The Opera Week That Was

By William Bender

The orchestra pit of any opera house is best heard from, not seen. That was not the case last week, as the Paris Opera opened at New York's Metropolitan Opera House and Milan's La Scala moved into Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center. It was the first visit to the U.S. for both the storied companies, and in both pits there was unexpected drama on opening night.

At the Met, Sir Georg Solti, the Paris Opera's principal guest conductor, led Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. A light had been glaring in his eyes all evening and, leaning away to avoid it, he had already broken two batons. Then, early on in Act III, he stabbed himself in the temple with the point of his third baton. Blood poured down into his right eye, dripping onto the score and music desk. Onstage, Count Almaviva was alone, plotting revenge against his uppity manservant, Figaro. Solti went on beating time with his right hand and sopping up the blood from his forehead and eye with a handkerchief in the left. "It was like a butcher shop," he said later, with characteristic bluntness.

Hand Cranks. Finally, the Count's aria ended. Solti scurried to the conductor's dressing room. It was an opportune moment to abandon the podium, because the opera had moved into a recitative section. Thus while Figaro was discovering that he was the long-lost son of two people he could live without, Solti was holding cold compresses to his head. Like the seasoned pros they are, the members of the orchestra began the subsequent sextet by themselves. His arms beating as he ascended into view, Solti returned to his place. His wound turned out to be minor, and was later patched with a small bandage. "Nothing like this has ever happened before," said Solti. Perhaps not in front of an audience, but Solti once stabbed his hand with a baton during a recording session in Vienna.

Many in the audience were not aware of Solti's dilemma. That cannot be said for what happened at La Scala's first night in Washington. The audience filed into the Kennedy Center Opera House to find the pit raised to the level of the stage. "I've never seen that before," said an usher in response to a ticket holder's question. No one had. The pit had been elevated for a rehearsal that afternoon and the hydraulic lift had stuck. While the audience--including Vice President and Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller and Mrs. Giovanni Leone, the wife of Italy's President--waited, stagehands lowered the pit by hand cranks. The prelude to Verdi's Macbeth began 54 minutes late.

The audience took the delay with good humor. It was, after all, a proud evening for Washington.

La Scala opened with Macbeth, considered one of its best new productions. Typically, the company offered a cast of Italian and non-Italian singers, notably Italy's Piero Cappuccilli as Macbeth, the U.S.'s Shirley Verrett as Lady Macbeth and Bulgaria's Nicolai Ghiaurov as Banquo. On the podium was Claudio Abbado, the company's former music director who, at 43, is a conductor of international stature. The production was conceived and staged by Italy's Giorgio Strehler (see box). For Strehler, it was one of three moments in the spotlight. His staging of Figaro was the first hit of the Paris Opera's run in New York. This week La Scala will introduce his production of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra.

Fiendlike Queen. Strehler's Macbeth turned out to be carefully thought out but disappointing. The play is one of Shakespeare's most vivid, bloody and craftily psychological works. So was Verdi's operatic treatment when he finally finished revising it 18 years after its 1847 premiere. Strehler's stylized production is bloodless and static; lethal emotion is indicated by second-rate symbols. Once they seize the throne, Macbeth and his lady trail around in long, heavy robes apparently intended to represent both royalty and their guilty burden. But the onlooker simply worries about whether, in their ceaseless circling, one may trip over the other's train. Lady Macbeth's wondrous sleepwalking scene is a long left-to-right stroll on a narrow ledge. The only problem is that Verdi was not interested in a high-wire act--Bellini took care of that very nicely in La Sonnambula--but in the play of Lady Macbeth's bloodstained hands. As Strehler directs her, Lady Macbeth (Verrett) has plenty of trouble keeping her balance, but in the wrong way.

Were Verrett the Lady Macbeth many had anticipated, perhaps Strehler's mannered direction would have been less bothersome. Both visually and vocally, Verrett conveyed little of Shakespeare's "fiendlike queen." Verdi wanted Lady Macbeth to be "twisted and ugly" and to sing with a "raw, choked, hollow voice." That may be asking too much. But Verrett's bland, unchanging facial expression and her constant concern--except in the sleepwalking scene, her best musical moment--with polished tone did not begin to get inside a character that is more important to the opera than Macbeth.

Abbado's conducting was a deft blend of energy, delicacy and a Toscanini-like instinct for the dramatic jugular. Even better, perhaps, was his mercurial handling two nights later of Rossini's La Cenerentola (Cinderella). This work is chamber music for the opera house and easily the high point of the composer's comic style. Abbado has that style in his bones.

Cenerentola is less popular than Rossini's The Barber of Seville, probably because of its emphasis on bravura ensemble work over traditional solo arias. Further, the title role is written for an almost extinct species, the coloratura contralto. La Scala has such a rara avis in Lucia Valentini Terrani. She really has too hefty a look for an ideal Cinderella, but her voice was lusciously bronze and agile. The production is by France's Jean-Pierre Ponnelle; within a delightful children's cutout house, he manipulates his characters like a swinging Coppelius. How, for example, Soprano Margherita Guglielmi (Half Sister Clorinda) can make her hoopskirt behave like a Hula-Hoop and still sing is her secret and Ponnelle's. But it is immense fun to watch.

Rossini's humor was, of course, strictly of the broad variety. Mozart's was something else again. One cherishes the 18th century for The Marriage of Figaro alone. One takes heart in the present, when a work of such bite and compassion can be done as well as it was on the Paris Opera's first night in New York. Among the many talents at work was the same essential Strehler as in Macbeth--but what a difference! It was as if he had taken his lead from the Figaro overture, that barely perceptible rustle of strings and woodwinds that swells to incandescence. All was succinct and imbued with restrained passion.

To Strehler, Cherubino is not really a silly little cherub, but a hot-blooded youth out to touch, hold, kiss and sleep with any woman who will have him. The result is that Cherubino becomes the mirror reflecting everyone else's sensuality. Other directorial details linger in the memory: the Countess singing of her lost love (Porgi amor), while behind her lies a trampled bed, the obvious result of a night of lonely tossing; the haunting way the light in the palace recedes in different layers of intensity as the day wanes at the end of Act III.

For all its stageworthiness, Figaro lives by its music, as any great opera must. It has been many years since New York has heard it sung and played so exquisitely. To describe the entire cast, the word perfect for once seems apt. Among the women, British Soprano Margaret Price sang the Countess with an appealingly fresh vocal bloom and a masterly control of the Mozartean style. From New York's Frederica von Stade came a Cherubino of distilled soprano beauty and ebullient range of boyish emotion. Soprano Mirella Freni remains the best Susanna of the day. Belgium's Jose Van Dam is a handsome, intelligent, rich-voiced Figaro. Gabriel Bacquier's Count Almaviva just gets better with the years.

Presiding over an obviously recharged Paris Opera orchestra, Solti made his first appearance in an American opera house since 1963-64. His Figaro had a spacious relaxation not always heard in his work with the Chicago Symphony. His handling of the surprising events that constitute the wondrous finale of Act II was but one of his many lessons of the evening in how to pace an opera.

At the company's second offering of the week, Solti again took the podium for the company's three-month-old production of Verdi's Otello. It is what is known in backstage lingo as a heavy-lumber show, and an odd one at that. The predominant thrust of the sets by the Czech Josef Svoboda is vertical and white--a tacky white, unfortunately. All of Cyprus seems to rise from the sea right onstage, leaving British Stage Director Terry Hands almost no room to move his characters in. There were one or two striking images--notably lago, watching Desdemona while leaning on a huge cross. To cite one not-so-striking image, Desdemona in the last act seems to be going to bed under a bulwark of the George Washington Bridge.

Despite the sets and Hands' pallid direction, there was much power in the musical performance. Solti's opening storm scene was a holocaust, the offstage military brass in Act III a multidirectional marvel, the instrumental heart break of Desdemona's last act Willow Song and Ave Maria delicately etched.

The Desdemona was Soprano Price again, pouring forth innocence and purity where, as the Figaro Countess, she had exuded weary experience. The contrast was complete, and Price clearly established herself as one of opera's grandest, most exciting sopranos. Her Otello was Italy-born, Argentine-reared Carlo Cossutta. He has a clear, powerful, sweet-topped dramatic tenor voice. He cuts a striking figure as the Moor general, and gives a subtle portrait of a man tearing himself to pieces with jealousy. Baritone Bacquier makes an old, haunchy lago, but there is craft, wile and evil in every gesture and vocal turn.

To be presented this week are the La Scala Boccanegra and the Paris version of Gounod's Faust. Even though both companies were off their home ground, comparisons were inevitable.

Paris came up with a better-rounded roster of singers-- one of whom, Von Stade, goes to Washington this week to assume the title role in Cenerentola for La Scala. Both companies were obviously up for the occasion, but Paris, at least with Solti in the pit, seemed to have an edge in esprit, or, to be diplomatic, brio.

But what may be remembered most are the small similarities. Like the smiling eagerness of all hands to take bows. At the end of each act, not only would all the La Scala principals file out for a curtain call, but the conductor too; that never happens in the U.S. At the end of the next-to-last act of Paris' Otello, the curtain went back up on the entire assemblage of generals, courtiers and ladies. And there, front and center, stood a little man in a tuxedo. He turned out to be someone who in America would be almost anonymous: Chorus Master Jean Laforge. There was credit for all in the opera week that was; both Paris and La Scala turned out to be vintages that travel well.

William Bender

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