The New York City Opera, so the story goes, had its beginnings in a 1943 meeting in Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s office. Interrupting a rosy account of prospects for bringing culture at low prices to a large audience, the Mayor—affectionately called “Little Flower”—shouted: “This is all very well and good and I congratulate you, but where is opera for the people?” Posthaste, there was opera, performed by a company which, almost forty years later, is still with us.
It began life, as did the other cultural presentations under city auspices which had immediately preceded it, at the old Mecca Temple on West 55th Street. The first season’s offerings were tentative and even a bit vulgar in appeal—Puccini’s Tosca, Flotow’s light Martha, and Bizet’s Carmen. Two aspects of the opening year were significant for the company’s future: Martha was done in English, in the fashion of a Broadway musical; and the general style of production in all three operas placed theatrical and dramatic values on a par with the music.
The initial success was sufficient to make continuation possible. The City Opera’s first four directors were László Halász, Joseph Rosen-stock, Erich Leinsdorf, and, from 1957 to 1979, Julius Rudel. All four were conductors, each of them with a special interest in opera; the reign of each was often contentious, marked by interesting departures in aesthetic conceptions, and characterized as well by an air of unpleasantness on their eventual supersession. The present general director is the American soprano Beverly Sills, herself a product of the City Opera and one of the small number of native-born opera singers to achieve celebrity status in the world of show business.
Throughout its life the repertory of the City Opera has been carefully chosen in an atmosphere of high hope and even, on occasion, a certain intellectual excitement. It was obvious from the beginning that the new company could never compete with the Metropolitan Opera either in sustained presentation of the most important and lavishly produced classics or in the engagement of star singers of international reputation. But it was also clearly perceived that the operatic field remained open to the exercise of daring and wit. Because the Metropolitan, in pursuance of its historical mission of presenting the “best” to a socially and economically elite audience, was ignoring lesser-known and smaller older works, as well as the entire production of recent years, many worthwhile works cried out to be done. And because of the Met’s wholesale importation and employment of European singers, an entire new generation of American-born and American-trained singers, at home both with easy dramatic communication on the stage and English as a language of theatrical discourse, was widely available.
Thus, despite the gleam in Mayor La Guardia’s eye, there was born a conception of the City Opera as something more than dollar opera for the masses. Here was an idea of a real second major opera company for New York City—a company at once younger, more stimulating, more up-to-date, and above all as American (or, more properly, Americanized) as the Metropolitan was European.
_____________
The facts of the repertory testify to the immense efforts the City Opera has made to implement its original goals. By the end of its first quarter-century in 1968, it had presented no fewer than thirty-five works by Americans, including Gian Carlo Menotti, Carlisle Floyd, Douglas Moore, Robert Ward, Marc Blitzstein, Kurt Weill, and Lee Hoiby. Contemporary Europe was represented as well. In this period the City Opera put on twenty-seven little-known pieces by modern composers; among these were works of Manual de Falla, Béla Bartók, Richard Strauss, Carl Orff, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Luigi Dallapiccola, William Walton, Alban Berg, and Gottfried von Einem.
Not entirely forgetting its mandate to serve the popular—and to offset the heavy losses which running a serious opera company always entails—the City Opera devoted some of its time to such classic masters of light opera, operetta, and musical comedy as Franz Lehár, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Jerome Kern. For the rest, in this twenty-five year span, the City Opera did classics like Rigoletto and La Traviata, and from time to time such heavyweights as Don Giovanni, Die Meistersinger, Der Rosenkavalier, and Pelléas et Mélisonde.
Again true to its original conception, in all City Opera productions throughout its entire history, the vast majority of singers employed have been American. While relatively few of these singers have gone on to the kind of international careers achieved by such American-born products of the Metropolitan Opera as Jan Peerce, Richard Tucker, and Leonard Warren, those who have done so include Sherrill Milnes and, of course, Beverly Sills.
_____________
A significant change in the world of the City Opera took place in the middle of the 1965-66 season. On February 22, 1966 the company left its old home at the musty Mecca Temple (for many years called the New York City Center) for the glamorous, newly built New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. The junior company thus became the Met’s co-tenant in America’s most highly publicized compound devoted to the performing arts.
Attractive as proximity to the exciting world of the Metropolitan Opera House and Philharmonic (later Fisher) Hall may have seemed, only those determined to look on the good side of everything could find the New York State Theater an unmixed blessing as an opera house. Because it had originally been designed as an ideal venue for ballet, sight had been given rather more consideration than sound in the building’s planning; the aural result is that voices and orchestra alike sound vastly different in various parts of the house, and the direction from which sound seems to come frequently does not relate directly to its true point of origin. Overall, the sound is best downstairs, and becomes progressively more nebulous as one rises to the higher balconies. And regardless of where one sits, music in the New York State Theater tends to sound vague and distant.
To the City Opera’s credit, despite what must have been temptations, it remains in some measure true to a desire to keep its repertory weighted in favor of both the unfamiliar and the new. In recent years it has continued to stage contemporary opera written by composers as different as the Argentine Alberto Ginastera and the American Leon Kirchner. In the realm of older but nonetheless little-known operas, the company has explored products of the bel canto school, originally to exploit the talents of Beverly Sills and, more recently, one must assume, because of a high opinion of the intrinsic merit of these works.
In the present season, for example, the company will have presented twenty-six operas. Of these, eight belong roughly to the 20th century; of these eight, however, three—all of them American and indeed the only American efforts programmed by the City Opera this season—are short, one-act pieces, meant to make a single evening’s bill. Among the remaining works, two—The Cunning Little Vixen and The Makropoulos Affair (both done in English)—are by the Czech Leos Janácek; one—Silverlake— is a refashioning of a work by Kurt Weill; one—Mary, Queen of Scots— is by the English Thea Musgrave; another is an old City Opera standby, Sergei Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges.
Another group of eight belongs to the category of unfamiliar compositions from the 19th century and before. Among them are two operas by Donizetti, and single works by Rossini, Handel, Nicolai, Bizet, Verdi, and Mozart. The conventional works the company is doing include three famous ones of Puccini—Tosca, La Bohème, and Madame Butterfly— as well as Don Giovanni, Carmen, Falstaff, and The Barber of Seville. Rounding out the list are three light pieces: Tales of Hoffmann, Die Fledermaus, and The Student Prince.
_____________
The current season is the second under the general directorship of Beverly Sills. Though opera seasons take years to plan, and though the cadres necessary to realize an administrator’s goals must be built up over a long period of time, Miss Sills’s years of close involvement with the company—and the grooming for the job she was plainly receiving in the years before Julius Rudel’s resignation—suggest that it has been possible for her personal artistic preferences to begin quickly taking hold.
As a singer, Miss Sills was known for her dramatic impact, her vivacious stage presence, and her ability to make the maximum use of a large, flexible, but frequently unwieldy voice. Her artistic efforts were generally directed less to the communication of musical values than to the expression of platform personality. Because the world of opera and its fans are so oriented toward star performers, it seemed both proper and natural for her to project the characters she portrayed through the medium of her own marked personality, and equally natural for her to emerge (as her singing career inevitably drew to its end) as a best-selling memoirist and a talk-show host on commercial and public television.
Not surprisingly, in her first years as the general director of the City Opera, Miss Sills has brought the same virtues of inexhaustible energy and public charm to her tasks. As part of running her company, Miss Sills chooses repertory, hears singers, engages conductors and stage directors, and makes all long-range plans. To a degree greater than is the case with most holders of such positions, she is both chief fund-raiser and public-relations expert.
In addition, she is the company’s chief public spokesman, appearing as either intermission host or guest on the City Opera’s nationally broadcast public-television appearances. Even the celebration of her retirement as a performer has provided an opportunity for Miss Sills, as she sings her way across the country for the last time, to spread the gospel of a new era at the City Opera. And only last October, she was both the chief attraction as well as the guest of honor at an immense benefit for the company which, it is said, raised one million dollars. The predictable result of all these highly publicized activities is that she has become synonymous with her company in a way reminiscent of the association between Kirsten Flagstad and the Norwegian State Opera for a few years around 1960.
_____________
But no matter how prominent the public image of the City Opera is under its present regime, its artistic image can only be formed by what takes place in performances in the opera house itself. Here the just concluded fall season at the New York State Theater—the spring season, of course, is yet to come—provided a unique opportunity to make an aesthetic case for the City Opera without the distraction of the usually overwhelming competition from the Metropolitan Opera, closed as it was for the duration of its lockout-strike. Operatically, the City Opera now had New York to itself, a long hoped-for chance to advance the cause of interesting rather than hackneyed repertory, of ensemble productions rather than star turns, of theatrically rather than merely vocally effective performances.
_____________
On the evidence of the City Opera’s record in the past months, the company hardly lived up to this opportunity. The productions I saw included works characteristic of the City Opera’s activities not only during the current season but also during its history. Here was a towering masterpiece of the classical tradition (Mozart’s Don Giovanni); a tuneful favorite of the lovers of late Italian opera (Puccini’s La Bohème); a little-known, pleasantly slight work of an older Italian tradition (Rossini’s Cinderella); a work closer to the later genre of operetta (Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor); and finally a gaggle of American works (Stanley Silverman’s Madame Adare, Thomas Pasatieri’s Before Breakfast, and Jan Bach’s The Student from Salamanca, which together make up An American Trilogy) illustrative of the new in native operatic composition.
Only two of these works—Don Giovanni and La Bohème— were sung in languages other than English, while the others were either done in English translation or, as in the case of An American Trilogy, in the original English. In solid City Opera tradition, all the singers were important as members of the ensemble rather than as stars, talented musicians rather than operatic heroes. And providing a link with the past, the conductor of The Merry Wives of Windsor was the company’s former director, Julius Rudel.
Everything about these performances was respectable, professional, adequate—and ultimately dull. From the standpoint of execution, the overwhelming impression was of much talent, hard-working and eager, in the long run going to waste because of insufficient and essentially uninspired direction.
_____________
Of all the operas done by the company this season, only Don Giovanni incontestably possesses the kind of stature which demands a level of realization taxing to the abilities of even the greatest artists. As if in recognition of this high stature, the performance I saw was sold out—the only such of all the performances I attended—and the audience was both deeply respectful and, one suspects, sophisticated.
What it saw and heard was one singer of undeniable force and personality—the Puerto Rican bass Justino Diaz in the title role. Though neither his appearance and stage deportment nor his vocal style managed to evoke the requisite blend of reckless but melancholy passion and Italianate vocal suavity, his dramatic projection and athleticism were achievement enough. Two other voices—those of Michael Burt as the Commendatore and Faith Esham as Zerlina—were strongly impressive in purely vocal terms. Elsewhere the singing was mostly acceptable, though nowhere distinguished.
The stage production reached its climax in the penultimate scene, when the statue of the Commendatore speaks with terrifying force to the doomed Don. That the final scene, the stage fully peopled and illuminated, seemed anticlimactic is perhaps traceable both to the heights Mozart’s music had just previously reached and to a palpable loss of tension on the part of the performers.
Indeed, just that sort of tension—which makes the longest piece of music seem brief—had seemed in short supply from the moment the orchestra began the Overture. Save for the scene just before the opera’s end, rhythms were slack, instrumental tone lacked vibrancy, and passages of vocal recitative were rushed through, their words indistinguishable. During famous arias and ensembles, the tempi chosen by the conductor, John Mauceri, seemed capricious, without necessary relation to what had gone before; it was therefore hardly surprising that the singers were so often at odds with the accompanying orchestra.
La Bohème, Puccini’s treatment of the contrast between bohemian life and romantic love, made, in the City Opera’s current production, a dispirited impression. In theatrical terms, the impression was undoubtedly affected by the unfortunate tendency of the singers to come to the front of the stage to deliver important bits of melody or dramatic business. At all times characters felt free, while singing, to face the audience rather than their partners on the stage.
But even more important than these dramatic gaffes was the lack of compelling musical direction from the pit. The leader once again was John Mauceri, reputedly one of the company’s best conductors. The opening half of the first act, for example, was raced through, words and actions seeming pointless and disconnected. When the famous passages took over—those beginning Che gelida manina, Mi chiamano Mimi, and O soave fanciulla— Mauceri presided over a luxuriant indulgence in Puccini’s melodies detrimental both to the singers’ comfort and the story’s urgency. By the end of the fourth and final act, one’s only wish was for something—a faster tempo would have sufficed—to put the drooping lovers out of their misery.
Rossini’s Cinderella, as televised nationally by PBS on November 6, was, for all the work’s essential triteness, more convincing dramatically and musically than most live performances seen in recent years in the New York State Theater. Perhaps because both cameras and microphones tend to bring images and voices into closer relationship with the viewer than is possible in a large opera house, the broadcast was clear in texture and immediate in impact; the voices seemed strong and fresh, the orchestra tone alive and confident. Because the English words were distinct and natural in sound, the story was communicated plainly and effectively. One’s major reservation could only concern the choice of this particular banality for so prestigious an airing.
Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, seen live in the State Theater, did not fare so well. Shakespeare’s story of bungled caddishness is always good for a laugh; in the hands of Verdi—as in the hands of Shakespeare himself—Falstaff assumes a certain picaresque grandeur. Nicolai’s talent hardly extends so far; both as story and music, his version is of no more than historical interest in the development of light opera. Be that as it may, the City Opera presentation on the occasion I saw it—with, it is true, a replacement cast on the stage—seemed pointless, an effort half-considered and half-workedout. What appeared to be the production’s one set, composed of wall panels and patterned flooring, was forced to make do (with the addition of a few props) as a domestic interior, a tavern, an outdoor square, and, slightly altered, as a forest. Julius Rudel’s conducting suffered from the lack of breadth, commitment, and excitement so characteristic of the City Opera’s conductors in recent years.
_____________
All the above works, of course, belong to opera’s past; potentially the most significant offering of the City Opera’s fall season was its trio of American pieces. Of these three operas—all being given their world premieres—Silverman’s Madame Adare was directly commissioned by the City Opera, Pasatieri’s Before Breakfast was written on a grant from the National Opera Institute funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and Jan Bach’s The Student from Salamanca was the winner of the City Opera Competition for one-act operas.
The three works are composed in widely differing styles. Silverman utilizes a musical vocabulary drawn equally from Broadway and the classics, and even includes some synthesized tape squeals. Pasatieri, as is his wont, employs a neo-Puccinian idiom owing most, it would appear, to the influence of that composer’s Il Trittico, and includes as well an extended excerpt from an old Duke Ellington record. Bach’s The Student from Salamanca is written in the mode of neo-pastiche so popular in today’s world of liberated compositional styles; his preferred models are Mozart and Rossini, and the whole work is suffused with the flavor of a tasty morsel from Carmen.
Not only is pastiche the musical order of the day for all three composers. Despite the varied nature of their subject matter, all three belabor a common theme: the sordidness and absurdity of human striving. Silverman’s opera is about a crazed woman, torn between being an actress and being an opera singer, who kills her psychoanalyst because he will not accept the payment for her “cure” which, in her less successful days, he had once demanded. Pasatieri’s opera, a setting of Eugene O’Neill’s monodrama of the same name, is about a shopgirl, caught amid the squalor of tenement life in a blighted marriage. And Bach’s work is an elaboration of the hoary old story of an old miser betrayed by his young wife and her feckless companions.
Musical borrowings combined with the maudlin exploitation of human weakness and suffering could only result in a kind of camp masquerading as high culture—an aesthetic nihilism which views art as entertainment and entertainment only really worthwhile as a mockery of life. Predictably, the performances of this questionable material were not so much disorganized as demoralized. The pacing of actions and gestures seemed wayward, the singers shouting their fragmented pittances into the void of an unresponsive audience. The evening ended up a black eye for American music, for contemporary opera, and perhaps most poignantly for the City Opera itself.
_____________
Need it all have turned out so badly? No one can be under any illusion that the record of new opera in the past quarter-century has been encouraging, and no believer in high standards can possibly be sanguine about the present state of musical composition. Despite several successes among its many efforts at finding new American works—one thinks immediately of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah (1955), Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956), and Hugo Weisgall’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1959)—it is surely significant that not one American opera is currently in anything like repertory status at the City Opera, or for that matter anywhere.
But even with all allowances having been made for the present very real difficulties, the impression remains that the City Opera had not, in the case of An American Trilogy, made a serious attempt to find and put on worthwhile contemporary operas. Over the whole course of the three operas were the signs of a tentative, tremulous attempt to accommodate the present enigmatic cultural Zeitgeist. The choice of several small works rather than a single large one suggests a hope on the part of the City Opera administration that boredom at least might thereby be avoided; that the more musical styles, as it were, the merrier, as if in art there were safety in numbers; that the choice of subjects at once so close to the bone of contemporary fantasies and so ultimately trivial in their outcome might titillate an audience drawn from a society of television viewers; that, above all, showing a new work—any new work—was something that could only bring credit on all concerned and especially on the management. These vain hopes, now dashed, suggest that at this point in its life the City Opera, in its search for new music, is floundering.
One would hesitate to criticize the present regime for the choice of the works which make up An American Trilogy were it not for Miss Sills’s pride in their presentation. And further illustrative of her taste in new works is her intention, announced in an adulatory interview published in Opera News, to go “to Holland to see Philip Glass’s new work on Mahatma Gandhi” and her disclosure that “she’s talked with David Del Tredici [the composer of lengthy settings of Alice in Wonderland] and Stephen Sondheim about something new for the company.” One need not be a booster of the avant-garde to deplore such aesthetic judgments.
Furthermore, Miss Sills’s preference in new works augurs ill for her coming choices in more traditional repertory. It suggests an increased concentration both on bel canto operas—star vehicles for which the City Opera does not have the stars—and light music, the entertaining products of the bygone commercial stage. It further suggests that what solid works are chosen will not receive the necessary concentration and investment.
Bad as this weakness in musical judgment is, it becomes all the more troubling when to it is added the present state of conductorial leadership in the City Opera’s orchestra pit. Because the heart of opera is musical composition, musical preparation, and musical performance, the real direction of an opera house can only come from musicians. Bringing in an occasional name conductor, which Miss Sills evidently has in mind, is not good enough. What is needed is a resident conductor of high and original gifts presiding over a resident staff hardly less talented.
Whither, then, the City Opera? Neither its choice of repertory nor its present standard of performance can guarantee it an assured place on the artistic and musical scene. Its principal claim to a future is at this time little more than the fact that it already exists. And indeed, the prevailing opinion today among supporters of culture is that no organization of past distinction ought to be allowed to die. But perhaps in our changing national climate a profound and hitherto forbidden question may be asked: does an artificial prolongation of the life of artistic organizations, by consuming the available resources, close off the possibility of new forms and expressions of significant continuing importance? If its current direction is any sign, a good place to start thinking about an answer might well be the New York City Opera.
