The Cosmic Message of “William Tell”

With Gerald Finley’s masterpiece of a performance in the title role, the Met’s dreamlike production highlights the unease in Rossini’s score.
Gerald Finley gave a masterpiece of a performance in the title role.Illustration by Golden Cosmos

Nothing in the brilliant operatic career of Gioachino Rossini became him like the leaving it. When, in 1829, “Guillaume Tell” had its première, at the Paris Opéra, the composer was thirty-seven; he had written some forty operas and attained wealth and fame. Although he went on composing for decades—his “Stabat Mater,” completed in 1841, and “Petite Messe Solennelle,” from 1863, showed how much music remained in him—“Tell” was his final opera. Biographers have long debated the reasons for Rossini’s withdrawal, failing to reach consensus. We are left with a gnomic remark that he reportedly made in 1860, eight years before his death: “I decided that I had something better to do, which was to remain silent.”

The last scene of “Tell” is, not by accident, colossal and sublime. The titular hero has helped the cantons of Switzerland rise up against Hapsburg oppression and, in the process, won the famous archery contest involving an apple balanced on his son’s head. As the sun breaks through the clouds, revealing ice-capped peaks, Tell exclaims, “Everything here changes and grows in grandeur!” His son, Jemmy, adds, “In the distance, what an immense horizon!” The change of weather is mirrored in the music. Over glistening harp arpeggios, other instruments enter one by one—horns, clarinets, oboes, flutes—with a phrase that climbs the notes of a triad and turns grandly at the top. (This is based on a traditional Alpine melody, which Rousseau had notated in his “Dictionary of Music.”) These phrases move across an ever-expanding spectrum of major and minor chords, in a sonic impression of infinity.

Something even more tremendous happens ten bars before the end. The chorus and the soloists have joined in a collective prayer: “Liberty, descend again from the skies / And let your reign begin anew!” The high winds and strings perform the Alpine turn. Just as we are on the verge of a final C-major triumph, with a line ascending stepwise from G to B, the harmony swerves down into A minor. Mozart loved this sort of deceptive cadence, using it to bittersweet effect. Amid the roar of Rossini’s massed forces, it casts a sudden, chill-inducing shadow. C major is quickly reasserted, but a cosmic message has been sent: there is no freedom without loss, no utopia outside of Heaven. At the same time, the composer might be delivering a conscious and faintly chastening farewell. He seems to say, “You thought of me as a mere entertainer, a bon vivant, but I had other worlds in me, and you will see them for only an instant.”

“Tell” is playing at the Metropolitan Opera for the first time in eighty-five years. Its long absence was lamentable but not entirely inexplicable. It is a score of forbidding dimensions: even though the Met has made various cuts, the production still clocks in at more than four and a half hours. And the lead-tenor role—that of Arnold, a conflicted Swiss in love with a Hapsburg princess, Mathilde—is punishing. At the end of a long evening, the singer is required to peal out a string of high Cs against chorus and orchestra. Yet the ongoing Rossini revival has brought forth tenors equal to the challenge. In 2011, when “Tell” was revived at Caramoor, Michael Spyres made a strong stab at Arnold. Two seasons ago, when Gianandrea Noseda brought the members of the Teatro Regio di Torino to Carnegie Hall for a concert performance of “Tell,” John Osborn dispatched the part with practiced elegance. In a video from the Rossini Opera Festival, in Pesaro, Italy, Juan Diego Flórez sings it with alarming ease. Bryan Hymel, who sang Arnold at the Met, had the necessary stamina, cleanly hitting his high notes, although his tone was at first narrow and pinched. He also brought to bear a sinewy lyricism that is essential for grand opera in the French mode.

Gerald Finley gave a masterpiece of a performance in the title role. The Canadian baritone has lately made a move into Wagner, singing Hans Sachs and Amfortas; the resultant darkening of his voice lent gravity and psychological complexity to the part of Tell, who makes his presence felt more through asides and responses than with bravura arias. From the start, with a muscular lament over the Swiss people’s lack of freedom (“How burdensome is life! / We no longer have a fatherland!”), Finley established character through urgent shaping of phrases and minute variations of timbre. Significantly, his Tell never shakes off a vaguely troubled air. In his central aria, “Sois immobile” (“Remain motionless”), not only does he seem to be imploring Jemmy to stay in place; he also seems to be trying to halt the passage of time. All of this confirms what has long been obvious: that Finley is one of the supreme singer-actors of our day.

At Noseda’s “Tell,” Angela Meade sang Mathilde with blazing accuracy and force. Marina Rebeka, at the Met, lacked Meade’s imperious agility in rapid-fire fioritura, although her rich, chiaroscuro tone and her fierce dramatic commitment provided ample compensation. There was much fine singing in the supporting roles; in particular, Sean Panikkar, as the Austrian captain Rodolphe, showed a degree of power and weight that I hadn’t heard in his previous outings at the Met. He seems ready for bigger assignments at the house. Fabio Luisi, in the pit, fell short of the transcendent atmosphere that Noseda summoned at Carnegie, but he led with authority and passion nonetheless.

The production, by Pierre Audi, unfolds in a dreamlike version of the late nineteenth century. The Austrians are black-clad figures out of a Victorian gothic chiller; the Swiss tend toward beatific white. The sets, by George Tsypin, try for a middle ground between the pictorial and the surreal, with A-frame structures suggesting chalets and boulders hovering, Magritte-like, above the stage. Many ideas swirled about; few cohered, yet the sombre strangeness of the concept somehow hit the mark.

At the end, Audi has the chorus gazing out at the audience, aglow with hope. Bands of yellow evoke beams of sunlight. In the final moments, though, Tell rushes off to the side, as if fleeing a resolution in which he does not believe. That gesture registers the tremor of unease that passes through Rossini’s score as the curtain falls.

The White Light Festival, Lincoln Center’s annual exploration of musical spirituality, opened with a production entitled “Human Requiem,” in which the Rundfunkchor Berlin, under the direction of Simon Halsey, sang Brahms’s “A German Requiem” with piano accompaniment. The Berliners, so transfixing two seasons ago in Peter Sellars’s staging of the “St. Matthew Passion,” have specialized in unconventional approaches to familiar scores, converting them into quasi-theatrical pieces. The “Human Requiem”—Brahms once offered that phrase as an alternative title for his work—took place in the great hall of the Synod House, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The beginning was a gorgeous shock: members of the chorus had infiltrated the audience, disguised in flannel shirts and the like, and, when they began to sing, the divide between performer and listener dissolved. During the second movement, I found myself scurrying out of the way of a phalanx of basses bellowing “Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras” (“All flesh is grass”): the power of that moment was redoubled. At times, the staging bordered on the twee, as when the soprano soloist, Marlis Petersen, sang “Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit” while floating on a swing suspended from the ceiling. For me, it was enough to be swept up in the sounding throng, experiencing music as a purely physical sensation. ♦