TEFLON
I wonder if we aren’t confusing the Metropolitan Opera with the Washington Monument and “grand opera” with “opera house.” What might also help is to figure out what the word “belongs” really means. There is a lot of conflict at the moment as to what does and does not belong inside the Met. Peter Gelb the Met’s intendant seems weary of publicly pussyfooting around charges that a “grand opera” repertory has survived a few hundred years of exposure, taken over the premises and relegated the new and the fresh to the sidewalk. His productions of new operas, and there are some, seem almost defensive measures — there, that’s done. Let’s get back to “Tosca.”
Composers and their listener-allies are not having it. The government subsidizers, after a postwar of largess, have become stingier but the Met has always survived on rich friends. These continue to back the Puccini-Verdi Industrial Complex against what they see as smellier revolutionaries. Ambitious newcomers in turn are rightly resentful. Opera is a living organism, say the latter. The Met smells of embalming fluid.
I have never resented a penny of government money given to the arts but in my 27 years on the beat I was amazed at how the system was played. How does one persuade a Washington politician who thinks Bach is a kind of beer to give money to put on my opera? It’s all in the subject matter — a tragic movie star, a giant of contemporary history, news of the day, a cataclysmic event that even culture-free senators will know about. Quality of the music? Dramatic values? Of lesser importance. These operas have premieres but rarely revivals. They are like fireflies.
Both sides are right and wrong. Those who argue that the “standard repertory” is dense with genius and that new pieces fail to match them should ask any musicologist about a 19th century that produced enormous amounts of musical trash to go along with an occasional “Tristan und Isolde.” Operas by Saariaho and Ades do get noticed and some Met audience members like them.
I used to rail at culturally unwashed audiences happy to hum along to the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto while at the same time “Moses und Aron” sat mute in some music librarian’s file cabinet. Maybe my anger was misplaced. Worshipping at the altar of Rach Two is no blasphemy. (I love it.) A Haydn string quartet may have more to say but it will have to make do with a smaller listenership. Peace.
And who says the Metropolitan Opera and its fellow traditionalists are obligated to give their imprimatur to operas that speak radically different languages with questionable persuasiveness? Well, the pure of heart do and I feel for them. I too hope that Messiaen’s “St. Francis” and operas of equal heft find their way forward but God knows how. Certainly not by throwing one new mediocrity after another up against the Met stage and watching it bounce back. The Metropolitan Opera is not a workshop. Capitulate. Let the Met be what its patrons want it to be, guilt free. Walk around it. The pure of heart feel it only fair that the new be nurtured by the old. Fairness, however, is not high on the list of humanity’s ambitions.
By BERNARD HOLLAND