After its annual winter hiatus, the Metropolitan Opera reopened with a pair of productions that chronicle their protagonists’ dangerous, intensely personal quests. The journey in Moby-Dick, Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s epic novel in its Met premiere, ends in death and destruction, while the latest revival of Beethoven’s Fidelio concludes with the victory of good over evil. If neither production could be deemed a triumph, both proved to be bright spots in what has been, so far, a pretty lackluster Met season.
Condensing Melville’s vast and discursive work into a three-hour opera may have seemed as foolish as Captain Ahab’s increasingly desperate voyage to find the whale that maimed him, but Heggie and Scheer’s Moby-Dick has been met with success since its 2010 premiere at the Dallas Opera, though it has not proved as popular as Heggie’s Dead Man Walking which played at the Met last season. Since Dallas, Leonard Foglia’s dynamically effective production has since traveled to Canada and Australia as well as other U.S. cities. It has now arrived, expanded for the Met’s huge stage, teeming with life aboard the Pequod ship as it sails to its final doomed encounter with its target.
Robert Brill’s evocative set, replete with elaborate rigging and billowing sails, augmented by Elaine J. McCarthy’s striking animated projections, sometimes makes it difficult to spot the principals among the many sailors, but Foglia is usually successful in foregrounding the five around whom the opera focuses.
A crucial decision by the opera’s creators—one which ultimately lessens Moby-Dick’s impact—has been to dilute the character of Ahab. It’s his obsession to find and kill the great white whale that propels the action, but we gain few insights into his compulsive monomania. The audience is invited to learn more about the inner lives of Greenhorn and Queequeg, Pip and Starbuck than Ahab. Brandon Jovanovich’s blank, if stentorian, interpretation of the Captain further distances us from the opera’s crucial prime mover. Heggie’s lush, sometimes explosive writing for the orchestra also prevents many of Ahab’s words from coming across so that we glean little insight into the impulsive decisions that result in the deaths of everyone on board except Greenhorn. Ahab’s sentimental duet with Starbuck just before the cataclysm attempts to humanize a man who has long since lost any compassion toward others.
We learn more about the concerned, fearful Starbuck whose ravishing aria of indecision closes the first act. The young Pip, a trouser role for the opera’s sole female cast member, gets a lively scene depicting his trauma when he’s temporarily lost overboard. But Heggie and Scheer give the most attention to the soulful relationship between Greenhorn and Queequeg, whose earnest interactions may call to mind the homoeroticism noticed in much of Melville’s writing and which also figures prominently in another seaworthy work drawn from Melville: Britten’s Billy Budd.
peter mattei was to have performed Starbuck at the premiere but withdrew due to illness: he was replaced by the confident American baritone Thomas Glass. Where Mattei and Jovanovich would have interacted as peers, Glass’s youth brought a special poignance to a character with his whole life ahead of him. The delightful Janai Brugger shone as Pip, her voice growing richer as the voyage progressed, particularly in her moving lament with Stephen Costello’s Greenhorn as Ryan Speedo Green’s Queequeg died.
Costello, who created his role in Dallas, and Green developed a palpable chemistry as two outsiders who find a connection in the chaos of the Pequod. Though physically separated high above the ship’s deck during their watch, the pair sang a piercingly lovely duet hoping for a future that will never be. A plangent Costello, who can sometimes seem distracted onstage, fully embodied the lonely Greenhorn in one of his best outings at the Met. Initially, Green sounded out of sorts, frequently covered by the wall of sound allowed by conductor Karen Kamensek, but he eventually found his footing.
One of the most striking Moby-Dick performers never appeared on stage. Singing from a side box, Brian Major’s rich baritone resounded as the desperate Captain Gardiner whose ship passes closely by the Pequod. Though she sometimes failed to rein in her vibrant orchestra, Kamensek otherwise led a taut and exciting performance that reveled in the lusty choruses that dot the score. I don’t remember seeing Tilman Michael, the Met’s new chorus director, taking a bow earlier in the season, but he and his hearty forces definitely earned their ovations after both Moby-Dick and Fidelio.
Before Moby-Dick began, Met General Director Peter Gelb stepped onstage to invite all to stand for the Ukrainian National Anthem. The Met has been quite vocal in its support for Ukraine during the ongoing war and one understood why the company chose the season reopening for this gesture. But the stirring anthem might have been more apt the following evening as Fidelio is a mighty work depicting the struggles of ordinary citizens against a tyrannical regime.
Absent from the Met since 2017, Fidelio returned in Jürgen Flimm’s stark 2000 production. Revived by Gina Lapinski, it looked better than it had eight years earlier, though she retained several of the late director’s worst ideas, such as beginning the glorious reunion duet “O namenlose freude” with Leonore and her now-rescued husband Florestan inexplicably positioned on opposite sides of the stage.
This season’s revival happened primarily due to the availability of Lise Davidsen, currently the world’s leading Leonore. She was originally set to perform her role of the heroic wife who disguises herself as a man to rescue her husband from prison at the Met during the fall of 2020 to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth, but the pandemic closure thwarted that production. Visibly pregnant—with twins!—the soprano will step back from performing after the Fidelio run to await her children’s birth before returning to the Met next March for a new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
If Davidsen on opening night sounded at slightly less than her sterling best, her nobly committed Leonore still rang out with thrilling conviction. In addition to her expected ringing, house-filling ringing notes, she also tenderly brought softly subtle shading to the heavenly quartet with Marzelline, Jaquino and Rocco and to the heartfelt “Komm Hoffnung” section of her big “Abscheulicher” aria.
The only cast member to match her was René Pape returning to the role of Rocco for the first time since he appeared in the Flimm production’s premiere nearly a quarter-century ago. If his plush bass has been reduced slightly in size, it remains sure and steady as he embodies all the contradictions of the jailer increasingly uncomfortable with his duties.
Although debuting tenor Magnus Dietrich as Jaquino acquitted himself reasonably well, he never suggested why he merited his Met invitation for this easy-to-cast role. On the other hand, Ying Fang’s sweetly vivacious Marzelline reminded us why she’s an invaluable artist who should be at the Met every season.
In the dark prison, David Butt Philip as Florestan began with a startling messa di voce in his opening “Gott!” and then confidently proceeded through to his aria’s frenzied conclusion. If his brightly sizable tenor had trouble keeping up with Davidsen’s radiant Leonore, he negotiated Florestan’s challenging music better than some other current exemplars.
Although Tomasz Konieczny was a convincingly hissable villain, his Pizarro was sung with such an ugly bass-baritone that one almost wished that Davidsen’s Leonore had pulled the trigger when she had the chance. Konieczny seems to have been going through a bad time dating back to his uneven Met Der Fliegende Holländer in 2023. His presence next season as both Mandryka in Arabella and Kurwenal in the new Tristan becomes concerning.
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Susanna Mälkki on the podium would ordinarily be a cause for rejoicing as she’s led some fine performances at the Met, but her Fidelio was occasionally frustrating, even puzzling. A fleet Overture was followed by often quite deliberate tempi choices that sometimes worked, sometimes lost focus undone by unexpected brass bloopers. The final chorus of rejoicing flew by so quickly that the soloists, chorus and orchestra struggled to stay together. An additional rehearsal or two might not have been amiss.
One hopes the remaining performances will jell so that the final show on March 15—scheduled to be transmitted in HD to theaters around the world—will at last be all that this promising Fidelio could be. Unfortunately, no HD has been scheduled for Moby-Dick, which runs until March 29, when it will be the weekly Saturday afternoon broadcast.
