Time for the latest installment in what looks to be the decreasingly frequent mash-up series of SNLC with the occasional opera diary series begun originally by past DK’er Demi Moaned, as connected to the Metropolitan Opera’s HD-cast transmissions to movie houses. Thus, the standard opening question today is:
Anyone see the Metropolitan Opera’s HD-cast of La Traviata today?
If you did, then you actually did better than 3CM the loser, because self has not seen today’s live HD-cast. (This is going to be an out-of-control-lengthy diary anyway, with a minimal audience at best, to fully enhances 3CM’s loserness.) In his loser-ish way, he plans to see the encore presentation next week, which will serve as a kind of de facto loser story for the week to be explained below in the non-autobot tip jar. Thus, for once, I won’t have any comments on this performance, or the intermission banter, for this edition. I’ll have to leave that for anyone who actually saw the HD-cast today (or even, extremely low-odds of this, live in the house, if anyone who stops by this diary lives in NYC). However, if nothing else, self the loser thought that doing this diary might make for some diversion from the week’s other craziness in multiple areas. Plus, it will serve as a useful e-watering hole for anyone here who actually did see the HD-cast, to comment on it and give a heads-up as to what to expect at the Encore presentation.
First, as is traditional for this series, initial linky goodness from the Met on the production:
* General page
* pdf of today’s program booklet
Michael Cooper has a preview article in the NYT here. As well, here are reviews from pretty much the usual suspects:
* Anthony Tommasini, NYT
* George Loomis, Financial Times
* Eric C. Simpson, New York Classical Review
* David Patrick Stearns, WQXR
If you actually look at the reviews before proceeding, you’ll note that the mixed-feeling reactions among them are actually quite high. If you didn’t read them, semi-spoiler summary:
AT, DPS = generally positive
GL, ECS = more negative
Before discussing aspects of those reactions, though, it might be worth mentioning a look at on-line ticket availability info, as of about 3 PM STL time today:
Tuesday night 12/18 = 49 seats left
Sat. matinee 12/22 = 0 seats (i.e. sold out)
Wed. night 12/26 = 9 seats
Sat. night 12/29 = 0 seats (i.e. sold out)
The audience capacity of the Metropolitan Opera is 3,977, for all seats and standing room places. So having so few seats available for this run of La Traviata is a good sign fiscally for the Met, at least for this specific production. The Met has had to deal with declining box office over the past several years (the “leaky bucket” audience syndrome, a topic for another day), as well as the long-standing disaster of the sexual misconduct scandal involving the Met’s former music director (whose name will go unmentioned here, except simply to say that he has about as much credibility in denying his conduct as Traitor Drumpf in denying involvement in a particular scandal in the news this week). So the Met Opera needs all the good news that it can get, and strong box office for this new production of La Traviata certainly counts as good news.
Plus, this raises the question of how much reviews can impact box office in general, or in this case, perhaps not. Intuitively speaking, as I obviously have no evidence either way (loser, he), it’s highly doubtful that even the geekiest opera nerd in NYC reads all the reviews prior to checking out a production. Probably the most influential, or at least widely read, outlet for reviews of the Met Opera productions is the NYT, and Tommasini probably the most widely read of the reviewers in NYC overall. Granted, La Traviata is one of the most popular of all operas, where, as noted in the Met Opera’s program booklet:
“…according to popular lore, for the last one hundred years, there has been at least one performance of La Traviata somewhere in the world every single night.”
An opera acquaintance once wryly mentioned that for any opera company, if the budget suddenly tightens for the next season, La Traviata is almost always on the list of fallback options, since it has only 3 main lead singers, and one doesn’t necessarily need a massive chorus, sets, or general production values to stage it successfully. However, precisely because of its immense popularity with opera audiences, La Traviata is pretty much guaranteed to be box-office gold unless a production is stupendously bad or the singing is truly awful. Plus, some quotes attributed to “Joe Green” (i.e. composer Giuseppe Verdi – do the translation, if you haven’t figured out the joke) himself, loosely paraphrased, go as follows:
“Pay no attention to the critics. Pay attention instead to the box office.”
“The theater should be full and not empty.”
Such is the case here, with the Met’s production.
Looking at the critical reaction, the clear sense is that this production is a more “traditional” staging, i.e. costumes and sets of an older era, certainly not updated to the current day, or done in what the ‘moldy fig’ traditionalists among opera-goers like to call “Eurotrash”. If you ever get to the Met Opera in your life (and if you have any interest in opera, you should, at least once, as Tippi Hedren, in her 80’s, did for the first night of Marnie this season), one classic example of a traditional staging that probably will never go away is Franco Zeffirelli’s production of La bohème, well into its 4th decade of life (it’s originally from 1981). The prior production of La Traviata, by Willy Decker, was a case of the opposite, that strongly divided opinions at the time. Cooper notes in his preview article:
“Introducing new Met productions of beloved staples is not for the faint of heart: Conservative members of the audience tend to howl at modernizing ideas, while more adventurous operagoers are just as dismayed by stagings they see as hidebound.”
If you care to read the comments in the NYT preview article or DPS’ WQXR review, you’ll definitely see whiners of the 1st group regarding the Willy Decker production of La Traviata. This newer staging by Michael Mayer is certainly more on the artistically conservative side, from the critical comments:
Tommasini: “Mr. Mayer — who made his Met debut in 2013 with a Rigoletto updated to 1960s Las Vegas and recently staged Nico Muhly’s Marnie — has said he wanted to capture the mix of romantic and decadent elements of Traviata. He presents the opera, as other directors have, as the memories of Violetta, who is seen dying in bed during the prelude…
For all its decadent touches — slightly garish, Day-Glo costumes in the party scenes (designed by Susan Hilferty); steamy ballet dancers who perform for the guests at Flora’s party — Mr. Mayer’s production is essentially a traditional staging set in the mid-19th century. But the imagery is not that involving, especially in comparison with the boldly surreal, excitingly provocative Willy Decker staging it’s replacing. If a production is going to rely on what’s in effect a unit set, it would be better for that set to be more visually interesting.”
Loomis: “Has the Metropolitan Opera turned its back on modern productions? Last year’s new Tosca reverted to Franco Zeffirelli’s overblown style but subjected it to a new twist. Now an interestingly innovative production of Verdi’s La traviata by Willy Decker — the one from Salzburg with the big clock — has been replaced by a production by Michael Mayer of surpassing gaudiness and few ideas.”
Simpson: “Unfortunately, too much…confetti-and-bubbles frivolity crept into the new staging as well. This has been a busy season for director Michael Mayer, who created the production of Marnie that premiered in October. This new Traviata is the first big miss of his young Met career, offering a glitzy confection with a too-clever concept.”
Especially from Loomis: ouch. Plus, from Tommasini, it’s kind of surprising to read him pulling out the critical knives for a new Met Opera production, since he has historically been quite deferential to the Met in his reviews. This micro-nitpicking trend in AT’s reviews seems to have increased since the aforementioned sexual misconduct scandal burst out in the news, almost as if AT is “acting out” some subliminal, hard-to-describe disappointment of some sort, with something or someone. On the more positive side, here is DPS, albeit with at least one reservation:
“After the stripped-down, modernized, super-obvious Willy Decker production of past seasons, the true-to-period sumptuousness of the new Traviata stage set was a relief. Director Mayer did have a concept lurking about: Each scene was set in the same dome-shaped room (something like the concert hall at the Frick Collection), suggesting that the tubercular courtesan Violetta — who falls in love with young Alfredo but is broken up by his snobby family — was trapped no matter what she did. Her death bed, positioned in the middle of the stage, was visible (sometimes annoyingly so) most of the time.”
One other aspect of Mayer’s staging got quite a bit of critical attention, on what seems like a detail, but which elicits from Tommasini, at least, some very sharp and passionate analysis of what he didn’t like about it. Namely, in Act II, when Germont, Alfredo’s dad, mentions his daughter (thus Alfredo’s sister) who is about to be married, the daughter remains off-stage. But not so in this production, where:
“….the crucial scene with Violetta was nearly ruined by an ill-considered directorial touch.
Germont tells Violetta that he has a daughter at home whose engagement is jeopardized by the family scandal Alfredo has created. In this production, Germont brings his daughter, played by a silent actor, onstage with him. But Germont would never expose his daughter to a woman like Violetta. And the tragic poignancy of Violetta’s sacrifice when she agrees to give up Alfredo comes from her imagining that young woman’s predicament. The daughter is more real when we don’t see her.”
Tommasini has a point, because in a 19th-century context and in the eyes of a ‘respectable middle-class’ type like Giorgio Germont, Violetta is, to be quite cruel about it, little more than a prostitute, even if she turns out to be the “hooker with a heart of gold” type. So it would seem indeed extremely unlikely that he would want his daughter to encounter such a person, in person.
Simpson uses a harder and slightly snarkier edge in his criticism of that one change to the original stage directions:
‘Mayer has a gift for visual flair… But the striking effects are lost in a sea of strange decisions — most bewildering of all being the choice to actually supply Germont père’s daughter onstage when he visits Violetta and Alfredo’s secret retreat. “Pura siccome un angelo,” Germont’s humble plea with Violetta to give up the affair for the sake of his family, becomes a cold act of emotional blackmail with her present: “Look at this sweet girl–you wouldn’t want to ruin her life, would you?” After her thirty seconds in the spotlight, Mlle. Germont retreats back behind the trellises where she lurks awkwardly by the door for the rest of the scene. Even stranger, she doesn’t come back out ten minutes later for Violetta’s confrontation with her brother Alfredo: apparently someone has to keep an eye on the horse-drawn carriage.’
Again: ouch. (Moral of the story: when opera reviews get bee-yotch-y, look out.) Loomis sums up his own opinion in one line:
“His main innovation was lame — bringing Alfredo’s sister onstage as a mute witness while her father persuades Violetta to give up Alfredo.”
However, perhaps ever the contrarian, Stearns has a more positive view of this change:
“Among the more distinctive staging touches: When Alfredo’s father Georgio [sic] arrived to convince her to leave Alfredo for the sake of his sister's impending marriage, the girl came along — which was a nice touch, since she was of a gawky age and perhaps witnessing the cruelty of the real world for the first time.”
Admittedly, this is but one moment in the whole production. But details do matter, along side the big picture. In any case, while reading these reactions in advance does clearly spoil any surprise, since I know that it’s coming, maybe I’ll react differently than the majority.
One other aspect that is novel about the lead casting in this product is the presence of Juan Diego Florez as Alfredo, the tenor romantic lead. This is because JDF has made his operatic name in earlier Italian repertoire like Rossini, or bel canto composers like Donizetti and Bellini, which tend to be ‘lighter’ in style in terms or textures, certainly nothing like Wagner or Richard Strauss (i.e. JDF won’t be singing Siegfried anytime soon). In his preview article, Cooper noted how the Met Opera’s new music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, was guiding JDF into this ‘new’ (for him) style:
‘[Nézet-Séguin] has been helping the singers hone their roles — especially the star tenor Juan Diego Flórez, a bel canto specialist known for his high C’s, who is singing the somewhat lower and less elaborately ornamented role of Alfredo for the first time. Mr. Flórez, whose Alfredo promises nevertheless to be very much in the bel canto tradition, praised Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s understanding of voices. “He wants to bring back the attention to detail that this part has,” he said in an interview.’
Reviews of JDF also fell into the mixed bag category, namely that his voice might not have quite the heft that it needs in the middle range for Verdi. However, most of the criticisms seem tempered by the critics’ admiration for JDF as an artist in general, and I suspect, as a person, as JDF seems like a genuinely nice guy whom everyone likes, from past HD-cast appearances and all general reports.
The above quote also notes the other main artist to factor in here, namely Yannick Nézet-Séguin in his first production as the new music director of the Met Opera. He wasn’t supposed to take the full title and duties at the Met Opera until 2020, as he has other commitments, not least the music directorship of the Philadelphia Orchestra just down I-95 and across two bookending rivers. However, after the sexual misconduct scandal exploded in late 2016, YNS tweaked his schedule (presumably giving up some of those other commitments, though I clearly don’t know the details) to become the Met Opera’s music director 2 seasons earlier than planned, even if he really doesn’t have the full bandwidth to devote to the post now. But YNS seems to be doing what he can, when he can. Cooper notes the “champagne glass” rehearsal incident where YNS made suggestions to Diana Damrau, the German soprano in the role of Violetta, and Mayer, which you can read about in the article.
The article also notes one change in terms of the evening’s running time for this production of La Traviata:
“Then there’s the big break Mr. Nézet-Séguin fought for: He persuaded the Met to restore the second intermission in La Traviata. The company, conscious that many people now prefer shorter nights at the opera, had been performing the work with only one intermission in recent years. But Mr. Nézet-Séguin pushed to bring back the second interval, so the singers could rest their voices between the second and third acts, and audiences could experience the opera and its pacing more as Verdi conceived it.
‘Verdi is strongest when we respect the text very much, when we respect the music, when we respect the drama,’ Mr. Nézet-Séguin said.”
This pushes the evening something like another 30 minutes or so longer, at a rough guess, compared to a production with just one intermission. So the audience, the artists, and the backstage staff will all get out later accordingly. However, at the risk of sounding flippantly cynical, one benefit of the additional intermission is that it gives one more opportunity to make more drink sales at the bar. Any music club owner will tell you that the real money doesn’t come from show ticket sales, but from the bar.
The reviews for YNS’ direction from the pit were mostly good, with some particular reservations from Simpson in his review. But even Simpson noted a classy gesture from YNS at the close of opening night:
“The closer collaboration between Nézet-Séguin and the Met Orchestra is a partnership to look forward to, one that he honored when he invited the entire pit onstage for the final bow.”
Tommasini noted this as well:
“And in a rare gesture of respect and good will, the Met’s musicians joined Mr. Nézet-Séguin on stage for a bow after the show.”
Whether this happened at the Met’s HD-cast, I don’t know, although everyone in the house today or who saw the HD-cast clearly knows (if they didn’t leave either early). But it will be interesting to see at the encore HD-cast.
With this, you can either:
* Discuss today’s HD-cast (and thus plant spoilers for self the loser), or:
* Observe the standard SNLC protocol.
One can certainly do both, of course, if you’re so inspired.