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American Opera at the Met
Part 2 (1935-2003): Page Two
Continued from Page One

By Robert Wilder Blue

Comes Vanessa

In the Met’s opening night program for Vanessa, Karl F. Reuling offered a recapitulation of the Met’s American efforts to date, noting that not until Deems Taylor’s The King’s Henchman and Peter Ibbetson, Louis Gruenberg’s Emperor Jones and Howard Hanson’s Merry Mount, did the Met have any success with American operas. He pointed out, “The basic weakness of our earliest operatic scores seems to have been too much reliance on the musical vocabulary of nineteenth-century Europe. An American school of composition evolved slowly until truly distinguished scores, written in a native, contemporary idiom recognizes the world over, appeared from the hands of Taylor, Hanson, Gruenberg, Menotti and now Barber.”

Rosalind Elias (Erika), Eleanor Steber (Vanessa), George Cehanovsky (Nicholas), Giorgio Tozzi (The Old Doctor) and Nicolai Gedda (Anatol) in Samuel Barber's Vanessa, Metropolitan Opera (1958). Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera Archives.

Samuel Barber had written for the theater only twice before, Cave of the Heart (1947) for Martha Graham and Souvenirs (1952) for the New York City Ballet. But his success and popularity as a composer was sufficient that Bing extended to him the first commission of his tenure. Menotti (Barber’s companion) wrote the libretto for Vanessa, after a story from Seven Gothic Tales by Danish writer Isak Dineson. The score sets the action in a “Northern country, about the year 1905." Vanessa has waited twenty years in her country home for the return of her lover, Anatol. Time has stopped for her; the mirrors have been covered, the house shut up. Her mother, the Baroness, has not spoken to her for years. The opera opens with preparations for Anatol’s return. However it is Anatol’s son who appears; Anatol has died. Anatol, the younger, succeeds in winning Vanessa’s heart as well as seducing her niece, Erika. When Erika confronts Anatol with his double duty, he offers to marry her; she refuses. Vanessa, however, accepts his proposal. In the climactic party scene, their engagement is announced. Erika, who has confessed to the Baroness that she is pregnant, flees the house and subsequently miscarries her child. Vanessa, unaware of Anatol’s liaison with Erika, marries him and the two leave for Paris. Erika remains behind, covering the mirrors and saying, “Now it is my turn to wait.”

Barber and Bing had wanted Maria Callas to sing the title role; however she declined at least in part because she felt the opera’s other principal female role, Erika, was the more interesting of the two and would overshadow Vanessa. Sena Jurinac was offered the role of Vanessa but turned it down also. Finally Bing asked the glamorous American soprano Eleanor Steber (who was often at odds with him) to play Vanessa. She learned the role in a few weeks time and scored one of the biggest triumphs of her career. (Brenda Lewis took over later performances.) Rosalind Elias created the role of Erika; Regina Resnik was the Baroness, Nicolai Gedda sang Anatol, Giorgio Tozzi was the Doctor and George Cehanovsky was Nicholas; Dmitri Mitropoulos conducted, Menotti directed and Cecil Beaton designed the sets and costumes. (Beaton had debuted at the Met with designs for the Rossini/Britten ballet Soirée in 1955. Vanessa marked his opera debut; he went on to design legendary Met productions of Turandot (1960) and La Traviata (1966).)

Vanessa premiered on January 15, 1958. The critics were nearly unanimous in their reaction. Harriett Johnson captured the excitement of the evening:

The sold-out house rivaled opening night in glamor [sic] and surpassed it in distinction....

It became progressively enthusiastic as the evening continued, finally giving vent to militant approbation. There were ear-splitting bravos and cheers at the conclusion, forcing countless curtain calls for composer, librettist and every other participant.

In itself, the production of “Vanessa” is a triumph for the American musico-theater. The celebrated house, after its extended disregard of our native talent, has honored Barber by mounting his opera with a superb mise en scene.

Dimitri Mitropoulos on the podium was the dominating musical genius of the performance, projecting alternating dynamic tension or tender emotion with the utmost effect. He received a prolonged personal ovation before the final act.

What then of the work itself? Was it, looking with cool objectivity at “Vanessa’s” intrinsic merits apart from the event’s significance, worth the trouble?

The answer is emphatically “yes,” notwithstanding aspects of Barber’s music which can be qualified. (NY Post, January 16, 1958.)

Howard Taubman echoed Ms. Johnson’s “qualified” reaction to the music:

If you do not grow impatient, “Vanessa” will reward you. It starts disappointingly. The first act has little or no musical profile. Mr. Barber, one of our ablest composers, edges into his first attempt at opera cautiously and self-consciously as if her were an explorer whose name is made and who is setting out on a dangerously publicized voyage into unfamiliar territory.

The composer’s confidence grows as he finds that he is not only breathing in the strange world but actually absorbed by it. He responds to the adventure with expanding assurance. He unbends and allows himself a waltz, a country-dance, a hymn, a genial aria or two. In the final scene he writes a quintet, a full-blown set-piece that packs an emotional charge and that would be a credit to any composer anywhere today. (Times, January 16, 1958.)

Of Menotti’s book, Ms. Johnson wrote, “This is possibly his finest libretto, a more mature piece of writing than those he has provided for his own operas. May the two foster artistically, together and singly, in the future. Their gifts, in our time, are rare indeed.” (Post, January 16, 1958.)

The cast was lauded. "If depth and significance of character are the criterion, the Barber opera should be named Erika. Rosalind Elias, who plays the part, attains the triumph of her short career by a characterization which is magnificent in its anguished poignancy.” (Johnson, Post, January 16, 1958.) All applauded Eleanor Steber for having learned the role on such short notice; many thought she was miscast but none could fault her persuasive portrayal. As Anatol, Nicolai Gedda earned raves also: “Probably the biggest surprise of the evening, however, was the Swedish tenor Nicolai Gedda. As Anatol, handsome and Nordic, he sang with a lovely lyric ecstasy and in exemplary English. He acted with appropriate ardor. It was no wonder that both Vanessa and Erika yearned for him.” (Johnson, Post, January 16, 1958.)

Vanessa was presented at the following summer’s Salzburg Festival; the first American opera as well as the first opera ever to be sung in English there. The Met’s production was used and the leading roles were sung by Ms. Steber, Ms. Elias, Mr. Gedda and Mr. Tozzi. The European critical community reacted violently to Barber’s opera and to the “old-fashioned” production. Only the singers managed to come away unscathed (although they were criticized for singing the opera in English). One writer called Menotti’s libretto “disgusting" and described Barber as a "collector and publisher of a musical anthology.” The occasion afforded critics the opportunity to condemn unilaterally all American music, which they found to be hopelessly backward.

When Vanessa returned to the Met the following season, Howard Taubman wondered whether or not American critics had been over-indulgent. He concluded not and that European reviewers had been blinded by xenophobia. He asks,

Is [Vanessa] so much worse than Rolf Liebermann’s “School for Wives,” which had an enthusiastic reception from these very Austrian critics when it was put on at Salzburg? Not at all. In fact, it is a far better work, and, praise be, it does not go in for a busy modernism that is as vacuous as it is fashionable. How about Von Einem’s “Der Prozess,” Martin’s “The Tempest,” Orff’s “Der Mond,” to name several others warmly received in Europe? All inferior to “Vanessa.”

One of the gravest troubles of “Vanessa” apparently was its American origin. Isn’t opera a European invention, and shouldn’t creativity in this field by materialistic Americans be suspect?” (Times, January 8, 1959.)

Vanessa was revived again in the 1964-65 season with Mary Costa, Ms. Elias, Blanche Thebom, John Alexander and Mr. Tozzi. In three seasons the opera was given 18 performances. Fifty years later, and operatic fashions notwithstanding, Vanessa is the first American opera commissioned by the Met to survive. While never quite gaining a regular place in the repertory (as have Porgy and Bess, Susannah, Of Mice and Men) it nevertheless remains on the fringe and performances of it are not a rarity.

Success Breeds Forgiveness

For the 1963-64 season, Bing scheduled the U.S. premiere of Menotti’s The Last Savage. In the twenty-two years since the fiasco of The Island God, Menotti had become America’s most popular opera composer. Amelia Goes to the Ball, The Old Maid and the Thief, The Medium, The Telephone, The Consul, Amahl and the Night Visitors, and The Saint of Bleeker Street were performed often around the U.S. In its February 8, 1964, issue, Opera News claimed that Menotti’s operas had been heard by more people than those of any other composer.

The Last Savage was again written in Italian again to the composer’s own libretto. The world premiere took place in Paris in a French translation (Le Dernier Sauvage) on October 21, 1963, starring Mady Mesplé as Kitty and Gabriel Bacquier as Abdul. (Ten days earlier had occurred the near-simultaneous deaths of Édith Piaf and her friend Jean Cocteau.) In his “Letter from Paris," Jean Genêt wrote:

"Le Dernier Sauvage,” an opéra bouffe by Gian-Carlo Menotti, was given its official première this week at the Opéra-Comique. It was commissioned by the Comique, now directed by the composer Georges Auric, as part of a renovation plan to bring modern blood and fresh musical sounds to the dust of its repertory and stage. The libretto, also written by Menotti, in a satiric vein, is elaborate and very funny, especially to Americans, the best equipped to appreciate the gaiety of its parody of themselves.

...On the whole, the première audience seemed to enjoy itself immensely—all except the critics…[who] have already used Menotti rather as their whipping boy. In their reports on this week’s Menotti opera, is it they who have been the savages. (New Yorker, November 2, 1963.)

(Genêt was referring the sentiment summed up in Le Figaro, which called the opera “a misery.”)

The Met’s production bowed on January 23, 1964, in an English translation by George Mead. Four days earlier, a lengthy conversation between Menotti and Eric Salzman appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. Menotti was unapologetic for thinking of his audience and for continuing to compose music that was listenable and singable. He described for Salzman his modus operandi:

My first principle is that my libretto is important and essential and not just an excuse to write music. For me the libretto is the feminine element; the music, the masculine that has to take over. First I write a passive libretto and then I do not hesitate to make it obey the music. Anyway, believe me, it is the music that gives me the most trouble.

...I look with enormous suspicion on all the modern attempts to invent new languages. Language is valid when spoken and enriched by use; a great artist can perhaps enrich but not re-create something out of whole cloth. Look, twelve-tone music is interesting—I admire its discipline—but it is a secret language for the few. Who cares about Esperanto? Beckett and Ionesco, for all their difficult content, use the common spoken language, understandable to all. Well, I like to use the spoken language of music.

...We talk about dissonance and think of it as more adventurous, more artistically valid. We talk about sweetness as something bad; but dryness, acidity, severity…ah…terribly interesting, terribly good. Sweetness? Grace? Humor? Simplicity? All vanished…well ‘The Last Savage’ is an effort to give a certain nobility to sweetness and grace; this is a completely assonant opera from beginning to end. (Herald Tribune, January 19, 1964.)

But he also confessed to a bit of insecurity:

I suffer from the big contemporary complaint: miniaturism. This is the thing that frightens me, that I criticize the most in my own operas. My melodies are small; I’m always sacrificing big line for the big explosion and the small surprise. Verdi had the courage to be vulgar and sacrifice detail for big line. His lines move. They breathe. In them, you hear a giant breathing. Well, that’s what I would like you to be able to hear in my music. (Herald Tribune, January 19, 1964.)

The Last Savage's story betrayed its author’s place as an astute observer of his adopted country. Kitty Scattergood, a Vassar anthropology student, has come to India with her father to capture a prehistoric man. She refuses to marry the Maharajah’s son until she has completed her experiment. Scattergood bribes a palace servant to impersonate a savage and Kitty “captures” him on her jungle expedition. She brings him home to Chicago where he is introduced at a lavish cocktail party. Horrified at Midwestern bourgeois life, he flees. But Kitty has fallen in love with him and follows him back to India. Both parents are dismayed at the outcome. But the couple seems genuinely to be in love and as they retire to their cave, servants begin unloading modern conveniences.

Roberta Peters was Kitty and Morley Meredith played her father; Ezio Flagello and Donald Gramm alternated as the Maharajah of Ragaputana, George London sang Abdul (Walter Cassel sang later performances), the “savage”; Lili Chookasian was the Maharanee, Nicola Gedda and later John Alexander played Kodanda, her son; and Teresa Stratas was Sardula, a servant. Thomas Schippers conducted, Menotti directed and Beni Montresor designed the lavish production. Harriett Johnson wrote:

[T]hough “The Last Savage” musically is light years away from the great operatic comedies – “Meistersinger,” Rosenkavalier,” The Marriage of Figaro” – its entertainment value is undeniable. This, alone, is a healthy accomplishment in these times when many of our musical savants have erroneously come to believe that music must be painful in order to have value. (Post, January 25, 1964.)

She praised Mr. Schippers and the cast and acknowledged the beefcake factor London had going for him:

George London, who, as stable boy turned actor, appears in both leopard skin and purple suit and performs, respectively, ferociously and lovingly (and I don’t mean spiritual love) with virile audaciousness.

Along the way, Menotti spoofs and exposes with good natured but biting satire, a shower of preposterous contemporary folderol to do with habits, people, ideas, concepts – from the cocktail party to the avant-garde painter and the “electrododecaphonic” composer. The painter achieves his masterpieces with a chain and what drips down miraculously before your eyes on the canvas looks esthetically more valid than many contemporary super-simple abstract hung in our museums.

...Of sheer musical invention and inspiration there is, however, little, and herein lies the question as to what has happened to Menotti*. Has he dried up melodically or is he spreading himself thin by too much activity in too many directions?

Whatever the answer, he still emerges as a great man of the theater. But his current triumph is as a librettist, not a composer. (Post, January 25, 1964.)

Time magazine, however, sided with the Paris press:

Merely to be believed, the Savage requires a better-natured audience than a composer can expect to find in all Christendom.

...Menotti moves through music like a troop ship avoiding U-boats – back and forth, in and out…from failure to triumph with great agility, but nothing he has written since 1955 can approach the genius of The Saint of Bleeker Street or even The Consul. Aside from one or two pleasant arias and one superb septet, there is very little in the Savage that suggests its composer’s grand reputation. The music could have been written any time after 1850, and the libretto could have been improved by almost anyone with 15 minutes and a pencil. (Time, January 31, 1964.)

The Last Savage was revived in the 1964-65 season, giving it a two-season total of 16 performances. At the end of the season a series of popular concerts was held at Lewisohn Stadium in upper Manhattan. Menotti’s one-act opera The Telephone received its company premiere on July 31, 1965 on a “Regards to Broadway” evening; Jeanette Scovotti and Theodor Uppman appeared as Lucy and Ben. Also presented at the stadium were evenings with Renata Tebaldi and Ella Fitzgerald, various complete operas and opera excerpts, a Rodgers and Hammerstein night and a Gershwin night. The season was also marked by the debut of Franco Zefferelli directing Verdi’s Falstaff and a gala concert honoring the 50th anniversary Giovanni Martinelli’s company debut. In the real world, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy shocked the nation and the 1964 World’s Fair opened on April 27 in Queens.

Moving Uptown

1965-66 was remarkable for a few reasons, especially for being the company’s final season in the old house. As such, the season had a celebratory feel and was the most extensive ever presented; the Met sponsored a total of 541 performances in New York and on tour (including a trip to Paris). Also significant was the launch of the short-lived National Company, a touring arm of the Met that lasted two years. In its first season, it presented Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah and Rossini’s La Cenerentola and in their company premieres, as well as Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Bizet’s Carmen. The National Company visited fifty-five cities between September 20, 1965 and June 12, 1966; Susannah received 27 performances in Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit, Boston, Brooklyn, Newark, Tallahassee, Austin, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Lawrence, Lafayette (IN), Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Mexico City and Guadalajara. Marilin Niska and Mary Munroe alternated as Susannah, Vern Shinall and Arnold Voketaitis played Olin Blitch, and Chris Lachona and Robert Bennett played Sam. Susannah also played at the New York State Theater, a theater where the New York City Opera had presented the opera many times. The theater’s bad acoustics were notorious and in an attempt to one-up the resident company the Met’s National Company performed the opera with amplification. The experiment was deemed unsuccessful.

Thirty-four years later, Floyd’s classic opera reached the Met’s main stage. Already 44 years old, its arrival was a major event for the Met even if it had logged hundreds of productions in the U.S. and around the world. Floyd acknowledged, though, that the Met’s performances marked the conference of a certain museum status on the piece.

For his libretto, Floyd adapted the Apocryphal story of Susanna and the Elders, transporting the action to the Tennessee mountains in the 1950s. Susannah has been raised by her alcoholic brother Sam and branded morally suspect by the self-righteous townspeople. One day while searching for a baptismal site, the church elders discover Susannah bathing naked in a creek. They quickly label her “of the devil” (although not until they have taken a good look at her) and return to tell the townspeople and the new evangelist, Olin Blitch. Susannah attends a revival meeting that evening where Blitch calls upon her to confess publicly and repent her sin. She refuses and runs crying from the church. Blitch follows her home and rapes her and in so doing discovers she had been a virgin. The next morning, Blitch tries to convince the congregation of Susannah’s innocence, but because he is unwilling to implicate himself he can offer no proof. Sam returns, hears Susannah’s story and runs out to the creek where Blitch is in the middle of a baptism and shoots him.

Susannah opened on March 31, 1999. Renée Fleming sang Susannah, Samuel Ramey was Blitch, Jerry Hadley was Sam, John McVeigh was Little Bat; James Conlon conducted. The production had appeared in Houston and Chicago previously. Critics generally dismissed the opera and objected to its presentation by the Met. Peter G. Davis wrote:

At this late date, it's probably pointless to bash Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, although many still resent its success. Cheap melodrama and tawdry music, they complain. But since the opera was first seen in humble surroundings 44 years ago in Tallahassee, Florida, it has had more than 230 productions here and in Europe. Even the Metropolitan has finally bowed to the inevitable, having just imported a production first seen at the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1993. The composer was only in his twenties when he wrote the piece, and none of his subsequent operas, not even Of Mice and Men, has remotely approached Susannah in popularity. Which suggests that Floyd, instead of becoming the American Puccini, as some had once hoped, is now our Mascagni: a one-opera composer who hit the jackpot early on (Cavalleria Rusticana), wrote many other interesting works, but never struck gold again.

Europeans have problems with Susannah in part because the plot strikes them as utterly improbable. How could a beautiful, naïve young girl, even in rural Tennessee, be socially ostracized and ruined simply because the church elders spied her bathing nude in the creek? Even in the apocryphal tale on which the opera is based, Susannah is exonerated by the prophet Daniel and the elders are executed. Of course, that doesn't take into account our penchant for witch-hunts-the opera, after all, was written during the days of the McCarthy investigations, when suspicion and accusation were enough for proof of guilt. Yes, it could happen here, as any American audience that sees Susannah instantly recognizes. Floyd, who writes his own texts, may not have handled the subject with any great subtlety, and the opera's broad theatrics can sometimes seem stagy, but its dramatic honesty registers powerfully every time.

The score has an appealing innocence that Floyd seemed to lose as his operatic craft became more sophisticated. His ear for the rhythms of valley language is unerring, and the score is filled with the lilting melodies, square-dance tunes, and revival-meeting hymns of Appalachia-all original, by the way, and not borrowed folk material. Yet for all its attractive surface, the music remains more illustrative than truly dramatic. In this respect, Susannah suffers when compared to the work it most closely resembles and that was written only a few years earlier: Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, an opera with similar concerns and situations, by a composer who went on to write one operatic masterpiece after another. (New York Magazine, April 19, 1999.)

The public took little notice of the critics' scorn; the seven performances sold out, acknowledging both the opera’s importance in that venue and the star power of the cast.

The “New” Met

For decades, the Met had wanted to build a new opera house but had never gotten momentum and money together at the same time. When the idea for an arts complex on New York’s upper west side evolved from whim to reality, the Met signed on as a tenant. The company bid farewell to Thirty-Ninth Street on April 16, 1966 and five months later moved its show twenty-five blocks uptown to the new Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The Met’s plan for opening night at its new address seemed like a sure bet. Bing commissioned one of the country’s favorite composers to write a new grand opera. One of greatest sopranos of all time would head an all-American cast. It would be led by a matinee idol of a conductor and staged by one of the world’s leading film, theater and opera directors. What could go wrong?

After the success of Vanessa, the Met had been after Barber to write them another opera. Subjects were discussed and rejected (including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, to which Barber responded, “Too much water for an opera.”). Barber was not enthusiastic to undertake the writing of another full-length opera. But when it appeared that the new Met was going to be built and that not only the Met but the rest of the music world seemed to expect him to write an opera for its first night, Barber finally agreed. He had considered Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra previously but had rejected the idea, finding the play too long and elaborate. He changed his mind when Franco Zefferelli offered to write the libretto. Months passed, however, during which Mr. Zefferelli worked on everything but the libretto. Frustrated and unable to begin his work, Barber finally hopped a plane and showed up at Zefferelli’s villa in Italy. Within three weeks he had his libretto. He then went into self-imposed exile to write the score. He delivered it to the Met on time, seven months before opening night.

Harold Schonberg described the opening of the new opera house:

And so, at last it finally came to pass: the grand, grand opening of the grand, grand Metropolitan Opera.

It was quite a spectacle, situated on the cosmic scale somewhere above the primeval atom that caused the original Big Bang, and somewhere below the creation of the Milky Way. It was a spectacle that connoisseurs will put in their memory box and treasure forever. It was a big, complicated package: big, grand, impressive and vulgar; a Swinburnian mélange of sad, bad, mad, glad; rich and also nouveau-riche; desperately aiming for the bigger and the better. Not many will deny that the Metropolitan Opera at least came up with the bigger.

An American opera, Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” received its world premiere. The conductor, Thomas Schippers, was American, and so was everybody else in the big cast. But that, like many other things last night, was somewhat lost in the shuffle. The emphasis, quite understandably from the point of view of the Metropolitan Opera, was to show the public what nearly $50-million worth of opera house could do. (New Yorker, September 19, 1966.)

A separate anthology could be compiled of the commentary on the opening of the Met. Writers from almost every major newspaper and magazine in the western world covered the event. Thesauruses lay limp from exhaustion the morning after. This study, however, is concerned with the opera performed that night. If you were not born then or have not hung around in standing rooms lines since, you might not know the legend of the opening night of Antony and Cleopatra. In fact, it was not the spectacular dud modern mythology has made it. Expectations ran so high there was bound to be disappointment when the opera turned out to be a fairly ordinary work. If anything, it suffered from the moment itself, its presence of only secondary importance to the evening’s proceedings. (In recent years, the Met has realized that on opening night, the opera is merely an intermezzo between the various social goings-on, and it has ceased to offer any work requiring too much attention.)

Critical reaction to Barber’s work ranged from mildly enthusiastic to disappointed. Desmond Shawe-Taylor saw past the event to the opera, noting that, “throughout the evening there was a recurrent impression that Barber’s music, rich in substance and sometimes very engaging, was being submerged beneath the glitter and complexity of the spectacle.” (The Sunday Times, 18 September 1966.) Winthrop Sargeant was more blunt:

"Antony and Cleopatra” is not entirely successful. Mr. Barber’s sensitive, retiring temperament seems out of its element in a spectacle of such grandiose proportions. "Antony and Cleopatra”—based on Shakespeare and containing a great deal of the speech of Shakespeare’s play—is, as one might expect, intended as a true grand opera…. Its dramatic scale…is about like that of “Aïda,” with large crowd scenes and marching soldiers, and Mr. Barber has failed to fill it out with music of sufficient power and eloquence. There are spots that are appealing…. The music of the last act is superior to the rest of the score. During the first two acts, there is no music of passionate, lyric quality to express the great love that is supposed to be going on between the two protagonists…. Most of the time the music is much too complex and much too thick. (New Yorker, September 19, 1966.)

This latter point is one to be considered for a moment. In the era before supertitles, conscientious audiences studied their libretti in advance, or, they had seen a particular opera so many times they had finally figured out the story thanks to the staging and the various gestures of the performers. Facing an unknown opera meant being at the mercy of the artists and their ability to communicate the story clearly. Sargeant reported on this failure:

In general, Shakespeare’s lines were totally obscured, either by poor enunciation or by the thickness of the scoring. One does not ever expect to understand all the text in opera, and sopranos are apt to be especially un-understandable. Still, with a text as noble as Shakespeare’s, it is a pity that more was not heard. (New Yorker, September 19, 1966.)

But, no one missed identifying the real culprit of the evening: Franco Zefferelli.

The production, despite one or two mishaps, proceeded with the enthusiasm of a group of children around a big, new Erector set. Things were screwed, locked and bolted; and things were pushed, and things were pulled, and things revolved. Sets nobly and ponderously arrived from the rear, slowly and majestically, like a Sherman tank passing over a wheat field. A great Sphinx was turned this way and that—profile, head on, rear. In the background, Cleopatra’s barge floated on a silver Nile, oars moving in unison. There was a camel. There were goats and horses. Far in the distance a wee Egyptian fleet set out to flight the Romans. The moon disappeared. The sun rose.

It was all very technological. It also was all so naïve, so innocent, so delightfully childish, so unself-consciously exhibitionist. And, it must be confessed, sometimes so vulgar: artifice masquerading with a great flourish as art. (Times, September 17, 1966.)

Also lost in the post-mortem were the monumental performances of the members of the huge cast, led by Leontyne Price as Cleopatra (whose every talent Barber had exploited), Rosalind Elias as Charmian, Justino Diaz as Antony, Jess Thomas as Caesar, John Macurdy as Agrippa and Ezio Flagello as Enobarbus. The opera was given eight performances. Barber was so demoralized by the opera’s reception, he fled to Europe; the event would affect him for the remainder of his life. He revised the opera in 1974, which version was seen at the Juilliard School, the Spoleto Festival and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Another O’Neill

Among the nine original productions given during the first season in the new house was a second world premiere, Marvin David Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra, based on the Eugene O’Neill play. Opera composers had been attracted to O’Neill’s American version of the Electra legend for thirty years. None, however, had been successful in convincing the O’Neill Estate to give them the rights. As early as 1960, Mr. Levy had wanted to adapt O’Neill’s opus for the opera stage. A meeting with Carl van Vechten led to an introduction to the playwright’s widow, Carlotta O’Neill, who finally consented, warning the young composer that "to telescope this play will be quite a job, but your enthusiasm will carry you along.” (Times, January 13, 1964.)

Spurred on by the success of his five-hour, Pulitzer-prize winning Strange Interlude, O’Neill had conceived Mourning Becomes Electra as three separate plays to be presented on successive evenings. This was deemed impractical and so O’Neill reshaped it as a one-night trilogy; the evening began at 5:00, there was an hour for dinner, and it concluded at midnight. The playwright transports the action to New England in the period after the Civil War. Christine Mannon (Clytaemnestra) has fallen in love with the sea captain Adam Brant (Aegistus) while her husband Ezra (Aegememnon) is away at war. Her daughter Lavinia (Electra) is furious when she discovers her mother’s affair and jealous because of her own love for Adam. Ezra returns and Christine kills him. Lavinia is outraged and enlists Orin (Orestes) to kill Christine and Adam. When Christine discovers her children’s plot, she arranges to leave with Adam. Orin kills Adam and Christine kills herself. A year later, Lavinia and Orin return from a voyage and Orin reveals the Mannon family’s crimes. Lavinia tells him he must die and Orin shoots himself. Lavinia locks herself up in the Mannon house to live out her life among the family’s ghosts. Time described the plot more succinctly:

The daughter loves the father, hates mother. The mother loves another man, hates the father and daughter. The son loves the mother and the daughter. The mother kills the father. The son kills the mother’s lover. The mother commits suicide. The son commits suicide. (Time, March 31, 1967.)

The Met assisted the composer in getting a Ford Foundation Grant to work on the opera. In 1964, there was a public reading of the second act, after which the Met committed itself to giving the premiere. The creators completed the opera but were dissatisfied with the first act. Director Michael Cacoyannis stepped in and gave it another revision and finally everyone was happy with the opera.

Mourning Becomes Electra bowed on March 17, 1967, with Marie Collier as Christine and Evelyn Lear as Lavinia, both in their Met debuts. John Reardon played Orin, Sherrill Milnes was Adam and John Macurdy was Ezra. Zubin Mehta conducted and Mr. Cacoyannis directed. The performances of Ms. Collier and Ms. Lear elicited unanimous praise:

So there were Miss Collier and Miss Lear, like a lynx and a bobcat, spitting psychic hate at each other. Both handsome and intense women, both commanding figures on stage, both magnificent actresses, they gave the impression of exuding death, moved by forces they could not control. (Times, March 19, 1967.)

The other artists were praised and the performance was deemed successful. Most found Mr. Levy’s score unspectacular. Winthrop Seargeant summed up the majority opinion:

Mr. Levy’s music fails to add very much to the drama. It is written in a post-Straussian idiom, without any of the soaring lyric passages that Strauss always produced in climactic moments. (I am thinking of his “Elektra.”) In general, the score is ambiguous in tonality, though it contains little or no twelve-tone writing. Nearly everywhere it is convulsive, and often it is simply noisy…. But there are better ways of enhancing operatic melodrama than attempting to top it with cacophony.

Mr. Levy is a serious composer who deserves to be treated with respect. His music is not avant-garde, and I am sure that his intentions were of the noblest. But he was evidently plagued by a fear of being old-fashioned and corny, of being accused of writing clichés. This fear has caused him to destroy nearly every moment of genuine lyricism that the opera might have contained…. But there are also a few instances of real inspiration*. In each case, however, Mr. Levy allows himself only a measure or two of inspired melody and then kills his own inspiration with noises of one sort of another. There are even leitmotivs in this opera—one that I noticed particularly was a short musical idea consisting of a triplet followed by a sustained note, which clearly had reference to the doomed Mannon family. It might have been the opera’s signature, as the fearsome Agamemnon motive is in the Strauss opera, but it never assumes real importance, and is soon forgotten. Generally the music is neutral, or neutrally unpleasant. There are no climaxes, no moments in which it contributes anything much to the drama. Mr. Levy’s work is, I suppose, a good try, but it doesn’t come off. What there is to hold the attention of the listener is O’Neill’s, not his. (New Yorker, March 20, 1967.)

The opera was revived the following season, playing a total of eleven times over two seasons. Mr. Levy revisited his opera some twenty-five years later; the revised version was presented in Chicago to acclaim and will make appearances in Seattle and New York in 2003.

For the next two decades, the Met's direction and activities reflected the turmoil in American society as well as the ever-increasing marginalization of classical music in the culture. The company was often dealing with crises-recession, labor disputes, management changes-and with the retirement of its greatest stars, it was adrift artistically. When Rudolf Bing stepped down at the end of the 1971-72 season, the company appointed the Swedish director and intendent Göran Gentele as General Manager. However, Gentele was killed in a car accident the summer before what would have been his inaugural season. Schuyler Chapin was selected to replace him.

Inspired Madness

Among the company’s innovations during Chapin’s second season was the Mini-Met, an attempt at presenting chamber opera. For its first production, it presented the company premiere of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s mad, modernist opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. It was a bold, uncharacteristic choice for the company, even away from its main stage.

The world premiere had taken place in Hartford, Connecticut, on February 9, 1934, under the auspices of The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music. The opening night audience was comprised of New York glitterati and intellectual elite who had traveled north by train in the middle of winter to witness a spectacle unlike anything previously produced in American opera. Steven Watson describes the event in his account of the opera’s creation, Prepare for Saints:

In early February 1934, a red velvet curtain slowly parted in the Wadsworth Atheneum’s intimate subterranean theater. After a long drumroll, the stage began to fill with black singers draped in richly colored vestments. Artfully posed beneath feathered trees and beaded arches, the ersatz sixteenth-century saints began to sing:

To know to know to love her so
Four saints prepare for saints
It makes well fish
Four saints it makes well fish.

The 299 members of the audience who heard these words to the orchestra’s vigorous oompah rhythm could use no conventional measure to evaluate what they were seeing and hearing. Even the opera’s title, Four Saints in Three Acts, was misleading: there were more than a dozen saints and four acts. Nor did anything that followed the opening chorus offer more than a hint of meaning. The libretto told no coherent story, the staging and costumes were deeply eccentric, and most of the lines made no apparent sense. The cellophane set, brilliantly lit to evoke a sky hung with rock crystal, defied comparison to anything the audience had ever seen. The music was to naïve, too simple, and too American for an opera. Yet when the final curtain fell, many found themselves caught between tears and wild applause. Later they found that they could no more explain their extravagant reactions than they could the opera they had just seen. (Watson, Prepare for Saints, p. 3, Univ. of California Press.)

Thomson and Stein had conceived the opera in Paris in early 1927. Thomson had proposed “something from the lives of the saints” and Stein suggested that it take place in Spain (where she and Alice Toklas spent their summers). Two Spanish saints were chosen as main characters, St. Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola. Six months later, Stein delivered her completed libretto to Thomson, who finished the music a year later. Six years passed, though, before a premiere could be organized and financed. Thomson insisted that the opera be performed by an all-black cast (although he made no such legal stipulation as in the case of George Gershwin and Porgy and Bess). He felt that their diction was better, their carriage nobler and that they would be better suited to carrying out what amounted to more of a religious pageant than a true opera. Almost all the original performers were amateurs, recruited by the Harlem choirmaster, Eva Jessye. John Houseman directed, Frederick Ashton choreographed and Florine Stettheimer contributed the famous cellophane scenery.

After a week of sold-performances the opera moved to Broadway. In a letter to the Times, Carl van Vechten counseled New Yorkers on how to approach Four Saints in Three Acts.

A favorite expression in the jargon of the critics has it that you only take away from a work of art what you are able to bring to it, but I feel certain that any one who brings to a performance of “Four Saints in Three Acts” more than kind of receptive passivity, a complete relaxation of the perceptions, is making a mistake. Perhaps a slight religious fervor might help, or a distaste for opera in general, or a preference for Negroes, or enthusiasm for the coruscating prose of Gertrude Stein, but I believe, on this whole, it is better to take your seat, in the theatre where “Four Saints in Three Acts” is being performed without expecting or desiring or hoping for anything, with nothing in the mind, in fact, but curiosity to discover what this form may be that author and composer, choreographer and decorator, have worked so conscientiously together to create.

...So then, if you will lounge in your chair and permit the words of Gertrude Stein, the music of Virgil Thomson, and the imaginative action of Frederick Ashton against the extraordinary decorations of Florine Stettheimer, to sink into your consciousness, play as they will on your emotions, you will perhaps find yourself, to your own surprise, actually enjoying this strange work of art, enjoying it very much indeed, in fact. I might also suggest that there is so much to see and hear the first time that it is not till the second audition that you can begin to get anything like the complete measure of this rather miraculous music drama, the apparent simplicity of which is entirely misleading. If, on the other hand, you don’t like it at all, this unfortunate condition cannot be blamed on the performance, for “Four Saints,” by another miracle, has come into the theatre not limping, but walking proudly, bearing banners. In other words, the performance of “Four Saints,” from the point of view of author and composer, is just about as perfect as would seem humanly possible. (Times, February 18, 1934.)

Four Saints madness swept New York (Gimbel Brothers’ department store windows were done up in cellophane with the banner, 4 Suits in 2 Acts), although not everyone knew what to make of the piece. Olin Downes wrote a slyly vague review:

A brilliant audience, a most knowing one—an audience, indeed, that included all our choicest spirits of modern verse, music an drama—gathered last night in the Forty-fourth Street Theatre and applauded and cheered itself hoarse at the end of the first performance in this city of the opera, “Four Saints in Three Acts.” ...

In fact, the work was adjudged by the elect a masterpiece, a perfect masterpiece. But this was known in advance, ever since the Hartford première of the opera on Feb. 7. It was known that the opera was about nothing in particular, hence its charm and its grave beauty. It was known that the scenery was of cellophane. The rumors that the Negro’s [sic] costumes were also of cellophane, though disproved at Hartford, had added another prospect of something new and piquant. And had not one of the greatest of the prophets of the new era, writing with trembling hand and steam coming from his shoes, cried out that the originality of this conception was only equaled by “Pelléas et Melisande”? And had not a later participant in the production proclaimed on the first hearing of Thomson’s score, in perfect Steinese, that “This opera should do the Metropolitan?” Debussy and the poor old Met, were buried last night, buried to shouts of joy and hosannas of acclaim for the new dawn of the lyric drama. (Times, February 21, 1934.)

Three nights after the premiere, the cast of Four Saints appeared in a three-minute excerpt from the opera on “March of Time” live from the WABC studio. The broadcast began at 8:30 p.m.; afterward the entire cast of forty was loaded into cars and escorted by the police to the theater for their 8:50 p.m. curtain. Four Saints played for sixty performances on Broadway.

Thirty-nine years to the day after its Broadway debut, the Mini-Met’s production opened on February 20, 1973, at the Lincoln Center Forum (now the Mitzi Newhouse Theater) and played for twelve performances. Betty Allen, Benjamin Matthews, Barbara Hendricks, Clamma Dale, Hilda Harris and Arthur Thompson (all in their company debuts) led the mixed-race cast; Roland Gagnon conducted and Alvin Ailey directed and choreographed. Despite various production difficulties (the Forum had an in-the-round style performing space with audience on three sides; the orchestra was stationed in the balcony above and behind the stage; the conductor appeared to the singers via television monitor) and a somewhat cynical populace from which to recruit an audience, the opera again scored a success. Harold Schonberg wrote:

The Bartóks and Prokofievs and Hindemiths and Coplands of the day showed their modernism through a screen of dissonance. That was the accepted avant-garde style. Along came Mr. Thomson, who decided to be avant-garde in reverse. he composed a white-key opera out of Satie; an American hymn-tune, folk-song opera with more plagal cadences than can be found in a church in a year of Sundays; an opera with hardly a dissonance. And yet it was altogether “modern.”

It still retains its charm. "Four Saints,” like “The Mother of Us All,” occupies a special place in the history of Opera. It may be precious, it may be overcute, but it has a peculiar sweetness and innocence. It means everything and it means nothing. The listener is awash in a sea of word and phrase associations; is exasperated by the repetitions the same time he is enchanted; can be irritated by the word play because he cannot make up his mind whether it is profound or bogus. And yet the damn thing works.

The music is affectionate and playful, and there is nothing remotely like it in opera. Only Mr. Thomson could have gotten away with this sophisticated bay talk; he always knew how to tease and to create outrageous paradoxes. In a crazy kind of way, “Four Saints in Three Acts” is more daring than the Prokofiev operas and the Bartók concertos—and that is part of the Thomson paradox. It is also regretfully true that without Gertrude Stein his music was nothing.

The Met had hoped to make the Mini-Met a permanent adjunct to the company but it lasted only one season.

Between 1975 and 1990, there were various management changes at the Met. It was during this era that James Levine began his rise to power in the company. Never in its history had the Metropolitan given a conductor an official position and title. From 1975-1981, the leadership of the Met was divided between a “triumvirate”-Anthony Bliss (executive director), Mr. Levine (music director) and John Dexter (director of production). In 1981, Dexter left his executive office and Bliss (now as general manager) and Levine shared management duties. In 1985, Bruce Crawford took over as general manager and Levine’s position was elevated to that of artistic director. One is tempted to dub these fifteen seasons the “Levine Era,” for it was the Maestro's artistic vision more than any other that shaped the personality of the company during this time.

American Opera at the Met Part II : 1935-2003 - Continue to Page Three