Opera: The Schippers Festival

The Metropolitan Opera had two new productions ready to greet the opening of its 79th season last week—a lavish but disappointing Aïda and a modest Manon. Aïda succeeded in sharing some of the opening night glitter with its $50-a-seat audience, but it was plagued by the galloping vulgarity that now and then attacks the Met’s production staff. Manon appeared with a blush three nights later and, despite troubles of its own, triumphed quietly.

With two suffering singers onstage—Birgit Nilsson was still in pain from a gallstone attack the night before, and Irene Dalis cried through all three intermissions over something like an inflamed T-Zone—Aïda never reached the pitch of performance that might have saved it from its staging. Designer Robert O’Hearn built a marshmallow Egypt; Stage Director Nathaniel Merrill strewed the huge cast across it like pistachio shells; Katherine Dunham firmly fixed a rhinestone in every navel within reach and made her debut as a Met choreographer nothing more than a tawdry reminder of her old Haitian dance suites. Uniformly brave performances and sensitive conducting by Georg Sold were not enough to counteract such problems, and Verdi’s tragedy sank into the goo without a tear.

Manon was another matter. Designer Ita Maximowna’s sets are airy and unpretentious—a close match with Massenet’s dulcet music and the story of his heroine’s capricious pursuit of an early death. In Manon’s virgin youth, the stage is warmed by springtime; in her Parisian tryst, the shabbiness of the curtains and walls is almost a state of mind; when she dies, her lover’s desolation is framed in a lane of twisted tree stumps. Anna Moffo and Nicolai Gedda as Manon and the Chevalier Des Grieux seemed nervous with the French libretto, but Conductor Thomas Schippers had a poetic command of the music.

Little of Love. Schippers’ Manon was the beginning of an operatic tour d’art that is the best news of the Met’s new season. In what Met Manager Rudolf Bing calls “the Schippers festival,” the young conductor will lead the orchestra in at least 36 performances of four operas, including the première run of Gian Carlo Menotti’s Last Savage. At 24, Schippers was one of the youngest conductors ever to appear at the Met; now, nine years later, he is established as the best conductor of opera yet born in America.

On the podium he is athletic but correct. His baton sweeps in wide, generous arcs and his left hand constantly beckons music from the air. His body dips and sways like a dancer’s, and his classic profile flashes now right, now left, like a lighthouse beacon. He has a nearly perfect ear for balancing orchestra and singers, and the Met chorus never sounds better than it does with Schippers conducting. Though emotion sometimes drives him into hurried tempi, he has a strong sense of opera that keeps his music in sympathetic concert with the libretto—which he soundlessly sings through in every performance.

After his triumphant debut at Bayreuth last summer in a new production of Die Meistersinger, Schippers was offered the directorship of two European opera houses—a temptation that sorely tries him. “Conducting is not enough for me,” he says. “I need a theater—a theater is the way I can express myself best. I want to live in the dirt of the theater.” The dirt is denied him at the Met, where conductors have no responsibility for staging or direction, but Schippers is too much at home there now to leave easily. “I feel that the Met is my orchestra,” he says. “It is an ultra-professional company—very little of love and affection—but it is the opera house of the world.”

Violet Stems. Schippers was born in Kalamazoo, Mich., but he has no taste for the sticks anymore. He is building a house on Corfu and keeps apartments in Rome and New York and, happily established as a princely bachelor, he avoids all thought of a permanent conductorship somewhere. When he first led an orchestra, he says, his legs “trembled like violet stems,” but success has blessed him with massive assurance. Now, in eager pursuit of a future he scarcely has reason to doubt, he says that “it’s a marvelous feeling to know that you know more. I’ve known before that I know music. Now I know I can run a theater. I don’t have a power complex, but why do what I do if I can’t do it right?”