Meet the Met:
When local devotees of the Metropolitan Opera gather this week in Hynes Auditorium to revel in their share of the Met's annual national tour, they will get their money's worth, even at $20 or $25 a seat. They will see and hear first rate singers like Jon Vickers, Regine Crespin, Luciano Pavarotti, Leonie Rysanek, and Sherrill Milnes. They will probably leave with high regard for the Met's artistic standards. They may even be a bit jealous of their New York acquaintances who can stroll down to Lincoln Center, spend astonishingly large amounts of money, and see a Met production anytime during the 24-week opera season.
There's no reason for anyone to be jealous. The quality of the singers on the Met tour this year is at least as high as in the New York house--even higher, some might argue. Because of the peculiar financial needs of the modern international opera house, tour audiences like Boston's can now see a concentration of talent in one week that New York audiences have to wait months for.
The Met tour hasn't always been an artistic or financial asset, even as recently as Rudolf Bing's regime. "The tour is the albatross hung around the neck of the manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Eventually, I suppose, it will simply fall off from sheer economic weight... Whatever we do, the tour is artistically a scandal," Bing wrote in his memoirs.
What has happened in the intervening years is that the Met's budgetary troubles have forced a reevaluation of the national tour. It might once have been a luxury that helped bring the Met closer to the national audiences gathered around radios every Saturday afternoon to hear opera broadcasts; it has become--along with the opera blitz on public television--a critical part of the Met's campaign to raise money across the country.
The boon to audiences like Boston's is huge. The seven productions the Met has taken on tour this year represent the best of its repertory. Boston audiences still must endure the conditions of Hynes Auditorium--universally referred to as a "barn," with poor acoustics and bad sight lines. But in 1981 the Met in Boston will move to the refurbished Music Hall, and the last major advantage the New York house can claim will disappear.
The Met's financial need to court its national audience goes beyond the obvious pressure of inflation which strains cultural institutions of every variety. Of all the performing arts opera is the most extravagant--combining as it does the costs of a major theater and a symphony orchestra with the fees of prima donnas and temperamental tenors. An opera house cannot contain more than a few thousand seats without forcing singers' voices beyond their capacity, limiting the revenue available from ticket sales. The Met is squeezing as much as it can out of its ticket-buyers; at $40 an orchestra seat next season (up from $37.50 this year), an evening at the opera is probably the most expensive form of entertainment available to New Yorkers short of a meal at the Palace. And European opera houses often charge more.
Even at these rates box office revenue simply doesn't cover the Met's costs, so its management has turned to audiences outside of the house to try to make up the difference. Over the last two years--during which the Met budget has been relatively untroubled--the national campaign has succeeded in a big way. The "Texaco-Metropolitan Opera Radio Network" has been broadcasting Saturday matinees from the Metropolitan Opera House for the last 39 years, but the series of live telecasts begun in 1976 has proved a spectacular stimulant to contributions.
The national tour--though probably a money-loser in itself--has done its share to boost the money flowing into the Met from its national audience. The tour also strengthens the Met's claim to be a national resource when it goes to seek grants from the federal government and national foundations.
If the telecasts bring money in faster than the tour, might the Met curtail or abandon the tour? Walter Pierce, managing director of the Met in Boston, says that's not likely. "It's a tremendous undertaking--you literally move the opera house," Pierce says. "If it wasn't essential then the Met wouldn't do it. They want to be a national company and the tour is the only way to do it."
Some observers speculate that the telecasts may actually have led to the upgrading of the tour. "What they're televising is their finest stuff," a New York-based writer on music says. "If the company then shows up in your home town with lower quality than that, you'll feel you're getting short shrift."
Whatever has prompted the tour's dramatic increase in quality over the past three or four years, the change has placed the artistic shortcomings of the company in relief. It can muster high-quality productions and casts for the week-long stint in each of the cities the tour visits, but the regular season in New York is much less consistent.
The Met expanded its season two years ago from 20 to 24 weeks, and from three new productions a year to four. The triumvirate that now rules the Met--James Levine as music director, John Dexter as director of production, and Anthony Bliss as executive director--is enthusiastic and ambitious, but many New York opera-goers feel that they are spreading their resources too thin.
Both Dexter and Levine have performed erratically. Dexter's record with modern opera is extraordinary--his Dialogues of the Carmelites and Billy Budd exemplify how best to present modern operas with narrow appeal. But his productions of standards from the nineteenth century repertory, like his curious Rigoletto, have infuriated audiences. Levine's conducting has gained undeserved acclaim in the press. It's forceful, direct, and intractably unsubtle; Levine takes scores and homogenizes them. Furthermore, at a callow 35 he is attempting to conduct everything in the repertory from Mozart to Berg and Weill.
Today's Met is capable of extremes of success and failure. Its record with Wagner, for example, is a wrecked new production and a brilliant one in the last two seasons. Last year's Tannhauser remains a model of creative fidelity to the essence of an opera; this year's Flying Dutchman is a travesty, fusing roles and entirely subverting the opera's dramatic and musical content. In its casts, too, the Met's standards fluctuate widely. It's a long way down from the near-ideal Parsifal of this spring to the dismal Norma playing at the same time.
No one expects perfection in an art as composite as opera, and the Met presents hits and flops about as frequently as any major company. It is in the middle ground of old favorites, like Il Trovatore and Carmen, the staple of any opera house, that the Met has abandoned its audience. Each year it revives Aida with mediocre singers. Undoubtedly the management calculates that these are operas which will fill seats no matter how meager the cast, and so far box office figures bear them out. Thus the present situation: except for new productions, only operas which are modern; unpopular, or obscure generally receive the casts they deserve.
Much of the Met's work at its New York base remains excellent, of course, and it continues to offer the widest variety of any North American opera house. But the moves towards television and a full-blooded tour hold the prospect of a radically different future for the nation's premier company --one in which talented casts and good productions are lavished on televised operas and those destined for the national tour, and the venerable New York opera house languishes, relying on its national income and the docility of its audiences instead of consistent production standards to keep it in the black.
If such a future ever comes to pass, though, it will take a long time, and meanwhile Boston residents can enjoy the singers and productions the Met is sending them. The ones remaining are:
* Tannhauser, April 26. Beyond the superb production--including a shadowy, carnal Venusberg and rear projections of woods--this Tannhauser features the legend of Leonie Rysanek's exuberant Elisabeth, a vocal titan of a heroine. Richard Cassilly in the title role acts and sings much more reliably than the man he replaced, James McCracken, whose croaking was the chief liability of this opera as presented in New York last year.
* Don Carlo. April 27. The Met's new production of the five-act version Verdi prepared for the Paris Opera was one of the season's successes in New York.
* The Bartered Bride, April 28. The Met's new production of Smetana's bouncy peasant drama boasts great singers but a botched translation and presentation. Teresa Stratas, Nicolai Gedda, and Jon Vickers (who cancelled his Tuesday Otello performance and may not show here) all are first-class artists, but some miscastings mar their contribution.
* Dialogues of the Carmelites, April 28. Poulenc's intellectual treatment of this story of a French convent martyred during the French Revolution has received a simple, stark, and thoroughly convincing presentation from the Met for three years now. Regine Crespin's age has taken the lusciousness out of her voice, but her insight and style are perfect for the role of the Old Prioress. Maria Ewing in the lead and Betsy Norden as Sister Constance both shine with youth and youthful voices. The Met in Boston reports that Carmelites isn't selling well, so it's probably your best chance to get decent seats at this late hour.