For a long time, people went to the Metropolitan Opera for the horses.
They looked to the Met, the country’s largest performing arts institution, for the kind of gaudily realistic splendor that popped even from the nosebleed seats: huge sets rising and falling, cast-of-thousands crowd scenes, and, yes, live animals.
Over the past quarter-century, most of those aging dog and pony shows of the 1980s and ’90s have been replaced. With the Met now facing grim financial troubles, those replacements have tended to be cheaper, with fewer and less bulky sets. They’ve often been updated, like a “Lucia di Lammermoor” in a trashy postindustrial America and “Rigoletto” in Rat Pack Las Vegas. The onstage menagerie has been vanishing.
On Tuesday, the company rang in the new year with a new version of Verdi’s Pharaonic classic “Aida” starring the shining soprano Angel Blue, 36 years since the premiere of the chariot-dotted last one. The sets have been streamlined; an intermission has been snipped. There was not a horse in sight.
The director is Michael Mayer, a Broadway veteran whose work at the Met includes that neon-drenched Vegas “Rigoletto” as well as a “La Traviata” in preposterous Disney princess crinolines. His “Aida,” which has some 65,000 seats to sell this season alone, has the carefully strategic feel of some presidential campaigns, desperate not to lose its base while trying to appeal to new voters with a veneer of freshness.
So, during Verdi’s delicate prelude, down from the flies rappels a modern-day archaeologist in an Indiana Jones fedora. He gazes around the looming, dimly lit interior of an ancient Egyptian temple, dusts off an object he finds on the ground, and holds it up to a shaft of light. Suddenly the walls fill in with richly colored hieroglyphics and the action of “Aida” can begin.
We are meant to understand that the opera’s plot — a tightly conceived tale of warring Egyptians and Ethiopians torn between love and patriotic duty — is in part the fantasy of this adventurer and his colleagues, who uncover the story as they tramp through and silently observe the scenes that follow.
The idea is to remind us that “Aida” is a depiction of exotic lands and peoples created by and for Europeans. If you strain, you can hear a distant echo of the influential scholar Edward Said, who included this opera among the Western artworks he critiqued for exploiting non-Western cultures.
But for anyone in the audience who hadn’t read an interview with Mayer, it might have seemed like extras in safari outfits were randomly walking around. Only in one brief sequence does his framing device do any clear political work: During the Triumphal March, instead of the Egyptians bringing in the treasure looted from the Ethiopians they’ve conquered, the archaeologists parade through, carrying out the antiquities that are (if you’re of a certain ideological persuasion) simply another, more broadly acceptable version of war booty.
Mostly, though, Mayer’s “Aida” is blandly old-fashioned, without real poetry, theatricality or fun. His frame lends itself to this: If the opera is being depicted as an appropriative fantasy, the point is only furthered if it’s stagy and stale.
Just as in the old production, the visuals are dominated by weathered hieroglyphics, even if they’re no longer painted on. (The company 59 designed the projections splashed on Christine Jones’s boxy sets.) The great tenor Enrico Caruso, who died in 1921, would have recognized the park-and-bark, arms-outstretched gestures and Susan Hilferty’s Cecil B. DeMille-style costumes. Thrown into the mix is Oleg Glushkov’s awkwardly thrusting choreography.
It’s great to finally have a Met “Aida” that’s over in three hours rather than four. But eliminating the second intermission — and without even bringing the curtain down between the third and fourth acts — means that Act III, Verdi’s evocative dream of the banks of the Nile by moonlight, has to take place in the same boring temple as Act IV.
Not to mention that making those two acts continuous is jarring, since in the plot at least a bit of time needs to have passed. Mayer makes a bunch of strange little choices like this, with characters appearing earlier or later than they’re supposed to. And his production has a last silly notion: The jealous Egyptian princess Amneris, who usually ends the opera in mourning, stabs herself in the stomach at the final blackout, as if she has wandered in from a performance of “Madama Butterfly.”
It was possible to take the measure of the staging on opening night, but more difficult to evaluate the cast, which was dominated by the ailing, unaccountably performing Piotr Beczala.
From his labored opening aria as the Egyptian warrior Radamès, this usually superb tenor was obviously sick, and it was announced at the end of intermission that he was recovering from a bad cold. Why, then, did the Met’s administration let him go on in the first place — and then return in the second half?
It was hard to tell how this affected his fellow singers. The bass Dmitry Belosselskiy sounded fuzzily distant as the brutal high priest, Ramfis; Morris Robinson was a solid King of Egypt.
The baritone Quinn Kelsey was firmly commanding as Amonasro, the Ethiopian ruler and the father of Aida, who has been captured and enslaved by the Egyptians. She and Radamès are secretly in love, enraging Amneris, sung at the Met by the mezzo-soprano Judit Kutasi, who has a loud, wavering voice and a campy gift for staggering around the stage in despair, clutching her head.
Blue, the soprano, has lately struggled to put across the wistful sophistication of “La Rondine” and the stylized sensuality of “Ainadamar.” But she was a lovely Aida, tapping into the sympathetically suffering vein of her Violetta in “La Traviata” and, despite some lack of richness in her middle voice, singing with ardent elegance and free, clear high notes.
The chorus answered the score’s call for everything from stentorian cries to ethereal rituals. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, conducted an energetically paced if blunt performance.
A revival this fall of Herbert Wernicke’s 2001 staging of Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” was a reminder that old-style grandeur is possible in an intelligent, modern vein. I’m fine with taking the horses out of “Aida.” But Mayer doesn’t find a contemporary analogue for them — for the kind of visual and theatrical wonder that the Met used to provide better than anyone.
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