Dartblog

Ah, the question: Did Pláci earn his boos?

There is more to say about Tuesday evening’s performance of La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera. The golden duo of Rolando Villazón and Anna Netrebko—which duo will not be together on stage for a good while, and certainly not in another Bohème this season—was occasion for vigorous curtain calls after the acts, and an extended one that lasted for nearly a quarter of an hour at the end of the opera. New York’s romance with Netrebko has not flagged one bit since she came to New York City in 2001, singing Natasha in War and Peace. Opera elites find her tiresome, but they are those for whom Spiro Agnew turned the phrase, “nattering nabobs of negativity.” Also like Agnew, they are very, strangely, improbably, conservative. I’ll explain.

Not really conservative, you see. Chatting and having a drink before the opera, I exchanged a few words with an employee of the Metropolitan Opera. She, like a goodly portion of the Met empire, works in development—the department concerned with ensuring the institution’s financial stability through the generosity of operagoers like you. She was very nice of course—very knowledgable and very entertaining. When it came time for me to tell what I do, I said I was a student. And what was I studying? Government. And that look, that familiar look of metropolitan liberal dour washed over her face. “Well, I do hope you’ll find a way to fix,” all this, she said, gesturing to indicate these fifty united states. No, she was not a conservative talking about the Democratic win in November. (A news flash: Conservatives aren’t exactly in an uproar because the Republican party lost power.) She was referring to the Big Evil; the presumed evil. Dubya.

Anyway, I was able to slough through using the deft maneuver known as the noncommittal chuckle.

Luminaries in the New York opera world aren’t really conservative, no. (Jay Nordlinger is a treasured exception.) But they are conservative in that one bad sense—the sense which rejects change because change is change and is therefore bad, quod erat demonstrandum. And so plucky young ones like Netrebko get the backs of the opera elite even as she becomes the toast of Manhattan. She’s too flightly, she’s appreciated only for her looks, folks aren’t paying attention to the singing anymore, she’ll make opera superficial, &c. One imagines that, given their druthers, the New York firmament would turn opera into lecture.

This odd little conservatism is also manifest, I think, in the present marketing of José Plácido Domingo Embil, the eternal tenor who in recent years has taken on musicology and conducting as well. The Met in recent memory has made two bad moves with Mr. Domingo. The first was staging an entire opera around the name Plácido. An entire run of Cyrano de Bergerac, a weak opera, was dredged up so that he could sing Cyrano. But his best was well behind him and, really, the opera didn’t go off all that well. The second was giving him conducting positions. Like Cyrano, the purpose was to bank on his name. And, as with his performance of Cyrano, some folks resented the “prestige crutch.”

Last night, each and every time Mr. Domingo took in a round of applause, there was audible, impassioned, and constant booing. To be sure, they were drenched by the applause of 95% of those assembled, but they were unmistakable boos. Evidently, even those listening at home through the Internet stream were able to make them out. Boos are rare in Manhattan, where audiences are usually so enamored that they are at a classical music event that even a sprightly round of “Heart and Soul,” plucked out on a Yamaha spinet by a seven year old, would earn a standing ovation, so long as the piano were in Avery Fisher Hall. But here were real, honest boos. I can understand, but do not agree with, the reasons. Critics—have a look at the Opera-L mailing list to read some—thought Mr. Domingo’s orchestra too booming and his timing, crucial in these sometimes cartoon-like Puccini scores, far off. But there is also the sense that Mr. Domingo ought to be retired; that his sterling name is being sullied by the Met’s marketing department.

“It must be the first time Mr. Domingo has heard that sound at the Met and it was well deserved. I don’t know what purpose all the flailing of his arms is meant to accomplish but he really let the entire first act sag badly and was no help in the rest,” one commentator wrote after arriving home from the performance.

I consider the performance to have been absolutely stunning in its dramatic power and classic in its technical precision. It was just wonderous. And, for the record, I disagree with booing, and am a little surprised that, as an art consuming public, we have not moved beyond it. Does not tepid applause send the very same message? Particularly when standing ovations are so common?

The interesting thing about those boos? Their redeeming quality? They came from neither the orchestra level nor the first tier, but from the upper decks—where the new guard watches in wait.

And a little confession from me: I have my bouts with opera liberalism, which is the rejection of tradition simply because it is tradition. Witness my regrettable critiques of Renée Fleming. They’re nothing more than overreactions to the musical conservatism of her apologists. In point of fact she is one of the world’s finest lyric sopranos, and after twenty years in opera it is only natural that the word ‘diva’ has begun floating about her.