The year the Metropolitan Opera declared war on critics

Will the art of opera one day be able to escape the stifling grip of its magnificent past? Judging by the impressive array of contemporary works that have reached American stages over the past year, we may be closer to that goal than at any time in recent decades. The Met, which in the mid-20th century routinely presented entire seasons devoid of living composers, presented no fewer than five modern scores in 2024: “” by John AdamsEl Niño“, by Terence Blanchard”The fire locked in my bones“, that of Kevin Puts”The hours», by Jeanine Tesori «Based”, and that of Osvaldo Golijov “Ainadamar.” My opera year also included “ ” by Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko.Chernobyldorf», at the Prototype Festival; “Last Days” by Oliver Leith at the Los Angeles Philharmonic; “by Damian Geter”American Apollo”, at the Des Moines Metro Opera; and Missy MazzoliThe listeners”, at the Philadelphia Opera.

For those who view opera as an ancient genre preoccupied with musty subject matter, the works mentioned above might prompt reconsideration of their interpretation. They address in turn the birth of Christ, the suicide of Virginia Woolf, the war of drones, the murder of Federico García Lorca, the recent apocalyptic history of Ukraine, a rock star like Kurt Cobain, homoerotic art by John Singer Sargent and a cult society built around ambient sound. Their musical languages ​​are no less diverse. If Puts’ late romantic and modern pastiches put you off, you might want to try the seething electronic drones of “Chornobyldorf” or the fractured, glitchy textures of “Last Days.” R. & B. and gospel lessons through “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”; “Ainadamar” is ignited by flamenco. “The Listeners” – to my ears the most formidable achievement of this series – balances fragmentary lyricism with drone and glissando, to dark and hypnotic effect.

It goes without saying that none of these works are intended for universal appeal. We lack a lingua franca that would make such a breakthrough possible, and given the range of voices demanding to be represented, that’s a good thing. It is therefore dismaying to see an opera leader assert that there is only one viable path: “operas with rich melodic scores,” in the vein of Puccini. This figure is that of Peter Gelb, the general director of the Met. In a opinion essay published in the Times in November, Gelb asserted that opera had “turned inward” in the second half of the 20th century, gravitating toward “experimental, sometimes atonal compositions that did not appeal to a wide audience.” He blames anonymous critics for promoting this unappetizing diet and denigrating the apparently more digestible dishes he’s recently offered at the Met.

At least one of these journalistic enemies of the people is easily identified. In October, the New York Job reported that Gelb had publicly complained about Zachary Woolfe’s behavior stove of “Grounded” in the Times. At a fundraising event on the Upper East Side, Gelb said, “There’s a lot of resentment from some critics. . . on the idea that music should be accessible to a wide audience. These alleged opponents defend “the operas of Elliott Carter or plays which I do not believe would have popular success”. In fact, Carter, a stubborn modernist who tended to receive criticism of the grudgingly respectful type, wrote only one opera, the forty-seven-minute “What Next?” As far as I know, neither Woolfe nor anyone else ever demanded that it be performed at the Met.

In the Times In his piece, Gelb returns to the theme of the avant-garde alienating the public, by designating a new target:

György Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre,” a lyrical farce about the end of the world created in 1978, has been described by the composer as an “anti-anti opera.” It featured 12 automobile horns and an absurdist plot that explored arachnophobia, among other unusual themes. I met Ligeti in the 1990s, when I was the head of a label and visited his apartment in Hamburg. He ordered me to quickly close the door before any spiders got in.

This sneering rebuke is even more bizarre than the blow to Carter’s ghost opera production. Gelb reduces Ligeti, one canonical figure of the 20th centuryto a fringe weirdo who wrote esoteric gibberish. He apparently forgot that Ligeti’s “Atmospheres” and Requiem reached millions of spectators thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s film.2001: A Space Odyssey» and that virtuosos like Yuja Wang regularly include the composer’s Études in their programs. The late Kaija Saariaho, whose opera “L’Amour du Loin” had a successful race at the Met in 2016 (and whose latest masterpiece, “Innocence“, is intended for a future Met season), recognized Ligeti’s impact on his dense and smoldering textures. As for the “Grand Macabre”, it is a must-have for European houses: this fall, it appeared at the Prague State Opera, the Bavarian State Opera and the Teatro Massimo in Palermo – and he exhausted three performances at the New York Philharmonic in 2010. It deserves to be seen at the Met, although we will obviously have to wait until Gelb leaves.

Who really are these “experimental, sometimes atonal” composers who tyrannized opera at the end of the 20th century? If you look at the posters for American operas between 1950 and 1990, you see dozens of non-radical, even humiliating, scores by Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, William Grant Still, Jack Beeson, Carlisle Floyd, Robert Ward, Douglas Moore, Dominick Argento and William Bolcom. A few of them showed up at the Met; a large number of others found refuge at the New York City Opera. Gelb’s notion of a decades-long melodic drought ending with Philip Glass and John Adams shows a fundamental indifference to the history of opera.

Gelb is equally vague when he looks to a deeper past. “History has proven time and time again that the status quo in artistic works is often wrong,” he writes. “When Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” premiered at La Scala in 1904, it was a critical failure.” Indeed, it was. But it also failed with the public, as Gelb would have understood if he had consulted a informative page on his company’s website: “There were cries of animals and birds from the audience during the dawn scene, laughter when Butterfly introduced her child to Sharpless, and cries of ‘She’s pregnant ! when a draft caught and inflated the lead singer’s costume, all in addition to the typical hisses, hisses and boos. Gelb’s populist tactic of pitting sympathetic audiences against unpleasant critics belies the complex reality of the repertoire’s birth.

The Met chief has previously had problems with free speech in the cultural press. In 2012, he I tried to stop Opera News– which then belonged to the Metropolitan Opera Guild – from publishing mildly critical reviews of Met performances. This fixation is a shame, because opera, like any form of art, thrives on debate, disagreement, the comings and goings of public space. The fact that the Met is presenting so many new works is fundamentally commendable. That some of them are better received than others – by the public and by critics – is not only inevitable, but healthy. New opera is an inherently failure-prone enterprise, as Joshua Kosman points out in a online response to Gelb’s diatribe: “It takes ten new operas to produce one good one.” If you’re complaining to (or in) the press the other nine times, you’re not really in it for the long haul.

Believing that you have a perfect understanding of what people want is the wrong way to run an opera company – or any other organization, including a nation. What we call the “audience” is an ever-changing collection of tastes, expectations, experiences, levels of knowledge, and degrees of passion. The global musical landscape has undergone so many tectonic shifts over the last century and a half that no one can claim to see it as a whole. The idea of ​​imitating Puccini is as undesirable as it is impossible. The man himself would have disdained such a step. In 1920, Puccini attended a performance of Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder,” hoping for an explosion of radical energy from the progenitor of atonality. Instead, as he told Alma Mahler-Werfel, he heard only a simple Wagner cover – “Gurrelieder” being one of Schoenberg’s pre-atonal creations. Puccini felt neither surprised nor challenged. He left during intermission.

Fifteen notable recordings of 2024

• Bára Gísladóttir, “VAPE”, “Hringla”, “COR”; Bára Gísladóttir, Eva Ollikainen conducting the Icelandic Symphony (Dacapo)

• Louise Bertin, “Fausto”; Karine Deshayes, Karina Gauvin, Ante Jerkunica, Nico Darmanin, Marie Gautrot, Diana Axentii, Thibault de Damas, Christophe Rousset lead Les Talens Lyriques and the Choir of Radio Flemish (Bru Zane)

• Kali Malone, “All of Life”; Macadam Ensemble, Anima Brass, Malone, Stephen O’Malley (Ideological organ)

• Ives, Violin Sonatas Nos. 1 to 4, Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; Stefan Jackiw, Jeremy Denk (Nonesuch)

• Bruckner, Symphony No. 7, Mason Bates, “Resurrexit”; Manfred Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (Reference)

• Weill, Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2, “The Seven Deadly Sins”; Joana Mallwitz conducts the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra, with Katharine Mehrling, Michael Porter, Simon Bode, Michael Nagl, Oliver Zwarg (DG)

• Saariaho, “Adriana Mater”; Fleur Barron, Axelle Fanyo, Nicholas Phan, Christopher Purves, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus (DG)

• Corelli, Violin Sonatas, op. 5; Rachel Barton Pine, David Schrader, John Mark Rozendaal, Brandon Acker (Cedille)

• Obrecht, Missa Scaramella (reconstructed by Fabrice Fitch) and other works; Andrew Kirkman at the head of the Binchois Consort (Hyperion)

• “Music in times of war”: music by Debussy and Komitas; Kirill Gerstein, Ruzan Mantashyan, Katia Skanavi, Thomas Adès (myrios)

• Fauré, Complete Works; various artists (Erato)

• Louis Beydts, Melodies and Songs; Cyrille Dubois, Tristan Raës (Aside)

• Sarah Hennies, “Zeitgebers”, “Clock Dies”, “Motor Tapes”; Set 0, Talea Set, Dedalus Set (New World)

• Chopin, Studies; Yunchan Lim (Decca)

• Jürg Frey, String Quartet No. 4; Bozzini Quartet (QB)