The Metropolitan Opera in New York is battling for new audiences, enlisting celebrity support and staging daring productions, writes Peter Conrad
In the 1970s, as New York staggered towards bankruptcy, the Metropolitan Opera made a desperate plea to prospective ticket-buyers. "Strike a blow for civilisation," its advertisements begged. Only a few years earlier, a slum had been bulldozed to make way for the marble-clad theatres of Lincoln Centre, propped on a podium above the brawling streets; the surrounding area remained treacherous. This was opera bravely proclaiming its civilising mission in a city on the skids. Today, the social landscape is irrevocably altered. The marble of the cultural citadel is grey and pock-marked with age, and the musical offerings of Lincoln Centre are outshouted by the glossy wares of the emporia lining a rebuilt Columbus Avenue. And, in our politically correct times, an opera company - surely synonymous with elitism and privilege - dare not pretend to be a civilising force; it must find a niche in the market place of popular culture, amid the babble, glitz and dreck.
Last September, the Met began its season - its first under the command of a messianically vigorous new general manager, the former recording in dustry executive Peter Gelb - by doing exactly that. A gaggle of celebs, most not celebrated for their interest in opera, was wrangled to attend the opening night: David Bowie and Iman, Jude Law and Sienna Miller, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, Rufus Wainwright and his mum. Flashbulbs popped as apoplectically as at the Oscars. A mile away down Broadway, the Nasdaq, Panasonic and Reuters screens in Times Square switched off their reports on the Dow Jones index and their tallies of Iraq casualties to relay Anthony Minghella's sleek, lacquered production of Madama Butterfly (taken over by the Met from English National Opera).
In streets blocked to traffic, a rush-hour crowd sat patiently and watched Puccini's geisha love, suffer, and sacrifice herself amid a neon galaxy of commercial slogans. An elderly couple visiting from Kansas, as mystified as Dorothy in Oz, gaped at the scene. "We're from the Midwest," the husband told a reporter. "We don't have this kinda thing in the Midwest," said his wife. Osvaldo Golijov, commissioned to compose an opera for the Met for a forthcoming season, noticed a passer-by weeping as she gazed up at the screens. The sight convinced the composer that tragedy, whether in the amphitheatres of ancient Greece or in this neon gulch above 42nd Street, could purify and healingly exalt us, thanks to the purgative agency of music.
The Met has historically been snooty, proud of its exclusivity. Free tickets were distributed for the final dress rehearsal of Butterfly, however, with an equally free lunch thrown in. Afterwards audience members were invited to prowl across the gaping stage, and even to test the hall's acoustics with their own, untuned vocalising. Having symbolically flung open the Met's doors, Gelb set about electronically universalising the company. He has shrewdly negotiated contracts that allow Met performances to be broadcast live most evenings on a private satellite radio station for subscribers. During daylight hours, addicts are able to hear selections from the company's archival treasury on the same channel. Over Christmas, the Met began a series of video relays by satellite across North America and in the UK, where Saturday matinée performances can be seen at Picturehouse cinemas in Notting Hill, Greenwich, Cambridge, Brighton and York. At this rate, the world will need only one opera house. We all abominate America's imperial presidency, but I'm not unhappy to be living in Gelb's buzzy, vibrant empire of music.
Tan Dun's The First Emperor, commissioned by the Met, fits in well with this newly expansive policy. Its subject is Qin Shi Huang (played by ever-valiant Plácido Domingo), the warmonger who unified China two millennia ago and constructed the Great Wall to keep out the barbarians. Qin mistrusted words, which generate dissent: he ordered the incineration of all books except agricultural and medical manuals. But he understood the political value of music, and knew that it could chorally regiment society and attune contrary minds. In the opera, he brutalises and blackmails the dissident composer Gao Jianli to produce a national anthem. When the piece is at last performed at Qin's inauguration, it turns out to be a mournful chorus for the downtrodden slaves who maintain the empire - a critique of power, not a cheerleader's sycophantic refrain. Music, made only of air, is after all more powerful than Qin's obtuse barricade of stone.
Tan Dun and his co-librettist Ha Jin - like the composer, a refugee from Maoism - leave the local relevance of their story unstressed, but it ironically pokes through the pomp of the film director Zhang Yimou's staging. The Great Wall has its porous, frayed equivalent in the electrified fences along the Rio Grande, which pretend to debar the illegal immigrants on whom the greedy US economy depends. Qin at least undergoes a moral collapse when the ghosts of his victims berate him; George W Bush remains thickly impervious to the assaults of conscience.
East and west, rite and drama, confront each other a little uneasily in The First Emperor. Tan Dun conscientiously supplies episodes that mimic conventional opera: a mellifluous music lesson for Paul Groves as Gao Jianli, flighty coloratura roulades for Elizabeth Futral as the emperor's daughter, some Otello-like rages custom-made for Domingo. In the orchestra pit, strings lushly sympathise with the emotional predicaments of the characters. But the most grandly sonorous moments belong to the Chinese instruments grouped on stage: drums beaten with stones, an eerily high-strung zither, ceramic rattles, and a cavernous gong that serves as the voice of a disapproving heaven.
"Loud music," cries Qin during one of his har angues, "weakens our spirit." The admonition seems to be addressed to modern America, deafened by advertising jingles and hip-hop rants, by fundamentalist hymns and jingoistic chants. Interestingly, the Met alternated performances of The First Emperor with a version of Die Zauberflöte specially edited and adapted for a family audience. Mozart's opera is also about the blessing of harmony, and Tamino's flute on this occasion did more than disarm enemies and soothe savage breasts: it enchanted and pacified an audience of customarily uproarious New York brats.
Although Qin would not have approved, music also dispenses delirium. Bellini hoped that the singing in his romantic operas would induce an exquisite agony in audiences listening to the long-breathed rhapsodies of a soprano. The Met continues to provide such delights, along with higher-minded pleasures. As the intermittently crazy Elvira in I Puritani, Anna Netrebko is currently hurling high notes through the air as if they were bolts of lightning, and slithering up and down scales like a trapeze artist who has dispensed with a safety net. At one point during the character's mad scene (Act II), she lies flat on the floor, lets her head and its cascade of black hair droop upside down into the orchestra pit, and continues singing some of the most dementedly difficult music ever written: she looks like an Ophelia about to drown herself in a river of sound. No wonder Gelb has Netrebko under contract for the foreseeable future.
Impresarios usually disclose their plans in small, grudging instalments, but Gelb, determined to rejuvenate and enlarge the Met's rep ertory, is confident enough to look far ahead. The Canadian visionary Robert Lepage has been engaged to direct a new production of Wagner's Ring cycle, and is at present conducting research among the geysers and fuming volcanoes of Iceland, a terrain where - as he says - "the earth spoke to men", who transcribed its convulsive fits of temper in the Norse sagas.
Lepage sees The Ring as an elegy for our imperilled, feverish planet. With a clash of tectonic plates and an eruption of sulphuric gases, the world will begin to end on the Met stage during the 2011-2012 season. I only hope that geopolitical reality doesn't get in first.
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