That Was The (Opera) Year That Was
(Da Capo Aria 2021, A section)
That was the year that was
It’s over, let it go.
Opera’s been in the dumps
A Zoom can’t beat a live show
(B section – longer exposition)
An ENO drive-in was held in a park
Bohème in a camper, the cast in the dark
Before Mimi snuffed it, we’d clowns on the stage
So, jazzed up Puccini is now all the rage
(Rising key)
Nevil Holt went all outdoors, the stage on a mound
What price Don Giovanni with amplified sound?
(Impossibly rising key – Singer, Millicent Martin self-combusts)
Met season’s start, Fire Shut Up in My Bones
Then came Eurydice, with three singing stones
(Da Capo, A section – reprise)
That was the year that waaaaaaas!
Acknowledgement: Ron Grainer and Millicent Martin
That Was the Week That Was (TW3) was a ground-breaking satirical BBC television show, that ran from 1962 to 1963. It was devised by David Frost and Ned Sherrin, fronted by Frost. Arguably, it broke the Tory government of Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. He lost the 1964 general election to Harold Wilson by a whisker. Thirteen years of Conservative domination cowered under the sharp whip of public ridicule.
Sound familiar? David Frost is at it again. This time in the persona of Lord Frost, whose unwelcome letter-aria resignation has been delivered, basso profundo, molto serioso, to his boss in No10. Arguably, it will break the government of Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
He now faces Christmas, trussed like a turkey in Chequers, tormented by squalling weans, while Tory backbenchers suffer conniptions over their chances of survival after the North Shropshire Tory-shoot.
As TW3 broke the mould of satire, so Covid restrictions have changed opera profoundly in 2021. (I know, I know, this is a dead cert entry for a Guinness Book of Records contrived link of the year podium place. But did you really think I could resist a poke at the Boris/Frost fire?)
Anyway, letters like Frost’s are great operatic devices. Think the letter aria in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin; Rosina and Susanna’s spoof letter to the count in Mozart’s Figaro; the flutter of contradictory missives in Verdi’s Falstaff.
And the 50-letter blizzard about to emit from the 1922 Committee premiere of Boris No Longer Goodenuff. Maestro Graham Brady is currently seeking sponsors with little confidence.
Covid has been a wake-up call for opera promoters as well as political farce dramatists. The same old was impossible during lockdown. Innovation came to the rescue and is here to stay.
Staging. Whatever their shortcomings, productions for broadcast in audience-free theatres have brought new filmic techniques front stage. Not just the broadcasting of opera in HD, pioneered by New York’s Metropolitan Opera in opera houses worldwide, but integration into the mainstream repertoire.
Not everyone is a fan. Opera critic and publisher of opera magazine Opera Wire, David Salazar, has argued that onstage performance is being twisted to fit the broadcast format:
“And given its increased importance in an HD world, one would imagine that the quality of the video recordings would naturally improve over time. While the technology has certainly captured more vibrant and photorealistic images, the actual art of video recording opera performances has seemingly been lost over time. Not dying or diminished, but lost.”
He has a point. How often have I been made, mid aria, to suffer a jump cut to the back of a conductor’s head, a cellist scraping away, a timpanist poised to strike, or a silent chorus. Missed that high note. Damn!
Salazar again: “The modern HD era is one dominated by rampant edits, strange camera choices, and a general lack of storytelling vision and cohesion that make you often wonder whether the person behind the camera is sensitive to a vocal line, what a musical score entails, or even how to tell a compelling and immersive story.”
I think he is being too harsh, but opera producers do need to reassert their supremacy in their dogfight with sharp fingered editor-nerds in the studio booth. The broadcast medium is here to stay.
The establishment of the Met’s global Live in HD brand has proved a huge success for general manager, Peter Gelb. Nonetheless, the medium must not be allowed to prevail over operatic art form.
On the plus side, filmic techniques incorporated into stage productions have often brought added drama and immediacy. They also allow smaller companies on tight budgets to improve visuals, minimising the need for massive, mobile sets and expensive scenery.
When the Fern Blooms, from Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych, presented by Lviv National Opera, is a good example. A single set, transformed by opaque screens and projected imagery took the audience to another world, beyond the horizon a conventional budget could reach.
For the ultimate exemplar of film upstaging action look no further than Dutch Opera’s Der Zwerg, composer Alexander Zemlinsky. The singers were presented in oratorio style in boxes, while most of the action was projected on a rear screen. Prescribed by distancing needs, I think this format will endure even as Covid rules relax.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste”. Thank you, Winnie. All over Europe opera houses scurried to bring performances online, then reopened socially distanced theatres when possible and ultimately returned to full houses, but in Maschera.
An exemplar of innovation in crisis was Wexford Festival Opera, whose online Wexford Factory morphed from being a hothouse of up-and-coming stars to a showcase for innovative performance until the Festival proper returned live in October 2021.
Rightly, the Wexford team blew their own trumpets: “First-rate soloists and the Wexford Factory enliven binge-watching this year’s Wexford Festival Opera online, a Festival in the Air” was the blurb for late 2020 and early 2021.
Their six-part mini-series of Verdi’s Falstaff – available here – was a tour de force and a refreshing change from watching mezzos singing in their bathrooms while rampant pet dogs challenged all comers in the background. By 2021 the novelty of domestic performance was wearing off.
That changing format in presenting opera, forced by circumstance, will stand the medium in good stead as it continues its battle for new audiences.
Other tweaks. Peter Gelb, the Met’s General Manager, has brought forward some curtain times, cut intervals and encouraged the production of family seasonal favourites. Gelb believes opera has to be more user friendly.
Massenet’s Cinderella, a shortened English version of Cendrillon and Mozart’s Magic Flute – same treatment – are currently running in New York. I saw them both and the audiences were refreshingly youthful.
“I liked the birdyman best.” “No, the serpent was better. Daddy, why did the bad ladies kill the serpent at the beginning?” And so, opera critics of the next generation hone their craft.
Much ingenuity has been on display this year. English National Opera’s drive-in concept of Puccini’s La Bohème at Alexandra Palace. Scottish Opera offered a cutdown version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Gondoliers from the back of a pantechnicon, which toured Scotland – to the surprise of residents in Auchtermuchty.
New Camerata, the vibrant New York chamber opera company, fashioned their Ives Project, the songs of the illustrious American composer brought to life with light-touch, animated vignettes.
And, to kick off 2022 I have just been pinged! No, not NHS Whitty Watch. The less probably named Hattie Hafenrichter, Royal Opera House, announcing three opera live streams for end 2020 and 2021 – Verdi’s Macbeth until 28 December; Gounod’s Faust – the wonderfully theatrical David MacVicar production – from 14 January and Verdi’s Nabucco from 28 January.
And amazing stop press news. I met English soprano, Alice Crowe, in an elevator in the WestHouse hotel on W55th Street this morning. She had just arrived in town with her family to start Met rehearsals for Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro. It’s amazing where a polite comment about the weather can take you.
She is singing the role of Susanna and debuted in New York in 2012 as Servilia in Mozart’s La Clemenza de Tito. Opening night is on 8 January. An amazingly compressed rehearsal time, even for a seasoned artiste and a familiar work.
As they say in Edinburgh’s genteel Morningside drawing rooms when the annual Festival programme is announced; “Haud me back”!