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Rockwell Matters

March 10, 2008

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I used to flatter myself that I was a purist. Or maybe I was just a snob. I thought of composers or choreographers or playwrights or film auteurs as more important than mere performers.

Yes, even then I did enjoy great performances, maybe even allowed myself to be thrilled by them. But I shared the disdain of my fellow purists for the Three Tenors, although I had to admit that Luciano Pavarotti belting out Puccini’s “Nessun dorma” was pretty grand.

I once sat in the office of Lotfi Mansouri, then the general director of the San Francisco Opera, as he schmoozed Renee Fleming on the telephone. I admire Fleming, but I was an awkward schmoozer. Which I discovered to my chagrin when I directed the Lincoln Center Festival.

Now, better late than never, I am coming to realize that stars are important, after all. I look, for example, at the recently announced Metropolitan Opera 2008-9 season. This is the last season planned by the Joe Volpe regime, not by the new general manager, Peter Gelb. But Gelb has his fingerprints all over the season, and to my purist taste admirably so.

He’s doing John Adams’s “Dr. Atomic,” a great opera. Robert LePage will direct Berlioz’s wonderful “Damnation de Faust” as a kind of warmup for his taking on Wagner’s “Ring” in seasons to come. Also down the line will be first Met performances of Adams’s “Nixon in China,” Thomas Ades’s “The Tempest” and Osvaldo Golijov’s “Daedalus,” a world premiere.

But what stands out are the stars. Gelb and his team have cast well, and he has shrewdly built his marketing campaigns around larger-than-life images of his prima donnas and primo uomos. There was Natalie Dessay’s deranged face in “Lucia di Lammermoor” this season, staring out from the side of every bus in town. Next season’s signature photo seems to be a particularly beautiful shot of Fleming in “Thais.” Scattered through the casts are most of the great names of present-day opera: Aside from Dessay and Fleming (who gets the opening-night gala singing three fully staged acts from three different operas), there are Rene Pape, Angela Gheorghiu, Anna Netrebko, Rolando Villazon, Placido Domingo and Karita Mattila. To name just a few. Great singers, and photogenic enough to suit Gelb’s other great innovation, live high-definition telecasts to movie theaters worldwide.

Stars sell. Their presence, properly guided and prepared, need not compromise an opera or a stage production. To the contrary, they can enliven them and attract the kind of adoring, sold-out audiences that sustain the operatic art form. So when I was a purist and a snob, I was wrong. It wasn’t the first time.

— John Rockwell

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