On Music
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music METROPOLITAN TREASURE-2 BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH T ^L. he "lyric scenes" of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (the composer did not call the work an opera) tell the tale from Pushkin's...
...Seiji Ozawa captured Onegin's instrumental expressivity in unforgettable concert performances of the entire score with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood, Boston and Carnegie Hall during the 1976-77 season...
...Amfortas (the tainted king of the knights of the Holy Grail) and Klingsor (the sorcerer who has led him into temptation) are complementary figures: one fallen from grace, the other never accepted...
...As the elderly tutor Monsieur Triquet, who at Tatyana's birthday party serenades her in French, Andrea Velis made poignant a figure too often made to look like an aging fool...
...Revealed in its symmetries and its linear progressions, illuminated by intelligence on stage and from the pit, Parsifal made a worthy ending to a season the Met can take just pride in...
...Deeply attuned to the pulse of the score, he explicated its line and texture with clarity, while the orchestra responded with warmth and plasticity...
...William Dudley's set shows the H.M.S...
...Still in love with him, yet mindful of her wifely duty, she turns her back on his desperate declaration...
...Jon Vickers enacted the Holy Fool of the title, who awakens from boyish ignorance to compassion and shoulders the sins of the world...
...The poem, an ironic masterpiece owing much to Byron (as readers without Russian can at last appreciate, thanks to Charles Johnston's elegant translation, published last year by Viking), determines only the course of events...
...at the close he is seen again, at peace...
...Captain Vere, who cannot bring himself to save Billy, receives his blessing as he goes off to his death...
...The stage pictures for these episodes, with their papery flats and clunky props (benches, fences) may once have been unexceptionable...
...Librettists E. M. Forster (the E. M. Forster) and Eric Crozier have taken liberties with Melville's story...
...but his reading was hardly the last word in spirituality...
...Still, for the pleasure of hearing the score in live performance, and for the quality of that performance, the old production—Tatyana's banklike bungalow and all—was most welcome...
...and after Lenski, at a birthday party for Tatyana, challenges Onegin to a duel for flirting with Olga, the estranged comrades face off with pistols in the open country...
...San Francisco offered it earlier this year, in fact, and National Public Radio listeners could judge that production's musical excellence for themselves...
...Barring an unlikely surprise visit from the Bolshoi Opera the Metropolitan's production of Onegin, dating back some 20 years, is the only one New York can expect to see for quite a while...
...the sets by Rolf Gerard and the costumes by Ray Diffen show their age...
...in the stately outer acts he sustained the broad sweep of the music, exhibiting unwavering yet sensitive control...
...The charge is patently ridiculous, but because Billy stammers in moments of over-whelming emotion, he cannot speak in his own defense...
...The large, all-male cast sang and acted splendidly, surrounding the protagonists with many sharp portraits...
...Bernd Weikl (as Amfortas) and Morley Meredith cried out awesomely from the depths of their private hells...
...Since then, Berg's Lulu, Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites and now Billy Budd have been outstandingly presented, reminding us (as many of us tend to forget) that opera of genius is a form that survives into our own time...
...Thus it is a happy occasion when the Met produces a major work of the 20th century...
...Britten's Peter Crimes was magnificently mounted by it a few seasons ago...
...illy Budd is not unknown in America...
...Produced by Nathaniel Merrill and Robert O'Hearn, the cryptic legend makes rich use of the company's resources...
...in the climaxes, he catapulted the sonic masses with a titan's energy...
...As the knight Gurnemanz, who is assigned long narrative sections plus the serene splendor of the oft-excerpted Good Friday Spell, Martti Tal-vela cut a commanding figure and issued firm tones...
...But a Metropolitan triumph "authenticates" a work as nothing else in this country can...
...Unlike Onegin, it boasted a stunning theatrical realization...
...Like Onegin, the Met's first production of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd (unveiled the second night of the 1978-79 season, though I did not catch up with it until its final performance at the end of last March), has a well-integrated cast, including brilliant principals, and strong leadership by the conductor...
...Peter Pears, who created the role of Vere over a quarter of a century ago, performed it once again with magisterial insight, balancing his declining vocal resources with perfect wisdom and self-knowledge...
...Both were equally skillful at drawing the jagged contradictions of their roles into smooth arcs of dramatic continuity, and both sang with uncommon musicianship and understanding...
...Her voice has a golden amplitude that may be recognized as Slavic, but it is entirely unafflicted by the typical Slavic defects: chestiness in the lower register, shrillness in alt, throbbing in legato, haphazard intonation throughout the scale...
...Unfortunately, this time out he seemed uncomfortable with the role's tessitura and kept lapsing into inaudibility...
...Yuri Mazurok, who sang Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera House with the Bolshoi in 1975, recreated the role this season for his debut as a member of the Met...
...After a resplendent account of the lengthy Letter Scene, which traverses a universe of romantic effusion, she attained a moving eloquence as she sat in total silence, listening with tragic composure to One-gin's humiliating rebuff...
...Having lost her heart at first sight of the haughty libertine Onegin, she pours out her soul to him in a letter, and receives in answer his patronizing assurance of brotherly affection...
...Of the seven scenes, three take place outdoors: The story begins in the garden of the Larin estate, where the poet Lenski, who is engaged to Tatyana's sister, Olga, comes to call and introduces his friend Onegin...
...Although it has been attentively refurbished and flatteringly lit by the Met's resident lighting designer, Gil Wechsler, it is not much to look at...
...the opera has also been well recorded under the composer by London Records (OSA-1390...
...The sea is everywhere woven into Britten's score, and Raymond Lep-pard, the conductor and yet another newcomer to the Met, made its presence felt...
...In the lightly scored passages, Leppard evoked a misty transparency (in Billy's dream music, he opened depths that seemed unfathomable...
...With Parsifal, Wagner's last music drama (he styled it Buhnenweihfest-spiel, or "Festival Play for Consecrating the Stage"), the Met closed its season with similar excellence...
...His baritone has a snarling edge that well suits Onegin's contempt and ennui, and his impeccable bearing makes him a likely object of infatuation...
...His goodness and beauty provoke the hatred of the wicked John Claggart, Master-at-Arms...
...The sailors' shanties rose like groundswells from the restless currents and countercurrents of the music around them...
...Hearing the magic from the stage rather than from the occlusion of the pit, added to an exceptionally full and vivid reading from the assembled forces—especially the winds and horns...
...As Tatyana, the Bolshoi soprano Makvala Kasrashvili, also new to the Met, breathed her phrases beautifully...
...Neil Shicoff distinguished himself as Lenski, particularly in his melancholy air before the duel, and as Prince Gre-min, Tatyana's husband, Paul Plishka added yet another suavely sung portrayal to his gallery of recent Met successes...
...The wooden hull that brackets the scenes in shipshape curvature looks entirely seaworthy...
...At the beginning of the opera, the aged Vere is seen alone (soft fingers of light tracing the sides of his dim vessel), tormented and confused...
...Christa Ludwig played Kundry, whose nature is split between destructiveness and abject penitence...
...Indomitable in cross section, with decks that rise and sink to situate the audience at the levels of immediate action...
...In this superbly conceived and executed space, John Dexter unfolds the allegory of good that by destroying evil condemns itself...
...he "lyric scenes" of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (the composer did not call the work an opera) tell the tale from Pushkin's celebrated novel in verse of the pensive Tatyana, reader of romances...
...In the turbulent and eventful second act (set in Klingsor's domain), James Levine allowed his forces to erupt with fire and to caress with sensuous languor...
...later, in another corner of the garden, Onegin delivers his reply to the mortified letter-writer...
...And the orchestral writing is no less various and delicately evocative than in his magnificent ballet scores, where it carries the action by itself...
...The central inspiration came from Naami Yarvi, principal conductor of the Estonian State Symphony, whose engagement marked his Met debut...
...In an otherwise satisfactory supporting cast, Isola Jones, as Olga, stood out for the discrepancy between her infantile mannerisms and her ripe, throaty, wholly inappropriate crooning...
...Petersburg, where, years later, Onegin meets her at a ball and is enflamed with passion...
...Besides her civilized musicality, she has impressive dramatic resources...
...For the climactic sea chase in Act 2, the set opens in tiers to the entire staggering height of the proscenium...
...His crafting of the vocal lines has a beautiful suppleness—they seem to melt the intractable Russian consonant groups in perfectly articulated phrases that accommodate the full dramatic range from easy conversation to ardent outburst...
...Unlike Pushkin's knowing narrator, Tchaikovsky treats the young protagonists with tenderness...
...James Morris' smooth singing gave Claggart's part a sinister quality, and Richard Stilwell's Billy was a radiant counterpart...
...The plot is played out in between, in the vivid theater of Vere's recollection...
...most notably, they have rescued Edward Fairfax Vere, captain of the Indomitable, from the mortal wound that carries him off soon after the main conflict...
...Rebuffed, Tatyana goes on to make a brilliant match in St...
...Billy Budd, a guileless young sailor, is pressed into the King's service during the French Wars of 1797...
...The ballrooms, however, both at the Larins and in St...
...Instead, he lashes out, killing his antagonist with a single blow, and is sentenced to hang under the Articles of War...
...Petersburg, can never have been anything other than dreary, and Tatyana's bedroom, where she pens her letter, is a genuine horror: a Greek-revival fane, standing free among the canvas poplars, with a strip of airborne molding obtruding on the invisibility of the ceiling...
...Determined to send the new foretop-man to the yardarm, Claggart accuses him of mutiny...
Vol. 62 • May 1979 • No. 10
