Slightly before 1 p.m. Saturday, I got a text from a friend reminding me that we had a date. We were both going to watch the At-Home Gala being livestreamed by the Metropolitan Opera on its website, she from her apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, me from mine 11 blocks north.
And we were not alone. I suddenly saw a bunch of tweets from people gathering to watch the four-hour concert, several of them posting photos of the glass of Champagne they had poured in honor of the event or outfits they had donned in celebration. Michael Cooper, the classical-music reporter for the New York Times, tweeted, “So excited for @MetOpera virtual gala that I’ve tried to recreate the sandwich I usually get at the downstairs bar at the Met in Founders Hall, by the bust of Caruso. Cheers!” The accompanying photo of the near-perfect creation of smoked salmon and cream cheese on brown bread brought praise (“That really looks like the sandwich!” and “The bread to salmon ratio is precise!”) and wry memories (“Better this than that awful chicken croissant thing” and “Except just this once it didn’t cost you $22!”). I immediately regretted not stocking my fridge with Champagne and smoked salmon.
Then, on the screen of my laptop popped up the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, in his apartment in Manhattan, and musical director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, from his home in Montreal, to introduce the unusual program and to talk of the circumstances that had brought us all here. “Music is so important, and it is important for us to keep bringing art,” said Nézet-Séguin.
The presentation began with the baritone Peter Mattei, dressed casually in a shirt and slacks, singing the serenade from Mozart’s Don Giovanni from his home in the Swedish archipelago, accompanied by a friend playing the accordion. It came off without a hitch. After the second number, Roberto Alagna and Aleksandra Kurzak hamming up a selection from Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, I went to the red button on my screen for donations, contributing $100. Then, realizing somewhat guiltily that I had paid twice that much for a seat to Porgy and Bess my last time at the Met, I went back and contributed another hundred.
It was worth every penny.
Among the early highlights was Renée Fleming singing “Ave Maria,” from Verdi’s Otello, recreating one of her signature roles from the sunny living room of her Virginia home. When she finished and was warmly congratulated by Gelb and Nézet-Séguin, a visibly moved Fleming said, “A powerful piece under any circumstances but, now, incredible.” (As Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical-music critic of the New York Times wrote the next day, “At the end, when she teared up, so did I. We have all sometimes taken opera, and opera houses, and opera singers, for granted. No longer.”)
Then the stars came fast and furious—Lawrence Brownlee, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Jamie Barton, Jonas Kaufmann, Bryn Terfel (with his wife, the harpist Hannah Stone), and Anita Rachvelishvili—masterfully performing their numbers and then doing remote handoffs to the next artist. The joy on their faces was palpable as they enthusiastically greeted longtime colleagues they had not seen in weeks and may not see for weeks and months more to come. They briefly recalled past performances and the stages they had shared, giving them (and us) an intimate look at their personal lives. (Diana Damrau and Nicolas Testé performed “Là ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni in their kitchen, their two young children coming out at the end to mug for the camera.)
But perhaps the most moving moments came when the Met itself came together—dozens of musicians and singers performing remotely, led by a T-shirt clad Nézet-Séguin from a tiny square on their respective computer screens. These performances were taped in advance, but that did not diminish the technological achievement or the emotion of the moment, especially it all came together in a rousing performance of “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s Nabucco.
The realness of this moment, a grand cultural institutional struggling to find its way forward in a global pandemic, was made heart-wrenchingly clear when Joyce DiDonato joined seven players from the Met’s viola section to perform “Ombra mai fu” from Handel’s Serse in memory of their colleague Vincent Lionti, who died early this month of the coronavirus. Afterward, Nézet-Séguin, barely holding back tears, said, “We will never forget Vincent, and we hope that this little moment also brought comfort—a little comfort, as music only can do—to all the people who lost friends, family members, loved ones to this virus.”
After the final performance (Anna Netrebko singing Rachmaninoff, prerecorded in a studio in Vienna), Nézet-Séguin called this a “strange and terrible time.” But he also offered a message of hope. “Music and the arts cannot be silenced,” he said. “We shall return.”
If Saturday was about the pain of death and the restorative powers of music, then Sunday night was all about life—specifically the life of the composer Stephen Sondheim, who turned 90 this year. On Sunday night, a live celebration of the Broadway legend, originally scheduled for March, was restaged as a remote livestream concert on Broadway.com. It was organized by Raúl Esparza and starred Oscar-winning (Meryl Streep), Emmy-winning (Christine Baranski), and Tony-winning (too many to mention, though one was Audra McDonald, who has six all by herself) performers.
At promptly 8 p.m. on Sunday, I, a few friends in various parts of New York, and 103,863 Sondheim-loving strangers clicked on Broadway.com’s YouTube channel and waited for the performance to begin. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. As the minutes ticked away, people started making jokes about the curtain always going up late on Broadway and tech problems involving the stage turntable and wondering if they still had time to make a quick bathroom run. (The answer was most definitely yes.) The delay, now past the half-hour mark, even raised the ire of the aptly named Twitter account @AngrySondheim: “Look, I’m 90. Can I just go to bed?”
Then, finally, the show started with fellow composer Stephen Schwartz playing the overture to “Follies” on his piano, while off-screen someone shouted a question, “Can you see him?” Answered another: “He’s in the bottom right corner.” Then, Esparza, the evening’s emcee, came on and gave what must have been a stirring tribute to Sondheim. I say “must have been” because he was totally silent for about three minutes—while people on YouTube were furiously commenting, “We can’t hear you” or “Turn off the mute!”—until Esparza looked befuddled and the screen went dark.
In the chat rooms, people were going crazy, and comparing the event to the famously disastrous (and famously short) run of Merrily We Roll Along.
But, then, Broadway.com took to Twitter to promise a reboot, and a half hour later (an hour later than the scheduled start time), the show was back on—and began, appropriately enough, with the overture to Merrily.
And for the next three hours, we were in Broadway heaven. Performers not only delivered impeccable renditions of some of Sondheim’s best-known songs (“Send in the Clowns” by Donna Murphy, “Joanna” by Katrina Lenk, “Finishing the Hat” by Michael Cerveris, “Move On” by Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford) but also gorgeous songs from little-seen shows (“I Remember,” from Evening Primose, sung by Laura Benanti from her bathroom floor and an inventive, Brady Bunch–like staging of “Somewhere in a Tree” from Pacific Overtures by Ann Harada, Kelvin Moon Loh, Austin Ku, and Thom Sesma). Lin-Manuel Miranda sang “Giants in the Sky” from Into the Woods, Josh Groban did “Children Will Listen” from Into The Woods and “Not While I’m Around” from Sweeney Todd. And Beanie Feldstein and Ben Platt, two old friends, did a remote duet of “It Takes Two,” also from Into the Woods. A surprising three songs came from Anyone Can Whistle, another legendary Sondheim flop: “There Won’t Be Trumpets” by Sutton Foster, “With So Little to Be Sure Of” by Brandon Uranowitz, and the rousing title song by Patti LuPone.
Meanwhile, the song LuPone was supposed to be singing this spring on Broadway, “The Ladies Who Lunch” from Company, was hilariously performed by a cocktail-swigging trio of stars: Meryl Streep, Audra McDonald, and Christine Baranski.
The evening’s final solo performance was fittingly by the longtime Sondheim collaborator Bernadette Peters: a stripped-down, quiet, a cappella rendition of “No One Is Alone” from Into the Woods.
And as Peters beautifully sang the cautiously hopeful lyrics of that song, one that points the way forward after the unbelievable death and destruction that have come before it, I was reminded—for the second time in two days—of the healing power of music.
It was a good weekend.