Not so good

It sounded like a terrific idea, when the Met announced that

it would promote its new Barber of

Seville production last night (November on Letterman. Since I’ve been a

big fan of their new promotions, I made sure I watched the show. But the opera

didn’t come off very well, and the Met may have made a mistake.

The first problem, which of course wasn’t the

class=SpellE>Met’s fault, was that the show last night was especially

goofy. Letterman’s first guest was Dustin Hoffman, who seemed to be playing the

“I’m such a big star that it doesn’t matter what I do or say” game. And

Letterman joined right in. Hoffman started out talking about a recipe he’d

learned from a Sicilian prostitute. Later he told a story (allegedly true)

about two opera singers (both fat, both women) who were making love in a

bathtub and got stuck. When it came time to show a clip from the movie Hoffman

was on the show to promote (Stranger Than

Fiction), Letterman asked what scene from the movie was on the clip, and Hoffman,

in a bored voice, said, “I don’t know.”

Next came a celebrity chef, who tried

to prepare linguine alla carbonara

while Letterman asked (in exactly these words) if he’d learned the recipe from

a whore. Then he seemed to want to distract the guy from his cooking. Finally

Paul Shaffer walked over, took a bottle of wine the chef had opened to cook

with, and started chugging it.

By the time the Met came onstage — to speed through the end

of the Barber‘s first act finale in last

few minutes of the show — it was hard to take anything seriously. Letterman did

introduce the opera with the slightly overdone respect he often shows for

classical music (“This is as good as it gets, folks,” or words to that effect. “You’re

not going to hear this on a streetcorner somewhere.”)

But he didn’t talk to anyone from the company, apart from a rushed thank-you

after the performance — and so the performance, coming at the end of a really

crazy night, seemed like a half-forgotten throwaway.

But then there were problems that really were the

class=SpellE>Met’s fault. They brought a lot of people, to perform live –

star soloists, their chorus, a conductor, and 22 members of their orchestra, who

played a skilful reduction of Rossini’s score. I’m sure this looked impressive

to the studio audience, but on TV, it didn’t look like a live performance at

all. It was shot with so little sense of place that what we saw could just as

well have been a film.

And why choose the end of the first-act finale? Nothing

happens. Here we had a production that the company is promoting — in ads in the

New York Times and

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Playbill (and surely elsewhere) — as

music theater. But what we saw was not just static, but silly, people dressed for

no apparent reason in military uniforms, standing still and singing. (If you

know the opera, you know the reason for the uniforms, but most of the TV audience

wouldn’t know it.) The performers looked like tin soldiers doing a really

boring half-time show.

And all the stars were wasted. Caught in the middle of the

screen, once or twice, was none less than Juan Diego Florez,

who would have knocked the audience dead both vocally and visually if he’d had

any chance to sing a solo. And then sure, the others in the cast might have

been miffed that they didn’t get their own chance to star, but isn’t the point

of the promotion to make people want to see the opera? Maybe using

class=SpellE>Florez alone wouldn’t be the answer (though, quite

honestly, it’s what I would have wanted to do), but surely the lead singers would

make a far better effect singing solo.

And there’s more. The

performance wasn’t very good. The orchestra played thrillingly, as could be

plainly heard in the few bars they had alone at the very end. But the singers –

doing rapidfire patter — got out of sync, and for one

bad moment the whole thing seemed to be heading for a train wreck. (If you want

to know what it was like, listen to the old Decca recording of Rossini’s

class=SpellE>L’italiana

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> in Algeri, the

one with Teresa Berganza in the title role, where the

singers aren’t quite together in the pattern parts of the first act finale. Then

multiply that by 20.) Maybe picking one of the trickiest spots in the score,

and expecting it to go like clockwork with no warmup

wasn’t such a great idea.

Finally, the text was translated in subtitles, and this, I

fear, made the opera seem very tired. The text has everybody — in what’s meant

to be a state of great confusion — singing about the noises banging in their

heads. This wasn’t original even in Rossini’s time; it’s what everybody sings also

in the L’italiana

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> first act finale, though there at least

the words are crazy enough to be worth a giggle. In Barber they’re just trite, and repetitious.

This didn’t matter much in Rossini’s time, because nobody

would focus on the words. To find out what the opera was about, people in the audience

would buy little booklets with the text, and quickly skim them. Then, while the

opera was performed, they’d talk. So when the first act finale came along, they’d

know in a general way what everyone was singing, but wouldn’t — and couldn’t;

they were talking — focus line by line on every word.

Which, unfortunately, was what the TV

audience was forced to do, with results that, I fear, were hardly very gripping.

And here we come to one big problem, if you’re an opera house that mostly does

old operas, and wants to find a new audience, and — especially — tries to find

that new audience by announcing that these old operas are really music theater.

By doing that, the company sets up expectations that the works can be compared

to the theater we have today. And in the case of this Barber first act finale — with far too close a focus on

uninteresting words — those expectations may not have been met.

Similarly, someone I know was coming out of a

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tosca performance at the Met, and

encountered some people who looked like they were in their 20s. “I could see

that coming,” one of them said, talking about the climax of the final act,

where the bullets used in the supposedly fake execution turn out to be real. My

friend reports that this person didn’t sound pleased.

In Aspen two or three summers

ago, there was a concert performance of Strauss’s

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Intermezzo

style='mso-spacerun:yes'> in the music tent. Someone on the

staff, in his 30s, thought that — for what’s essentially a sitcom — the opera

moved with leaden feet, so much so that no amount of masterful music could save

it.

These are honest reactions, not surprising when old and

sometimes creaky melodramas are trotted out in our modern world. How can an

opera company perform these pieces (which, by the way, I myself mostly love),

and still attract a modern audience?

That’s a question that I don’t think the Met answered very

well on Letterman. (At least they might have tried what was done with great

success in the Baz Luhrman

production of La bohème

on Broadway, and made the translation in the titles lively rather than

accurate.)