A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

The Met Opera Swaps Out Two More Zeffirellis

Image may contain Stage Human Person Musical Instrument Musician Footwear Shoe Clothing Apparel and Dance Pose
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera/Cory Weaver.

This week brings us the latest episode in the ongoing saga of replacing those sumptuously detailed but somewhat dusty productions created by Franco Zeffirelli for the Metropolitan Opera with new stagings, in this case his 1970 double bill of Cav and Pag (Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci) with a new version, by Sir David McVicar.

Zeffirelli has been outspoken in his resentment of this process, the driving force behind which is Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. On March 29, 2008, when Zeffirelli was 85, he and Gelb came together on the Met stage to celebrate the record-breaking 347th performance of the director’s greatest triumph with the company, his 1981 La Bohème. Plans were then already under way to replace his Tosca and Carmen, however, and days later Zeffirelli told New York magazine, “I imagine the Met must present masterpieces with a different approach, but who is going to give a better approach than what I did? They must preserve some of my productions, which are really masterpieces.”

According to Robert Tuggle, director of archives at the Met, Zeffirelli has directed 11 productions at the famed opera house. The first was Falstaff, in 1964. (That year he also directed Maria Callas in Tosca, at the Royal Opera House, and in Norma, at the Paris Opera.) In 1966 he staged and provided the libretto for Antony and Cleopatra, by Samuel Barber, the work commissioned to open the new opera house at Lincoln Center, with Jess Thomas and Leontyne Price in the title roles. Dismissed as an utter debacle by the critics, who found the score unimpressive and the sets and costumes by Zeffirelli grotesquely unwieldy and overdone, it was withdrawn after the initial performances and never revived at the Met. Since then, however, the steady succession of Zeffirelli’s Tosca, Don Giovanni, Otello, and two La Traviatas have come and gone.

In the case of Tosca, one of his best-loved, most resplendent creations, the new, 2012 version, by the Swiss director Luc Bondy, drew angry catcalls from an audience incensed, for starters, at seeing Scarpia, in the second act, being serviced by a trio of hookers. New productions of Carmen and Don Giovanni fared much better.

McVicar, the Scottish director of the new Cav and Pag, which will have eight performances, ending on May 8, has an excellent record here and in Great Britain. His production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare for the Met, in 2013, was a stylish, four-plus hours of comic delight, and next season he will complete the trio of Donizetti’s operas about English queens with Roberto Devereux. His Pag, with Patricia Racette and Marcelo Alvarez, borrows English-music-hall techniques for the play-within-the-play, and the result is thoroughly satisfying. For the Cav, whereas Zeffirelli gave us a realistic Italian village square on Easter Sunday, with a huge church towering over it, McVicar has chosen for a set a vast circle of black straight-back chairs on a turntable, all very dimly lit. Perhaps the idea was to focus the audience’s attention on the beautiful sound made by Fabio Luisi and the orchestra and cast, headed by Eva-Maria Westbroek and Alvarez.

That leaves two Zeffirelli works in the Met’s repertory, and they seem to be holding fast by popular demand: La Bohème, which has now been presented 426 times in the huge house, and the excessively garish Turandot, which continues, after 28 years, to attract and delight audiences.

Related: “The Met’s Grand Gamble,” by Nina Munk

George Gagnidze as Tonio, Patricia Racette as Nedda with Marty Keiser, Joshua Wynter, and Andy Sapora in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.

By Cory Weaver/Metropolitan Opera.