Fledermaus

By Michael Walsh

Everything about mid-19th century Vienna was larger than life, from the caloric content of the pastries at Demel to the Emperor Franz Josef's mustaches. For its new Die Fledermaus, televised by PBS on New Year's Eve, the Metropolitan Opera has constructed outsize rooms in Johann Strauss's idealized waltzing city with such vivid realism that they could be sold today as luxury condominiums. Eisenstein's residence comes equipped with a spacious sun porch; Prince Orlofsky's pleasure palace boasts both a grand foyer and a palm-court refectory that make Maxim's look understated. When it comes to grandeur, Otto Schenk and Gunther Schneider-Siemssen's magnum of a production has popped its cork.

Recent Met stagings -- notably Franco Zeffirelli's spacious La Boheme from 1981-82 and his Tosca, for which Rome was rebuilt, two seasons ago -- also have marooned their casts in movie sets. Presto: singing pygmies. Now comes this extravagant Fledermaus with singers who become a backup chorus to the brocade and the woodwork. Rosalinde (Soprano Kiri Te Kanawa) gets lost in the crowd during Orlofsky's drinking party in Act II, and the vengeful Dr. Falke (Baritone Michael Devlin) blends nicely with the patterned wallpaper and the potted ferns.

Musically, the performance is just as diffident. No matter how often heard, the melodic freshets and torrents of Strauss's score should always flow, but under Conductor Jeffrey Tate's charmless time beating, even the famous waltz proves resistible. Te Kanawa displays her shimmering voice to some advantage in the first act, then fades away. As the bubbly chambermaid Adele, Soprano Judith Blegen is unsure of pitch and unsteady of tone, while Baritone Hakan Hagegard inappropriately plays Eisenstein as a staggering buffoon.

Some of the problems could be solved by a cast and conductor with a better sense of style. Others, though, will remain. Much of the operetta's bibulous humor depends on a generous tolerance for drunk jokes, but these times do not find inebriation quite as amusing as formerly. Further, Director Schenk's maladroit adaptation of the libretto is not particularly funny, although his appearance as Frosch, the tipsy jailer, has a couple of comic moments amid the prevailing tedium. But Die Fledermaus should soar and sparkle, not merely be endured.

Even sophisticated audiences get a childlike enjoyment out of scenic prestidigitation, and when the anteroom of Orlofsky's villa rotates in the second act to reveal a banquet hall with a sit-down dinner for 57, the marvel is rewarded with outbursts of applause. A revolving stage, however, should not be the highlight of the evening.