A Met fan details what’s gone wrong
OperaMatthew Paris shares his thoughts on the problem:
I’m one of the Met audience who has stopped going to their enterprise after enjoying opera there going back to the 50s. I can tell you why. First of all half the operas they put on are done in gross travesty visuals by regie-directors who have no idea that the function of an opera production or theatre show of any kind is to present the intents of the composer and librettist, or don’t care whether that is honest directing. I’ve even seen a Carmen there where the director had the stomping of feet drown out the overture. Overtures aren’t an excuse for mounting dumb shows.
From a hapless ignoramus like Peter Gelb down these honchos there aren’t musicians. They can’t discern what might be of value and what is politically orthodox posture. They need an artistic director who values what opera is: High art and a harvest of genius. They had one and their humiliated and fired him. Nobody at the Met has the taste or the clout to say this is not what the audience wants.
There are many ways to honor these goals but setting an opera in Las Vegas or a Kansas City high school lunch room are not two of them. Opera going and full houses stands or falls on the musical genius of the composer. It’s not about the supposed ingenuity or petty politics of the production. They don’t deserve the fruit of egoistical mediocrities at war with the opera.
Secondly if nobody at the Met or elsewhere can figure out how to avoid living composers and librettists, real enough but creatures of deadly political orthodoxy, there are at least fifty to a hundred operas I’ve never seen live but have taken in on thankfully on YouTube that the Met might do with some success if they purged themselves of regie-directors. The late City Opera was able to mount decades of successful seasons based on their correct but once audacious assessment that many bel canto operas were filled with genius. They also were aware Handel had turned out several of them. Even they hardly touched the work of the geniuses of the French and Italian baroque. They always had a full house for the three extant Monteverdi operas.
Knowing what ling and dead composers might write a viable opera requires taste and knowledge of who has had those skills. It usually isn’t professors. It might be movie musicians like James Horner. The only great Western Academic and great opera writer was Cherubini. The Russians had Anton Rubinstein and Rimsky-Korsakoff. Both were in many ways pariahs.
Thirdly because the people in charge at the Met some to come from nowhere they don’t value American operas even though their audience are nearly all Americans and the Met is set in an America city. One might ask whether or not American composers who have written operas are ever done by the met. The late City Opera did some of them but the Met never did.
The general implosion of the Met is not an isolated event. We have all sorts of institution who once were viable that are no longer what they had been from publishing to theater to museums that advertise viable work done 100 years ago by the now dead as ‘modern art”.
None of them can do what they once did because they are hollow vessels inhabited by unqualified people from top to bottom. Moreover with such ignorant officers they’d rather go kerplunk that look for remedies and adaptions that are for them unimaginable and beyond them. Then, since they are carpetbaggers, they will take the same policies to do in other temples of High Art elsewhere, maybe Toronto .
I think one of the inarticulate critiques of these times is that nobody now is interested in High Art. They think High Art is monarchical. It is true that almost all High Art was financed by monarchies and institutional religions. It does have a formidable quality pharaohs and hierophants aim for. To be daunting to the innocent., isn’t history taught as the rise and fall of such people?
Operas are compromised by geniuses who some nobleman or prelate has the sense to value. Opera audiences are mostly enthusiasts of elevated shabby genteel folk. Opera going is not as casual as hamburger gobbling.
Recently you noted there’s nobody to replace Alfred Brendel playing Beethoven. Well, there are such people but they are turned out mostly by Asian musical schools. I heard some great basso and tenor from Korea at a Met gala a few years ago. One of the reasons Brendel was as good as he was came from an ethic of driven hard work. One can’t play the piano mechanically well without it. One also can’t be an ideal Met performer or compose an opera without being a kind of radical and sometimes even twisted spirit that thrives on hard work.
We even need an audience like that. Nobody is going to listen to Moses und Aron or Mose et Pharoan when they are trained only to half-listen to Guy Lombardo oldies in an elevator. There’s nothing wrong with Guy Lombardo; there are other ways to make music.
One takes that value of ferocity of Schoenberg or Rossini out of the society and you get what we’ve got.
Oh dear oh dear. It’s the big bad regie theater wolves again. Well, maybe he’s right. Maybe the Met audience is too provincial, too shortsighted and too petty bourgeois to appreciate contemporary theater that sells out houses all over western Europe. They call it Eurotrash for a reason I guess. I sincerely hope Mr. Gelb will soon come to reason, accept the audience level he has been dealt, and give New York the gorgeous Zeffirelli sets again that it craves and deserves.
Sadly that DOES describe the majority of the over-60 audience, reaffirming the need to add newer ones.
It might be difficult to get James Horner to write an opera considering he died in 2015.
And no doubt, the moment a film composer writes an opera, the crusty old guard will howl about the Titanic-ization of opera, and erect wall to guard their precious museum pieces against modern iconoclasm..
Yes, he’s decomposing.
I agree that too many recent productions have been pointless. A director should not have anything going on that blatantly contradicts the libretto. One problem with broadening the Met’s repertoire is its size: it is simply too big for a lot of earlier opera and any chamber opera.
Wow. This is far more revealing of the regressive mindset of a chunk of the Met’s audience than it is of the Met’s view of opera.
Not least for the whining that the institution which regularly programs John Adams (Nixon in China, El Nino, Antony and Cleopatra), Kevin Puts (The Hours), Jake Heggie (Dead Man Walking), Terence Blanchard (Champion, Fire Shut up in my bones), Philip Glass (Akhnaten), Matthew Aucoin (Eurydice), Gershwin (Porgy and Bess) is blind to American opera.
This kind of commentariat wants to kill opera, not ‘save’ it.
I could not agree more. The good news is that if you look around the audience at operas like the new productions of Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, Champion, and The Hours, you saw engaged, excited younger audience members packing the hall.
Wrong. Wrong on so many levels.
Times have changed, the world has changed and arts needs to reflect it.
A change isn’t necessarily an improvement!!
“They need an artistic director who values what opera is: High art and a harvest of genius. They had one and their humiliated and fired him.”
Haver I misunderstood this: he’s talking about the paedophile James Levine? He’s saying that opera needs *more* of that sort of leadership?
(Also might be worth pointing out to him that “regie” means “direction” so when he’s talking about “regie-direction” he’s talking gibberish).
Levine was accused of sexual approaches to individuals when they were 16 and 17. Paedophilia is a condition whereby someone is sexually attracted to pre-pubertal children, as opposed to being attracted to those old enough to enter into sexual relationships – currently 15 in France, and not too long ago 13 in some American states. Always unwise to pursue sexual relationships at work.
When you’re starting to parse definitions of sexual abuse of minors to discuss ‘how bad is it really’, you’ve already lost.
I’m sure he’s one who continues to deny Levine’s well-documented sexual crimes and abuse of authority. Legions of them in the Met subscriber base – about as easy to reason with as the Trump MAGA cult.
It’s not Trump voters who protected or supported Levine. The Met subscriber base are very anti-Trump but have no issue defending Levine.
Where is the proofreader! Way too many typos.
There’s one in your first sentence.
“Operas are compromised by geniuses” – do you mean “composed”? And there are other typos. Try rereading your articles before you publish them.
Maybe the intricacies of the cultured New York mind are beyong me, but for me this estimable Met patron’s rant is terribly confusing. Bear with me. Opera productions of living composers are to be avoided, but “museums that advertise viable work done 100 years ago by the now dead as modern art” are also bad?
And we want Monteverdi’s marble shitting gods and heroes but not relocated to an American city, but we also want American opera in American cities, but not by living composers, and anyway high art is produced for “hierophants” en “pharoans”? So let me see, Girls of the Golden West bad but Porgy and Bess (in a non-woke production of course) good? I forget for which hierophant or pharoan that one was written.
And we want Monteverdi in the Met according to “the intents of the composer”, so with a Monteverdi-sized orchestra on historical instruments, because those are perfectly suited to stadium-sized opera houses?
It all sounds a lot like teenage tantrum to me. Or like the intricacies of the cultured New York mind, of course – I couldn’t really say. In any case I’m very much looking forward to discovering those several bel canto opera’s that Händel apparently wrote.
“He who pays the piper calls the tune”.
Simple.
This is beyond comprehensible. I wouldn’t necessarily trust the opinions of a bitter elderly man, especially not one who is unable to write coherent sentences. Most of this is opinionated conjecture anyway.
It must be reassuring to know that you’ve never have typos.
Typos are one thing. Incoherent rambling is another.
Incoherent and absurdly pretentious
If “the late City Opera” was so successful at presenting Bel Canto, then why are they are “the late City Opera”?
Susan Baker
Lol!
(But seriously: there should be room for a second opera company in New York. Even Montreal has two now, with the Classica Festival engaging in rarity opera programming. Surely there’s a public for opéra comique or operetta in NY, for instance?)
Totally agree. That New York only has one opera company that can barely fill its house in a regular basis is a sin. A second, more accessible and smaller company like the City Opera was would actually help the Met as the City Opera did in its day.
Horrific Board members and people running it. City Opera had a supportive audience .
Excellent parody. Oh, you’re serious? Five words of truth (sorry I am not singing them in Italian): Not everything is for you.
If you have really been visiting the Met since the 50s, two things are certain: you will be dead soon, and the Met will sell your seat to someone younger. You are not the demographic the Met is wooing. They don’t care about your blather. Time to exit stage left, old man.
Was that really necessary?
Not that the younger generation has delivered anything flash. Consider the dangers of walking the streets of NYC, thanks to modern progressivism.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Fair dinkum on that one Sue. You take your life in your hands crossing the street – not the motorists, it’s the bicycles and scooters, typically coming the “wrong way” against traffic, running red lights and, in my experience about 20% of the time piloted by someone who is high on marijuana. And NYC is worried about drivers doing over 25 mph. Ridiculous.
Could you consider being less harsh and showing more respect? It seems the author’s words may have touched a nerve for you, but it’s important to move past that.
I’m laughing hysterically at this ridiculous article, like an old man shaking his fist at a cloud. Matthew Paris has absolutely no idea he and other geriatrics like him ARE the problem. That’s fine; we younger generations will fix it.
Yeah, with half-full houses.
Maybe, just maybe, if he told you he was a trannie and a ‘person of colour’ his words would have found acceptance. That isn’t shallow. Or anything.
Spoiled alert. When these “geriatrics like him” ran the Met, the houses were full, productions regularly sold out, singing was first class. Now it is you, the younger generation who runs the Met, with predictable disastrous results. So perhaps what needs to change is your smug attitude.
The writer has here made some worthwhile comments and I agree with many of them. However, the fact that the piece was not well written and/or proofread tends to slide its ideas down the scale from “valid/thoughtful” to “WTH ranting”.
The appalling singing doesn’t help either. Is there not one singer out there who can produce a steady, strong, and unforced tone?
Yes, there are plenty and yes, some do sing at the Met
Sir Rudolf Bing, where are you now that we need you???
Poorly written (no editor available?)
Poorly argued.
Often inaccurate (One might ask whether or not American composers who have written operas are ever done by the met. The late City Opera did some of them but the Met never did).
Comes across as backward looking and elitist.
Love the juxtaposition of Schoenberg and Rossini (I love the Moses operas).
Stuart,
Opening night at the new Met “Anthony and Cleopatra “……
Yes! It’s the staging that ruins opera. It’s a lie that modern, non-traditional staging is well-accepted in Europe. It wasn’t that long ago that a conductor bailed on Bayreuth because he found the staging incomprehensible and wrong. If the Met would fix the staging, lower ticket costs, and get back to great music things would improve.
I attend about three dozen opera productions in at least five western European countries every season. The immense majority of the stagings are “non-traditional”. And the audiences are find with it, except for some reactionaries who make lots of noise like the author of this article.That doesn’t mean these stagings are all good – I have booed a couple myself. But traditional stagings, just like musical interpretations, vary in quality too.
I have also attended a number of productions in Western European houses and agree with you: most of the staging is non-traditional and varying in quality (mostly bad, a few brilliant). But from talking to people, I saw that many detest the staging and simply attend because there is no other way to listen to music live. There are definitely not fine with it – except for some dumb kids and people with agenda.
As for those you call reactionaries, there is another name for them: opera lovers.
Paraphrasing Norma Desmond for a moment…”it is big; it’s the audiences that got small”.
You win for comment of the year!
I agree with some of his points, but not others. He does himself no favours with so many typos and by coming across as a grumpy old man. He would have done well to put his draft on hold for 24 hours and then revisit it.
So this website is in favor of James Levine, a serial pedophile, or am I missing something? Will you post just any rant here? What is the point of this article? Be ashamed of yourself.
I’m glad all the people who downvoted can forgive anything as long as a “genius” perpetrated the crime.
This little essay reads like a clever parody of a certain type of opera fan. I can agree with some of it but absolutely draw the line at “Opera going is not as casual as hamburger gobbling.” A really good hamburger is a serious thing and should be gobbled!
Ah, the real national American pastime finally is exposed!!
“Recently you noted there’s nobody to replace Alfred Brendel playing Beethoven. Well, there are such people but they are turned out mostly by Asian musical schools.” Jeez–didn’t know Leif Ove Andsnes, Helene Grimaud, Khatia Buniatishvili, Jeremy Denk, etc, were products of Asian musical schools. Wait a second…didn’t Yuja Wang get her start in an Asian music school?
Who is this so-called commentator?!
Yes, Yuja Wang got her start in an affiliated school of the Central Conservatory in Beijing. Yunchan Lim got his music education wholly in South Korea.
But she then went on to the Curtis institute and studied with Gary Grafman
If this is the kind of reclusive crank the Met is pissing off, then God bless the Met.
Better an empty house than a bad tenant, aye!!
I assume the intent of this post was to be a broadside against the Met. Instead, it’s a barely-coherent rant that’s clearly written by someone who doesn’t go to the Met often, nor other opera houses.
Let’s do some quick fact checking:
“I’ve even seen a Carmen there where the director had the stomping of feet drown out the overture.”
Fact check: FALSE.
The Richard Eyre production, which debuted in 2009, has no “stomping of feet” during the overture. Neither did the previous production by Zeffirelli. Perhaps they’re thinking of the opening scene in Act II “Les Tringles Des Sistres Tintaient” which features flamenco dancing, which is in most productions at opera houses throughout the world. This is a pretty big epic fail by the writer — how can you claim to offer criticism of opera and not be familiar with one of the most popular operas?
“Thirdly because the people in charge at the Met some to come from nowhere they don’t value American operas even though their audience are nearly all Americans and the Met is set in an America city.”
Fact check: It was James Levine and Joseph Volpe who eschewed American operas. Gelb and YNS have been much more aggressive with programming American operas, both from legends like Adams and Glass, as well as up-and-coming composers.
For all of the claims that Met is alienating its audiences with so-call “Eurotrash” productions, the Met’s productions tend to be pretty tame. The last production they had that was provocative for the sake of being provocative was Luc Bondy’s 2009 Tosca. The Met does its share of contemporary, or rather somewhat contemporary settings of classic operas, like Rigoletto in 1950s Las Vegas and Cosi in 1950s Coney Island, but the stagings aren’t provocative, and the sets tend of be bright, warm, and colorful. And both of those productions are generally well liked.
And in general, the Met’s Verdi and Mozart productions are pretty straightforward, especially compared to European opera houses.
Where the Met has struggled the most is with Wagner. High-concept Wagner productions are the norm around the world, which the Met tries to match. Robert Lepage’s Ring felt like a technological solution in search of a problem. There are a lot of good ideas in Girard’s Parsifal, but the on-stage action is painfully static at times.
Here’s my criticism of the Met: It has no brand. There’s no unifying vision for what operas it performs and the productions. It tries to be all things to all people. So if you’re someone who thinks that Zeffirelli-style productions define the Met, then yeah, I can understand why you have a lot to gripe about.
Great call on Les tringles. I had been scratching my head about overture stomping. I should have thought of that.
The problem is that Gelb replaced decent if not always great productions with worse ones, whatever their style. Also, a lot of the new productions are gimmicky, and once the novelty wears off, you realize that there is not too much to them, and no reason to return – the Vegas Rigoletto being a prime example.
Other than that, you make a few good points. Though, in fairness, Levine did conduct some American operas such as The Ghost of Versailles and The Great Gatsby, and Susannah was also staged during his tenure, though conducted by James Conlon. But your point remains: that Gelb and YNS have been more aggressive in promoting American music.
Gelb, a marketing person, was hired specifically and according to him to “get the Met’s brand out there.” He spent ad dollars on bus and subway posters that did not help sales even after being told it would be a waste of money. He cancelled the 12 free parks concerts, the Met’s only real community outreach. It’s social media that’s helping today, younger folk who need that photo at the Met for their accounts. It might translate to ongoing sales, it might just be a series of one-offs.
Whoever wrote that hissy fit conveniently left out the unprecedentedly appalling state of singing which, unfortunately, negatively impacts more than just the Metropolitan Opera. The malaise is worldwide. And you know what is said: Without singers…
“The only great Western Academic and great opera writer was Cherubini.”
What??
I can’t believe I wasted 2-3 minutes plowing through this illiterate reactionary rubbish.
“Good riddance.”
We present The Met Live in HD in our cinema and that was our thought when an elderly man stormed out of the theatre nearly frothing at the mouth over the sight of two men kissing in CHAMPION. The remaining 200 season regulars were able to ‘tough it out’, as they not only happen to enjoy the classics but new takes and new ideas.
Now that the so-called “writer” of this piece has gotten that off his chest, he can go back to yelling at kids to get off of his lawn.
You, like Oscar Wilde, probably find it harder and harder to live up to your blue china.
The writer’s complaint and the hostile responses are both so sad. OK, this is not the most articulate or measured presentation of the conservative viewpoint, but the defenses of Regietheater in the comments have an edge of anxiety that is just as revealing. I suspect the writers know that what’s being presented–even if it may stimulate discussion, even if it may sometimes have theatrically compelling qualities–has fallen far short of the impact, social penetration, and sheer quality that used to be achieved when opera was not yet seen to need “reinterpretation” and during-the-show critique from the visual side.
Bravo.
Say what you want about this albeit poorly written article. It reflects the loss of long time dedicated patrons (who yes, happen to be really old and write like crap).
People want quality: not political pageants performed by some great singers and in other cases diversity hires and saturated with banal liberal talking points.
People want GENIUS singing to match the GENIUS composers that WERE often done. Not the 90% garbage new music that is NOT THE WORK OF GENIUS.
MASTERPIECES are such because they have been evaluated by many generations to be such. These current works will disappear and stay gone. They are not anywhere near Mozart. You could perform Mozart for an entire season and it is of far greater value than for example the supremely dumb Fire Shut Up.
The MET was led by a criminal genius Levine. It is now being sunken by fools as YNS and PG.
One can’t program or conduct opera anywhere near his predecessor and the other is a petulant liberal fool. Actually they kind of both are the latter. And the audience attendance is SHOWING PEOPLE THEY DONT LIKE IT. WAKE UP!!
Sad reality!
The Met’s transformation is less about Levine and more about Volpe.
Volpe was really the one who kept the Met frozen in time for the benefit of patrons who took a very traditional view of opera, especially during the 1980s and ’90s when European houses were becoming much more daring with their productions.
When Gelb took over in 2006, many of the productions were already fifteen-plus years old; quite a few dated back to the early 1980s, and probably the oldest was John Dexter’s 1979 Don Carlo.
And the style of the Volpe-era productions was spectacle above all else. Productions like the Schenk Ring cycle from ’86-’90 defined the Met aesthetic. They were big, romantic, realistic, and made no attempt to explore any of the subtext in operas. If you thought that operas had no subtext, Met productions validated that belief.
Gelb was absolutely in the right to begin refreshing the productions when he took over, including killing some of the sacred Zeffirelli cows.
His mistake was not articulating a new vision for what a Met opera production would be, and then having a clear, longterm plan for how he would refresh the entire core repertoire. Stylistically, he was all over the place at first, creating uncertainty and anxiety with patrons about what would come next. But he’s since settled into fairly conservative staging — as I said before, even when new productions are set within the last 50 or 60 years, they are careful to never poke the audience in the eye.
As for Levine, Gelb should have given him the boot even before his first backstage fall that resulted in strings of cancelations. By 2000, Levine was very much in autopilot and was more preoccupied with a late-in-life attempt to become the music director of a major orchestra (remember his dismal stint at the Munich Philharmonic?). And as I said before, Levine had zero interest in programming contemporary and American operas.
Excellent points. Thank you.
You say “Volpe was really the one who kept the Met frozen in time…and the style of the Volpe-era productions was spectacle above all else.”
In that era we got productions like Moses und Aron, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Makropulos Case, Jenufa, The First Emperor, The Voyage, The Great Gatsby, 4 world premieres, 22 house premieres, 47 new productions, the endowment tripled, the house installed titles, customer care, labor peace was maintained; not the lockouts of which Gelb is so fond.
So when you say “frozen in time,” I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Gelb’s production planning is simple and self evident. If the last production was traditional the next one shall be modern, and here’s the genius part of the plan: vice versa! Wow!
And to be very clear I don’t like either of them, but facts are facts.
“We have all sorts of institution(s) [that] once were viable that are no longer what they had been[,] from publishing to theater to museums[,] that advertise viable work done 100 years ago by the now dead as ‘modern art.’ ”
————-
Beyond not knowing who Matthew Paris exactly is (formerly in the arts, an accountant, a bus driver, an engineer, a retired world traveler, etc?) — and his comments apparently being extemporaneous more than carefully edited — I’d say that his one sentence above does apply to today’s social-cultural-political scene in general.
Are we really supposed to listen and respond to a rant by someone who writes so badly as to be essentially unintelligible? I guess this is now just a forum for anyone to rant – as long as they hate the Met/Gelb?
The Met doesn’t do “regie”.
Duh.
To expand a bit, the fact that this writer thinks that anything the Met has put on is “regie” shows how out-of-touch the Met audience is. The problem with the Met isn’t that it goes too far; it’s that it’s board and audience don’t let it go far enough. So its productions range from brain-dead plopping of a piece on the stage with no thought or point of view (something that would not be tolerated in, say, a Shakespeare production) to lame watered-down attempts at more modern styles that fail because they’re not allowed to be biting or deeply thoughtful or, God forbid, confrontational.
The Met probably IS going to die. But it won’t be because it went too “regie”. It’s because the board and audience whose dictates it follows are dying, and nobody actually interested in the arts wants what they force the Met to provide.
The Met isn’t going to die, but the Met as we know it will. People have pointed out for 20 years that the 3,800 house is an albatross.
Eventually the Met will either leave Lincoln Center to a smaller house, or the Met house will be gutted and rebuilt.
“The food is terrible, and the portions are so small” (Woody Allen).
Well said. Same reasons I cancelled my Lyric Opera subscription.
This confused, subliterate letter would have a place in the comment section, but not outside of it.
The Met Fan’s screed can be deciphered if one reads carefully. He’s saying opera is a a high cultural art form and do not screw with it. Bring back Joseph Volpe!
mark cogley ,
Thank you for your reasoned response , Professor .
Interesting and sometimes confused ramble but still making many good points. Notably:
*Met leadership doesn’t know opera or the audience
*accurate comparison with City Opera policies and vision and leadership
*it‘ll hurt European feelings but he‘s accurate that- on average – Americans DO NOT LIKE pseudo-intellectual, disconnected “Regietheater” by professors, enfants terribles, etc engaged in masturbatory shock-fantasies who often don’t know or even like opera, lookdown on it and willfully change storylines, alienate the audience by dragging pseudo-analysis and politics into the show
*NYC customers invest lots of time and money to go to an evening of opera; alienating, angering or condescending to them will make them stop attending. Simple as that.
*Nobody at the Met seems to stand up against decisions re current programming and creative personnel. All yes-men?
*The overpayed, prima donna jackasses in Met leadership should listen to this gentleman.
Great comments from Mr. Paris!
I suspect some of the problem is due to the extremely wealthy who, many times have no culture, but are chosen to serve on artistic boards, so that institutions can receive their contributions. This happens with museums, orchestras, and opera companies. Many of the super-wealthy are Corporate representatives, who are famously ignorant about the Arts.
Maggie Baby ,
How much money can you contribute – ? Without the wealthy , we would have no MET .
Exhale!
The same argument can be made regarding Shakespeare’s plays.
I’m breathlessly awaiting a regietheater performance of that timeless masterpiece, “The Emperor has no Clothes”. It will be apposite.
So the standard right wing Heather MacDonald drivel with no useful specific suggestions of how he or anyone else could do better?
We manage to get the audiences in Europe. A few days ago during this unaccustomed heatwave we are having at the moment which can decimate audiences who decide life is better by the beach, I attended a classical concert, Scheherazade followed by Petruschka. We had an introduction given by a Professor of Musicology who heads a university department. He explained just what the composers were doing, the historical background and the fact that the orchestra of the evening, Les Siècles,
worked with older instruments that gave the music a different tone than is usual. In short during the 45-minute lecture we were given a thorough briefing.
The auditorium was full, the concert nearly blew the ceiling off but was brilliant and hugely appreciated by the audience.
Europeans have that kind of commitment. Every opera or concert has an introduction by an expert if you want to go and hear it.
It’s obvious that the MET is running on empty at the moment probably due to the pandemic but hey, the pandemic is over and even when it was raging those who were fully vaccinated and kept masks on could still go to the opera at times. I know because I did so and precisely because of the pandemic, the venues were full of people grateful to have a smidgen of normality.
If you would know anything about concerts in America, you would know that precisely these kind of introductions are regularly offered by most of the orchestras. Not all of them, but in most of the cases. And they are well attended, too.
Enjoy you lime juice.
There is nothing in the US opera field that I could possibly be envious of. As I said, we get the audiences. I have yet to attend a performance within the past two years that has not been fully booked and La Monnaie’s season tickets are flying out the door. Enjoy your half empty house.
You cannot be envious of something that you have no clue about.
The Met, half full, has 80% more patrons than La Monnaie, lady.
P.S. And if you would have heard of something called math, you would have known that a half empty Met house has 1 1/2 more spectators than the Cash (one of the possible translations of La Monnaie, other being currency, change, money, etc.)
Enjoy your trash stagings, third rate singing and second rate pit band.
I think who wrote this piece has never seen a real regie theater production….
If Mr Paris wants to experience opera as he imagines were the “intents” of the composer and librettist, he has a dusty archive of “traditional” recordings available on DVD and other media available for him to enjoy at home. When I go to the opera (59 years and counting) I’m going to the “theatre” (or “theater” for our would-be sub-editors). Last weekend I saw two wonderful so-called “regie” productions: Don Giovanni and Carmélites. Neither was set in the composer/librettist’s original period but both drew masterful interpretations of their creators’ original, dramatic, yes THEATRICAL, intentions. The future for opera houses is to draw young audiences excited by theatre and to stop giving the impression that most operas are about Mimí characters (sorry, often less than physically believable) dying in a Paris loft.
What an absolutely ridiculous and old-fashioned assessment. Why did you even feel the need to print this? Translated: OMG I CANNOT ACCEPT CHANGE AND CREATIVE TAKES ON THINGS I LOVE SO I’M GOING TO WHINE AND GO HOME.
Met – let people like this go. They are of no value. Use your new vision to create new audiences of younger folks.
The future of the high-performing-arts — choral, orchestral, opera, and dance — means finding new and younger audiences and giving them what they want.
I lead a 45-year-old performing arts org – if we didn’t push the envelope, we would have a smaller audience post-Covid than we already have.
Just ridiculous. Go new, go big, go creative – or go home.
It was posted because it justifies the constant MET bashing.
If you would have bothered to read what you wrote, you would have realized that you are contradicting yourself not once.
Said every evangelical church everywhere….sigh.
It works. For a while. Ya give em a bit of razz-ma-tazz and people enjoy the novelty. Then the novelty wears off: you keep going and push the envelope so much it’s became a cow turd more than a piece of paper, glued to be cohesive with purpose.
You lose audience, belief, cohesion.
When you turn 45, remember what you wrote above. At some point along the way in your life you realize your ageism bit you in the balls, you ARE of value and your opinion and tastes matter, you are not to be “let go.”
And then you too will want to conserve what you love and know.
Until then, grow the eff up.
I have no idea who Mr Paris or what qualifies him to be a “critic”, but first off, if he actually spent time proofreading his screed and not embarrassing himself with his illiteracy I might take him seriously. There are a few valid points, poorly made. But mostly this is just and unpleasant, unreadable, very unhappy person given a platform for bile. Shame on you, Norman. Your readers deserve better.
Vudney ,
Offer you self as his editor…..
Opera must be a living art, relevant to living people, not a museum piece. Some experiments with resetting older works are exciting, others not, but that judgement is always subjective. Personally, we have been excited by the new operas, good acting, wonderful singing, and the move away from “park and bark”.
Opera productions reflect their times and tastes. If I look at old photos of costumes, sets, etc. I am glad things change.
I am a symphony musician, and like the Met, we are reaching out to new audiences and doing what we can to be relevant and to survive. We cannot cater just to our aging audiences.
The word for “high art”is snobbery and those of us working in the arts have no desire to cater to that.
And then you are surprised that you are losing your most regular and trusted patrons. And those new audiences never show up, or, in the best case, show up once, mostly twice, and do not come back.
Don ,
Yea, us “old farts” do not go anymore…..We just listen to recordings of thr great singers of the past….
I realize that it is necessary to have back up for the constant MET bashing but could it at least be something coherent and believable?
OK give us a reason for the drop in audiences compared to European houses? If the MET is so great how come people are falling away?
What always amazes me about the defenders of up-dated operas is their total lack of concern about what the libretto says and the absurdity of what they see and hear. Most striking is the recent Met Rigoletto set in Las Vegas. Otherwise sophisticated and knowledgable opera listeners who get bent out of shape if the soprano misses a few roulades or the tenor sings one flat or sharp B flat, don’t wonder why everybody in a Las Vegas casino in the 1960’s is Italian with many of them being of the aristocracy.Nor does it bother them that a casino owner/singer has the legal right to exile a love rival from Las Vegas. (I always wonder where one gets exiled to-South Dakota, Idaho?) And a Mafioso hit man gets paid in scudi! What’s the exchange rate or does the casino, also, use scudi? Does the Treasury Dept. allow this? At the end of the opera, Rigoletto doesn’t get to a phone and call 911 as his daughter lies dying in the trunk of a car outside an isolated bar. Who would build a bar in an isolated patch outside Las Vegas away from the action/customers? Maybe, most egregious is that the libretto tells us the Duke first saw Gilda in church!! I’m supposed to believe that Las Vegas’s most notorious womanizer gets up Sunday morning to go to church in a city that has more casinos and whore houses than churches. Who goes to Las Vegas and gets up Sunday morning to go to church? Why don’t these and many other absurdities in other operas bother the accepting listener? How about a Boheme in Paris in the late 1960’s? Her candle went out? The building has no electricity? Shouldn’t she be asking for a 50 watt light bulb? Musetta has to sell her jewelry to pay a doctor? Just call the French version of 911, have an ambulance pick her up ,show them her medical card and voila an anti-biotic and Mimi lives on for the sequel.I can’t reconcile these acceptances of libretto destruction by otherwise sophisticated musical listeners with their whining about a flatted B natural or a hi C sung a little sharp.
I’ve no idea who Matthew Paris is. There’s a Britisher named Matthew Parris: is this him?
I’m under 40 and prefer traditional productions that have real trees, rocks and dragons. I feel bad for opera newbies who experienced their first operas in ugly minimalist modern productions where the music and singing are completely divorced from the incomprehensible stage pictures.
zandonai ,
I agree…. but you forgot that most singers today are , well , mediocre – Kaufmann, Netrebko , Davidsen , Gould ….etc.
This screed is as poorly informed and as full of untruths as it is poorly written and full of bilious nonsense.
Krunoslaw,
What kind of name is that ? Does it mean Arschloch ?
This person is out to lunch. Operas by American composers? The Met has produced multiple operas by John Adams and Phillip Glass. Try Kevin Puts and Nico Muhly. What is this person talking about. Sure, Monteverdi would be great, but that certainly hasn’t killed the Met’s attendance. Living in the Past is how I would title this possibly facetious piece. Oh, and that’s an album by Jethro Tull.