Music for Grownups: A Night at the HD Opera

The glory days of live broadcast live on at New York's Metropolitan Opera.

 

You could nearly see Renée Fleming's tonsils when she performed three starring roles—in as many languages and designer gowns—during the Met's opening-night gala on Sept. 22. You could, that is, if you happened to be in one of the 800 or so theaters here and abroad that were screening the season opener in high-definition video.

 

The Fleming-a-thon marked the beginning of the Met's 125th season and the first time the opener has been simulcast as part of The Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD. The series, now in its third year, will deliver 10 more live operas this season, beginning with Richard Strauss's "Salome," starring Karita Mattila, on Oct. 11.

 

The Met's simulcast turns out to be a wonderful way for a neophyte to test the operatic waters. The price (about $20) is definitely right, the dress code relaxed, the bathroom lines nonexistent, and the seating front-row perfect no matter where you plop yourself down. On opening night, Fleming and her co-stars, 40 feet tall on the screen, reclaimed the heroic stature enjoyed by opera's gods and goddesses of yore.

 

During her four-hour endurance test, Fleming played Violetta in Act Two of Verdi's "La Traviata," the title role in Act Three of Massenet's "Manon," and the Countess in the final scene of Strauss's "Capriccio." Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, and John Galliano supplied the bejeweled diva's respective confections.

 

The gala provided a rare opportunity to observe how America's favorite opera singer approaches two similar yet ultimately quite different roles. Perhaps the highest of arts, opera is famously populated with "low" women. Both Violetta and Manon are courtesans, "kept" women, who sacrifice themselves for their beloveds before arriving at their tragic demise.

 

Fleming's Violetta was sad yet impassioned as she bid goodbye to her lover, Alfredo, in the country house they shared. Her Manon, however, was haughty, even narcissistic, reveling excessively in her own beauty and happiness during a colorful and festive carnival scene.

 

After displaying her chops in Italian and French, Fleming turned to German for "Capriccio." The Countess weighs the virtues of her two suitors and their respective careers, literature and music, in a remarkably sensual scene Fleming obviously relished.

 

Did I mention that the five scenes were fully staged, involving as many set changes and dozens of supernumeraries (opera-speak for “extras”)?

 

What occurred between acts was almost as entertaining as the evening's onstage doings. Mezzo-soprano Susan Graham (who co-stars in a new multimedia production of Berlioz's "The Damnation of Faust" later in the season) was a busy, bubbly, and knowledgeable source of surprisingly casual interviews on the red carpet, in the lobby, and backstage. She caught Fleming, for example, mere moments after she left the stage, and elicited breathless yet informative comments and a general sense of excitement from the American soprano.

 

The opener was also simulcast on a handful of screens in the middle of Times Square. New York is fairly magical any time, but watching live opera from Lincoln Center being screened in Times Square from one's seat in a Union Square multiplex dozens of blocks away lent the experience an especially dreamlike quality.

 

Thanks to the Met's Live in HD, my appetite for opera has been thoroughly whetted. I'll be back for an encore.