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      Retooling ‘La Bohème’ for Pandemic Performances

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      Opera has been forced to forgo its love of packed stages, large orchestras and sold-out crowds, for now.LONDON — It’s an evening of drinking and revelry at Café Momus. A group of young men chatter away as a femme fatale tries to get their attention, jumping on tables and tossing undergarments. But the night spot is not as crowded as usual. There are few waiters in attendance, and by the windows in the back three patrons dine alone.It is Act II of a pared-down production of Puccini’s “La Bohème” at the Royal Opera House. In light of pandemic restrictions, the orchestra has 47 players, down from the usual 74. The act opens with only 18 of 60 chorus members onstage, the rest singing from the wings, and 10 (not 20) children onstage. There are four, not 10, waiters in the cafe.“The cafe scene feels less ‘bustling belle epoque cafe’ and more ‘lonely-hearts establishment’ at the moment, simply because there’s a limited number of people that we can have in the Cafe Momus,” Oliver Mears, the house’s director of opera, said a few days before the June 19 premiere. “It’s just adapting to the circumstances that we were faced with.”Andrew Macnair as Parpignol, with members of the Royal Opera Chorus, in a scene from Act II. Tristram Kenton/Royal Opera HouseMr. Mears said opera is an art form that breaks every social-distancing rule, relying on “crammed pits,” large and dense onstage crowds, moments of intimacy between performers, singing (which can spread viral particles) and a sellout audience. “All of these things really work against us,” he said.“If you were someone who hated opera and you wanted to devise a disease that hit opera particularly hard, then you’d probably come up with something rather like Covid,” he added.The global coronavirus outbreak has had a drastic effect on the performing arts, and opera, which is expensive, has suffered hugely. Many of Europe’s major houses have received government help — in addition to annual taxpayer-funded grants — to avoid insolvency.The Royal Opera House, which was closed for 14 months, received a government loan of 21.7 million pounds (about $29 million) in December, part of a recovery package for arts organizations. The house attracts an average of 650,000 people a year and presents films and screenings in Britain and in 42 countries around the world.Last October, it sold a 1971 David Hockney portrait of its former general administrator, David Webster, for £12.8 million (about $18 million). But even that was not enough to avoid cuts, and 218 staff members were let go.The Royal Opera decided to sell a David Hockney portrait of its former general administrator, David Webster, for £12.8 million to help make up for losses. Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA, via ShutterstockSince the house reopened on May 17, it has been operating at roughly a third of capacity to ensure socially distanced seating — just over 800 spectators, down from 2,225, Mr. Mears said. He described the mood in-house as “enthusiasm tempered with caution.” (Pandemic restrictions are in place until at least July 19.)The Paris Opera, which also incorporates a world-renowned ballet company, has faced similar threats in the pandemic. In an interview, Alexander Neef, its director, said the opera house had received €41 million (about $47 million) in aid for 2020, leaving it with a €4 million deficit.This year, the Paris Opera is due to receive another €15 million in state aid, he said, to help offset a projected annual loss of €45 million.“Everybody’s exhausted from more than a year of crisis,” Mr. Neef said. The Paris Opera reopened May 19, and since early June has required all audience members to show a “pass sanitaire” (health pass) proving vaccination, a negative test or one proving post-Covid immunity.There was “great appetite when we reopened,” he said on June 22, but “it’s been a little bit flat now,” whether because of the health pass requirement or the good weather and the reopening of cafe terraces.“There’s still a lack of perspective as to how this can actually come to an end,” he said. The hope was that by the fall, “we will be back to whatever this new normal will be. But there’s no guarantee for that right now. We don’t have visibility.”Opera houses in the United States, which depend mainly on private philanthropy and ticket sales for survival, are suffering even more. The Metropolitan Opera in New York, which plans to reopen in September, announced on its website that it had lost $150 million in earned revenue because of the pandemic.Ms. de Niese said pandemic restrictions meant having “to do all of our rehearsals with a mask on, and that is a killer.”Tristram Kenton/Royal Opera HouseFor the cast members of “La Bohème,” which ends live performances on Tuesday but can be streamed online through July 25, the pandemic has only compounded the art form’s challenges.Danielle de Niese, who plays Musetta, the femme fatale, said in an interview during rehearsals that without a pandemic it was hard enough to do “the drunken tabletop thing” — having to hop from one tabletop to another in a long, heavy gown while singing at the top of her lungs. The coronavirus, she said, also meant having “to do all of our rehearsals with a mask on, and that is a killer.”“It is incredibly challenging to sing into a material mask,” she said. “It basically kills your sound, and it feels like you’re singing into a pillow.”Ms. de Niese, a soprano, pulled out her special opera-singer mask: a protruding face covering with an extra wire that ensured it wouldn’t “go up my nostrils” at each breath. Masks were worn throughout the rehearsal period, she said, and instead of the “natural camaraderie between colleagues” and between acts, performers had to sit on strictly distanced chairs.Ms. de Niese said she was concerned about “singers who are just starting to get into it, who aren’t yet making the big bucks,” and who, struggling financially during the pandemic, had to take “a job packing boxes at Amazon.”“We need to make sure that the next generation will still put their skin in the game,” she said.The Royal Opera’s next big show is directed by Mr. Mears himself: a new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” opening in the fall. In its favor during a pandemic? It doesn’t have a chorus, he pointed out.Despite the prolonged shutdown and logistical and financial headaches, Mr. Mears said there was a silver lining to the difficulty: a regained appreciation for opera.“We always thought that this was something that would always exist, and now I think there’s a tremendous sense of gratitude for the work that we are able to make,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll ever take opera for granted again, and that can only be a good thing.” More

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      ‘Peter Grimes’ Sails on Choppy Seas of Brexit and the Pandemic

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      A production of Benjamin Britten’s opera at the Teatro Real in Madrid highlights the difficult new conditions for British artists working in the European Union.MADRID — In a new production of “Peter Grimes” that premiered at the Teatro Real opera house here on Monday, the people of an English seaside town wave the British flag, and pack into a pub seeking shelter from a sudden downpour.Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera about an ill-fated fisherman is one of the most quintessentially English works in the opera repertoire, but Britain’s recent exit from the European Union, coupled with a travel ban and other restrictions triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, has made staging it in Madrid a journey across choppy and uncharted waters.“Having to deal with Brexit and the pandemic at the same time was diabolical,” Joan Matabosch, the artistic director of the Teatro Real, said in an interview.Allan Clayton as Peter Grimes, left, and the dancer Juan Leiba in the Teatro Real production.Javier del Real/Teatro RealA chorus representing the townspeople surrounding Clayton, lying on the stage floor.Javier del Real/Teatro RealThe show is a coproduction with three other theaters, including the Royal Opera House in London, where it is scheduled to play next March, and 17 people had to travel from Britain to Madrid for rehearsals and performances. Almost all the production’s lead singers are British, as is its director, Deborah Warner.Until Jan. 1, while Britain was in a transition period after its departure from the European Union, British performers could work throughout the bloc without visas. Since then, they have to apply country by country for entry visas and short-stay work permits. Each E.U. member state has set its own requirements, making it even more complex for artists who want to tour the continent.Rehearsals in Madrid started two weeks late, because of difficulties getting visas and a travel ban introduced after a new variant of the coronavirus was identified in England late last year. The performance schedule had to be shortened by one show, with fewer rest days, to allow the British members of the cast to leave Spain within the 90-day limit of their visas. Gregorio Marañón, the Teatro Real’s president, said that he personally spoke with three Spanish ministers to help with the paperwork required for the British visitors.Matabosch said that many of the production’s difficulties arose “because nobody really seemed to know how the new Brexit rules applied. So we had some people who had to make three attempts to reach Madrid, but at least finally everybody got here.”The auditorium of the Teatro Real at the premiere on Monday.Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York TimesPlastic screens have been set up in the orchestra pit between the conductor’s podium and the musicians.Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York TimesUshers at the theater are also taking extra safety precautions.Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York TimesOpera productions are planned well in advance. Four years ago, when the Teatro Real decided to schedule “Peter Grimes” for 2021, Britain had recently voted in a referendum to leave the European Union, “but nobody imagined it would take so long for Brexit to actually happen,” Matabosch said.Negotiations between the British government and the European Union dragged on because Brussels did not want Britain to cherry-pick benefits that apply to its member states while freeing itself of membership obligations. Even after an overall deal was completed, the specifics of many issues were left unresolved, including how travel visas would work for artists.In Britain, a parliamentary inquiry is underway, spurred by a chorus of criticism about the post-Brexit situation for performers, with complaints from major pop stars like Elton John and Dua Lipa. In February, Britain’s culture minister, Oliver Dowden, blamed Brussels for rejecting a British proposal to grant British artists eased access to the 27 remaining E.U. nations. “It is worth noting that what we put forward was what the music industry had asked for,” Mr. Dowden argued before Parliament. But Michel Barnier, Brussels’ chief negotiator, has insisted that it was London that rejected last year an E.U. offer to agree special terms for traveling musicians and other artists.Warner was scathing about the lack of a deal for British artists, saying that the production’s visa problems were the result of “the scandalous negligence of the U.K. negotiators who have failed utterly the music world.”Deborah Warner, the production’s director, said: “I had my doubts about how likely this was, and, at certain moments before I got here, how wise this was.”Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York Times“Having to deal with Brexit and the pandemic at the same time was diabolical,” said Joan Matabosch, the artistic director of the Teatro Real.Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York TimesSpain was among the countries worst hit at the start of the pandemic, when hospitals in Madrid overflowed with Covid-19 patients. But after a national state of emergency was lifted last summer, Madrid’s opera house reopened, alongside many other theaters across Spain.Since then, the regional authorities governing Madrid have kept Spain’s capital among the most bustling cities in Europe, even though the number of coronavirus cases has recently been creeping up again. While the Teatro Real had to cancel some ballet and orchestra shows, it has staged several operas successfully.The opera house said it had spent about €240,000 — nearly $290,000 — on regularly testing employees and guest workers and that around 20 had to go into self-isolation last month, including cast members for “Peter Grimes.”In an interview before Monday’s opening night, Warner, the director, said: “I had my doubts about how likely this was, and, at certain moments before I got here, how wise this was.” She said she felt “there was a craziness” to the Teatro Real’s plan to stage “Peter Grimes,” which is about a close-knit community and could not be done with social distancing onstage.But looking back, she also said that key themes in Britten’s “shocking opera,” including its references to English nationalism, resonated with “the stress of these times.”The opera house said it had spent about €240,000 on regularly testing employees and guest workers.Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York TimesIn Madrid, the British singers welcomed the chance to perform in a major “Peter Grimes” production involving about 150 artists, at a time when most opera houses in Europe and the United States are closed, but they also sounded anxious about what would come afterward.James Gilchrist, who sings the part of a priest in Britten’s opera, said that 90 percent of his work had been in the European Union rather than in Britain, which made him worried not only about his own future but also the prospects for younger artists. “If you are a promoter in Frankfurt or somewhere like that, you are not going to want to put a British artist at the top of your list, because it is just such a hassle,” he said.“For very well-established artists, that is probably less of a problem because their name on the poster will bring people in, but if you are more at the beginning of your career, I think this is going to be very, very hard.”Matabosch said the Teatro Real was committed to having the best possible lineups, irrespective of nationality. He forecast that the post-Brexit travel rules would become easier to navigate, but he acknowledged that British performers risked losing substitution work, which is an important part of their incomes.“I’m sure that we will end up knowing exactly how to bring over a British singer, just as people also come here from Australia or Canada. But the problem is that if you need a last-minute replacement and have to fly somebody over that very morning, this is not really doable from Britain at the moment,” Matabosch said.Another British member of the “Peter Grimes” cast, John Graham-Hall, thanked the Teatro Real for helping overcome travel hurdles that left him with “the very nasty feeling that the British government does not care about the arts.” He also gave a succinct summary of the twin hurdles raised by Brexit and the pandemic: “It’s a bloody nightmare.”Alex Marshall More

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      Elijah Moshinsky, Met Opera Director With Fanciful Touch, Dies at 75

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and Cases13,000 Approaches to TeachingVaccine InformationTimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storythose we’ve lostElijah Moshinsky, Met Opera Director With Fanciful Touch, Dies at 75Mr. Moshinsky, known for mixing traditional staging ideas with modern flourishes, also created productions for the Royal Opera and Opera Australia. He died of Covid-19.The director Elijah Moshinsky in 2015. Joseph Volpe, the Metropolitan Opera’s former general manager, said Mr. Moshinsky was “the closest thing the Met had to a house director.” He also worked in theater.Credit…Jeff BusbyJan. 21, 2021Updated 6:53 p.m. ETElijah Moshinsky, an Australian theater, television and opera director known for his productions at the Royal Opera in London, Opera Australia and especially the Metropolitan Opera, died on Jan. 14 at a hospital in London. He was 75.The cause was Covid-19, his family said.The best Moshinsky productions combined traditional staging ideas with modern, striking, sometimes fanciful touches, as in his 1993 version of Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” for the Met, which is slated for revival in the 2021-22 season.That production reached the essence of Strauss’s opera, a delicate mix of grandeur and farce, providing “the thrill of beauty encased in irony, of sincerity at the end of self-consciousness,” Edward Rothstein of The New York Times wrote in a review.Mr. Moshinsky’s version featured an exaggeratedly bustling depiction of backstage preparations for an entertainment at the home of a Viennese gentleman, as well as a trio of eerily gigantic nymphs, their colorful dresses falling to the ground.“Ariadne” was one of nine new productions Mr. Moshinsky presented at the Met from 1980 to 2001, making him “the closest thing the Met had to a house director,” Joseph Volpe, the company’s general manager for much of that period, wrote in his 2006 memoir, “The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera.”Along with “Ariadne,” four are still in the Met’s active repertory, including a boldly stylized 1995 version of Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” that had a film-noir feel, and a bleak, eerily contemporary, almost Expressionist 1996 staging of Janacek’s mysterious “The Makropulos Case.” Mr. Moshinsky’s last Met production was Verdi’s “Luisa Miller.”Mr. Moshinsky’s Met career began inauspiciously with a roundly criticized production of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera,” a clumsily updated and poorly executed production starring Luciano Pavarotti. He returned in 1986 for Handel’s oratorio “Samson,” starring the tenor Jon Vickers in the title role, a stiff production that originated at the Royal Opera. But with that 1993 “Ariadne,” he announced himself anew.In attempting to bring a contemporary edge to his productions, Mr. Moshinsky was sometimes criticized for forcing what seemed quasi-modern elements and stark monumentality onto an otherwise traditional staging.His 1994 production of Verdi’s “Otello,” mounted for the tenor Plácido Domingo, was full of grandly operatic spectacle, yet some felt it seemed heavy-handed. It was dominated by “soaring columns and towering facades” that “alternately embrace and smother a great opera,” the critic Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.When Mr. Moshinsky followed his instincts to keep things traditional, the results were often effective. The critic Peter G. Davis, in a review for Classical Music, called the director’s 2001 production of “Luisa Miller” the Met’s “most satisfying Verdi effort in years.” Working within a “sensible but atmospheric setting,” Mr. Davis wrote, Mr. Moshinsky directed his characters “with skill, flexibility, and a sure understanding of who these people are.”He was also content, unlike some directors who come to opera from the world of theater, to work with singers who bring “outsized emotions” and “huge egos” onstage, as he put it in an interview with the BBC in 1993. Opera, he said, needed “people who can fill those emotional roles,” and part of his job was to engage with a performer’s temperament “to enable the best performance to occur.”Plácido Domingo as the title character and Renee Fleming as Desdemona during a dress rehearsal for a Moshinsky production of Verdi’s “Otello” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2002.Credit…Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesElijah Moshinsky was born on Jan. 8, 1946, in the French Concession in Shanghai, to which his Russian Jewish parents, Abraham and Eva (Krasavitsky) Moshinsky, had fled. He was the youngest of the couple’s three sons. Even though the family left Shanghai for Australia when Elijah was 5, he retained vivid memories of his early childhood, fortified by family stories and memorabilia, he said in the BBC interview.The Coronavirus Outbreak More