Hudson Review, The: Twentieth-century opera at the met

WE ARE ACCUSTOMED TO THINKING OF OPERA as a quintessentially nineteenth-century form, stretching from the works of Mozart on the verge of the 1800s through the masterpieces of Verdi and Wagner and the retreads of Puccini. But in truth the form retained its vitality well into the next century, with Debussy, Shostakovich, Ravel, Bartok, and Strauss finding ways of keeping the form alive. As if to prove the point, at the end of its 2000-2001 season, the Metropolitan Opera staged three extraordinary twentieth-century works that showed the form in robust health, and were as well staged as anything in the house's repertoire: Sergei Prokofiev's The Gambler (1919-1929), Leos Janacek's The Makropulos Case (1926), and Alban Berg's Lulu, left unfinished at the composer's death in 1935 but with enough in sketch form to enable its completion by the Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha later in the 1970s.

The Gambler, the first of Prokofiev's seven operas, was written when the composer was twenty-five, and it has all the glinting lightness and mordant irreverence that his early works display. Based on a short novel by Dostoyevsky-himself a compulsive gambler for a time-its two hours of music shine a merciless light on a group of mostly selfish and deceitful characters gathered in a fictitious gambling spa called Roulettenberg. Alexei, tutor to the children of a retired general, is in love with the general's stepdaughter Paulina. The general himself, in love with the fickle Miss Blanche, has ruined his chances with her by gambling away most of his money, and is in debt to a sleazy French marquis. He is hoping to hear that his sick grandmother has died and left him her fortune. But she turns up hale and hearty, and proceeds to gamble away the general's bequest. Paulina is now faced with having to marry the marquis. To prevent this, Alexei decides to try his hand at roulette again. He breaks the bank, but when he offers Paulina the money to buy off the marquis, she is ashamed and hurls it back at him in disgust. Alexei reflects on his fate and his future as a gaming addict.

The possibilities for comedy and satire in the story are obvious, and eminently suited to the young Prokofiev's gifts. For the most part the music hustles along brashly, pausing occasionally for passages of rich melody such as marked some of his later works. The score also shows off the composer's skill at manipulating orchestral color. Prokofiev's model was Mussorgsky's The Marriage, on a comedy by Gogol, in which the older composer had dispensed with operatic conventions and tried to create a new musical language based on natural speech rhythms Uanacek's method in The Makropulos Case was similar). Though Mussorgsky turned his back on this aim when he began Boris Godunov, the model worked well for Prokofiev's youthful romp.

The Metropolitan production combined the traditional and the contemporary deftly: particularly striking was the penultimate scene in the casino, as Alexei wins at the tables, played around a giant roulette wheel as a garish party of low-lifes mills about. Valery Gergiev was the energetic conductor, and he had an expert cast of fellow Slavs, including Vladimir Galouzine as a strong, pungent Alexei and Olga Guryadova as a near-hysterical Paulina. Elena Obratsova had a star turn as the grandmother, intoning her contempt for her weak-willed and scheming relatives in broad contralto strokes, and getting most of the evening's laughs. (This was an instance in which the house's Met titles were absolutely imperative.) It all made for a lively, beguiling evening of musical theater, one especially welcome as a demonstration of Gergiev's talents as he assumes his role as the Met's principal guest conductor. Berg's Lulu was first done at the Met in the early eighties, a few years after Cerha's completion of the score. John Dexter's economical but striking production has worn well, and the fin-de-siecle interiors and costumes tend to mitigate the more lurid aspects of the work's libretto, fashioned by the composer from two plays by the Austrian playwright Frank Wedekind. Without the scorned conventions of nineteenth-- century opera-arias, duets, ensemble pieces, choral passages-and the foundation provided by diatonic harmony, Berg turned to fresh ways of integrating his score (ways he had initially tried out in Wozzeck). For one, as George Perle points out in the valuable notes for the production, the broad span of the music is dominated by a series of recapitulative episodes that become more extensive until, by the final scene, they supply all of the material. The score divides neatly into two sections, Part I-Act I through Act II, Scene 1-based on Wedekind's Erdgeist and showing Lulu's amorous fortunes on the rise, and Part II-Act II, Scene 2 to the end-based on Pandora's Box and tracing Lulu's reversal of fortune after her precipitate shooting of Dr. Schon, whom she had blackmailed into becoming her husband. The two parts are separated by a silent film that shows Lulu's arrest, trial, imprisonment, and infection with cholera by the lesbian Countess Geschwitz, who then replaces her in her hospital bed as Lulu escapes. This is accompanied by music that, at its midpoint, turns completely around and becomes its own retrograde, a musical palindrome running back to its beginning.

Berg also embeds within the score a number of self-contained closed forms: sonata-allegro, rondo, variation, canzonetta, cavatina, etc. But though he relies on these devices for structural cohesion, he wrote that once the curtain goes up the audience should not be aware of these methods but should apprehend this opera as sheer music drama.

And what music drama it is. For the listener who succumbs to it, the seductiveness of the music is so great that it all but neutralizes the libretto's occasional Expressionist excesses. This is music of longing, menace, and rue, often spiced with mordant or grisly humor. James Levine's affinity for music of this school is well known, and he seems to have infused his crack Metropolitan orchestra with his own enthusiasm: exertion vanished as the music's sensuous phrases and massed instrumental climaxes cast their spell. The difficult wind and brass parts were cleanly articulated and poignantly shaped; the strings sighed, moaned, sang, and danced. The ample percussion section punctuated the music's flow without overwhelming it. The playing could not have been more idiomatic.

In the title role, the young German soprano Christine Schafer was splendid. An attractive woman in a role that requires it, she used her secure and expressive voice to create a Lulu who is more victim than predator. She managed the demanding passagework with aplomb and eked out some sympathy for this macabre character. All of the secondary parts were handled ably. James Courtney's Dr. Schon looked youngish, but he imbued the role with cool detachment, then desperation, and finally helpless regret. David Keebler's Alwa was thin-- toned but effectively semi-hysterical, and Hanna Schwarz made a strong Countess Geschwitz. As the acrobat, Stephen West was vigorous and rich-sounding. As Schigolch, the shambling old man who may or may not be Lulu's father, Franz Mazura, once a great Dr. Schon himself, was appropriately perplexing.

An argument could be made that Janacek's Makropulos Case is the most remarkable of these three operas. Based on a play by the Czech author Karel eapek, it has at its center an opera singer who has taken an elixir that enables her to live more than 300 years. The translation of the title as the Makropulos "case" misrepresents the original a bit-the Czech is closer to the Makropulos "thing"-by diverting attention to the lawsuit on which the action hinges rather than to the "thing," the central enigma of Emilia Marty herself. As she approaches the end of the term for which the elixir spared her death, she is desperately seeking the formula among the possessions of Jaroslav Prus, whose antecedent was the father of a child borne by Marty when she was calling herself Elina Makropulos. She appears in the office of the lawyer Kolenaty as she schemes to obtain the formula. Finally, after her efforts have succeeded, she comes to the realization that for life to be valuable it must be trumped by death, and she consents to the burning of the formula.

Once Marty makes her entrance in the first act, she is seldom offstage, a boon for the opera: except for Prus and Albert Gregor, his opponent in the suit, the supporting roles are little more than foils for her. Though the composer himself fashioned the libretto from Capek's rather wordy play, it tends to bog down in legal exchanges and small talk. So Makropulos needs a compelling singing actress in the pivotal role, and fortunately for the Met it had one in Catherine Malfitano, with her elegant and vivid singing and stage demeanor. (She also had been an estimable Lulu a decade and more ago in the Dexter production.) She surmounted the role's many difficulties with ease and grace and imbued the Czech language with particular bite. (Again, the Met titles were essential to understanding the legal and chronological intricacies of the story.) She delivered the long despairing monologue that closes the work with great poignancy. The supporting singers managed to inject sufficient life into their terse lines: Tom Fox was particularly fine as Prus, and all seemed comfortable with the language.

The Met orchestra played this idiosyncratic music with great distinction, as its motivic cells swelled, split, expanded, bolted, and curled, and ultimately transformed themselves into something new and startling. Their mastery of this brilliant score was no doubt in large part because of the presence of the veteran conductor and Jan.Rek specialist Sir Charles Mackerras on the podium.