I am in Ann Arbor, participating in a Mahler project with Ken Kiesler and his fervent University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra – the group with which I memorably toured South Africa a year ago (and about which I blogged and broadcast).
Addressing a class of young conductors this morning, I was reminded by one of them of a promotional video that I stumbled upon a few days ago. It shows Yannick Nezet-Seguin rehearsing his Metropolitan Opera orchestra in the orgasmic Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The student who brought it up was commenting on the orchestra’s apparent disengagement – which is here rendered both audible and visible.
The tendency of the Met orchestra to phone it in – notwithstanding its high reputation – is something I’ve felt impelled to comment upon, as have Alex Ross in The New Yorker and Joshua Barone in the New York Times. Juxtaposing last season’s Met Aida with the Aida broadcast of February 6, 1937, conducted by Ettore Panizza, I called Nezet-Seguin’s Met orchestra a “matchbox” versus Panizza’s “powder keg.” That was in the May 29, 2025, New York Review of Books (“Grand Opera’s Tribulations”).
Two nights ago I attended Tristan und Isolde at the Met and again encountered a crippling lack of urgency in the pit (in this of all operas). Upon returning home I listened to Artur Bodanzky lead the Tristan Prelude in live performance at the Met on March 9, 1935. You can hear it here.
Bodanzky’s is the most memorable reading of Wagner’s Prelude in my experience – in 10 minutes, it conveys Tristan und Isolde more potently than Wednesday night’s five hours. The opera’s preternatural gravitas registers instantly. Its vortex of feeling, its inexorable trajectory are indelibly mapped.
Any present-day listener is challenged to account for this astounding feat of music making. Certainly it can be said that the strings of Bodanzky’s orchestra command an exceptional range of dynamics and texture and inflected song compared to which today’s Met orchestra is another, more confined instrument of expression. Ultimately, however, the difference is summarized by an anecdote that came to mind upon hearing Klaus Makela conduct the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Here it is again, from my blog of February 26:
“I am reminded of a conversation I had in South Dakota with Derek Bermel, who had composed something remarkable for the Creekside Singers and the South Dakota Symphony. Derek told me that his clarinet teacher had been a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. I was fascinated to learn that – because broadcast Met performances from the 1930s and ‘40s document a caliber of intense orchestral collaboration unknown at the Met today. Derek had just auditioned the February 12, 1938, Otello – the greatest Verdi performance known to me, with Giovanni Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett, and Elisabeth Rethberg conducted by Ettore Panizza – and reported back that it sounded “fundamentally different” from any Verdi he had previously heard. Seated in a hotel lobby – I think we were in Chamberlain (population 2,600) – Derek and I spent twenty minutes debating what made that 1938 performance so special. Was it the conductor? The orchestra? The singers? Stylistic authority?
“Unbeknownst to us, the late Chris Eagle Hawk, a Lakota tribal elder I knew to be both wise and succinct, was a table away listening to it all. When there was a pause in our discussion, Chris said three words: ‘They felt it.’ That ended our conversation.”
For more on Artur Bodanzky’s Wagner at the Met, click here.
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