"Diva Parade"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, June 12, 2006.
The
Metropolitan Opera season lumbered to a close with a gala in honor of
Joseph Volpe, who is completing his term as the general manager of the
house. With its mixture of bedazzling vocalism and befuddling lapses of
taste, the event captured in microcosm—if a five-hour evening can be
called a microcosm—the artistic vagaries of Volpe’s tenure at the Met.
It also offered up opera in raw, pure form, its theatricality stripped
away and its complexity minimized. Vocal jamborees of this kind have
the appeal of a tribal ritual: favorite singers parade across the
stage, and fans respond with ovations of minutely graded intensity. PBS
broadcast the gala on June 1st, but, in a perfect world, it would have
played on Fox, with explosive graphics, yammering commentators, and an
atmosphere of gladiatorial bloodlust.
During the not infrequent lulls in the program, I got to thinking
about opera’s odd position in American culture. Although the art is
hardly popular, styles of singing that are described as “operatic” are
integral to the pop mainstream. Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban sing to
millions, purveying a hybrid genre that has been dubbed “popera.” Simon
Cowell, the acidulous producer turned music critic who dominates the
hit show “American Idol,” has organized an act called Il Divo, in which
trained opera singers bleat pop tunes. Cowell’s projects have succeeded
in making America sound like a gaggle of opera queens: at water coolers
and barbecues across the U.S. of A., people chastise singers for
waywardness of pitch (or “pitchiness,” in “American Idol” lingo), weigh
the relative importance of technical precision and expressive force,
and indulge in other forms of intermission second-guessing. There was a
curious moment during this year’s “Idol” auditions when a young woman
named Heidi Fairbanks came out singing “Caro nome,” and not badly,
either. She was sent home, but she sounded less out of place than you
might expect.
For a long while, during the macho decades of rock and rap, it
seemed as though vocal floridity had been drummed out of pop music. But
it turns out that there is an abiding hunger in the heartland for high
notes, melisma, fioritura, and the rest. So why don’t more people warm
to the grand original? One problem is that there is no way of capturing
opera’s elemental thrill on television, or even on a recording. To hear
a great singer such as Karita Mattila throw the emotion in her voice
across the hundred and eighty-five feet that separates the middle of
the Met stage from the back row of the Family Circle is not an
experience that can be reduced to digital bytes. This is part of the
reason that opera remains an open secret, at once ubiquitous and
unknown. There is also the issue of opera’s obsession with the past,
where most people understandably do not want to live. None of the arias
that were sung at the Volpe gala were written after 1936, four years
before the outgoing general manager was born.
If there was a consensus “winner” at the gala, it
was Natalie Dessay, who sang the climactic sleepwalking scene from
Bellini’s “La Sonnambula.” Like most bel-canto showstoppers, it ends
with rapid runs and brilliant high notes, which Dessay dispatched with
ease. But the true magic came in the slow aria “Ah! non credea,” in
which Amina sings to a withered flower in her hand, and enters into a
lingering duet with a lone cello. Dessay sang it as if with one breath,
unfurling a long, luminous ribbon of tone. This singer has experienced
difficulties in the past few years, having had operations on both of
her vocal cords. If her voice no longer sounds as effortless as it did
nine years ago, when she had her first major success on the Met stage,
as Zerbinetta in “Ariadne auf Naxos,” she has compensated by finding a
darker, richer vein of feeling. It was almost disconcerting how good
she was; you forgot that you were at a gala, and were absorbed into
Amina’s dream world.
The fun of a first-rate gala is in seeing stars goad one another
into tasteful excess. A trio of deep-voiced singers in the second part
of the program—Dmitri Hvorostovsky, René Pape, and Dolora
Zajick—engaged in a friendly fight to see who could sustain the longest
line at the slowest tempo. Hvorostovsky gave a surreally robust account
of Rodrigo’s death scene from “Don Carlo.” Pape tested the upper edges
of his magnificent bass voice in King Philip’s Act IV lament from the
same opera. Zajick produced what may have been the most decibels of the
evening in “O mon Fernand,” from Donizetti’s “La Favorite.” For glamour
made visible and audible, none could rival the majestic Mattila, in
“Vilja,” from “The Merry Widow,” although Renée Fleming came close in a
finely nuanced “Tacea la notte placida,” from “Il Trovatore.”
If the entire evening had gone like that, it might have been
quasi-legendary. But, alas, I have left several hours unaccounted for.
Having wasted a small but not insignificant portion of my life at last
season’s new production of Franco Alfano’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” I
hoped never to encounter that puddle of late-Romantic mediocrity again,
but Plácido Domingo, at whose bidding the opera was disinterred,
apparently insisted on bringing it back once more. This time, the great
tenor conducted an aria, “Je jette avec grâce mon feutre,” which his
putative successor Roberto Alagna sang; they were, respectively,
stiff-armed and dry-voiced. Earlier, Domingo came onstage to sing the
kitschy Spanish tune “Granada”; for Volpe, “That’s Amore” might have
been a better choice. Deborah Voigt, Kiri Te Kanawa, Frederica von
Stade, Waltraud Meier, Olga Borodina, Susan Graham, Stephanie Blythe,
Denyce Graves, Ben Heppner, Juan Diego Flórez, Thomas Hampson, James
Morris, and Samuel Ramey also made appearances.
The singers performed in front of sets from “Ariadne auf Naxos,” “La
Traviata,” and “Die Fledermaus.” There was something vaguely
avant-garde about the effect of seeing, say, Morris intone “Die Frist
ist um,” the phantom mariner’s soliloquy in “The Flying Dutchman,”
while standing in the middle of the ornate parlor set from Franco
Zeffirelli’s version of “La Traviata.” Peter Gelb, the next general
manager, has promised to modernize the Met’s productions, and it
occurred to me, during another of the evening’s lulls, that Gelb could
make a quick start by taking stuffy old productions and staging the
wrong operas on top of them. For example, Zeffirelli’s picture-postcard
“La Bohème” could be used as a backdrop for the bloody nightmare of
“Elektra.” Or “Fledermaus” could be staged amid the peaks and crevasses
of the “Ring.” The possibilities are endless, and it wouldn’t cost a
cent.
Volpe took a couple of solo bows at the end of the evening. It was
touching to see the Met’s brusque boss looking a bit awkward and
overwhelmed. Volpe has written, with the help of Charles Michener, a
lively memoir of his years at the Met, where he started out as a
carpenter. Much has been made of his tough-talking, streetwise persona,
which ruffled feathers at the hoity-toity house. In fact, as the memoir
reveals, he had a well-to-do upbringing in Glen Cove. (You could have
deduced as much from the tony home movies of his childhood, which were
shown during the gala.) Despite his gruff exterior, Volpe had just the
right touch to maintain the Met’s traditions. Production values
remained luxurious. Casting was done according to the star system.
Despite a few innovations and renovations, there were no seismic
changes. Although I’m one of those who believe that the Met is in dire
need of new ideas, I am also savoring every glimpse of those towering,
opulent, meticulous sets, knowing that, in a decade, they will probably
be gone.