Met opening

That was on the Metropolitan Opera’s website, less than half an

hour before opening night. They’d been running this countdown for days, and I

loved it. How to create excitement! Or, rather, one way to do it, along with

the free open house they’d had the day before; the announcement of the deal

putting the Met on its own full-time channel on Sirius satellite radio. And, of

course, the announcement of the video screens in Times Square and

w:st="on">Lincoln

w:st="on">Center Plaza,

allowing anyone to see the opening night performance free.

Here’s an institution that knows what it’s doing, and

especially knows that it needs a new relationship with the city

class=GramE>it’s part of. I was at the opening performance (I live

barely 10 minutes from Lincoln

Center by cab, on a good

day even less, and so I really could grab that countdown from the website, and

then head off to the performance). And it was a triumph. The buzz was tangible,

in part because there were celebrities around. My wife and I saw Sean Connery,

which almost (though not quite) trumped the opera. I don’t mean to gush, but it

was fun having stars around. Don’t think that some of the most serious music

critics you might read didn’t enjoy it just as much as I did. And don’t think

that the excitement doesn’t matter backstage. I ran into people from the

class=SpellE>Met’s orchestra, slipping into the house at intermission to

look at the crowd. You think this isn’t good for the Met? And

good for opera? You’d rather have an audience of musicologists, studying

their scores?

And the performance was really good. You can quarrel with

the singing (a Butterfly who could act the role, but pushed her voice, and

still couldn’t make an impression at big moments like “Un bel

di“; an apparently nervous tenor pushing his voice

though he had no need to). But the new Anthony Minghella

production (well, new to the Met) was both gorgeous and powerful. It was real

theater, something you could take serious people to, who don’t usually like

opera. There was lots of talk about the puppet that enacted Butterfly’s child. Yes,

it was heart-wrenchingly grotesque, but at the same time it was

heart-wrenchingly realistic, moving and yearning much like a real child (and

more than a stage child ever could).

And its grotesque look, to me, at least, was part of the

point. In many ways this production tore through the sometimes sentimental

surface of the opera, and showed the ugly underside of the story, though

without making any great fuss about that. Here’s another example. Far above the

stage, on the lofty ceiling of the stage space, were mirrors, reflecting the

scene below — but at an angle, so it looked uneasy and sometimes harsh. This

paid off wonderfully in the last act, during the scene were Sharpless

and Kate Pinkerton tell Suzuki the horrible truth. Butterfly is asleep offstage,

but in this production, she was just behind some of the sliding screens that

served as the house’s walls, and in the reflections above, you could see her

sleeping, chillingly present in the production even though she had nothing to

do onstage. Later, when she woke up, we could see that, and see her coming

toward the door that would bring her onstage to her doom.

Many of the reviews I read were dubious — some of the

critics found the production too modern, too abstract, not

emotional enough. This, I think, means that music critics are in a cultural

place that isn’t where many other cultured people are today. To anyone who goes

to the theater, I don’t think this production would have seemed at all

off-putting or even remarkable, except for its quality. I think of the

class=SpellE>Medea

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> that was on Broadway a few seasons

class=GramE>ago, or the fascinating Sweeney

Todd with the actors playing all the musical instruments. Both were at

least as abstract as this Butterfly, and

nobody seemed to mind. So the question then becomes: Should the Met please the

critics (and the more conservative part of its established audience), or should

it do things that bring it into the wider world, full of people who aren’t yet

going to the opera? Surely it needs to do some of both, but in the long run,

the new people are more important. The old audience has been shrinking; without

a new audience, there won’t be any Met. And if, to your hoped-for new audience,

you look stodgy and inartistic, you’re in big trouble.

One last thing. The Met has

revamped its program book:

Note that it now looks like a real magazine, complete with

striking cover image, and what the trade calls “cover lines,” text that tells

you what you’re going to find inside. I’ve been agitating for something like

this for years. Program books should look like the kind of magazines people

read in the outside world. Or at least they should if we want people to read

them. I’m not going to say that nobody has moved in that direction. The New

York Philharmonic program book, for instance, has a nicely spacious design,

with lots of white space, and smart use of sidebars and other special text.

But the Met’s cover takes things

to the next level. I’m not going to pretend that everything is terrific inside

the book; the Philharmonic’s inside layout is often better, and in the

class=SpellE>Met’s book (or at least in this first edition this season)

there are blocks of text in what I’m not alone in thinking is too small a typeface.

There’s also an unfortunate photo of Peter Gelb, one that manages an improbable

trick — making it hard even to imagine what he really looks like, while at the

same time making him look older than he really is.

These things, though, should be easy to fix. And what’s most

important about the program book is its content. A lot of it addresses the

class=SpellE>Met’s central problem, which is also the central problem

for classical music. I can’t do better than quote Peter Gelb’s introductory

essay, written in a wonderfully informal but also very direct style. These

words are highlighted in a pullquote: “My greatest

challenge is to keep the Met — and opera, more broadly — connected to

contemporary society.”

And that, in many ways, is the theme of the program book.

There’s an interview with Beverly Sills, titled “The Opera Singer as Pop Star,”

with a teaser saying that Sills is going to talk about “the changing place of

opera in contemporary culture.” Which she does, sometimes in

pretty strong language. Best of all might be an essay by Andre Bishop, “The

Case for Opera,” bearing this teaser: “Does the art form have a relevant place

in contemporary culture?”

Bishop is the artistic director of the Lincoln Center

Theater, and will be working with the Met on developing new works. And while

his ideas about opera’s relevance are worth thinking about, his most

provocative thought is about new operas:

And we must break away from what I

call 19th-Century Thinking: not every good play or novel should be adapted for

the musical stage. Most of them should be left alone. My favorite new operas (works

like Adams‘s Nixon in China and Corigliano’s

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Ghosts of Versailles) have been

totally original; my least favorites have simply taken an old book or play and

set it to music, to no real purpose beyond a stab at respectability.

Can you believe that? Serious artistic discussion in a

classical music program book — and serious discussion that takes strong issue

with the Met’s own most recent commissions, John

class=SpellE>Harbison’s The Great

Gatsby and Tobias Picker’s An

American Tragedy (not to mention William Bolcom’s

A View from the Bridge, which the

Chicago Lyric Opera premiered, but which the Met also staged). If we’re going

to have talk like that right out in the open, the Met

could be a very interesting place.