A 1977 Met Performance

 

Note: I was searching an old diary for information  on the article, “From Roshen to Vidya” a blog entry from a few days back. I thought I found  one, but couldn’t find it again. Instead, I found an entry from February 21, 1977, which I thought might be of some interest to some readers.        

 (Oh, I was more than a tad arrogant in those days.)

February 21, 1977

We attended a performance of Le Prophète (an opera by Meyerbeer) today at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

 

It was the cheapest production I  ever saw there. Since Meyerbeer’s music needs lavish productions to carry it across, the sets of this evening’s performance were doubly disappointing. The basic set remained fixed during the performance—some details  were changed to suggest a new scene. The background looked like some crazy Art-nouveau aqueduct, a semicircular wooden scaffold with several ladders.  One would have to have read  the libretto to know what was going on; for instance, when Berthe is taken into the castle—in this staging, she went through one of the openings in the scaffolding, followed by some soldiers, while others went through another opening in a different direction—who could guess where? The frozen pond for the skating scene looked like a a giant Dr. Scholl footpad. In the last scene, a red canopy suggested the pomp of the palace! As a few ribbons fell from it, people screamed—thus suggesting the collapsing castle! A really awful production, perhaps the worst I ever saw at the Met.

The singing was a lot better. Although Marilyn Horne was in poor form for her—it was announced that she was suffering from “an extremely bad cold.” It still was a pleasure to hear her. James McCracken (God! he’s still singing about a conflict with Mother—one would think Carmen would have cured him of that!) sang superbly. He acted as of he couldn’t skate, as if  the whole pond were really made of ice.  Ruth Shane was all right, albeit a little shrill.

The music is another matter. The opera contains many nice melodies, without any being truly memorable. The best parts have to do with theatrical effects—the skating scene, the coronation scene, etc. I believe the opera should be heard now and then, but not in cheap productions like this one was. A shoddy production of a grand opera can only succeed if the music is of a high order. This is unfortunately not the case with Meyerbeer, although he was certainly competent. The Met should have known this.