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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.
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.
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.
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Christopher Corwin
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