What Ails Today’s Metropolitan Opera? — It’s in the Pit

The current issue of the “New York Review of Books” carries my review of the Metropolitan Opera’s current “Aida” – a new production given fourteen times this season. It features one of the company’s heralded young stars – the soprano Angel Blue – and it’s mainly conducted by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nezet-Seguin. The result is tepid. As “Aida” is the quintessential grand opera, its current fate, I write, “must disclose something about the fate of the house” and the challenges it faces. A crucial defect “is what’s happening – and not — in the pit.” I proceed to compare today’s “Aida” conductor and orchestra with the Met orchestra of the 1930s and the conductor then presiding over Italian opera: Ettore Panizza – a Verdi interpreter of genius. I write in part: 

Of the Met’s earliest Aida broadcasts, the most esteemed (it is readily available on youtube) was aired on February 6, 1937. . . . What first commands attention is Panizza and his band. The intensity of this contribution is not merely different in degree from what we now hear; its difference is fundamental: a difference in kind. Compared to Nezet-Seguin, Panizza deploys a vast range of tempo (the final duet is more than a third slower than the one to which we have grown accustomed). Additionally, the pulse throughout is radically flexible, accommodating scorching accelerandos (typically at cadences and phrase endings) and lyric allargandos (expanding the arc of a sung phrase). At the same time, linear tension is maintained – so the cumulative effect is that of an ongoing flexed line. All of this furnishes punctuation and trajectory, shape and purpose. The pit is not supportive; it is collaborative. . . . [In act three,] Amonasro enters: a wild man: “You are not my daughter! You are the slave of the Pharaohs!” And Panizzza’s orchestra is wild. . . . Juxtaposed with this powder keg, today’s Met orchestra is a matchbox. . . .

The American arts are mired in a crisis of cultural memory. The implications for the Metropolitan Opera . . . are infinitely complex. A basic reality, finally, is that grand opera is a product of the nineteenth century, and its most idiomatic exponents began to fade from the scene half a century later. Absent a time machine, maintaining opera as a living artform can today only be an exercise in ingenious accommodation. Panizza was no anomaly – he embodied interpretive norms once widespread and now best remembered via the recordings of Toscanini (they were colleagues at La Scala). Are those performance practices – if adequately acknowledged and studied – to any extent revivable? Is it at least possible to revive the intensities of a Dmitri Mitropoulos or Georg Solti – non-idiomatic Verdi conductors who lit a fire at the Met? A further consideration: Toscanini, in his final Met season, led 68 out of 209 performances. Panizza, in his final Met season, led 38 of 69 performances given in Italian. This season, Nezet-Seguin (who is also music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra) leads only 36 of 194 performances. The house needs a genuine music director of its own.

For a related blog on Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducting Wagner at the Met, click here.

For a related article on Lawrence Tibbett and the “crisis” afflicting opera in America, click here.