On Music

...D ie Frau ohne Schatten, last seen in New York in 1976, was revived this season to accommodate the remarkable Birgit Nilsson, now in her 60s...

...An unofficial reason one hears is that the production is prohibitively expensive...

...Erich Leinsdorf, the seasoned, often prosaic old hand who presided, led a far more committed and poetic traversal of the score than the celebrated deceased was wont to do in his later years...

...Never having greatly admired Nilsson's foursquare interpretative powers or enjoyed the grim thrust of her swordlike instrument (and having witnessed via broadcasts within the last two years her bloodcurdling, stentorian New York Elektra as well as a deeply unfelt Dyer's Wife from San Francisco), I cheerfully attended the single Met Frau in which la Nilsson did not appear...

...Designer Robert O'Hearn took his cues from the ornate tremendousness of the score, rather than from the delicate conceits of the libretto, and his stunning special effects unfolded with their remembered impact undiminished...

...It would, I expect, have exceeded Donnell's authority to cancel the absurd final rise of the entire floor, which, instead of providing an intended visual image for the exultation of the four rejoicing lovers of the finale, simply spoils the effect by lopping of f the top of the scenery...

...The house management nevertheless does not often oblige with revivals...

...She requested the Dyer's Wife in Frau, the latest addition to her heavyweight repertoire and probably her last ever, when she was invited to choose an encore for herself...

...Sad to say, his work was pretty much lost unless listeners troubled to consult his text (commendably rushed into print in time for the opening performance...

...The indispensable Wagnerian staples, to cite one of the weightier examples, have proved difficult to cast and maintain on active status (a long-promised Ring cycle has yet to coalesce from random fragments...

...The singers had no such excuse, yet there was little onstage, musically speaking, except bad news...

...True, Kaspar's bizarre hidden exits and abrupt, spotlit entrances in the first act were minor annoyances...

...displayed the security, ease and grandeur missing in Shade's Agathe...

...Whatever the reasons for Frau's all too infrequent returns to the Met, it was wonderful to have it back...

...better placement on the stage would have made a big difference...

...In her Romance and Aria, beginning with a a satiric account of her aunt's terrifying nocturnal encounter with a hellish apparition, her rendition of the aunt's climactic cries for the servant girls ("Susanna...

...The opening fell on a Sunday night, and thus was the players' fourth performance in two days...

...Keene's effort would surely have counted for more with less harried instrumentalists, though...

...Stage director Bruce Donnell reproduced the blocking of Nathaniel Merrill-the original director-accurately, while leaving his singers sufficient leeway in pose and gesture to recreate in their own manner their predecessors' great immediacy...

...Still, the economic and artistic realities of musical life are such that no segment of the literature is ever adequately represented, not even the bread-and-butter war-horses...

...The distribution of principal parts exactly replicates that of Wagner's Die Walkiire: two sopranos, one mezzo, a tenor, a bass-baritone, a briefly featured bass-all six in the heroic mold...

...Although Franz Ferdinand Nentwig was vocally out of his depth as Barak, his dignified mien and declamation made his character's plight and generosity credible...

...In the lesser part of the Spirit Messenger, Franz Mazura sounded grumbly when he could be clearly made out at all...

...Escham should be graduated to the loftier part at the earliest opportunity...

...As Max, the young sharpshooter with wavering aim approaching the Trial Shot that will win or lose him his bride, tenor Jacque Trussel gave forth pinched, constricted tones lacking in bloom and fervor...

...Bass David Cumberland's debut as the malevolent Kaspar, who tries to destroy the lovers to redeem his own soul from the devil, was underpowered and unremarkable...

...The one principal who made plain that she understood her music and had both the voice and technique to express that understanding was Faith Escham, playing Agathe's young cousin Ann-chen (a happy, unsuperstitious soul, alone among the characters in keeping a level head on her shoulders amid the plot's otherworldly goings-on...

...Ellen Shade, his beloved Agathe, marred her part's noble eloquence with squally vocal production...

...That his singing was blasted clear off the stage by the grotesquely overampli-fied speaking voice of the devil during their confrontation and bargain-striking in the famous Wolfs Glen scene was, it must be admitted, the fault solely of misjudgment on the part of the sound technicians...

...The same child no doubt would have laughed more heartily than the premiere audience did when a paper bogeyman two stories tall sprang into view like a Halloween jack-in-the-box and promptly collapsed...

...All the cast members were making local debuts in their parts...

...In the pit, the musical leadership was in good hands, with the young American maestro Christopher Keene emphasizing precise dynamics, taut rhythms and transparent textures...

...On Music REVIVING OPERATIC FAVORITES BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH Between the Metropolitan and the New York City Operas, not to mention the countless smaller organizations that present works of lyric theater on scattered stages and in concert halls, Gotham has a respectably varied operatic repertoire these days...

...Der Freischutz, absent from the Metropolitan since 1972, was attempted for the first time by the City Opera in a new production...

...Brenda Roberts as the Dyer's Wife had power to spare in the climactic outbursts, and also found the right notes of tenderness to convey the barren woman's thwarted maternal longings...

...The new English translation by Andrew Porter succeeds beyond all reasonable expectation in finding acceptable, dignified equivalents for the libretto's quintessentially romantic German...

...The official explanation is that it is impossible to assemble a cast equal to the composer's demands...

...The premiere was a disappointing affair: well-intentioned, thoughtful, deeply flawed...

...John Copley, the director, and Carl Toms, the designer, took their assignments as seriously as Porter, but their vision faltered...

...Theroleof the Emperor-for years the province of the wooden James King at the Met-passed over to Gerd Brenneis, and his fuller tone and more shapely phrasing came a good deal closer to filling the bill...

...Margareth...

...In the central role of the Empress (the titular woman with no shadow), Eva Marton sang with blazing intensity, yet manifested a subtle sense of dramatic shading...

...But what happened there, amid the smoke of hell, could have been witnessed with composure by an impressionable three-year-old...

...Nilsson's performances in this country came to a rude stop several seasons ago when the diva and the Internal Revenue Service could not agree on the subject of back taxes...

...She was spirited over the border in the dead of night, intending never to come back...

...And the quietly terrifying appearance of the fiend from the mists, in satin cape and pointed hat, did engender high hopes for phantasmagoria in the scene where Kaspar and Max join forces in an unholy rite to cast the magic bullets...

...It made for a worthy tribute...

...This beautifully revealed her character's progression from desperation at the anticipated loss of her mortal husband to magnificent, courageous acceptance of her own fate and the refusal to buy her happiness at the expense of Barak (the Dyer) and his wife...

...The sheer spectacle of the show-acknowledged to be one of the Met's most phenomenal ever-plus the opulence and power of the score, have won the Strauss opera a clamorous following in New York since its Met premiere in 1966...

...Adding to my good fortune was the absence of Mignon Dunn...

...Given the State Theater's dry, unflattering acoustics (re-engineering is now scheduled for next summer), Keene may have picked the wisest strategy: If at first his reading sounded small-scale, he never forced the orchestra into the brittle, clattering overdrive this Lincoln Center auditorium so often encourages, and as a result achieved a justness of proportion that invited a listener into the score rather than vainly seeking to persuade by overstatement...

...The music, too, was rendered with insight and passion...

...He did not seem to be looking for, and did not get, a thrilling or expansive orchestral sound...

...No wonder the brass chattered and the strings went sharp...

...It is a pageant of matchless monumentality...

...her hokey portrayal of the devious Nurse has long been familiar here...

...Similarly, charitable spectators surely winked at a live hawk's disdaining to leave its perch after being "shot" and "killed...

...Susanna...

...The revival was dedicated to the memory of the late Karl Bohm, the conductor of the opera's 1966 New York premiere and all subsequent performances there...

...But by a happy coincidence, Weber's most popular, if not most prophetic, creation, Der Freischutz, and Strauss' elaborate post-Wagnerian allegory, Die Frau ohne Schatten, showed up in New York's established opera houses during the same weeks of late autumn...

...Margareth...

...Dunn's replacement as the Empress' devious Nurse, mezzo-soprano Gwynn Cornell, cut an enthralling figure, despite intermittent trouble in her lower registers...

...Her loyal fans did not rest, however, and years later she triumphantly returned to the Met in the grueling title role of Strauss' Elektra...

...The full technical panoply (elevators, revolving stages, multiple scrims and projections) is called brilliantly into play for swift, cinematic dissolves from the aerie of the shadowless spirit princess down into the maelstrom of struggling humanity, thence to enchanted forests and into the forbidden cave where the demon lord keeps his throne of justice...

...Under these circumstances, it is understandable that we see little of works by two composers lacking Wagner's more universal appeal-Carl Maria von Weber (whose efforts to establish German national opera prepared the way for Wagner's music dramas) and Richard Strauss (who, wearing one of his many compositorial hats, reactivated the Wagnerian forms in the 20th century...

...The hymnic stanzas of the mysterious three Watchmen did not well up with the sonorous amplitude they demand...