Lisette Oropesa as Elvira and Christian Van Horn as Giorgio. Photo: Ken Howard / Met Opera
What do we want from historical romance? Should it reflect its time or offer escape from it? Fact and fantasy coexist frequently in opera, but balancing these impulses proves both fascinating and difficult in Charles Edwards’s new production of I Puritani, the first at the Metropolitan Opera in over four decades. The star-crossed pair—the Puritan Elvira and staunch Royalist Arturo—are separated first by Arturo’s divided loyalties and then, more disturbingly, by Elvira’s increasing madness. And while the 17th Century is the historical backdrop, I Puritani is more a reflection of 19th-century Italian opera tropes than of the English Civil War: mad scenes and cries of “la patria!”
Edwards’s production amps up both the historical context and adds in some psychoanalytic touches to its general peril; maps of Plymouth under siege are projected, and chyrons appear to deliver snippets of the English Civil War timeline. There is more than one green-tinged mad sequence in which ghostly doubles of our characters float through the scene. Elvira paints numerous hideous self-portraits that recall more AP Art portfolio than Robert Walker, and in a climactic scene, she hurls them across the room and punches an arm through one of them. There’s a lot going on here, in other words.
For an opera with a tighter grip on its own historical setting, this approach could be both informative and compelling, but in I Puritani the English Civil War is used primarily to provide obstacles to the lovers. The additional history, instead of amping up the drama, only knocks it off-kilter. Everyone seems all the sillier for caring this much about the star-crossed pair when the audience is constantly reminded that Scots are besieging the town. I Puritani, even more than similar works, insists romantic difficulties take precedence over horrifying contemporary events. Edwards’s impulse to beef up the dark setting merely exposes the myopia of Bellini’s opera.
Lisette Oropesa as Elvira. Photo: Ken Howard / Met Opera
Unsurprisingly for a director who is primarily a set designer, what does work beautifully are the sets. The first act places the audience in a Puritan meeting house that is at once austere and dramatic, without sacrificing visual interest or flattening his setting. The tiered seats and towering pulpit gave Edwards multiple levels on which to place his singers, lending the whole production—especially the first act—welcome variety. Met newcomer Tim Mitchell’s lighting is exceptional, with a painterly sensibility that sees great shafts of light angled downward into the faces of the actors from high back windows or emerging from firelit darkness, half-shadowed but still visible as in a Caravaggio painting. Later on, the Puritan meeting house splinters apart, with dashes of light crisscrossing the stage as if showing us Elvira’s fragmentation on the very walls. Edwards and Mitchell’s collaboration makes this production one of the most visually striking in the past few years.
Edwards’s ability to create arresting tableaux is a great strength, as is his commitment to having singers move; a frequent critique of mine is that directors do not always know how to leverage the Metropolitan Opera’s massive stage to sufficient dramatic effect, leaving singers snoozily parked downstage center or moving aimlessly across the floor with nothing to engage with. But frequently, the production’s dynamism gives way to busyness or even adds confusion to the already convoluted plot. Background characters pull focus from the principals during arias, difficult-to-make-out paintings trip up the space, and the use of child doubles for Arturo and Elvira in the mad scenes and dream sequences was neither dramatically clarifying nor emotionally compelling. Claus Guth’s Salome may have succeeded with this tactic earlier this year, but let’s not overdo it. There are a few other missteps that mar this production. Gabrielle Dalton’s costumes are by turns austere and splendid, and she manages to make even the Puritan characters look sleek and expensive, but her choice to style Elvira in Act III as a pixie-cut-sporting waif recalled Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables too closely for my taste.
Eve Gigliotti as Enrichetta and Lawrence Brownlee as Arturo. Photo: Ken Howard / Met Opera
Lisette Oropesa, a soprano whom I frequently admire, was by turns brilliant and bumpy as the pathetic Elvira, who sings what feels like a record number of mad scenes. The slower cavatinas displayed Oropesa at her best—rich rivers of nuanced, lively sound—but the vocal fireworks expected in the cabalettas had not enough sparkle, with moments of effortful coloratura and a few breathy, pinched high notes. Laurence Brownlee, recently adorable as Tonio in La Fille du Régiment, was an exceptionally strong Arturo, with an even, forward sound that perfectly balanced brightness with depth. He is well-suited to this role; even though it does not take advantage of Brownlee’s effervescent charm, his Arturo was near-unimpeachable vocally and only gained momentum as the opera drew to its close.
As the lovers’ principal antagonist Riccardo, Artur Ruciński was the other standout. He has a dimensional, delicious baritone that leans toward bass in its richness; his Act I aria “Ah, per sempre” was a surprising emotional high point, as was his duet with Christian Van Horn’s Giorgio. Van Horn, who has a crisp metallic bass, was persuasive and heartfelt as Elvira’s beloved uncle and advocate. Eve Gigliotti has only a little to do as the secret-queen Enrichetta, but delivered a massive sound in her short time on stage.
All the singers were supported by veteran guest conductor Marco Armiliato, who is a generous and sensitive interpreter of Bellini, able to bring out both the elegance and the occasional bouts of military bombast with grace.
While Edwards’s production veers into the dangerously overstuffed by the third act—his choice to stage the final moments of the opera with Arturo embracing the ghost of his father was strange and nonsensical—there is still much to commend in his bold visual style, even if his ideas strain at the seams of his material. Arturo and Elvira’s romance ends with a surprising reprieve; Cromwell’s forces save the day and, madness forgotten, the lovers can reunite. I Puritani is tragedy with a happy ending, one that always feels forced and unrealistic regardless of the production. At its best, it reflects that shred of hopefulness romances always offer—that love might, for a moment, overcome the forces of history.
Artur Ruciński as Riccardo. Photo: Ken Howard / Met Opera
On another note, you won’t be seeing as much of me on Observer’s pages moving forward, and to all those reading this, I want to thank you. As a scholar and a singer, writing these reviews has meant so much to me, as has the work of the team of editors at Observer who have polished and published my writing. It has been a deep honor and extraordinary pleasure to write on this platform, though this isn’t necessarily goodbye. If you’d like to continue reading my articles and reviews, including a 2026 season preview with all of the things I’m most looking forward to hearing this year, use this link to sign up for my email list. Happy New Year to all—may yours be full of opera. With that, exit Madame Ferrari. On to the next stage!
Evan LeRoy Johnson, Julie Roset, Ben Brady and Ricardo José Rivera as Count Elemer, Fiakermilli, Count Lamoral and Count Dominick. Photo: Marty Sohl/Met Opera
The Metropolitan Opera’s production style from the 1970s through the 1990s could best be described as lavishly (and expensively) realistic. Audiences enthusiastically applauded works luxuriously mounted by Franco Zeffirelli, who embraced primarily Italian opera, and Otto Schenk, who took care of German opera—most notably Wagner’s masterpieces. Since Peter Gelb took over in 2006, however, there’s been a determined shift toward a sparer, cheaper, more contemporary aesthetic, one that hasn’t always been welcomed by conservative Met audiences.
After Luc Bondy’s much-reviled Tosca, which replaced Zeffirelli’s, was dropped, Gelb admitted he will never drop the Italian director-designer’s beloved La Bohème and Turandot. The flop of Robert Lepage’s scandalously expensive Ring cycle likely also convinced the Met that it should cancel a provocative new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Stefan Herheim and instead revive Schenk’s 1993 version as well as his 1977 Tannhäuser. This season, after an absence of eleven years, November’s delicious revival of Richard Strauss’s Arabella again reminded audiences how much they miss Schenk, who died early this year at 94.
Arabella, which premiered in 1933, is the sixth and final work created by Strauss with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of opera’s most successful composer-librettist partnerships. Of their works that also include Elektra and Die Frau ohne Schatten, Arabella most resembles Der Rosenkavalier, another romantic comedy of manners playing out among the upper echelons of Viennese society. Count Waldner’s family, however, has suffered financial reverses and is desperately trying to hold on by finding a rich husband for Arabella, their eldest daughter. In a quirky Hofmannsthal twist, the younger daughter, Zdenka, has been introduced to all as a boy named Zdenko in a money-saving scheme.
In the first act, Strauss, who relished composing for female voices, gives one of his most ravishing duets to the soprano sisters who both yearn for “der Richtige” (the Right One), and by the opera’s end, after tragi-comic complications, both will find their ideal mate.
Later in the opera, Arabella duets with Mandryka, and they are among the most moving moments in all of Strauss. Although Arabella shares Der Rosenkavalier’s fondness for waltzes, it has never achieved the frequent repertoire status of its popular predecessor. Hofmannsthal’s prolix libretto features many trying pages of sumptuously accompanied stark parlando, helpfully translated by the Met’s back-of-the-seat titles.
A challenge for performances of Arabella remains finding the ideal soprano for its title role, an alluring beauty desired by all men but whose wise self-possession leads her to find her many suitors unworthy until she encounters Mandryka, an outsider with whom she instantly feels an unbreakable bond. The Met’s premiere production in the old house served as a showcase for notable Straussians Eleanor Steber and Lisa Della Casa. After an absence of nearly twenty years, the opera finally returned in 1983 in Schenk’s striking new production for kiri te kanawa. Nearly two decades would pass before the company found its next “Right One”: Renée Fleming.
Tomasz Konieczny and Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Mandryka and Arabella. Photo: Marty Sohl/Met Opera
Subsequent Met revivals arrived without their originally planned soprano: by 2014, the elusive Anja Harteros had canceled all her U.S. appearances, and in her place we heard Malin Byström, while this season’s revival was planned for Lise Davidsen, who dropped out to care for twins born in June. In between feedings, she’s preparing her first Isolde, due in Barcelona in January, followed in March by Yuval Sharon’s new Met Tristan.
In Davidsen’s absence, the company turned to Rachel Willis-Sørense,n who in her first-ever Arabella gave the finest performance of her thus-far uneven Met career, which last season included a wayward Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore. The first act found the American soprano still nervously finding her footing in the duet with Zdenka and her introspective monologue “Mein Elemer.” But when she entered the Coachman’s Ball resplendent in all white, the heretofore chilly Willis-Sørensen melted most winningly as she was introduced to Tomasz Konieczny as her Mandryka.
Her commanding Arabella clearly knew how to handle men, as we saw in touching farewells to her three unsuccessful suitors, whom the Met cast with special care, each making their Met debuts. Ben Brady suavely pivoted from September’s bravura Rossini in Philadelphia to November’s charming Strauss as Lamoral, while Ricardo José Rivera’s randy Dominik didn’t allow him to display the really impressive baritone we’ve experienced in Teatro Nuovo’s summer revivals.
Given the best opportunity of the three, Evan LeRoy Johnson nearly stole the show with a handsomely ringing tenor as Elemer. Strauss is kinder to him than to Matteo, Zdenka’s hoodwinked suitor, whose cruelly high music Pavol Breslik tackled with noticeable effort.
Best known for her Handel, English soprano Louise Alder made her highly successful Met debut as an achingly vulnerable Zdenka, dashing in her male garb while soaring with hidden love for the distracted Matteo. Young French soprano Julie Roset, in the evening’s fifth debut, happily made Fiakermilli’s fits of coloratura frivolity less annoying than they can be.
Louise Alder and Pavol Breslik as Zdenko and Matteo. Photo: Marty Sohl/Met Opera
Who knew that Karen Cargill was such an accomplished comedienne? As the girls’s irrepressible mother Adelaide, the Scottish mezzo dithered and flirted with zest, leaving Brindley Sherratt, sonorous as her husband Waldner, to fuss and fume amusingly.
Like Willis-Sørensen, Konieczny found Mandryka a most congenial role, at least since his acclaimed debut as Alberich in 2019. Though his pungent, craggy bass-baritone could never be called beautiful, he readily took on his role’s punishingly high tessitura while his shyly determined courting of Arabella easily won over both her and the audience. His infatuation clearly brought out the best in Willis-Sørensen, whose voice bloomed as he forgave her alleged indiscretions and ended the evening in self-confident triumph as she exclaimed to her future husband: “I cannot help it. Take me as I am!”
Dylan Evans skillfully revived Schenk’s busy but pleasingly naturalistic staging, but the most popular stars of the revival were the dazzlingly detailed, stage-filling Cinemascope sets of the director’s frequent collaborator Günther Schneider-Siemssen, abetted by entrancing costumes by four-time Oscar winner Milena Canonero. Before both the first and second acts, nakedly inviting applause, the curtain rose in silence. Only after the grateful ovations did conductor Nicholas Carter begin Strauss’s bustling music. The Australian maestro who has been so impressive at the Met in Brett Dean’s Hamlet and Britten’s Peter Grimes drew superbly assured playing from his orchestra, though at times his brisk tempi rushed the singers, particularly Willis-Sørensen, who clearly wanted more leisure to savor Arabella’s grateful music.
The Met eschews an edition sanctioned by Strauss that eliminates one intermission by joining the second and third acts, which makes for a nearly four-hour opera. Nonetheless, this season’s fresh and vivid cast makes Arabella an especially entertaining enterprise, one that will be shown live in HD in theaters worldwide on 22 November.
The Metropolitan Opera’s season opener brought Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel to the stage with an ambitious new adaptation exploring art, politics and survival. Photo: Evan Zimmerman
“Noise! Make noise!” Sher hollered at the stage as the cast of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay rehearsed a complex party scene with a huge cast of characters. Unusually for a long tech rehearsal, the energy on stage buzzed between run-throughs. Performers bounced from foot to foot, stretched and practiced stage fighting and falls. They waited for the show’s impressive but temperamental new “irising” system—a curtaining technology that opens and closes around a square “eye”—to figure itself out.
Leaving his lunch uneaten at the director’s stand, Bartlett Sher was constantly in motion. He moved around the stage like a party host, wisecracking, laughing and answering questions. Chatting with Edward Nelson, who plays the opera’s Tracy Bacon, they practiced a balancing move, each showing a different way to hold his body.
Bartlett Sher. Courtesy Bartlett Sher
A native Californian who speaks with a slight uptalk—his voice rising at the ends of sentences like an invitation—Sher’s conversational mode comes across as a desire to connect with whoever he’s talking to. Describing himself as an “interpretive artist,” Sher told Observer that he sees his talent as being “good at marshalling, pulling together many points of view.” His approach to direction is exploratory rather than single-minded. “I’m leading the exploration, I’m guiding us, I’m helping make choices that bring out the best in everybody’s work—rather than thinking of my vision being fulfilled.”
This penchant for weaving together diverse threads seems suited to bringing to the Met’s stage a story as soaringly epic as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Chabon’s novel follows two Jewish cousins—a Czech artist and magician, Joe Kavalier and a Brooklyn-born writer, Sam Clay. Joe escapes Nazi-occupied Prague and arrives in Brooklyn a refugee after being torn away from his beloved younger brother (transformed into a sister, Sarah, in the opera). Together the cousins create The Escapist, a comic book about a superhero who fights fascism through Houdini-esque escape tricks. The book is loosely based on the life of Jack Kirby, the creator of Captain America. It covers a wide range of political themes that remain pertinent to our own times, including fascism, homophobia and antisemitism.
The opera, he said, compresses Chabon’s story into the lives of its principal characters and their relationships, all set against the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust. Incorporated into the work is the theme of art’s place during times of historical turmoil.
Comic book imagery and cinematic set design merge onstage, reflecting the story’s fascination with escape, imagination and transformation. Photo: Evan Zimmerman
“Layered in with essentially Chabon’s own obsession with how much art can help you make sense of or change life,” Sher explained. “Joe Kavalier goes to comic books as a way of handling his pain and maybe transforming his pain. Whether that works or not is a fascinating question. Whether art can actually help you with these things or not becomes a major obsession of the book.”
The place of art in the political and the political in art has been woven throughout Sher’s career as a director. He’s often sought out politically charged material—from directing a dramatization of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book Nickeled and Dimed, about the inability to survive on minimum-wage work in America, to politically sensitive revivals of South Pacific, The King and I and My Fair Lady, to Aaron Sorkin’s 2018 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.
“I think theatre is a catalyst for change,” Sher said. “I don’t think you make theatre pieces to tell people how to change. We tell stories that express people’s ability to handle ambiguity, deal with problems, see conflicts and make decisions.”
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay approaches politics in a gently coaxing manner. Gene Scheer’s libretto tells a simple story about a handful of relationships in wartime New York and Europe. The epic breadth of Chabon’s novel is conveyed visually. Its density and richness are mirrored in the opera’s textured and complex set design. Layered screens iris in and out, with designs from 59 Studio projected onto them. Towering above the audience are images of midcentury New York in its gloomy noir glory. We see comic book superheroes gleaming in primary colors or animated as elegantly looping works in progress. Haunting the background like a nightmare are greyscale sketches of Nazi death camps, reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s Maus.
As a director, Sher uses the entire stage—with all its dimensions and angles—in a cinematic approach to theatre. The vast cast of characters appears on stage with fair frequency, in large groups at parties, battles and crowd scenes. A superhero even flies on a wire. But it’s all conveyed with a subdued elegance, never demanding, always inviting. Sher’s contribution in Kavalier and Clay is conversational: the production’s emotional texture is pliable. He doesn’t tell you how to feel or think.
Sher’s ever-shifting, multi-perspectival approach feels ideal for our own overwhelming, anxious and information-dense moment. It dances away from ideological definition. “The themes of a kind of creeping fascism and the struggles against art, against the political mind, against who we’ve become, are really critical right now but also very elusive and very hard to figure out how to express themselves.”
On opening night at the Met, the political charge of our new normal seeped into the opera house. Peter Gelb and Senator Chuck Schumer made speeches on the importance of freedom of expression—the former to cheers, the latter to boos and heckles from frustrated constituents. Even in this historic environment, operating at a political remove now seems impossible.
“I try to believe that great stories come when you need them most,” Sher concluded. “And it feels to me like we’re lucky that Kavalier and Clay is coming around for us at this time.”
Deborah Colker’s production has a deft and beautiful visual poetry, pouring moving bodies and striking vignettes into the spaces around the libretto. Photo: Marty Sohl / Met Opera
“Oh, the dead,” the artist Lily Briscoe thinks in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. “One pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy.”
Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar (on at the Met through November 9) follows one artist, the actress Margarita Xirgu, as she comes to terms with the death of another, the famed Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated by Fascists in the early months of the Spanish Civil War. Ainadamar, the place where Lorca is thought to have been executed, means the “fountain of tears.” The opera is not about Lorca’s life, as much of the promotional material suggests, but about his afterlife—how he is mourned and how he lived on, in part due to tireless work from Xirgu, who championed his works for the remainder of her life.
Angel Blue as Margarita Xirgu and Daniela Mack as Federico García Lorca. Photo: Marty Sohl / Met Opera
We meet the actress backstage, about to revive her role of Mariana Pineda in Lorca’s play of the same name for what must be the hundredth time. Pineda, who was executed a century before Lorca, is a symbol of resistance to fascist and authoritarian power. She died for her beliefs without giving up her comrades. Playing Mariana Pineda this evening sends Xirgu into an extended reverie about the war and about Lorca, a figure who has dominated her artistic and psychic landscape.
Told through imagistic visions and in a non-linear fashion, David Henry Hwang’s libretto leaves much to the imagination but has a clear moral thrust, depicting Lorca’s death in the manner of a passion play. Brazilian director and choreographer Deborah Colker gives the production a deft and beautiful visual poetry, pouring moving bodies and striking vignettes into the spaces around Hwang’s words. One particularly gorgeous moment saw white statues pull off their togas to reveal bare legs as the now-women wrap themselves in shawls against the night air. The arched back of a flamenco dancer speaks both beauty and pain. Jon Bausor’s set is stunning. A circular scrim made of thousands of strings, like the trim on the edge of a parasol, encloses the center of the stage. Projections dance on it, and dancers move through the tendrils that recall beams of light and strands of hair and water flowing from the circular basin of a fountain. The fountain is always there, a reminder of what awaits Lorca. Later, a stream of red threads descends from the sky like bloody rain or crepuscular rays of warm sun. These visual ambiguities only add to the poetic sensibility, where meanings shift in the blink of an eye or the subtle turn of a phrase.
Daniela Mack as Federico García Lorca, Angel Blue as Margarita Xirgu, and Elena Villalón as Nuria. Photo: Marty Sohl / Met Opera
Golijov’s musical language combines lush romantic passages, electronic segments, and environmental sounds, but this score has Flamenco in its soul. Ainadamar pulses with a visceral intensity and percussive fervor. It grooves threateningly, making audible the mounting violence and the sense of bad history repeating itself. A large female chorus comments on the action, repeating their praise of Mariana Pineda; their reminders become more jangling, more dissonant. As Lorca’s murderer, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, veteran flamenco singer Alfredo Tejada (who has sung this role in other productions of Ainadamar) cuts through the texture like a garrote; the nasal, forward sound that’s familiar in flamenco becomes downright shocking when set against the operatic technique of the other characters. Tejada’s voice is an unearthly battle cry, the screech of Death as he bears down upon Lorca. This and other startling, intelligent choices—the clop of hooves turning into a lively percussion riff to the decision to cast Lorca as a trouser-role mezzo-soprano and the chatter of voices that lurk around moments of calm—make for an absorbing, visceral sound world for much of the opera. When Golijov turns away Flamenco’s insistent rhythms, however, the score can slip into a wearying stasis; a confession scene that otherwise should have been the height of tension felt more pensive than frightening.
Flamenco dancer Isaac Tovar. Photo: Marty Sohl / Met Opera
Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya drove the orchestra forward with gusto whenever he could, allowing the percussion and brass to shine. But the balance was off throughout the evening, largely a result of Golijov’s occasionally challenging vocal writing, which sets soloists in tricky ranges and then doubles down the large choral, orchestral and electronic forces around them. Unaided by score or conductor, the singers were forced by the overloud sound mixing to shout or simply to remain unheard.
As Margarita, Angel Blue felt somewhat underutilized until the opera’s final number. Her warm, generous soprano is best when she’s allowed to soar above it all. Blue’s chest voice is powerful but less expressive; thankfully, the final trio allowed her voice to reach heroic heights. Mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack brought a buttery, vulnerable sound to Lorca but similarly strained against the orchestration. Rounding out the major characters as Nuria, one of Margarita’s students who becomes the bearer of both Lorca’s and Xirgu’s legacy, is Elena Villalón, whose silvery, lucid sound was a welcome addition.
We meet Lorca as a reflection, an image in the mirror of his actress-muse Xirgu, and the picture we get leaves much out of the frame. It is not a biography, as that would likely deal more specifically with Lorca’s homosexuality, his collaborations with other prominent artists like Dalí or his own style and works. Instead, we glimpse him in vague flashes as Margarita struggles to pull apart the man and the martyr. Lorca never comes into the picture as a full person, even if his presence (or really, his absence) haunts Margarita. Similarly, if Lorca is glimpsed darkly through Xirgu’s looking glass, then Margarita herself is relegated to always reflect and repeat Lorca and the character he creates for her. By the end of the opera, Margarita Xirgu dissolves entirely into Mariana Pineda, an apotheosis directed by the spirit of Lorca himself.
Daniela Mack as Federico García Lorca. Photo: Marty Sohl / Met Opera
When Lorca sings of his desire to write about Mariana Pineda, he does so from an impulse to humanize her, taking her from statue, image and icon to flesh, blood and bone. He denies a political motive in favor of a personal one. Little does he know, as Xirgu herself points out, that Pineda’s fate—both execution and subsequent transfiguration from person to symbol—is also his own. But in rendering all three figures as the ultimate symbol—Christ—Ainadamar cannot resist the inevitable pull of myth-making, as real events become history, and history becomes art.
Colker ends her production with one of Lorca’s poems, spoken by Nuria, as if to address this very tension. These lines especially struck me: “My silken heart/ Is filled with light/ the lost tolling of bells/And bees and lilies.” The pleasure of hearing Lorca’s voice—the only time we access his words outside of Margarita’s memory—felt marvelously refreshing. As the dead Lorca was allowed to speak again, we were finally at the mercy of the poetry.
While acknowledging wonderful Canadian and Mexican tenors, here “American” refers to those born and/or raised in the United States. Our sopranos rose to opera’s highest ranks beginning in the late 19th Century. Record collectors treasure samples of early prima donnas Lillian Nordica, Olive Fremstad and Emma Eames; Massenet and Debussy wrote operas for Sibyl Sanderson and Mary Garden, while Geraldine Farrar and Rosa Ponselle attained fame that transcended the opera house. It took much longer for our tenors to achieve similar status.
The 1940s saw the rise of Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker, who incidentally were related by marriage, and American tenors began to attain the worldwide prominence that their soprano counterparts had long enjoyed. Although George Shirley and John Alexander performed primarily in the United States, others like James McCracken had to go to Europe to break through. Demanding Wagner and Strauss operas found assured proponents in Jess Thomas and James King, while the bel canto renaissance advanced by Maria Callas and Beverly Sills had to wait for years to hear equally stylish tenors like Rockwell Blake, Chris Merritt and Bruce Ford. Another of that era, Gregory Kunde, who made his professional debut in 1978, gradually transitioned from bel canto to the most dramatic French and Italian roles which he still performs—without resorting to transposed high notes!—at the major opera houses at seventy. Retired from leading roles, Neil Shicoff returns to the stage as the elderly Emperor Altoum in Washington National Opera’s Turandot this month.
Of today’s pride of tenors, Jonathan Tetelman has recently been the subject of great media attention. Born in Chile, adopted by American parents and raised in New Jersey, he recently made his Metropolitan Opera debut in circumstances that recalled Roberto Alagna’s almost exactly twenty-eight years earlier. Like Alagna, Tetelman arrived armed with an exclusive recording contract with a major label—a very rare asset these days. His deluxe pair of solo CDs on Deutsche Grammophon have been greeted with enthusiasm, so anticipation surrounding his debut was high. But unlike Alagna who belied the advance hype and stumbled in his first Met appearance in La Bohème, at his debut Tetelman garnered an ardent ovation by partnering Angel Blue in Puccini’s lesser-known La Rondine.
With his second CD devoted exclusively to Puccini, Tetelman told Observer that he “is perhaps one of the most challenging composers because the operas reside in between late bel canto and verismo. I consider myself lucky to have a voice that works well in his repertoire. However, planting my flag as a Puccini tenor also has its disadvantages. Representing myself as a diverse tenor can be challenging because I am often only asked for Puccini.”
The Met has done precisely that as Tetelman’s second Met role this season is Pinkerton, the cad who marries, then abandons the naïve geisha in Madama Butterfly. While the tenor will be absent from New York next season, he’ll record a new Tosca but also stretch his repertoire with a new Verdi role. “My next big challenge is coming this season at the Deutsche Oper, Don Carlo. It will be the four-act Italian version. I also believe that Verdi roles need their time, if not more, to mature. I have plans for Un ballo in Maschera, Il Trovatore, Luisa Miller and Aïda down the line, four to five years away.”
Though he missed the first Pinkerton performance, Tetelman is scheduled for this season’s final Met HD transmission to movie theaters in Madama Butterfly opposite weltstar Asmik Grigorian.
Running simultaneously with Butterfly at the Met is the return of Carrie Cracknell’s controversial staging of Bizet’s Carmen with a new cast featuring high-intensity tenor Michael Fabiano offering local audiences his Don José for the first time. Filling in his character’s backstory Fabiano believes “Don José was declining before the timeline of the opera begins, starting with a probable screwed up childhood and difficulty assimilating in his military unit. He seals his fate by punching his superior, throwing life to the whims of a woman and quickly leaving his personal and political leanings for a woman that he never thought he was capable or worthy of having ever before. His slope downwards is fast; he continues to be infatuated with a person who clearly doesn’t have the same interest in him that he has in her. Infatuation is a killer. The reason why I’m ambivalent about who is guilty is because Carmen knowingly brutally taunts him before and after the flower aria, and easily could leave.”
Fabiano has recently been moving into heavier roles like Calaf in Turandot and will appear at the Met next season in another iconic Italian role, his first-ever Manrico in Il Trovatore. But being a globe-trotting singer isn’t enough for him as he continues his close association with ArtSmart, an organization he cofounded. “I launched ArtSmart with the goal to find a pathway to income for young working artists. When I was young and studying, it was a struggle to find meaningful work that also helped pay the bills. Not only were we getting meaningful income into the pockets of working, younger musicians, we endeavored to see changes in the lives of our students because of direct, personal mentorship. I want to see our next generation thrive and to do so, we need to find access points that inspire them to greatness.”
Influential people clearly agree with Fabiano’s goals as earlier this year arts patron Maria Manetti Shrem pledged one million dollars in support of ArtSmart’s activities.
Often the tenor’s role is to fall in love with, then lose the soprano, but Carmen’s Don José is just one example of the malevolent personae that tenors are sometimes asked to portray. Veteran Brandon Jovanovich has become known for his searing portrayals of tortured souls like Hermann in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, which he portrayed earlier this year in a new production at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera. Jovanovich relishes those roles’ dramatic challenges.
He finds that “one of the joys of singing the tenor fach that I do is being introduced to a myriad of psychologically complex characters. A “drive” or “obsession” that keeps this constant propulsion to the journey, this victimhood mentality that is buried in layers of rage, hate and indifference. These are just some of the traits I try to explore and highlight in my performances. Delving into the psychosis of each character is such a journey. When coupled with a great director and conductor, it seems almost transcendent to me. Plus, anytime you pull apart these deeply flawed characters you inevitably learn something about yourself.”
Next season, Jovanovich will star in the Met premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick as Captain Ahab, one of the most famous characters in American mythology. “With Ahab, this idea of vengeance to the point of death seems so foreign and extreme, but in extrapolating these larger ideas and honing in on the underlying obsessive qualities that we each wrestle with to some degree, I can start to understand and “live in his skin” to some extent. It is this work that I absolutely love!”
Another exciting new role for Jovanovich will be yet one more obsessive, Paul in Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt which the Boston Symphony will present in concert in January 2025. “It is one of these rare gems that comes along only every once in a while. The score…oh my…it is just glorious. This thick, lush carpet of sound that washes over you. Korngold’s music satiates one’s soul in such a satisfying way.”
It was in another Die Tote Stadt during the 2019 Bard Summerscape that I last heard Clay Hilley who has in just a few years risen to become one of the world’s most in-demand heldentenors.
After his gloriously sung Korngold performance, I expected to hear much more of Hilley, but then the pandemic hit. “In retrospect, Covid was, if anything, a catalyst for my career. Because of so many cancellations at American companies, I was available to say ‘yes’ when Deutsche Oper Berlin called in February of 2021 to ask if I could take over Siegfried in their new Ring. The rest is history.”
The next year, the doomed hero Siegfried once again proved to be Hilley’s lucky role when on one day’s notice he stepped into the internationally televised premiere of a new Gotterdammerung (replacing the late Stephen Gould, another heroic American tenor) at the legendary Bayreuth Festival, which invited him back the following summer for Tristan und Isolde. Hilley will make his first appearance at the Vienna Staatsoper next year starring in a new production of Wagner’s Tannhãuser.
Once you’ve proven yourself in the heavy Wagner-Strauss repertoire, you may only be offered those operas, but next season in Berlin, Hilley will take on “a role I’ve yearned to sing for at least fifteen years: Calaf. Singing Laca in Jenufa this past January was a very rewarding experience—such great music, but the singing isn’t as strenuous as in Wagner/Strauss. Samson is another I ADORE, and I would love to do sometime Otello, Don Alvaro and Dick Johnson, as well as Les Troyens and La Juive, and also there’s Massenet’s rarely-performed Le Cid.”
Russell Thomas, best known for his sterling Verdi and Puccini portrayals, is lately beginning to also embrace heroic German and French tenor roles. Earlier this year Thomas sang the title role in Wagner’s Parsifal for the first time with the Houston Grand Opera where he’ll return in April 2025 for his first Tannhãuser. Richard Strauss beckons for his return to the Met in November’s long-awaited revival of Die Frau ohne Schatten in which Thomas stars as the Emperor. He follows that new role with another in Seattle when he tackles Énée in a concert performance of Berlioz’s epic Les Troyens à Carthage.
To my surprise, Thomas said, “Actually, performing Wagner was never really a goal of mine. I never thought it was a realistic option for me. Most of the tenors that sing this rep are white and heldentenors. I’m neither. I believe Tannhäuser is the perfect opera. It just works. The aspect of the role that give Heldentenors trouble is the higher tessitura. That is where my voice does its best work. When I was offered the role, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse: the opportunity to sing a dream role. These last couple of years Tristan has been on my mind and every chance I get I learn a few pages.”
Having starred in the Met’s four-act Italian Don Carlo in the fall of 2022, Thomas relearned the role in French for Hamburg’s Don Carlos. I was impressed by this devotional act: “I love Don Carlo(s). I think it’s a perfect opera in all its forms. I don’t feel like a singer has truly conquered the role if they’ve not performed the five-act French. My experience prior to Hamburg was only with the four-act Italian. I’m often called a great Verdi tenor, but because I had not climbed that mountain, I believed the accolade was premature.”
But Thomas hasn’t abandoned his core repertoire, as he recently sang Aïda’s Radames in Chicago and will soon correctly answer Turandot’s riddles for the Los Angeles Opera where he serves as Artist in Residence.
Another American making his mark in Verdi is Brian Jagde who earlier this year scored his biggest Met success so far as Don Alvaro in the new contemporary updating of La Forza del Destino. Earlier this season he had a similar Forza triumph at London’s Royal Opera.
Immediately following the Forza run, Jagde flew to Milan to make his long-delayed debut at La Scala as Turiddu in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. He offered: “I’m excited to finally make my debut. I’ve been fortunate to sing in so many of Italy’s legendary theaters, but I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. I find Turiddu to be certainly “quintessentially Italian” in the music and the story, but also at the same time he is like many men hailing from that period. Singing Turiddu at La Scala is a dream scenario, especially following so many great tenors who’ve performed the role before on that historic stage.” The unpredictable Latvian mezzo Elina Garanca was Santuzza at Jagde’s debut, but she withdrew from several of the following performances including the livestream.
After he returns to the Met next season as Radames, Jagde will introduce a new role there as Hermann, the desperate gambler in The Queen of Spades, his first Russian role which he’ll try out in Berlin. “I think my process in taking on anything new has always been to follow the trajectory of my voice and its natural path, with inspiration from tenors who had similar career trajectories from the past. Of course, I will continue to sing mainly Italian and French roles for a while—hopefully for my entire career! I’m not too surprised that my Hermann debut is happening soon, as many people over the years have asked me when I will sing this particular role. Hermann is a role I feel I can really sink my teeth into, with his powerful motivations and of course the beautiful arias and duets. The role sits in a range that is still comfortable to sing in as it’s not very low, but it also presents challenges I feel I’m now ready for in my development as an artist.”
Not every American tenor tackles the heavy 19th- and early 20th-century repertoire. Over the past decade, Ben Bliss has risen to the top ranks of the world’s Mozart tenors, especially at the Met where he starred in new productions of Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni. He’s only performed Tamino there in the Met’s brutally abridged, but widely popular English-language The Magic Flute. but next year he’ll finally get a chance to do a proper Die Zauberflöte there when Simon McBurney’s wildly inventive production returns. Bliss also excels with another 18th-century composer—Handel—in whose Semele the tenor will appear in 2025 as Jupiter in a new production, first in Paris, then in London.
But following his shattering Tom Rakewell in The Rake’s Progress at the Met several years ago Bliss will continue venturing more often into operas of the 20th and 21st centuries. During the Bavarian State Opera’s summer festival, he will be Pelléas in a new production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, a role most often taken by lyric baritones. “Luckily for me, the lower part of my range seems to be ample for a role like Pelleas. I look forward to using this slightly different, deeper palate of colors to paint our picture in Munich. Interestingly, Debussy himself actually wrote a few augmentations for the role when it is sung by a tenor. They are little known, but I look forward to offering them to our conductor and music staff. I’ve never heard them in a recording so it could be interesting to explore them.”
Bliss opens the Met’s 2024-25 season with Grounded, an opera by Jeanine Tesori that had its world premiere just last year in Washington DC. The tenor offered that “as interpreters of an operatic repertoire that is largely ‘antique,’ it is a unique opportunity and challenge to give voice and life to a new piece. Not only because it is new itself, but because it will be an important piece in the patchwork of 21st-century opera defining itself, laying out a musical and dramatic landscape and language for the genesis in our living artform. Also, how fun to play a ranch hand instead of a prince!”
I’m grateful to these seven men who spoke to Observer, but they are far from the only Americans excelling on the international scene. The Met lately mostly offers just Puccini roles to Matthew Polenzani, but he shone as Florestan in Fidelio last fall in Hamburg, while next season he adds to his huge repertoire Mauricio in Adriana Lecouvreur for Madrid and Anatol in the National Symphony Orchestra’s long-awaited revival of Barber’s Vanessa starring Sondra Radvanovsky. When Stephen Costello appears in the Met’s Moby Dick as Greenhorn, he’ll be the only cast member recreating the role he originated at the opera’s very first performance in Dallas in 2010. It’s puzzling that Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra have programmed the widely performed La Bohème in June, but Costello will be their Rodolfo.
Sometimes tenors even team with each other as Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres did on their recent showstopping all-Rossini CD “Amici e Rivali” in which the pair trade comradery, insults and showers of high Cs!
Brownlee returns to the Met next year once more as Almaviva in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, the role in which he made his company debut in 2007. Spyres, on the other hand, has joined others in plunging into Wagner with his first Lohengrin in March in Strasbourg. He’ll continue that journey this summer with his Bayreuth debut as Siegmund in Die Walküre, a role he shares with Eric Cutler, a fellow Mozart/bel canto specialist who has graduated into more dramatic repertoire. Cutler will be yet another American to take on Die Tote Stadt when he stars in a new production of the Korngold next year in Zurich.
It can’t be an accident that the Richard Tucker Award, one of opera’s most prestigious and lucrative prizes and one bestowed by the foundation founded by the late tenor’s family, has been given to Polenzani, Cutler, Brownlee, Jovanovich, Costello and Fabiano. The next winner is due to be announced next month! One more tenor?
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor of orchestras in New York City, Philadelphia, and Montreal, wants to break down the walls that have kept some audiences from classical music and opera.
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Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor of orchestras in New York City, Philadelphia, and Montreal, wants to break down the walls that have kept some audiences from classical music and opera.
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