Lucia at the Metropolitan Opera's open house, with a photo journal

The big story of the Met's new production of Lucia di Lammermoor is undoubtedly Natalie Dessay, who sings and acts the hell out of the title role. And I can't believe that I got in FOR FREE to see it. The Met's one-year-on-the-job general manager Peter Gelb has totally made a sucker out of me - I mean, how else to explain how he got me, to not only pay attention to the Met and to opera, but to also pant in desperation while playing the online rat race to get tickets to the open house dress rehearsal last Thursday? Mr. Gelb's marketing machine worked on me - six movie theatre broadcasts (that I attended eagerly), many live web streams - and as much as I loathe to say it, they got someone who had only nonchalantly noticed opera passing by to become a very interested fan. Blah blah blah whatever I got free tickets to the Met on Thursday!

So I thought that the Met's new production of Lucia was pretty wonderful. And my measure for wonderful is that I wasn't ever bored between 11am when the curtain went up until 3:05ish pm, when maestro James Levine put down his baton after giving the orchestra some extra post-performance music notes. The opera, with music penned by Gaetano Donizetti, is an Italian opera in the bel canto style (which literally translates to 'beautiful singing'), about a Scottish noblewoman, Lucia, forced to marry a man she doesn't love for family/political reasons, when the man she truly loves is an enemy of the family. When the marriage is forced through, Lucia goes mad and kills her husband on their wedding night, then races out to sing a 18 minute operatic mad scene.

Director Mary Zimmerman's production focuses on how the men use Lucia for their own means, ultimately causing Lucia to go mad. Lucia here is a victim of the oppressive and paternalistic society around her. It creates a rather contemporary sympathy for Lucia; poor girl, you say, look at how the asshole men around her toss her around, it's no wonder she's gone mad, they'd say.

The performances were solid, from both the singers on stage and the musicians in the pit. Dessay's performance was finely acted - to my delight as a theater person - but also beautifully sung as well (to my ear, anyway; more detailed critiques from the uber fans here). I'm already a fan of Dessay's rich, clear voice, which can reach into the high notes without sounding strained or doing that super vibrato/shrill thing that some singers do. In Lucia, there are several gorgeous arias and moments for Dessay's Lucia to present "the voice," most famously, a spectacular and lengthy mad scene in Act 3. Though the moment that I really loved was the duet that closed Act 1, with Dessay and Marcelo Giordano as Edgardo (Lucia's romantic counterpart) spinning beautiful sounds from the beautiful music. To make sure that the beauty of her voice wasn't just a fluke on Thursday, I listened to the live webstream of tonight's opening performance, where the mad scene was both sensitive and impulsive. She let out a blood curdling scream in the middle of it that seemed to show her total investment in the role, and followed it up with a delicate vocal trilling that also showed how in control of her voice she still was. Her portrayal made us feel rather sympathetic towards Lucia, we kind of understood her sadness and her what eventually drove her to madness.

I came into the house already a fan of Dessay's from recordings. I first noticed her as Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, when my ear perked up at her bell clear and beautiful reading of the 12-minute "Grossmachtige Prinzessin." Then I Netflixed her DVD of highlights from her televised opera performances, which included this crazy version of "Grossmachtige" set in a whorehouse. She so convincingly sold the character that the nontraditional setting totally worked, and I was taken in by her strength as an actress as well as a singer. Dessay's performance in Lucia was totally satisfying in much the same way.

Oh yeah, and the other singers on Thursday: Marcellio Giordani in the tenor role of Edgardo, Lucia's real love, had a great, strong and commanding voice. The audience loved his two big arias in Act 3. Mariusz Kwiecien sang Enrico and John Relyea sang Raimondo.

Regarding the opera itself, it was my first experience with Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, so it seemed odd to me that in certain very sad moments - like when Raimondo rushes into the wedding party to tell everyone that Lucia has stabbed her new husband to death - the music is fairly upbeat, almost celebratory. The only part where the music seemed to be in an appropriately minor key was the mad scene. It was a strange feeling, maybe I need to pick up a recording and re-listen to those parts.

Opera at the Met is such a different experience than I've seen here regionally: there's a strong emphasis on acting, and acting in a manner convincing to the peculiarities of operatic theater. Either way, I had a good time on Thursday.

PHOTO TOUR

I was at the Met from 9:45am until 4pm on Open House day, so here's a photo tour and description of what I saw/heard:

Not many people appeared to be as crazy as me in arriving early, so the place looked serene and quiet when I arrived in the morning. The Metropolitan Opera House looked particularly regal bathed in morning sunshine.

The doors opened at 9:00, and at around 10, the Met's technical director Joe Clark gave a talk on the Met stage about the physical production elements of putting the show together. The curtain was open behind him, so stage hands and electricians could be seen scurrying around setting the stage and focusing lights for the dress rehearsal. Clark told us about the Met's repertory schedule, and about how enormous productions are shuttled on and off the stage two or three times per day. There's the night show, which gets taken down over night after the performance - usually 11 or 12pm - and then the full scenery is set up for whatever production is rehearsing that day until around 3 or 4. Then that set is taken down and an entirely different set is put up for the evening performance again. It's mind boggling, considering the huge set pieces and all the lights which must be rehung and refocused (when I did my little 99 seat theatre show over the summer, it took us 3 days to hang and focus lights alone). Of course, it's all very helpful when you have a backstage the size of the Met's: space on stage for four full set ups of the stage, in the wings, behind and below the stage. I took a backstage tour of the Met once... it's huge and nuts back there.

Much of the crowd arrived closer to 11am for the dress rehearsal. The Met gave away around 3500 free tickets for the open house, as an audience development initiative. I didn't see many people there who looked unusually new to opera going - a lot of the similar crowd that you'd usually see at the opera, though there were some children sprinkled in. Maybe the people sitting next to me were new to the opera because they left before Act 3 - the best part! They missed Dessay's flip out! Around the blogosphere, it appears that many opera fans used it as an opportunity for a free preview of the new Lucia production (proving to be a hot ticket this season) and of Dessay in the role.

In the lobby, they had displays of costumes and set models, with members of the Met production team on hand to explain what things were and how they worked.

An interactive display showing set detail and construction.

This was a particularly interesting display: the glass harmonica, a very rare instrument that was being used in this production of Lucia. Donizetti originally wrote the score of Lucia to include this instrument, but because of it's rarity, it isn't always used in performance - a flute is often substituted instead. The instrument basically makes the sound that is produced when you run a wet finger on the rim of a wine glass. Here the instrument is laid out so that you can make that sound musically in a rather more organized fashion: bunches of glass bowls are arranged together, then spun around while the player runs wet wingers on the appropriate edges to make music - it created a very ethereal, otherworldly sound when it wafted out of the pit during the opera itself. The Met has a brief blog post about it here.

I went upstairs to hear the sound rising in the lobby, as the woman who plays it demonstrated for other passers by.

This is a gratuitous pretty picture of the Met lobby, with the bursting chandeliers.

During the first intermission, they actually gave us free lunch! Some small finger sandwiches, cookies and an apple... it was plenty. Not only did we not pay for our tickets, but we got fed, too. Neat! People were standing around eating their food on the ledges surrounding the lobby, not a sight that you see very often at the opera house.

Inside the auditorium now, which from this vantage point (in the Family Circle boxes), is quite tall and large. The theater seats 3,800, with standing room for an additional 195.

More fancy chandeliers in the ceiling. Some of the smaller ones start the performance hanging lower in the auditorium, and as the lights go down, they rise into the ceiling like UFOs. Didn't get to see that happen today, as they were already up at the beginning of the day, but the flying of the chandeliers is kind of fun to watch that at a normal performance.

This is the view from my balcony seat (and that's the act curtain for the second intermission). They distributed tickets first come, first serve on Monday and Tuesday - I realistically couldn't get to the Met until Tuesday afternoon, so a balcony ticket is what I got. At least I didn't end up in the Family Circle, even higher up! When I saw American Ballet Theatre at the Met, these seats seemed incredibly high and far away. But opera here is staged on a huge, grand scale, and my seats actually didn't seem so bad at all: I could see everything, no backdrops cut off by the top of the proscenium, and the scenic elements were scaled appropriately large.

Curtain call!

After curtain call, the orchestra stayed behind for a few music notes from conductor James Levine. He made them go over a few parts one more time, to get an accent or smooth out something else; interesting to watch them working.

The curtain then came back up with the singers and designers on stage for a Q&A session hosted by Margaret Juntwaet, the Met's radio broadcaster. There was the usual stuff "what were you thinking while you were preparing this production, blah blah", but the best part was at the very end, when Natalie Dessay decided that she wanted to ask the audience why we laughed during the "contract" scene, towards the end of Act 2. In this production, the director had Lucia's brother force her hand into the signature - usually Lucia just signs reluctantly, but here it's clearly forced upon her. Dessay wanted to know why we thought it was funny since they of course had meant it to be a fairly serious moment, but I guess it just looked funny when Enrico kind of shoves her hand around - it felt a bit too "directed" and obvious, perhaps.

UPDATE 9/25: Apparently the forced signing has been directed out of the production, according to this post at Opera Chic.

Then, they let the whole audience go up and walk around on stage. The Lucia set was pretty steeply raked (slanted, for the audience in the orchestra to see the floor), so the sensation of walking on a slope was kind of fun.

Surprisingly to me, as a person who works for a theater, they let us take pictures on stage to our heart's content. I say surprisingly because usually, strict union rules from the stagehands, etc. prohibit any photographs even from the front of house - but hey I'm not going to question letting them do this!

A view not seen by us plebeians very often. One lady got up there and let it rip vocally, singing at the top of her lungs. I didn't see anyone doing any ballet, though... next open house I say we should get some ABT fans together and represent for us balletomanes! Although on second thought, seeing what I see in the mirror at ballet class, maybe not.

A view off into the wings, where you can see the giant staircase that the mad scene is staged on. Lucia runs up and down it during the scene, and then it rolls off into the wings after they're done with it. Considering it's size, watching the thing move is quite a spectacle, especially if you've ever tried to move scenery on stage before. While watching the opera, I had also been wondering how they managed to move large scenery onto and off of the very raked stage. When I was walking backstage, I realized how they do it: they 'simply' have three stage decks, and during intermission, slide one off to the side (or the back), and replace it with another that already has the big scenery pre-set on it. Only at the Met, with all that money and space...

It was a very fine day indeed for this nerd, spending over six hours at the Metropolitan Opera House. Now I wait eagerly for the Met radio broadcasts to start on December 8, and for the HD movie theatre broadcasts starting on December 15. Performances will also be streamed live once a week from the Met's web site (though my Real Player connection is spotty so I might not be able to listen to many of those), and if you have Sirius, you'll get even more live radio performances.

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I've got a few more things to post about the New York trip: further thoughts on Martha Graham and Balanchine's Don Q, plus Spring Awakening and the New York Philharmonic. Oh, and the two operas I saw even before I left for New York, too - the LA Phil's Boris Godunov and LA Opera's Fidelio.