Margaret Juntwait, host of the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast
Was the maestro ailing?
This afternoon’s start of the season’s final performance of Wagner‘s “Die Walküre” at the Metropolitan Opera (I attended the first one on Apr. 22) was delayed for 40 minutes, with no explanation for those of us who were listening to the radio broadcast. (This performance was also to be broadcast live in HD in movie theaters around the world.) The comparable radio announcers, Margaret Juntwait and Ira Siff, gamely and ably filled the time, like sportscasters during a rain delay.
Given the fact that the conductor, Met music director James Levine, had already dropped out of the May 5 performance of the opera, announcing the next day that he would take the entire summer off “to rest and recuperate from his ongoing back condition” (missing a Carnegie Hall concert, Tanglewood concerts and the Met’s tour in Japan this summer), I had visions of his being infused with painkillers to get him onto the stage. I knew that the final, widely broadcast performance was one that he would refuse to miss, no matter what.
But no. The problem was atttributed to the cumbersome, complicated set that is part of director Robert LePage‘s new production of the Ring Cycle. Part of the radio broadcast’s filler during the curtain delay was a previously taped interview with Levine, who essentially dodged Juntwait’s question about how well the new set was working for him.
WQXR, New York’s classical music station, at last reported on its website (and also on the air):
According to a statement from the Met, the delay was “due to a problem with an encoding sensor in one of the planks that comprise the set. The problem was discovered this morning as the stage was being set for today’s opera, so the sensor had to be fixed before the performance could begin.”
As I write this, Act II is about to begin, setting the stage for Brünnhilde’s signature “Hojotoho!,” which had been the occasion, during the performance I attended, for soprano Deborah Voigt‘s being momentarily vanquished by the set, losing her footing on its steep, slippery slope and landing flat on her rear.
[It’s now a few minutes later.] The music sounds glorious and I didn’t hear any audience gasps during the passage that had previously accompanied the woman warrior’s undignified flop.
But when a highly expensive set gets so complicated, obtrusive and even dangerous that it compromises the audience’s and singers’ experience, priorities should be fixed, along with the sensors. “Spider-Man the Opera” shouldn’t be in the repertoire.