Before anything else, before the music or the singing or the sets, the Metropolitan Opera House is a place, an extravagant point in space. No other musical hall in the country has such active, palpable, thick, warm atmosphere. Sets are built to match the dimensions of the house, and voices are built or rebuilt with them. In some sense it hardly matters who comes and goes through its creative channels. This is its virtue and its curse: to be imperturbable in the face of change, or to absorb change imperturbably.
As always, there is a Byzantine world behind the grand facade, aswirl in rumors. The season just ended was especially rewarding for inveterate Met watchers. The company is in limbo, some say; no dominant personality guides its operations. James Levine, the artistic director, is said to be out of touch, losing power, possibly losing his job. After all, he vehemently opposed supertitles and cultivated the career of Kathleen Battle; now supertitles are coming in, and Ms. Battle is out. Is Joseph Volpe, the blustery general manager, taking control? Is Bruce Crawford, president of the board, the power behind the scenes? What role will Sarah Billing hurst, the artistic administrator of the San Francisco Opera, play when she becomes assistant manager of the Met in August?
Then there are the facts as they are known, sometimes hard to reconcile with the whispered talk. Rumors of Mr. Levine's imminent departure run up against the fact that the Met recently extended his contract through 1999. The Battle episode was an inevitable blowup that Mr. Volpe handled in an unusually public manner. Ms. Billinghurst is, indeed, a significant addition; she will take a hand in coordinating direction and design, commissioning new works and overseeing video projects, and she will share responsibility for casting with Jonathan Friend, the artistic administrator.
But change is afoot in a larger sense -- at least the desire for change. As the century nears its end, the company is seeking a modest transformation of its musical profile. The change shows up in tiny increments, in the seasonal schedules of repertory.
Repertory is everything; it dictates what is sung, who sings, who comes to listen, who stays away. Although certain works are popular the world over, the repertory is shaped by the tastes of particular audiences and artists. The machinations of choosing repertory reveal the personalities that shape the Met, their strengths and limitations.
The Met is, in opera parlance, a repertory house. In the more widespread "stagione" system, a house puts on one opera at a time, with one cast and conductor, and runs it for a week or a month. The Met is one of the few remaining companies able to mount several operas simultaneously and switch them off from night to night. This, at least, is what it does in theory; in fact, the Met no longer has an ensemble on call for all productions but instead plans its projects around the comings and goings of jet-set singers.
The impact of such a system on repertory is ambiguous. On one hand, it seems to limit the breadth of repertory that can be attempted, since the mainstream operas are those that attract the widest range of both singers and subscribers. The steady-state repertory of the Rudolf Bing era at the Met, and most eras before, was a stable of favorites. Yet this system could also, theoretically, promote flexibility in the choice of repertory, since the breadth of the operation could permit experiments over the course of a season. The house might not be shackled to what Patrick J. Smith, the editor of Opera News, has called "the central core repertory, slightly augmented."
A bit of Met history reveals slow pendulum swings in the repertory. When Giulio Gatti-Casazza served as general director from 1908 to 1935, and when Otto Kahn headed the board of the Met's parent company, an astonishing number of new operas were done alongside confirmed 19th-century favorites. Works like Janacek's "Jenufa," Korngold's "Tote Stadt" and Krenek's "Jonny Spielt Auf" were imported from Europe; native operas were commissioned from Howard Hanson, Deems Taylor, John Alden Carpenter, Walter Damrosch and composers of lesser renown. Unfortunately, they all immediately sank from sight.
The Edward Johnson and Bing regimes that followed were adamant in their apathy toward anything unconventional. ("It's not fair to the Met's public to test new composers on them," Mr. Bing said.) But the 1970's brought another wave of experimentation. As Mr. Levine entered the picture as principal conductor and then music director, operas like Berlioz's "Troyens," Britten's "Death in Venice" and "Billy Budd," Berg's "Lulu," Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites" and even Weill's "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" crept into the schedule.
As the current management is at pains to point out, none of this solved the company's money problems, which crested through the 70's and early 80's. The 80's saw a retrenchment; new operas receded, and the Puccini quotient edged up. Franco Zeffirelli's blockbuster productions remain enormously popular, attracting some of the tourists who patronize scenic spectaculars on Broadway. They drew financial backing from generous patrons like Sybil Harrington, who has also underwritten extravagances like Elijah Moshinsky's "Otello" this season.
Now that the company is on sound financial footing, it has room to maneuver. "We consciously went to a more familiar repertory," Mr. Crawford explained. "We spent the money on new productions. Once we got out of it, and we got out of it quickly, we began to lay plans to be more venturesome."
This season brought three new operas into the repertory, and next season will offer no fewer than four 20th-century works, outside the accepted Strauss and Puccini: John Corigliano's "Ghosts of Versailles," Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," Britten's "Peter Grimes" and Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande." Not since the 1983-84 season, notable for its precipitously low 83 percent box office, has the 20th century loomed so large at the Met.
What is the Met's philosophy in moving toward new repertory, and who is responsible for it? The company is run by a triumvirate, as it has been since the close of the Bing era in 1972. Mr. Levine has been with the company since 1971 and became artistic director in 1986. Mr. Volpe became general director in 1989, general manager a year later. And Mr. Crawford, who was general manager from 1985 to 1989, now represents the Met's board of directors. In conversation, they are an interesting group of personalities: Mr. Levine speaks in effusive, diffuse generalities; Mr. Volpe displays a peculiarly belligerent manner that makes one sympathize with Ms. Battle; Mr. Crawford projects shrewdness and aplomb.
Mr. Levine is still the starting point for repertory ideas. He has been the first conductor to exercise sustained artistic influence at the Met since the era of Mahler and Toscanini early in the century, and he has lasted much longer than either of them. When he arrived, the orchestra could not be considered one of the Met's chief assets. Now, so long as first-rank players are present, it is the most consistently impressive aspect of the operation.
"I would say that Levine's tenure, however long it lasts, and I hope it lasts longer, will be comparable to Mahler's in Vienna," said Speight Jenkins, general director of the Seattle Opera.
Although Mr. Levine's musical world-view continues to dominate the Met's schedule, with heavy doses of Mozart, Berlioz, Wagner and Strauss, and a general emphasis on orchestrally driven works, he is not the ubiquitous presence he was a decade ago. He has lightened his conducting schedule -- 50 performances this season versus 78 in 1981-82 -- and devoted more time to side projects with the orchestra, including a series of symphonic recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. Long criticized for hogging high-profile productions, Mr. Levine has ceded important ventures in new repertory to guest specialists: Charles Mackerras and David Atherton in Britten operas, Kent Nagano in "Carmelites."
An unfamiliar work must also have the energetic commitment of a cast that will draw the interest of the public, and the Met's trek this season into lesser-known Verdi -- "I Lombardi" and "Stiffelio" -- could probably not have been sustained without the box-office draw of Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. The superstar tenors were celebrating their 25th anniversaries at the Met, and it was a clever maneuver to pair their mass-media appeal (both appeared on the David Letterman show) with explorations of unfamiliar repertory.
The question of private financing also exercises a strong gravitational pull on most decisions at the Met. Productions need patronage simply to get off the ground, whether or not they eventually attract audiences. Mr. Crawford says repertory ideas and other artistic concerns always emanate from the artistic director and general manager, never from the board.
"Not being the general director, I myself would not initiate ideas," he explained, "although indirectly I might say things like, 'We have a "Peter Grimes"; couldn't we get it on the schedule some time?' The only two things the board would question is, one, if the box office deteriorates they want to know why and what are we going to do; or if in the mind of the directors, artistic quality is either slipping or not improving and major artists are not coming to the house." The company has gone ahead with "Lady Macbeth," he added, without having found a principal donor.
The severest critics are the subscribers and ticket buyers. Any 20th-century opera -- even something as accessible as "Jenufa" -- plays to swaths of empty seats in the Sybil Harrington Auditorium. "Death in Venice," the late-20th-century venture this season, was a near-disaster, with attendance hovering around two-thirds of capacity, Mr. Crawford said. It will not be back next season, as originally planned. The Met's strategy in pushing new works is not to rely on marketing or publicity but to make a long-term commitment with the aim of drawing in subscribers over time. "Billy Budd," "Carmelites" and Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" have shown up faithfully every few years; operas by Janacek and Berg have been more sporadic.
Attendance for these works has been rising over the years despite the "Venice" setback, Mr. Volpe said, expressing optimism about chances to add more repertory: "I believe in more operas, fewer performances. We should increase our activity; we should increase our television; we should get more out there rather than less. If we lay back now -- and many companies are cutting back -- we're finished."
The old met was notorious for its hit-and-run approach to contemporary works, giving them gala premieres then discarding them. The current management is wary of this pattern. Both of the recent commissions are scheduled for revival: "The Ghosts of Versailles" next season, Philip Glass's "Voyage" soon after. Whatever their purely musical merits, these works created unprecedented excitement for the idea of contemporary opera.
"What 'Ghosts' did for us was demonstrate that an audience and a company could make contact with a new piece," Mr. Levine said. "The next two commissions are coming strictly from what I really would like to commission, with another wave of 20th-century works that don't happen to be in our repertory in between."
One commission, the Met says, is to John Harbison, but his opera will not appear before the end of the decade.
Here is a great difference from the long-ago days of Gatti-Casazza: whereas opera companies were once casual and spontaneous in choosing new works, the current Met moves at a glacially cautious pace. The accumulation of expectations over many years -- will the new work be worthy of the Met or even worth the wait? -- puts tremendous pressure on the composer. Mr. Corigliano countered cannily with ingenious stylistic effects and a carnival atmosphere; Mr. Harbison, a composer of more introverted temperament, will probably not do so. New operas of serious intent will probably thrive at the Met only if they somehow became routine.
Ever the optimist, Mr. Levine thinks a partial return to a long-dead operatic culture is possible. "One could get back to that Gatti business but not quite in the same way, not so that one threw operas out there and saw whether they sink or swim," he said. He also hopes to reclaim the company's meager heritage of postwar works, reviving Barber's "Vanessa" and Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress."
A discussion of repertory inevitably leads to other issues. Mr. Crawford draws a direct connection between expansion of the repertory and the projected installation of supertitles. "My reason for saying we've got to solve the technological problems," he said, "is that the best chance of doing more Janacek, Mussorgsky and so forth is to be able to use supertitles."
A more intractable problem for literary-minded 20th-century works is the enduring awkwardness of the Met's dramatic presentations. Some of the most successful 20th-century productions ("Carmelites," "Billy Budd," "Lulu") come from the late 70's, when John Dexter imposed his idiomatic designs. The Met has not had a director of production since Mr. Dexter left, and the present management denies the need for one. But some observers point to the comparative lifelessness of current staging as evidence that someone should be minding the theatrical side of the fence.
And there is the enduring problem of the Met's cavernous interior. A 4,000-seat house creates a huge public whose collective taste must be satisfied with lowest-common-denominator productions. The sheer size of the stage rules out large areas of repertory both before and after the 19th century. "Death in Venice," with its ghostly orchestration and conversational tenor lines, should perhaps not have been done at the Met at all.
The matter goes beyond issues of repertory, of course, to the disjuncture between today's specialized, diversified singing talent and the antediluvian sprawl of the space itself. "The Met's natural purpose is to stage big old-fashioned operas for big old-fashioned voices," a longtime observer said adamantly. "The operas are still there. The singers are not."
But the management has a point when it says the Met is being held to an impossible standard. "There isn't a paradigm you can point to where it's being done so well," Mr. Crawford said. "On the good nights, the Met is the best there is and better than it ever was."
Although the Met lags behind the repertory innovations of Covent Garden in London, it is certainly more adventurous than the Vienna State Opera, the only major house in the world with a schedule comparable to the Met's. Still, one can easily wish for more daring, more vitality in its presentations: not arrogant directorial whimsies, willfully obscure novelties or an infusion of the avant-garde but merely a repertory that reflects contemporary life, at least in occasional flashes.
In a classical-music world fraught with panic, the Met has the great strength of self-confidence. It is doing very well and has no need to try desperate remedies. In many ways, its caution is admirable. Nothing is gained if new repertory is tried out halfway; indeed, a lifeless production of an unfamiliar work will push the composer deeper into obscurity. Hence the sinking feeling some admirers of Britten's music felt during the drafty "Death in Venice."
The Met has the power to confer immortality; as history shows, it also has the power to confer oblivion. It has a sort of Midas touch that is sometimes lethal. Think of Richard Strauss's "Liebe der Danae," in which any living thing the monarch touches turns to gold and dies.
