New Yorkers are a big bunch of weenies.
Seriously, this is what passes for a fiasco in the Big Apple? This muscular, clear-sighted and often powerful staging of a familiar repertory standard - marred, admittedly, by a handful of small but painful directorial missteps - is all it takes to arouse the collective ire of New York's opera crowd?
What will they do when something really goes wrong?Having been a part of the New York audience scene and a Metropolitan Opera subscriber for several years, I feel some need to defend. About the only generalization one can make about New York audiences is that they are diverse, and that diversity permeates even establishments as traditional as the Met. Within all of that diversity, some pockets are more vocal than others, sometimes fanatically so. In this case the pocket in question was the faction that was adamant about giving up any production by Franco Zeffirelli with a spirit that could only match Charlton Heston's attitude about giving up his gun; and basically they were as vocal about their position as Heston was about his. Unfortunately, Bondy did not deal with this faction particularly well, since the only message he had for them was (in paraphrase): Things change; get used to it.
On the other hand, there were certainly places in the production where what Kosman chose to call "small but painful directorial missteps" were, for me, cases where "something really goes wrong." None of those situations are irreparable; and, if the Met allows Bondy the time to work on them, I am sure the problems can be remedied. Unfortunately, the first few of those cases (the spotlight that cannot decide whether it is taking orders from Scarpia's police or the stage manager and the key whose hiding place is just plain dumb) take place within the first minutes of the production; and it is extremely difficult to get beyond first impressions.
Nevertheless, it is possible to get beyond biting Bondy's finger to look where he is pointing. Personally, I saw the finger pointing at our general conception of "grand" opera (with intentional scare quotes). Bondy seems to be in the camp that can accept that, whatever criteria we may have for grandeur, those criteria are absent in Tosca. My predecessor, Scott Foglesong, wrote the following about the 1953 recording by Maria Callas under this banner last July:
One hears gush about the "utter truth" of Callas's performance as diva Tosca, but let's get real here: how much "truth" can there be in a trashy, shabby, grubby little potboiler? The fans hear "truth"; I hear cheap histrionics.My own reaction to this position is that, ultimately, the opera indulges in vulgarity to the point of celebrating that very quality; and, in Bondy's production, George Gagnidze's Scarpia rules over that vulgarity with the same relish that Milton's Satan rules over Hell. There were no cheap histrionics in any of those moves. Those could be found in Karita Mattila's Tosca, who was trying to go in too many directions at once, and Marcelo Álvarez' Cavaradossi, who never really negotiated the fine line between pathos and bathos.
My guess is that Bondy would be the first person to recognize that more work needs to be done. From that point of view, I personally find it unfair that this particular video document should be part of his legacy. The Ovation Channel used to broadcast European videos of his earlier work, and he quickly registered with me as a director who could draw me into certain operas that I usually did not particularly like. I have no idea whether or not the operating constraints of the Metropolitan Opera will give Bondy the opportunity to do that necessary work that would make Bondy's case more clearly and concisely. I certainly hope so. There is no question in my mind that he has a valid point of view. We would all benefit if he could present that view in circumstances better than he has had thus far.
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