“The Myth of Met’s Recent Disastrous ‘La Sonnambula’”

Opera is based on myths, and one of the operative myths of the opera world today is that theater director Mary Zimmerman is a combination of Lucrezia Borgia and the anti-christ. Zimmerman gained this notorious status by running afoul of French soprano Natalie Dessay during rehearsals of the Metropolitan Opera’s current production of Vincenzo Bellini’s “La Sonnambula”. A New Yorker magazine reporter profiling Dessay had the good fortune to observe the two at loggerheads and then to obtain some choice quotes from Dessay, and on opening night the audience booed the director at the final curtain in a manner rarely witnessed in New York. The newspaper critics then took their cue from the audience (but for the reviewer from The Wall Street Journal), presenting Zimmerman as a fit target for effigy and the least loveable current villain not named Madoff.

But what had she done so wrong? Bellini’s opera is a masterpiece of bel canto melody: sweet, tuneful stuff that influenced composers as different as Chopin and Wagner (The latter repeatedly conducted Bellini’s “Norma” and is reputed to have said that it was the greatest Italian opera.) Its plot and story however are something less than profound or artful. A conventional production of the opera set in the Swiss Alps with a confused sleepwalking maiden and her inamorata garbed in lederhosen would be not only hokey, but likely to make the audience think of Shirley Temple playing Heidi. Zimmerman conceived a production which updated the story to a modern rehearsal hall where “La Sonnambula” is being prepared; it is a confusing conceit that did not work altogether well.

But was the production a scandal and is Zimmerman the greatest enemy of humanity since Pol Pot? Hardly. Moreover, the production is worth seeing – or, rather, it’s well worth attending to hear. Juan Diego-Florez is splendid in the part of the tenor hero. Again, he makes a case that he is the best lyric tenor to appear since Pavarotti. Complementing him is Dessay, who is affecting and lovely, along with a number of other fine voices, including baritone Michele Pertusi in the role of a mysterious but good-hearted Count.

What’s curious about all this invective is that it comes soon on the heels of a genuinely shoddy Met production – a real scandal – that opened not many days before: a revival of Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur”. The production I saw included much full-throated singing in this dated verismo opera, which though written at the turn of the last century, is set in the theater world of Paris in the 1730’s. The hefty voices and their ringing tones were delivered by Olga Borodina and Maria Guleghina and, as a late fill-in, Placido Domingo. The latter acquitted himself well for a singer of any age, let alone one approaching his seventh decade. The disgrace lay in the production. Audiences were offered up a cheap and tatty mix of badly-painted flats as backdrops. These were pulled out of mothballs and date back to 1963 – before the present Met was even built. Here it wasn’t that no expense was spared but that none was assumed.

Still more troubling is the question of why the opera was staged at all. While it does contain a few superb arias, its story is hard to follow and the bulk of its music is a derivative, third-rate pastiche of Puccini and Giordano which any second-rate Hollywood film composer could summon up on command in a month’s time.

These two productions suggest two possible futures for the Met in days of straitened charitable giving. Although Zimmerman’s most recent effort was flawed, let us hope that Met management is more committed to her staging of “La Sonnambula” than thoroughly conventional but worthless revivals like the current “Adriana Lecouvreur.”

By Jonathan Leaf