“Antony and Cleopatra” played a crucial role in the history of the Metropolitan Opera. In 1966, Samuel Barber’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy opened the company’s Lincoln Center home — back when the Met barely did anything from the 20th century, let alone world premieres.
Things could hardly be more different now. John Adams’s version of “Antony and Cleopatra” arrived at the Met on Monday at a time when new and recent pieces are frequently on offer, a shock for an art form in which the standard repertory pretty much ended with Puccini. This is the fifth Adams title the company has presented, the kind of sustained commitment to a living composer that would have once been unthinkable.
Barber’s “Antony” was a notorious fiasco. Even with Leontyne Price as Cleopatra, the opera was buried beneath a lavish staging, designed to give the theater’s new machinery a workout. Deeply wounded by the blowback, Barber eventually revised the work.
Adams, too, has futzed with his “Antony” since its premiere in San Francisco in 2022 and a later production in Barcelona. By now, some 20 minutes have been trimmed from a score that ran nearly three hours at the premiere.
But the opera still slumps and sags, for all of the music’s nervously chugging energy and despite an excellent cast led by the eloquently weary Gerald Finley and a bristling Julia Bullock.
The main problem is basic intelligibility. For this story of the obsessive love between two seen-it-all cynics and the impact of their bond on ancient politics, Adams, who also created the libretto and conducts the piece at the Met, has chosen to retain the play’s dense, allusive Elizabethan verse.
Bustling music seems to have been employed not just as a stylistic choice but also to efficiently process the reams of text; it takes most of a listener’s attention merely to try and keep up. Even with subtitles it’s so difficult to figure out what’s happening moment by moment that you may well find yourself tuning out entirely.
In the first act, when Antony receives word that his burdensome wife, Fulvia, has died, he sings, “What our contempts doth often hurl from us, we wish it ours again.” Reading that through a couple of times, you can figure out the meaning: Sometimes we regret throwing something away in anger. But when it’s rushed, in music plainly pressed to get on to the next line, you’re just left thinking, “Huh?”
It’s not necessary, of course, to understand every word in an opera. But the confusion in “Antony and Cleopatra” is pervasive, and the anxiously simmering music doesn’t consistently offer the kind of emotional cues that would let viewers comfortably relax and trust they’ll get the gist.
Adams’s previous stage works, including masterpieces like “Nixon in China,” “The Death of Klinghoffer” and “El Niño,” all presented by the Met, have been stylized enough that you sense from the beginning that the broad impression is what counts. For all the poetry of Shakespeare’s language, “Antony and Cleopatra” is a much less poetic — more conventional and naturalistic — opera than his past ones, with accordingly different audience expectations about getting what’s going on, line by line.
The material often feels unshaped and unsuitable to the art form. A scene in which Cleopatra gets the news that Antony has married Octavia and beats the unfortunate messenger keeps going — and going, and going — to diminishing musical and dramatic returns. My impulse was to want a swifter confrontation and then some kind of solo in which Cleopatra expands and explores her thoughts and feelings. But Adams has locked himself into the play’s structure and rhythms.
The score, with its edgy, relentless ostinato propulsion, fanfaring brass and (especially near the end) brooding lyricism, is vintage Adams, if in a generally milder vein. When Enobarbus blusters, “But why? But why, why, why, why?” it is set in an offbeat staccato style that brings you back to Nixon’s nervous repetitions of the first word in “News has a kind of mystery.”
Adams’s gift for details can still impress, as in the solemn combination of celesta, harp and timpani, frosted over with quiet strings, that accompanies the announcement of Fulvia’s death. Swaths of the score are etched with the coppery twang of the cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer. Particularly in the Met orchestra’s colorful performance, a grandly primordial interlude before the sea battle at Actium nods to the watery-depths start of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold.”
Bullock is a magnetic, volatile presence as Cleopatra, with a voice that’s seductive and focused without being huge. (She and the other principal singers are discreetly amplified, which is standard in Adams operas.) She even expressively mines her parched strain in the upper reaches of Adams’s rangy writing, and she has the necessary chemistry with Finley’s Antony, sung with steadiness and conviction. They both clearly relish the long, introspective monologues near the end, but these expansive passages are, as Antony sings, “Too late, too late.”
As Caesar, Antony’s restive younger partner in ruling Rome, Paul Appleby is forceful without tightness. The supporting cast is superb, including Alfred Walker, rich-toned and charismatic as Enobarbus; Jarrett Ott, making his Met debut as a sonorous Agrippa; Taylor Raven, another company newcomer, as a dusky-sounding Charmian; and Breton Ryan, as an alert Eros.
Elkhanah Pulitzer’s smoothly flowing production sets the opera in a dreamy vision of 1930s Hollywood — with touches of 1930s fascism — to play up the sense that its characters are always performing for each other. (The updating also provides a pretext for Constance Hoffman’s slinky, glittering gowns.) Mimi Lien’s handsome set pieces are Art Deco-ish abstractions of Egyptian temples; Bill Morrison’s projections savvily combine archival film and new video.
Everything works here except for the work itself. Adams may have yet more cuts in him. Between its 2017 premiere and a 2024 recording, his “Girls of the Golden West” lost nearly an hour and ended up far more vivid.
But perhaps “Antony and Cleopatra” is simply his awkward working-through of a shift in his process — away from the long series of quiltlike pieces he created with Peter Sellars, and toward other styles of libretto, adapted or original. This flawed opera hopefully marks a transition to new experiments and new successes in the career of one of our most distinguished composers.
Antony and Cleopatra
Through June 7 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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