Justin Davidson in New York:
Kavalier & Clay is a serious work about serious issues, including the idea that a global cultural phenomenon can spring from a highly operatic collision of history and an artist’s private trauma. That thought had me imagining a different plot, which I encourage the Met to consider for a future commission. It’s about a brave storyteller, gifted with eloquence and clarity, whose truths anger a vengeful king. He flees into exile, only to be entrapped and murdered just when he thought he was safe. On the Met’s stage, the writer — called, say, Jamal Khashoggi — would be sung by a heroic tenor, his tormentor by a demonic baritone.
But this company operates in compromised reality, where morality is more novelistic than operatic. And so the Met’s general manager, the nimbly opportunistic Peter Gelb, recently struck a $100 million deal with Saudi Arabia to supply Riyadh’s new opera house with three weeks’ worth of performances each year and a dose of possibly obsolete cachet.
The agreement goes a long way toward rescuing the Met’s tottering finances — since the pandemic, it’s siphoned off $120 million of its endowment for operating costs — and Gelb has argued that the company is merely following the lead of the many democratic governments that have enmeshed itself in Saudi affairs. Fair enough. But governments routinely have to make grisly tradeoffs for the good of their people. Perhaps political reality dictates that one dismembered journalist is a reasonable price to pay for access to vast reserves of oil and cash.
The Met deal is different: It suggests that since neither this city nor this country will adequately support an artistic establishment it once cultivated with pride, the company’s welfare outweighs any ethical qualms. If that’s so, Gelb might want to tone down the Met’s full-throated support of beleaguered Ukraine, invite pro-Putin musicians like Anna Netrebko back to its stage, and revise the endings of a handful of works in which the protagonists die for their principles. He might even consider adopting Falstaff’s ironic disquisition as the Met’s official anthem. What is honor? A word.
Another hypocrisy might be pointed out: Gelb’s embrace of freedom of expression, which he trumpeted from the Met stage on opening night, does not seem to extend to the press. Years ago, he attempted to curtail negative reviews in Opera News, and last year he went after Zachary Woolfe, then the New York Times‘s classical critic. If Gelb thought that the sidelining of Woolfe would eliminate dissent, Joshua Barone’s review of Kavalier & Clay must have been an unwelcome surprise. If Josh is suddenly reassigned to the Wordle department, it will be time to ask questions.