Tristan und Isolde (Opera)

Hailed as the event of the season, the Met's towering new production of Tristan und Isolde lives up to the hype. It is daunting, no doubt, running a massive five hours. I was so impressed with the orchestra playing essentially four full hours of the most heart-wrenching music ever written (plus two intermissions). I also impressed myself staying awake! My new strategy is to chew gum. I also think periodically lifting my binoculars to my eyes really forced me to focus and not doze off. The Met has had some well-publicized financial woes, but the house was packed today, at what was actually an added performance after the original run sold out. And I'm very glad to have snagged a ticket to this Saturday matinee because I don't think I would've lasted at an after-work performance ending at midnight. The line to enter the opera house 10 minutes before curtain stretched the full length of Lincoln Center Plaza, and double-backed twice. I've never seen a crowd like that for the opera, with such rapturous applause. Timmy Chalamet, eat your heart out! How hard can it be really to create blockbuster opera all the time (I have a lot of ideas for the Met to attract audiences!)? I think the length actually works to its benefit. It makes it something more than just opera, but an endurance test to experience. People nowadays seek out experiences. It bodes well for the upcoming Ring cycle, which will reunite Yannick Nezet-Seguin with director Yuval Sharon and Soprano Lise Davidsen as Brunhilde. Seeing Davidsen live was incredible; this must be what it was like to see La Divina in her time. 

The set by Es Devlin is unconventional but inspired. It reminded me of a camera shutter or the barrel of a Skyfall-gun or an eye (with eyelid). At times it looked like a a James Turrell (the lighting by John Torres makes the characters glow). I liked that the singers are essentially elevated above the stage, aiding sight lines. There has been criticism about the cone shape making it hard to hear the singers over the orchestra. But that didn't really bother me. There's a delicacy to Davidsen's voice in the soft piano parts--but even if you're not hearing the note necessarily, you do still hear the shape of the phrase in the continuous melody. In Act I, there is a brilliant reference to Un Chien Andalou, the Bunuel/Dali movie that famously uses the Prelude to Tristan and Liebestod. Isolde holds up a dagger to Tristan's neck and the set perfectly mirrors the blade. It's so good it made me gasp. Only later did I realize the blade cuts the "eye", just like in the iconic scene from Un Chien Andalou. In Act II, the cone reveals segments that move in opposite directions separating the lovers. The production uses doubles, actors standing in for Tristan and Isolde doing a kind of performance art in slow motion in the foreground, seated at a table Marina Abramovic style. In Act I you don't quite get the meaning behind it. But in Acts II and III, they enter another spectral plane. They look down on themselves from a heavenly vantage point. The program quotes WH Auden about the yearning of their two souls to merge, a consummation impossible in the physical realm while they have bodies, and so their doubles allow them to to "leave" their bodies behind. The final coup is the ending, notoriously tragic but here ending not just with death but with a birth, confidently recontextualizing the Liebestod.

Don Giovanni (Opera) (2025)

Mozart has grown on me in my old age. I used to find his music kind of boring. But in its simplicity is actually musical perfection as God divined. Even when writing about womanizers and their conquests his music is gorgeous. The Cattalog aria sung by Leporello is my favorite in the 3.5 hours. The music itself is interesting in that it's sometimes just singing over a sparse harpsichord line. It's kind of odd harpsichord against the brutalist backdrop of the Ivo Van Hove set. There are three pieces that rotate very slowly, so slowly and subtly that you don't even notice it until it reaches its final position. In the climactic scene when the Commendatore's ghost (or Mozart's father according to Amadeus) drags Don Giovanni down to hell there are these intense projections that look as though they're on a screen, but all of a sudden the projections turn off and I'm told they're projected straight on the set. It's a trick of the eye. From the heights of the family circle, I had a hard time telling the female characters apart. They were all dressed kind of similarly and I'd forgotten my binoculars. Could not tell that Federica Lombardi (Donna Anna) dressed in basically a nightgown was so pregnant she is just a couple weeks away from maternity leave. The singers are all universally excellent. 
 

Salome (Opera) (2025)

Two straight hours of music, without applause breaks, the new Met Opera production of Salome boasts a large 100-person orchestra. Yannick Nezet-Seguin is at the helm, his music stand glowing in gold. The music, like everything about the opera frankly, is wild. Richard Strauss got some bizarre sound effects out of the orchestra. The music is undoubtedly interesting. There are bits of melody, but no such arias really. It has the drama of Wagner without the beauty. Not intro level opera. The singing role of Salome is extremely demanding and Elza van den Heever sings it powerfully.

The production design has two levels, the palace upstairs and the cistern downstairs. When the scenes transition like an elevator, it's quite a sight to behold. The cistern is stark, but has a steep staircase and ominous shadows. There are small children playing younger/inner Salome; they just sit on stage observing. It's traumatizing. The little girls will never forget the severed head. It's all super creepy like a nightmare. The projections shimmer tricking the mind as though the floor moves--which of course it does. Some of the characters wear rams heads rather inexplicably. For much of the first act, they remain in the background coming on and off stage bandying around a woman in a bikini. There is a ram-man statue that they actually smash to pieces! They have budget to irreparably break props performance after performance. 

The Marriage of Figaro (Opera)

Anthony Roth Costanzo is a force of nature. He might be the biggest name in opera right now, surely the most famous countertenor.  The Little Island amphitheater is a perfect venue for him to experiment a little. It was my first time seeing a performance there, and I like that there is a cool outdoor space for avant garde work. Costanzo sings all the parts in this abridged Figaro; his tenor as powerful as his soprano. That doesn't mean he's the only person on stage. There are a handful of actors who mime and lip-sync but you can always see Costanzo somewhere on stage belting out the lyrics. Sometimes he's standing or sitting or lying or hiding--it's really impressive in every respect. And it is downright hilarious. Aside from it being a comedic, albeit confusing, opera, there is abundant physical comedy. I found myself, along with the rest of the crowd, actually laughing out loud...at the opera! There is a small 9-piece orchestra, with an interesting orchestration featuring instruments like guitar and saxophone that surely didn't exist in Mozart's time. There's even a circus element to the show. One of the actors is a circus guy, jumping up and down on a trampoline. There is a comedic interlude, allowing Costanzo a short break while the actors give us a ridiculous synopsis and recite the original French source material for the libretto. This show truly has everything.

Madama Butterfly (2006) (Metropolitan Opera)

The Met has been performing this beautiful production of Puccini's popular Madama Butterfly since 2006. And thirteen years later, it is still incredible. The production by Anthony Minghella is more theatrical than it is operatic, in my opinion. By that I mean the staging is not grandiose like you expect opera to be. The set is rather bare, consisting mostly some screens, some chairs and a large mirror. There are a couple of dozen people that play actual pieces of the scenery, like a kindergarten play in which the trees are played by children. Here, they are dressed and veiled in black like the bunraku puppeteers and they carry lanterns, flowers and birds. It is beautiful and sufficient, don't get me wrong but it is not operatic. The scenery at the end of the first act is especially beautiful with the falling butterflies and stars and lit lanterns. The enormous mirror that makes up a slanted ceiling is a mystery for much of the show. The opening scene makes dramatic use of it, but the mirror is really there for 3 hours and 15 minutes to create the final striking image of the fallen Butterfly, red sash cutting diagonally across the floor and mirror to great effect. The colored lighting creates beautiful silhouettes, and the figures against the white screens, still as a portrait, are highly artistic.  The silhouettes at the final bows are gorgeous. I'm not sure if the puppets add much more than what a real kid might have brought, but it does make the production a little more Japanese (read: authentic?).

I love Puccini, but this is not my favorite score of his. It is not nearly as melodic as Tosca or Turandot. He still creates wonderful harmonies but the music meanders and infrequently resolves--is that the difference between showtunes and opera? It quotes the Star Spangled Banner and uses East Asian instruments to evoke Japanese music. None of the arias are particularly memorable. I remember Un Bel Di because it is a pivotal aria for Cio Cio San in her emotional development but I might not recognize it.

The story is a tragedy. It features an American in Japan singing in Italian. The naval lieutenant Pinkerton is sleeping his way around the world, as one does in the military. At the turn of the twentieth century, America has forced open Japan by gunboat at the port of Nagasaki. He rents a house, has a fetish, finds a wife and commits statutory rape (albeit in a beautiful scene)--young Butterfly is only 15 though apparently she looks as young as ten (because westerners can't tell age in Asians?). He intends for the marriage to be temporary but it's very real and permanent to Butterfly/Cio Cio San. And so naturally he returns to America and gets married to a white woman, leaving his wife and (unbeknownst to him) child, and leaving his problem to be solved by the State Department, like the consul wants to be bothered by immoral and callous military men. And then even the consul demurs to the poor housekeeper to break the news to Butterfly. In short, there are some questionable race and gender politics in this story that probably didn't even occur to playwright Belasco but in 2019 we are more enlightened. Consequently, some of the dialogue is funny and some of it a little cringey.  We can overlook it because Butterfly's love is genuine, though at 15-18 years old, what does she really know of love? If you can get past that, the tragedy is heart achingly beautiful.