Opera: Sopranos’ Week

The way to greet the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s 84th season last week was with a polite nod—at least for the events onstage. The premiere production was Francesco Cilea’s 1902 opera Adriana Lecouvreur, a sometimes saccharine, sometimes sobbing account of the tragic love life of an 18th century Comédie Française actress.* As opera, it was more soap than grand. For color and drama, it did not compare to the opening-night shows out front and backstage.

The most striking entrance of the evening, for example, was made not by one of the performers but by a visiting diva, Maria Callas. To the accompaniment of applause and shouts of “Brava!” from bystanders, Callas regally ascended the Met’s red-carpeted stairway and took her seat in a center box. In the wings, Stage Manager Osie Hawkins spotted her on one of the Met’s closed-circuit television screens and passed the magic words to singers and stagehands: “La Callas.”

Evil Eye. Cast members glanced ominously at Soprano Renata Tebaldi, who was Callas’ chief rival in the 1950s. Opera lore persists that Tebaldi has always feared Callas’ “evil eye.” But as things turned out, Tebaldi’s Adriana was clear, finely shaded and charged with pathos. If anybody seemed hexed, it was Tebaldi’s costar, Franco Corelli. During the afternoon, he was shaken by a press story erroneously reporting that his part would be sung by another tenor. Corelli recovered and went on to sing a rich, robust performance, but he was too nervous to try any of the pianissimos and other subtleties that he had rehearsed.

The worst moment came when Corelli stepped out for curtain calls. Tebaldi’s fans pressed noisily against the orchestra pit—but where was his cheering section? Suspecting skullduggery by a paid claque, Corelli refused to finish his curtain calls, stomped to his dressing room in a fury. He began to brighten only when Met General Manager Rudolf Bing, New York City Mayor John Lindsay and Callas herself came back to compliment him.

But then as Callas was leaving, she suddenly came face to face with Tebaldi. Bing and other onlookers froze. Would the two divas stare right through each other? Lash out? Cast a spell? No. Without a word, they embraced warmly. Tebaldi smiled. Callas wept.

And Corelli? Upstaged again. But this time he couldn’t object: It was just strictly a sopranos’ week at the Met. The following night, for example, the great Birgit Nilsson delivered a thundering performance in the title role of Puccini’s Turandot. Restricting her acting to ritualistic gestures, she gave a virtuoso display of how the voice almost alone can project the character of a “Chinese” princess, belonging to a China that never existed. She had icy power and self-sufficiency, with a molten core of passion. And with that, rather than the opening-night charade, the Met’s season was well and truly launched.

* Cilea (1866-1950) was a deservedly obscure contemporary of Puccini, Mascagni and Leoncavallo who advocated—but never fully achieved—highly realistic and lyrical opera.