For this first Saturday night of 2013, time for another SNLC mash-up with Demi Moaned's past occasional opera series, fitting this is now the 13th in the latter series. With that in mind, time for today's version of the standard lead-off question:
Anyone see the Metropolitan Opera's HD-movie cast of Les Troyens today?
Given that this production was 5.5 hours long, with 2 intermissions, it's understandable if your answer is "no". However, because this work is probably the single biggest challenge in all of French opera, it's a rare treat to get to see it staged in any form, live or Memorex-live. The last Met Opera performances of Les Troyens were in 2003, notable because the late great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sang Queen Dido (Didon) of Carthage. However, for this particular HD-cast, a new star had the spotlight, the young American tenor Bryan Hymel, singing the lead tenor role of Aeneas (Énée). More below the flip......
First, just so you get up to speed on the plot, you can read the Met's synopsis here. At the risk of stating the obvious, composer (and librettist) Hector Berlioz based the opera on the fall of Troy at the culmination of the Trojan War. Aeneas and other Trojans escape the destruction (interestingly, all men - more about that later), getting diverted to Carthage on the north African coast, and then having to go off to Italy, to found a "new Troy" in the form of what will become the Roman empire.
The opera falls essentially into two parts, sometimes presented with these titles:
Part 1: La prise de Troie (The Fall of Troy; Acts I & II)
Part 2: Les Troyens à Carthage (The Trojans at Carthage, Acts III-V)
In Part 1, where Acts I and II were presented without a break in this production, the dominating voice is that of Cassandra (Cassandre, sung by Deborah Voigt). She's the daughter of Priam, and thus brother of Hector, cursed with the gift of prophecy, but to have no one believe her, because she refused to give herself to the god Apollo once upon a time. Hence there's more than a bit of emotional "one-noteness" about her character, as she keeps singing about how doomed, doomed, doomed, doomed Troy and its people are, but virtually everyone else there is blind to that idea. The one exception turns out to be the priest Laocoön, who was wary of Greeks bearing gifts, and off-stage (narrated by Aeneas later), hurled his spear at the massive wooden horse left behind by the Greeks. Two serpents emerged from the sea and ate Laocoön and his two sons. Not a good sign.
In Act II, of course, now everyone sees that Cassandra was correct. Aeneas and a number of Trojan men escape the burning city with the city's treasures (Priam's scepter, that kind of stuff). Cassandra leads the remaining women (the ones who don't slink off to be captives of the Greeks, that is) in a scene of mass suicide just as Greek soldiers come on the stage to search for Troy's civic treasures. Hence my comment about "all men" earlier as escapees from Troy.
Things calm down in Part 2, with Act III showing the kingdom of Carthage under the rule of Queen Dido (Susan Graham), and doing a pretty good job, from all the civic goods shown in pageant at the start. She's widowed, and has been approached for her hand in marriage, but she has refused. Aeneas and the Trojans have arrived, but Aeneas has hidden himself for the moment. It's only when the minister Narbal brings word of an attack by Iarbas, ruler of Numidia, and that the Carthageneans are under-equipped to halt the attack, that Aeneas reveals his identity, and offers his men as defenders of Carthage.
Of course, once the battle is done and Aeneas and Dido have locked gazes, you know where this is going. They get it on in Act IV, which subsequently depicts of Carthage in a state of lethargy with Dido in love and neglecting her civic duties as ruler, to Narbal's worry. However, the implacable gods will have their way, and the spirits of the underworld coldly urge Aeneas to abandon Dido and fulfill his destiny of founding Rome, not to mention a heroic battlefield death. Dido isn't too happy about this, as you can guess, and lets loose at him as he goes. As at the end of Act II, the climax is another female suicide, this time Dido stabbing herself on the pyre with Aeneas' past belongings, but dying with one last vision of Carthage going down and of "Rome immortelle".
This production was a revival of the 2003 production by Francesca Zambello, which replaced the older staging from the 1980's (which you can watch below, at least for now). I actually traveled to NYC to see this production back in February 2003, which turned out to be the final performance with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Queen Dido. I didn't have a ticket to the performance when I planned to travel, as tickets all sold out on the 1st day. However, when I got there, I'd heard about standing room. So I bought a standing room ticket as a bit of an insurance policy, in case I couldn't get a real seat. Luckily, things worked out that I got a real seat, and I sold my standing room spot to someone else.
So was it a mind-blowing, utterly fabulous experience? Well, to be honest, not completely. This is Berlioz's longest work, of course, and it does drag in Act IV particularly. Depicting lethargy on stage ideally shouldn't be lethargic to watch and listen to emotionally, but that's a tricky feat to pull off. At the time, I thought the production was fine, not great, but good enough. Given how rare it is to stage the opera, you work with the production that you get, not the one you wish you had, especially since no one asked me (or anyone else) to direct. It was a good experience, if not stupendous, but worth the trip overall. It also proved to be the one and only time that I ever saw Lorraine Hunt Lieberson live. I waited what seemed like hours at the stage door to get her autograph in my program, especially since I was keen to get to another concert at Carnegie Hall by 8 PM. Fortunately, she emerged with her husband just in time, and I got her signature. Little did I realize that it proved to be my only chance ever, since she died in 2006.
I was sort of iffy about going back to see the HD-cast, since I'd seen it before, even if, by my own statement above, chances to see the thing live are rare. What changed my mind was the fact that Bryan Hymel, as noted in the intro, was called in to take over for the originally scheduled Aeneas, Marcello Giordani. Per the NYT review by Anthony Tommasini of the performance when Hymel took over:
"Marcello Giordani....was a vocally wobbly Aeneas when the Met's 2003 production returned on Dec. 13. Mr. Giordani sang the next two scheduled performances. But on Saturday [12/22] it was announced that he was withdrawing from the final four performances and retiring the role from his repertory, and that Mr. Hymel would take his place."
The last bit sounds curious about "retiring the role", as well as a bit uncomfortably close to recapping what sounds like a Met Opera PR-statement, but that aside, I'd heard about Hymel stepping into the same role in the 2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden production of
Les Troyens and saving the day there. Given how demanding the role is, not many tenors can do that. So it seemed a natural that if Giordani wasn't quite up to the job, Hymel would get the call, if he was available.
Evidently, Hymel was available, and indeed got the call. In the 2nd intermission chit-chat between Hymel, Graham, and HD-cast hostess Joyce Di Donato, Hymel said that he had a rehearsal on Christmas Eve for about 2 hours or so. He then sang Aeneas on the day after Christmas, in what proved to be his Met Opera debut. Evidently not just the audience was happy, per Tommasini's review:
"When, close to midnight on Wednesday, the American tenor Bryan Hymel appeared for his curtain call at the end of the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of the Berlioz epic Les Troyens, the entire cast lined up onstage and applauded along with the audience during the prolonged ovation. This gesture from the singers seemed not just a welcoming tribute to a young colleague making his Met debut on short notice in the daunting role of Aeneas. The cast members, especially the beaming mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who was again a vocally sumptuous and alluring Dido, seemed genuinely grateful to Mr. Hymel for saving the day by giving an impassioned and confident performance of a heroic role that dominates this formidable French opera."
In fact, after his big Act V aria "Inutiles regrets" ("Useless regrets"), the house erupted in prolonged cheers. At the very end, had this been the production with the original cast, I'm guessing that Susan Graham would have been the last singer to take the curtain call before bringing on the conductor. However, under these circumstances, it seemed only fitting that Hymel was the last singer on the curtain call, since everyone knew that he would get the biggest cheers of the afternoon among the cast.
The rest of the cast was overall quite good also, but it's pretty clear to whom the afternoon belonged. In fact, in that same intermission chit-chat moment, Hymel recalled that 7 years earlier, he and Graham had sung at a gala concert in Louisiana. Graham was impressed by Hymel's talent, and evidently told him at the time, "don't (*&#$& it up". One hopes the same thing now, that his 15 minutes of operatic fame don't completely go to his head. But if you saw him, he seems like a genuinely nice guy, so all best wishes to him, and of course congratulations on a job well done.
BTW, if you have a lot of time to spare:
It's obviously the older production from the Met, this particular version from 1983. I wonder how long the above will last on YT. In addition, if you want to see Susan Graham as Dido (I include Part 1 for completeness, although SG's not in Part 1, of course):
Part I (Acts I & II):
Acts III & IV:
Act V:
With that, since this is a mash-up of series, you have 2 options for the "usual protocol":
(1) Chit-chat about this HD-cast, or this opera overall, or:
(2) The usual SNLC option
Up to you which, of course. You can even do both. We're flexible here :) . Or maybe that's wishy-washy......
