Ground was broken for the new Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center in 1962, and the house itself opened in 1966, at a cost of $46 million, with a disastrous production of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. Directed and designed by Franco Zeffirelli, it starred soprano Leontyne Price, "looking like a miniature pyramid herself," in the worlds of a wit of the day, and wearing more spangles than Elizabeth Taylor did as queen of the Nile.
The Met's first new production this year, after a calamitous cut-and-paste Il Trovatore opened the season, was on a similar theme: Handel's Caesar and Cleopatra, this time with the bell-voiced Kathleen Battle as Egypt's regent. The production of Handel's Baroque masterpiece had, actually, been borrowed form elsewhere, but what it served to point up was how inappropriate the house is, physically, for most opera beyond the large-scaled spectacle of, say, Wagner, Verdi, or Strauss.
When plans were under way for the 3,800-seat house, the board of directors demanded a horseshoe style, with the result that, as renegade opera director Peter Sellars jokes, only about ten singers in the world can fill its cavern. The Met is huge, a chandeliered barn, where a Baroque opera such as the Handel, which tends to employ smallish voices anyway, is as fitting as high tea on a football field.
What the Met tends to do best, given the near-miraculous facilities of its stage (five movable stages, actually), are the big old warhorses. Over the past several seasons it has mounted, under the musical direction of James Levine, a new production of Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed by Otto Schenk and designed by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen. (The entire cycle of operas was performed this spring.) All told, it is a "safe" Ring, without even the smallest comet of controversy orbiting it. Traditional in its thrust, it is meant to last the Met many years.
Schenk has been extremely astute in realizing that Wagner wrote music-dramas: that is, the music must carry the day. What Wagner asked for on the stage is sometimes well-nigh impossible--underwater maidens, horses flying through the air, and quite literally, the destruction of world (and its rebirth) at the conclusion of Gotterdammerung. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a tall order.
Storybook Quality
Schenk and Schneider-Siemssen have come through with a Ring remarkable for its storybook quality, which owes a great deal to the illustrative genre of the late nineteenth century. Profound as it may be, and God knows it is, the Ring is essentially a fairy tale, populated by dwarves, giants, dragons, and a host of other paranormals. Some operas are much more successful than others, notably Die Walkure and Gotterdammerung, although both Das Rheingold and Siegfried have their moments.
To my mind, the opening of the Met's Das Rheingold just doesn't work the kind of magic you want it to: the simulation of being under water misses the mark. Nor is the rainbow bridge to Valhalla, the home of the gods, as colorfully dazzling as one might have wanted it to be. Siegfried, which to many people doesn't begin until its last act, when the hero wakes Brunnhilde from her sleep with a kiss, is a long haul, even for the devoted, and the mechanical dragon was
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