. Of Rossini, he said, “I have no emotional response”; his favorites are Janacek and Handel, “because they’re so honest.” And for 25 years he has wanted to stage Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.”If Carsen did take on that piece, he would likely start with Auden’s libretto. Because of his training as an actor, he studies text obsessively, which explains the thoroughness of his concepts.“If the thing doesn’t work all the way through, you have to throw it out,” he said. “A thing has to work from beginning to end for me to be satisfied, and sometimes it’s only in the end that people realize why you made a certain choice.”At opera’s best, Carsen says, “your head and your heart are engaged, satisfied and in dialogue with each other.”Oscar Gonzalez/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesIn a “Tannhäuser” he staged in Barcelona, for example, he transported Wagner’s tale of a singing knight to the studio of a contemporary painter. Rather than succumbing to a struggle between the sacred and profane, the artist reconciles them into a new kind of art that is initially rejected, but in the opera’s final moments joins a gallery of masterpieces that were misunderstood in their own time.It’s a bittersweet ending, one that may not seem to follow the libretto. But it makes sense: Tannhäuser’s redemption is ultimately out of his hands, whether in medieval Germany or the pantheon of Western art.At times, Carsen has found that a libretto speaks well enough for itself, as in his minimalist production of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” at the Met, first seen in 1997 (and available on demand in a film from 2007). It is an arrestingly spare actors’ playground, surrounded by towering white walls, the stage covered in autumnal fallen leaves. Late in the opera, Carsen breaks from tradition, ending Act II before Onegin’s fatal duel with his best friend.Renée Fleming in Carsen’s “Eugene Onegin” at the Metropolitan Opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOnce that moment finally arrives, after intermission, it leads directly into the joyous polonaise that opens the third act, now shatteringly ironic: Onegin doesn’t miss a beat after killing his friend, remaining in place as his servants spritz him with perfume and dress him for a ball. It is echt Carsen: loyal to, yet building on, the opera.The Tatyana in that “Onegin” was Renée Fleming, who reunited with Carsen for Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Royal Opera in London, a staging that came to the Met in 2017. This may be the quintessential Carsen production: gorgeous, sensual and smartly considered, with an affecting coup de théâtre at the close.He moved the opera’s action to the time and place of its premiere: Vienna on the brink of World War I. He was inspired by Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s small but telling changes to the libretto, which made the Marschallin the wife of an army leader and Faninal a nouveau riche arms dealer. There are other touches drawn from throwaway moments in the text; Carsen has the Marschallin exit the opera arm-in-arm with another young soldier, based on a story she begins to tell her lover, Octavian, in Act I before abruptly changing the subject. The opera may be about one affair, but it is neither her first nor last.Carsen’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” which moved the opera’s action to the time of its premiere.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe production was unexpectedly resonant when it arrived at the Met, in the early months of the Trump presidency, when the country felt, after the abrupt end of the Obama era, on the edge of an uncertain future. The early scenes reflect the unsustainable excess of prewar life; the walls of the Marschallin’s bedroom seem barely able to hold the weight of all the portraits, the history, of her family. And the set literally bursts open in the opera’s final measures, revealing the haze of cannon fire and soldiers on the front — a rude awakening from the dream of the opera’s romance.For “Il Trionfo” in Salzburg, things may appear more contemporary: The character Bellezza (Beauty) is presented as the winner of “The World’s Next Top Model,” and is then wooed into a life of celebrity by one of the judges, Piacere (Pleasure) — while the other two, Tempo (Time) and Disinganno (Insight), engage in something of a battle for her soul. But as it goes on, the production becomes increasingly abstract.The first half is a parade of glamorously hedonistic tableaux, whose use of video — unusual in a Carsen production — is more of a dramatic device than a gimmick. At one point the videos are invasively focused on Bellezza, who is subjected to the relentless scrutiny of fame despite its visible toll on her mental health; you could imagine her as Britney Spears or Naomi Osaka.But as Tempo and Disinganno raise the curtain on the theater of truth, as they say in the second half, the stage becomes shallow, filled with a mirror that eventually gives way to the absence of any set: just an exposed backstage whose rear door Bellezza opens, exiting to the street. At the end of this oratorio there is no longer theater — only reality.It’s a powerful closing image for a work that wasn’t even originally meant to be staged. Yet Carsen fashions it into sustained drama, with the excellence that he can be, yes, relied upon to deliver. More

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      Review: Marina Abramovic Summons Maria Callas in ‘7 Deaths’

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      Part mixtape and part séance, this opera project by the famed performance artist attempts to unite two divas across time.MUNICH — In Leos Carax’s new film, “Annette,” the husband and wife played by Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard are described in inverse terms. As a comedian, he kills every night; as an opera star, she dies.That’s of course a reductive view of opera. But the alignment of the art form and demise persists in the popular imagination, and guides “7 Deaths of Maria Callas.” A dramaturgically misguided séance of a project by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, it played to its largest in-person audience yet on Tuesday at the Bavarian State Opera here, after a heavily restricted run and livestream last year. It is bound for Paris and Athens in September, then Berlin and Naples — and who knows where else, with Abramovic’s celebrity behind it.“7 Deaths” is a meeting of divas in which Callas is invoked through a series of the arias for which she was notable. She is then inhabited onstage and in short films — the summoning of a spirit who, Abramovic argues, is still very much with us.In the work, Abramovic inhabits Maria Callas, miming to a recording of “Casta Diva.”Wilfried HöslShe’s right. Callas died in 1977, yet lives on in a still-robust stream of albums, art books and, yes, hologram concerts. She was known even to a public beyond opera as tabloid fodder, especially because of her affair with Aristotle Onassis — a love triangle involving Jacqueline Kennedy, his eventual wife. But her pop celebrity emerged from her being an indelible artist, who contributed to the 20th-century resurrection of bel canto repertoire with a transfixing stage presence. Even when silent, she emoted with the entirety of her face, arrestingly expressive with just a small hand gesture. Her voice failed her too early, but she embodied the “Tosca” aria “Vissi d’arte”: “I lived for art.”That voice caught the attention of a young Abramovic, who has said that she first heard Callas on the radio when she was a 14-year-old in Yugoslavia. Since then she has been haunted by their similarities: They share astrology signs, toxic relationships with their mothers and, she told The New York Times last year, “this incredible intensity in the emotions, that she can be fragile, and strong at the same time.”In the opera’s initial run, Adela Zaharia, left, sang an aria from “Lucia di Lammermoor.” On Tuesday, it was sung by Rosa Feola, in a standout performance.Wilfried HöslIn that interview, Abramovic noted one essential difference: how they reacted to losing the loves of their lives. Callas, in her view, died of a broken heart — a heart attack, to be exact — but Abramovic, so shattered that she stopped eating or drinking, eventually survived by returning to work.All this background about “7 Deaths” is clearer than the work itself, in which Callas is never present enough to persuasively intertwine with Abramovic, who upstages the great diva throughout. That’s the insurmountable flaw of the project, and the main reason it doesn’t belong in an opera house.“7 Deaths” is best experienced in person; the spatial audio design and immersive, big-screen film element made its 95-minute running time a breeze on Tuesday, compared with the tedious livestream last year. But its use of live performers relegates them to mere soundtrack, while also erasing Callas from her own history.This might have been more satisfying as a set of video installations, something like Julian Rosefeldt’s “Manifesto.” If Abramovic’s homage were accompanied by Callas’s storied recordings, the goal of joining and blurring divas could be more naturally achieved. Instead, “7 Deaths,” directed by Abramovic with Lynsey Peisinger, never quite approaches actual drama in its succession of arias and films, then its dreamy re-creation of Callas’s final moments in her Paris apartment.Nadezhda Karyazina, left, sang the role of Carmen last year against a backdrop of a video with Willem Dafoe, left onscreen, and Abramovic. On Tuesday, Samantha Hankey sang it.Wilfried HöslThe piece does include new music, by Marko Nikodijevic — ably conducted, along with the opera excerpts, by Yoel Gamzou. The overture begins with haunting bells and slippery melodies whose glissandos render them distant memories of unplaceable tunes. Behind a scrim, Abramovic lies still in a bed under soft lighting; not since Tilda Swinton has an artist so easily gotten away with sleep as performance.Then swirling clouds are projected onto the scrim — a tacky recurring “visual intermezzo,” as it is called in the credits — and a maid enters. She is the first of seven singers who dress identically and whose arias follow introductions in the form of poetic texts prerecorded by Abramovic.The characters are never named, but opera fans will recognize them instantly: Violetta Valéry from “La Traviata” (Emily Pogorelc); Desdemona from “Otello” (Leah Hawkins); Cio-Cio-San from “Madama Butterfly” (Kiandra Howarth); and the title protagonists of “Tosca” (Selene Zanetti), “Carmen” (Samantha Hankey), “Lucia di Lammermoor” (Rosa Feola) and “Norma” (Lauren Fagan).Their onstage appearances are an insult to the singers, who feel like interchangeably anonymous musical accompaniment to the short films — though Feola’s Lucia was defiantly present, a performance that captured the role’s emotional force and vocal acrobatics, even stripped of its dramatic context.In the work’s coda, Abramovic imagines herself in Callas’s Paris apartment on the day she died.Wilfried HöslA spotlight remains throughout on the sleeping Abramovic, as behind her the short films — starring her and a game Willem Dafoe, and directed by Nabil Elderkin — provide not reflections on Callas but (on a superficial level) the arias themselves, and (on a more thoughtful one) the nature of operatic artifice.In their embrace of excess, these videos flirt with winking camp. As Abramovic falls from a skyscraper in slow motion, inspired by “Tosca,” her enormous earrings dance in zero gravity; when Dafoe wraps thick snakes around her neck to strangle her like Desdemona, their slithering bodies smear her lipstick. Her Carmen is a bedazzled matador, while in the “Norma” film she and Dafoe trade gender roles, with him in a glittering gown and the penciled eyebrows of Marlene Dietrich.Little, if anything, is said here about Callas, but after the seventh aria, Nikodijevic’s music returns — now rumbling and tumultuous, with singers and instrumentalists perched in the theater’s boxes — as the scene changes to her apartment on the day of her death. It’s realistic yet suggests a place beyond, the window opening not to a streetscape but to a pale blue emptiness.In this long coda, Abramovic’s prerecorded voice both gives her directions for onstage movement and imagines Callas’s final thoughts in a collage of non sequiturs resembling a mad scene. She contemplates her luxurious bedding, “Ari” Onassis, her gay friends (Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli, Leonard Bernstein). Then, at some point, she leaves through a door. The maids come in, dispassionately clean the room and drape black fabric over the furniture.One of them lingers, opening a turntable and dropping the needle on a record of “Casta Diva.” The sound is scratchy, but a distinct voice comes through: Callas, for the first time. Abramovic returns to the stage, in a sparkling gold gown, and mimes the performance — an outstretched hand, a downcast look. The two divas unite at last, too late.7 Deaths of Maria CallasPerformed Tuesday at the Bavarian State Opera, Munich. More

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      Review: With Fresh Subtlety, Opera Returns to New York City

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      Teatro Nuovo’s “Barber of Seville” was the first full-scale live performance in the city since before the pandemic.Opera is back in New York City.On Tuesday evening, two months before the Metropolitan Opera is scheduled to reopen, a full-scale live performance took place, for the first time since before the pandemic. And it was in the Met’s shadow, in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, where Teatro Nuovo presented a semi-staged, concert-dress version of Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” (There is a second performance on Wednesday evening.)Like almost all outdoor performances, this one required amplification. Usually this is a burden. Yet on Tuesday it proved a salve for the audience of roughly 750, as the music had to compete with the sounds of grunting generators and crunching machinery on a nearby street.Members of the cast get ready backstage before the performance.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesLike almost all outdoor performances, this one required amplification, which proved a salve for the audience of roughly 750.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesAn outgrowth of the Bel Canto at Caramoor series that Will Crutchfield, a conductor and scholar of early 19th-century Italian opera, ran for 20 years, Teatro Nuovo is a performing and training program focused on the bel canto repertory. Generally known for his devotion to complete performances of these works, Crutchfield had to make trims to Rossini’s score to end the performance by 10 p.m., the park’s curfew.No matter. This was still nearly three hours of opera. And what came through was a fresh, lively performance full of ideas and rich in subtleties.The artists who work with Crutchfield study the performance practices of a golden era of opera. His goal is not to make performers today feel beholden to the past in matters of ornamentation and rhythmic execution; after all, the style in Rossini’s day encouraged freedom and flair. Crutchfield tries to embolden his colleagues to start from scratch and think for themselves.Hannah Ludwig starred as Rosina.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe ensemble was made up of artists in Will Crutchfield’s training institute focused on bel canto operatic style.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThat this cast, backed by 31 orchestral players, had made their own interpretive choices came through consistently. Early in Act I, the tenor Nicholas Simpson — as Count Almaviva, who has fallen for the lovely Rosina — brought bright sound and expansive lyricism to the serenade he sings from below her balcony. Simpson certainly embellished the melodic lines with ornate ornamentation; not for nothing has Crutchfield called one offering of his program “ornamentation boot camp.” But his embellishments emanated from the melody and the mood, and never seemed overly elaborate.As Figaro, the dynamic bass Hans Tashjian, whose voice has a nice, light ping in its upper range, adorned the character’s famous aria “Largo al factotum” with fresh, inventive ornaments. Many singers overdo Figaro’s bluster as he boasts of being Seville’s indispensable jack-of-all-trades. But Tashjian sang the aria almost as a personal revelation to the audience — underplayed, with some wonderfully soft-spoken phrases. You felt that this Figaro seriously believed himself to be special, beyond arrogance.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe mezzo-soprano Hannah Ludwig, as Rosina, went perhaps a step too far in ornamenting her defining aria, “Una voce poco fa.” Still, with a rich, dark voice she shaped supple phrases and conveyed the character’s mix of reticence and sass.The baritone Scott Purcell excelled as the officious Dr. Bartolo; as his housekeeper, Berta, the soprano Alina Tamborini was unusually big-voiced and feisty. The young bass Daniel Fridley, as the wily Don Basilio, was downright chilling in the aria “La calunnia,” in which he explains to Bartolo that the way to deal with Almaviva is to start a rumor and help it spread until an explosive scandal erupts. (Rossini anticipated social media by two centuries.)Rather than relying on a single conductor, this performance — nodding to the usual practice in Rossini’s day — was guided by both Crutchfield, who also played the accompanying fortepiano, and the violinist Jakob Lehmann, the concertmaster, who led the orchestral players while seated on a stool. If this looser approach sometimes resulted in minor slip-ups, the gain in spontaneity and freshness was well worth it.The Barber of SevillePerformed Tuesday at Damrosch Park, Manhattan. More

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      Review: To a Rare King Arthur Opera, Bard Says ‘Welcome Back’

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      Superb singers and a clear production make a strong case for Ernest Chausson’s seldom heard “Le Roi Arthus.”ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — It took just two words over the loudspeakers for the audience at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College on Sunday evening to break into vigorous applause: “Welcome back.”Welcome back, indeed, to Ernest Chausson’s seldom heard opera “Le Roi Arthus,” being presented as part of Bard’s SummerScape festival. And welcome back to many in the audience, for whom being in a theater for live opera with a full orchestra and chorus, after such a long deprivation, was truly something to cheer.“Le Roi Arthus,” based on the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, proved a powerful work for this fraught, polarized moment in American life. It is the story of an idealistic ruler who fails to bring about the era of enlightenment he strives for, but whose principles will endure, as an angelic chorus assures him at the end of an often ravishing score. The production is the latest project in the conductor Leon Botstein’s long campaign to break classical music from its fixation on repertory staples and call attention to neglected works.This remarkable opera, first performed in Brussels in 1903, four years after its composer’s death in a cycling accident at 44, is especially deserving. Chausson, who also wrote the libretto, labored on it for almost a decade — not because he was stuck, but because he wanted to get it right. He did. The Bard production, directed by Louisa Proske, is scenically spare but richly costumed and dramatically effective. And Botstein, leading the American Symphony Orchestra, an impressive cast and the excellent Bard Festival Chorale, made a compelling case for the piece. (How has it languished when many lesser scores by French composers of Chausson’s era — especially, for me, Massenet — keep returning to international stages?)The Bard production, directed by Louisa Proske, is scenically spare but richly costumed and dramatically effective.Maria BaranovaThe influence of Wagner, especially “Tristan und Isolde,” looms over “Le Roi Arthus.” Chausson was a Wagner devotee, no question: For his honeymoon in 1883, he took his wife to the Bayreuth Festival to see “Parsifal.” As he worked on “Arthus,” Chausson exchanged letters with his friend Debussy, who had a love-hate relationship with Wagner. In one letter Chausson wrote that the similarity of subject matter between his opera and “Tristan” — both concerning overpowering feelings of love that lead to betrayals of marriage and duty — would not matter to him if he “could only successfully de-Wagnerize myself.”Wagnerian strands run through the music, even hints of motifs from “Tristan” and the so-called “Tristan” chord. Yet the score also comes across as beholden to the French heritage Chausson was born into, especially Franck and Massenet. His use of thick chromatic harmonies is less dark and elusive, more ludic and radiant, than Wagner’s writing. The score is rich with lyrical stretches that almost break into song.The orchestral prelude teems, at first, with swashbuckling music that suggests the triumphant battle the king’s forces have just waged over the invading Saxons. We meet Arthur, with his wife, Guinevere, at his side, presiding over a celebratory gathering of his court. The baritone Norman Garrett, in elegant robes and gold crown, looked and sounded splendid as Arthur. His voice, deep-set but capable of lightness in its high range, easily conveyed authority and dignity. Yet even in his opening monologue he plumbed the music for hints of the king’s vulnerability.The opera’s illicit lovers, Lancelot (Matthew White) and Guinevere (Sasha Cooke), are reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.Maria BaranovaWhen the king singles out the valiant knight Lancelot (the ardent tenor Matthew White) as a “true victor,” the other knights mutter their resentments, especially the menacing Mordred (Justin Austin, a youthful baritone). In this telling of the story, Lancelot and Guinevere are already deeply consumed by illicit love. As the queen, the mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke brings gleaming sound and a touch of self-destructive volatility to her singing. Unlike Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, this couple is fully aware that they are betraying their king and their oaths. But, as Guinevere sings, “love is the only law.”The singers brought dedication to an important project, learning these demanding roles for this production. Botstein’s enthusiasm for a score he has long championed came through — sometimes too much. In bringing out the brassy richness and intensity of the music, he sometimes let the orchestra overpower the singers. Still, he brought urgent pacing and color to this nearly three-hour score.The opera ends with a series of death scenes, one for each of the principal characters — a dramatically risky move that Chausson handles deftly. In a daringly slow, mesmerizing monologue, Guinevere strangles herself with her own long hair. Lancelot, having offered no defense in a battle with former comrades who are avenging their king, comes back to the castle mortally wounded, living long enough to ask Arthur’s forgiveness in anguished yet noble phrasesThe shaken Arthur, seeking death, is greeted by a group of heavenly maidens who offer to take him away — not to death, but to eternal sleep. Chausson turned this sequence into a shimmering, harmonically lush double chorus, performed here by choristers in celestial white robes. “Your name may perish,” they tell Arthur, but “your ideas are immortal.”Let’s hope this production helps Chausson’s opera thrive as well.Le Roi ArthusThrough Sunday at Bard College; fishercenter.bard.edu. Also streamed at that website on July 28. More

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      Review: At Wagner’s Festival, a ‘Dutchman’ Never Sails

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      With neither ship nor sea, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new Bayreuth Festival staging recasts the opera as a tale of violent revenge.BAYREUTH, Germany — The pilgrims to the Green Hill, who have been making their way to the storied festival Richard Wagner founded here 145 years ago, looked more like cattle on Sunday. The theater’s bucolic grounds had become a network of roped-off, one-way sidewalks and checkpoints.With stricter pandemic safety measures than many other European opera houses, the Bayreuth Festival’s opening night — a new production of “Der Fliegende Holländer” (“The Flying Dutchman”) — lacked some of its usual glamour. Indeed, the romance ended at the sight of mobile bathrooms outside the theater; the ones inside had been deemed too risky. The audience was limited to 900, less than half the house’s capacity.Yet the unpleasantness of these restrictions faded as the lights dimmed, the hall resounded with the stormy opening of “Holländer,” and the Bayreuth experience began to work its usual magic.And what a sound it was: The orchestra, propulsive and spirited from the start, was led by Oksana Lyniv, the first female conductor in the festival’s history. Much has rightly been made of that milestone, however embarrassingly overdue.In Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production, the opera takes place firmly on land, with the opening scene at the bar of a small town.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleLyniv’s “Holländer” was occasionally a little brash, but it was always both driven by and driving the drama, with sharp attention to detail and pacing — in a work whose repetitive score can easily sag under a less assured baton.She wasn’t the only newcomer at the festival this summer: Dmitri Tcherniakov, virtually unavoidable at European houses in recent years, was directing his first Bayreuth production. And Asmik Grigorian, a steel-voiced soprano and one of the finest acting talents in opera, was making her debut here as Senta — a performance met with a roaring ovation.There was polite applause for Grigorian’s colleagues, as well; the audience seemed ready to warmly greet whatever they saw after Bayreuth was canceled last year. But although there were some elements of normalcy on Sunday — Chancellor Angela Merkel was even back in her usual box — the festival was still far from its former self.The full forces of Bayreuth’s fabled chorus, for example, were not allowed onstage. Instead they were divided: half singing in the theater, complemented by an ensemble of lip-syncing actors, and half broadcast from a separate hall. The effect was at times acoustically disorienting.From left, Marina Prudenskaya as Mary, Eric Cutler as Erik and Grigorian as Senta.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleAs a director, Tcherniakov is often interested in trauma: the ways in which it is overcome, sublimated or succumbed to. Here, that was manifest in the Dutchman’s origin story, recounted in a series of vignettes during the overture.The Dutchman, in this telling, grew up in a small town — possibly coastal, though there is neither a ship nor sea in sight — with uniform, clean, monochromatic, rather sinister architecture. His single mother had an affair with a married man, who violently broke things off with her. Gossip spread, and she became an outcast, isolated in an already isolating place. So she hanged herself; the boy, unable to help, was left mournfully holding onto her swinging foot.He leaves his hometown and later returns — like the libretto’s cursed Dutchman, docking his ship every seven years in search of a love that will redeem him. Now an adult, with an imposing build and furrowed brow, he is unrecognizable at a local bar, where he tells his tale to a half-interested crowd. (The baritone John Lundgren’s delivery of the monologue was strained, and misaligned with the menacing force of his demeanor.)Among the people the Dutchman meets at the bar is Daland — in the libretto a sea captain and the father of the opera’s heroine, Senta, but here a clean-cut, middle-class man. (Indeed, the one who ruined his mother’s life.) The bass Georg Zeppenfeld portrays him with a warm tone and a touch of naïve insouciance.From left, John Lundgren, Prudenskaya, Georg Zeppenfeld and Grigorian in Act II of the opera.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleThe cityscape shifts between scenes, its buildings fluidly rearranging into new configurations. At the beginning of Act II, they create a plaza-like space for the “Spinning Chorus,” led by Mary, Senta’s nurse (though in Tcherniakov’s staging presented as her mother and played, often silently, by Marina Prudenskaya with weary exasperation).This scene introduces Grigorian’s Senta, a young woman with Billie Eilish hair and a defiant streak. She sings her Ballad — which recounts the Dutchman legend, with an emphasis on his redemption by a woman who will be faithful to him until death — with dramatic gesticulations and a sense of ironic overstatement. But later, when she is alone onstage and her theme returns, Grigorian delivers the tune with quiet, sincere longing, perhaps seeing in the Dutchman a kindred spirit.She and the Dutchman meet over an awkward dinner at her house, separated by her parents and seated at opposite ends of the table, which is laid out slowly and fussily. It’s not exactly a meet-cute, but something clicks, and the parents fade to invisibility as Senta and the Dutchman sing what came off on Sunday as a mismatched duet, Grigorian luxuriously lyrical and Lundgren a little thin. (Eric Cutler, who sang the role of Erik, the Dutchman’s rival for Senta’s affections, similarly struggled to rise to her level.)The Bayreuth Festival’s chorus was divided in two, with half singing onstage, complemented by silent actors, and the others broadcast from a separate hall.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleAct III opens like most any “Holländer” production, with the town’s women bringing the men food — only here they gather to enjoy it together. Off to the side, though, is a group of sullen men whose dark clothing contrasts with the earth tones of the locals. Traditionally, they would be the Dutchman’s ghostly crew, and they provide one strategic use of the broadcast choir. As their lines are played through speakers, the men onstage remain threateningly silent.They are, it becomes apparent, willing collaborators in the Dutchman’s plot to exact deadly revenge on the town. After Erik confronts Senta about their now-broken promises to each other, a fight breaks out in which the Dutchman coolly shoots someone while the crowd retreats back into the town — which the mysterious men have set on fire.As smoke fills the space and the Dutchman violently casts Senta aside — just as her father once did to his mother — Mary enters with a shotgun, aims it directly at the Dutchman’s chest and pulls the trigger. It’s a lot of violence in not a lot of time, and it wasn’t easy to follow on opening night.But one thing was clear. Even though this production, as it had been described in advance press, is focused on the psychology and background of the Dutchman, the redemptive power of Senta was inescapable. Rather than join him in an act of eternal devotion, she takes the gun from her shaking mother and holds her, bringing a sense of calm as the curtain comes down.So while Tcherniakov might have been most interested in the psyche of an angry and vengeful man, the only character who truly changes — and, indeed, matures — in his staging is Senta. Especially with Grigorian onstage, it’s very much her opera.Der Fliegende HolländerThrough Aug. 20 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. Also streaming Tuesday on DG Stage; dg-premium.com. More

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      A King Arthur Rarity Is an Apt Way to Return to the Opera

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      Ernest Chausson’s “Le Roi Arthus,” with its fragile promise of renewal, is coming to the Bard SummerScape festival.In the third act of Ernest Chausson’s opera “Le Roi Arthus” (“King Arthur”), Guinevere asks Lancelot, “United in love, united in sin, will we also be joined in death?”The tangled Arthurian love triangle is familiar from “The Once and Future King,” “Camelot” and the works of Sir Thomas Malory. But here the question, set to longing sighs in the orchestra, immediately evokes another complicated 19th-century operatic romance: Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”Chausson’s only opera, which is being given a rare staging at the Bard SummerScape festival starting on Sunday, never fully escapes the shadow of “Tristan.”But in “Le Roi Arthus,” he also managed to find his own path. A contemporary of Henri Duparc and Gabriel Fauré, Chausson (1855-99) is today best known for his “Poème” for violin and orchestra. Born to wealth, he composed slowly and carefully. “Arthus,” which he wrote over the course of almost a decade in the 1880s and ’90s, didn’t premiere until 1903, years after he died in a cycling accident. By the turn of the 20th century, the work already seemed dated, and it has only occasionally been performed since.“It’s unbelievably beautiful,” Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and the production’s conductor, said in an interview. “And not only beautiful, but grammatically very smartly put together.”Chausson, like many composers of the late 19th century, labored in the shadow of Wagner. But in his only opera, he did carve out his own path.Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesLike many composers of his time, Chausson labored under the anxious influence — what he called the “ardent and despotic inspiration” — of Wagner. “If you’re going to be influenced by someone, Wagner is as good as you can get,” Botstein said. “But it is terribly obvious that it’s not by Wagner; there is very French chromaticism and a French melodic sensibility.”Chausson was well aware of the threat of merely rewriting “Tristan.” His friend Claude Debussy wrote to him in 1893 with concerns that part of Debussy’s own opera then in progress, “Pelléas et Mélisande,” “resembled the duet of Mr. So-and-So” — meaning Wagner. Later, after reviewing a draft of “Le Roi Arthus,” Debussy wrote to Chausson, “We would gain, it seems to me, by taking the opposite course.”Chausson’s score does occasionally sound like Wagner, notably in a brief, portentous appearance by Merlin. But he also made conscious decisions to distance himself from the master: He tends to avoid characteristically Wagnerian dense orchestration and that composer’s shifting thickets of leitmotifs — bits of music representing characters or concepts.As was Wagner’s practice, Chausson wrote his own libretto, and repeatedly edited it — especially after his colleague Duparc sent him a 51-page critique singling out the opera’s similarities to “Tristan.” By its final form, unlike in Wagner’s opera, Lancelot and Guinevere’s illicit affair is already in progress at the start of the opera, and they are fully in command of their own fates — not, as in “Tristan,” under the spell of a love potion. And Lancelot, crucially, experiences a crisis of conscience unlike any faced by Wagner’s hero.Chausson makes his mythic figures into fallible, conflicted humans. Arthur (at Bard, the baritone Norman Garrett) struggles with the loss of his marriage and of his most trusted confidant. The extended duets for Lancelot (the tenor Matthew White) and Guinevere (the mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke) explore earthly questions of trust, loyalty and love — far from Wagner’s weightily philosophical, Schopenhauerian mists.Louisa Proske, the production’s director, sees this as one of the opera’s strengths. “This love is organic, it’s genuine, and it’s human,” she said in an interview. “And it’s very modern, in the sense that Chausson is really interested in the impasse between the two lovers and how the arguments on each side keep playing out.”Writing about “Le Roi Arthus,” the musicologist Steven Huebner has pointed out that Guinevere can be seen as a typical fin-de-siècle operatic seductress, her chromaticism aligned with Carmen before her and Salome after — “driven by sensuality, a threat to virility.”But Proske disagrees. “She’s not a femme fatale who splits up the good work of the men,” she said. “She is a woman who is fighting for a love that she deeply believes is sublime, and the highest good in this world. There’s so much substance in what she says and expresses musically.”Proske’s staging mixes images from different cultures, both ancient and modern. She said that the abstract set and timeless costumes — including new heraldry for Arthur’s knights — “create a tension between the past and the future.”“They’re not historically accurate,” she added of the designs. “They express an imaginary idea of Europe. I really love that it’s, at the same time, an action movie as it has knights and kings and queens. It has this kind of grand, epic scale that is really fun to put onstage. And at the same time, it’s deeply an opera of ideas.”The work depicts Arthur’s Round Table at its twilight. “The Round Table,” Proske said, “which Arthur devotes his life to, stands for or embodies an idea of good governance and good kingship, which is not quite the same as democracy.”The political context will come to the fore in Bard’s presentation of what is perhaps the opera’s most distinctive sequence: its ending, in which a boat arrives to carry Arthur away. Five offstage sopranos and what the score describes as an “invisible chorus” call to him to “come with us beyond the stars” for a “deep, endless sleep.” (Morgan Le Fay and Avalon go unmentioned.) This all comes after two protracted death scenes for Lancelot and Guinevere, who strangles herself with her own hair.The Bard production will bring that invisible chorus onstage. “Arthur and the heroic, charismatic autocratic nobility essentially disintegrate and recede into the heavens,” Botstein said. “The people come onstage. They represent the future. There’s a symbolic vision of the possibilities of democracy.”Proske also sees the ending as an image of recurrence: “It’s the situation of a political leader at the end of his life. It is a complete failure because the project has failed. The gift that the chorus brings to Arthur is to say that it hasn’t failed, because in the future, it will recur, your thought will live on and take shape in different periods of history, and people will pick up what you left us.”Such a fragile promise of renewal and rebirth is perhaps an apt way to return to the opera house after the coronavirus pandemic. “I think this is a really exciting piece to come back with, because at heart, it actually thinks about the necessity of collective storytelling,” Proske said. “I hope that the audience will feel part of that collective at the end and will take home something that will stay with them.” More

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      Kennedy Center Taps Joni Mitchell and Berry Gordy for Awards

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      Bette Midler, Lorne Michaels and Justino Díaz will also receive tributes at a ceremony that is expected to look much more like it did before the pandemic.The last Kennedy Center Honors aired on television less than two months ago, but on Wednesday, the institution announced a new batch of honorees, taking a step toward getting the program back on schedule after the upheaval of the pandemic.The recipients include the folk singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell; the stage and screen performer Bette Midler; Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown; Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live”; and the opera singer Justino Díaz.Because of the pandemic, the 2020 honors were delayed until this year and the celebration did not at all resemble the event from prior years, when artists, politicians and other prominent figures packed into the opera house. Instead, the ceremony was split over several days, and television producers stitched together a combination of recorded at-home tributes and in-person performances that aired in June.This time, the ceremony, scheduled for Dec. 5, promises to look more like the Kennedy Center Honors of old, with the house at capacity and, if all goes well, President Biden in attendance. (President Trump was a no-show at the three ceremonies held during his time in office.)Throughout her career, Bette Midler released more than a dozen studio albums. Her starring role in the Broadway revival of “Hello, Dolly!” earned her a Tony Award for best lead actress in a musical in 2017.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s going to be the party to end all parties because we haven’t had one in so long,” said Deborah Rutter, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.The ceremony will air on CBS, but the date has not been set.The honorees, selected on the recommendation of an advisory committee that includes Kennedy Center officials and past award recipients, include two singer-songwriters, Mitchell and Midler, whose careers started to soar in the early 1970s, when they were in their 20s.Fifty years ago, Mitchell, 77, released “Blue,” her fourth album, which went on to have an enduring influence on singer-songwriters for decades to come. Mitchell, who helped shape an era of protest music with songs like “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock,” said of the honor, “I wish my mother and father were alive to see this.”Midler’s debut album, “The Divine Miss M,” came out a year after “Blue,” and helped propel her into a career that spread to Broadway, television and film. Midler, 75, put out more than a dozen studio albums, and her run as Dolly Levi in the Broadway revival of “Hello, Dolly!” earned her a Tony Award for best lead actress in a musical in 2017.Berry Gordy, right, onstage in 1981 with Smokey Robinson, one of the many singers discovered by Gordy.Joan Adlen/Getty ImagesIn Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, the Kennedy Center is honoring the figure behind an entire generation of musical talent. Gordy, now 91, once borrowed $800 from his family to start the record company and then went on to discover and help ignite the careers of Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye and more.After announcing his retirement two years ago, Gordy said in an interview, he spends much of his time playing golf, tennis and chess.“Here we are 60 years later and Diana Ross and the Temptations are both coming out with new albums,” he said. “Motown’s legacy continues without me having to do anything.”This year is the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center’s opening in 1971, more than a decade after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation creating a National Cultural Center. Shortly after the grand opening of the center, Díaz, then a 31-year-old opera singer, performed there as the male lead in Ginastera’s “Beatrix Cenci.” He played a villainous count and recalled handling two huge Mastiffs onstage during his first entrance.Now, at 81, Díaz, a bass-baritone who has performed for opera companies across the globe, will return to the opera house to see artists pay tribute to his career.Fifty years ago, Justino Díaz sang at one of the opening performances at the Kennedy Center. Now, he will return for a celebration of his career.Presley Ann/Patrick McMullan, via Getty Image“Little old me?” he said in an interview. He noted that despite his fame in the opera world, he is not a household name.“I say I’m an opera singer,” he said, “and immediately I have to follow with, ‘No, I’m not Plácido Domingo and I’m not Luciano Pavarotti.’”Rutter said that although the last ceremony was limited by social distancing requirements, there are aspects of it that she wishes to maintain. In particular, she said, there was a sense of intimacy in that celebration that had not been there before. At one point, she noted, as the artists mingled outside on a terrace, Rhiannon Giddens picked up her banjo, began playing, and Joan Baez started to dance.“It was spontaneous,” Rutter said. “The artists broke open their instruments and people started singing and dancing together.”(It is unclear whether the attendees this year will be required to wear masks, as they will be required to do for the Kennedy Center’s fall programming.)Michaels, 76, who created “S.N.L.” in 1975, was also forced by the pandemic to drastically rethink his show. In the spring of 2020, “S.N.L.” filmed sketches at its actors’ homes, allowing the audience to connect with the cast members in a new way. Now that they have returned to a live audience, they are thinking of ways to apply what they learned in quarantine.“Those shows had a strong homemade quality, which was part of their charm,” he said. “Once we went back to the audience, we kept pushing the limit of what we could do.” More