The Brooklyn Rail

Death ain't what it used to be, at least on the opera stage. And that's a good thing. Death, especially death as the final climactic moment of the drama, is a staple of the opera house, and has been since the development of opera after Beethoven. There's a barely sub rosa outline of European intellectual and cultural history in the movement of opera subjects from stories from classical history and myth in the seventeenth century, to the social and political humanism of Mozart and Beethoven, to the figures of heroic sacrifice, fate, tragedy, and death in the romantic era.

That last has stuck with us. Despite a few scattered avant-garde and experimental breakthroughs from such composers as Philip Glass, Robert Ashley, Meredith Monk, and György Ligeti, opera has kept to the romantic style of drama through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. As much as opera culture—made up of administrators, record companies, and self-professed fans—since World War II has feared new operas, most modern and contemporary works are new only in the sense they put contemporary subjects onstage. The music itself is often less harmonically adventurous and more melodic than Richard Strauss, and Strauss is a staple of the opera house; Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier will always sell tickets.

So too will Verdi and especially Puccini. There are eight productions combined for those composers at the Metropolitan Opera this season, with their attendant dramatic deaths, especially those from Puccini. To paraphrase Ian Faith in This is Spinal Tap, “death sells.”

There’s more than one kind of death in these works. Verdi’s stage is populated by people, not Wagner’s allegorical archetypes, and Verdi is also the philosophical opposite of Puccini. He was a humanist, and like Mozart loved his characters and treated them as people deserving respect (even the villains have depth and are recognizable as real people), while for Puccini (and Strauss) people are just toys to play with to manipulate the audience’s emotions. Death in Verdi’s operas is tragic, while in Puccini’s it’s a glorification of his own ego as a composer. Their musical values and social views were modeled in their politics; Verdi was a patriot and a national hero who helped liberate Italy from the control of other countries and unify the nation, while Puccini (like Strauss), was chummy with and admiring of fascists, and (also like Strauss) his operas betray a class-based sense of social and political superiority.

The Met also has a concerted strategy to modernize their repertoire, perhaps inspired by the popular success of Glass’s masterpiece, Akhnaten. That has meant staging, and even commissioning, Kevin Puts’s The Hours, Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up In My Bones and Champion, and Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. Death is in these operas too, but of a very different kind than one finds in so much from the romantic era. One major difference is, who’s dying?

The answer at the Met so far this season has been a revelation. All the new operas above are American, putting aspects of our national values and experiences on stage. Instead of royalty it’s been recognizable people, and this fall it’s been poor people in the small town and rural South, and of course Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, the Black communities of Boston, Detroit, and New York.

This is radical in the extreme. It may not be apparent sitting in the orchestra seats on opening nights, surrounded by expensively dressed patrons, but those patrons are not seeing and hearing idealized figures who often outrank them socially, they are witnesses to poor and Black people. The music is not radical, but opera culture has been upended just by changing the social and cultural relationships between the audience and the kinds of people on stage.

Death has been radically different in these dramas as well. There’s no Cio-Cio-San slitting her wrists while the music swells and we admire the glory of it all in Anthony Minghella's beloved and repulsive suicide porn production of Madama Butterfly (which opens January 11 and will run in different stages through May 11). Instead we see the step-by-step details, in close-up via live video projection, of Joseph De Rocher's execution at the end of Dead Man Walking. Ivo van Hove's staging up to that point is bland and noncommittal, but this culminating moment is genuinely upsetting and absolutely blunt, a mockery of the way the living gaze at the dead in opera culture, waiting for the exalted frisson of a tragedy that happens to someone else, not even a step removed from the atavism of human sacrifice in ancient cultures.

De Rocher, who murdered two teens, is executed not because of operatic passions of love and duty, but via the psychopathic process that legalizes and systematizes revenge as legally acceptable. X is different than this in a way that nails the problems with Robert O’Hara’s staging. Both the opera and O’Hara are making their debut at the Met with this production; the opera is a good depiction of a difficult subject, Malcolm’s entire life from childhood to his assassination, with fine vocal music, but overall it depends so much on Thulani Davis’s libretto and Christopher Davis’s story that it doesn't have the form of the drama, or even the conflict between Malcolm and Muhammad in the score. X needs this to be shown forcefully on the stage, but O’Hara only partially delivers.

The first of the three acts is rich and dynamic, with brilliant costumes and choreography. But then the Verdi model returns to the worst of nineteenth century operatic traditions, which is having everyone stand around while they sing. The singing from baritone Will Liverman as Malcolm and tenor Victor Ryan Robertson as both the composite character Street and Muhammed, is excellent, but there’s only so much they can do.

Malcolm’s assassination is also troubling because it is, like in Puccini, exalted. He stands at the podium of the Audubon Ballroom, and two shots ring out. The action immediately freezes, Malcolm backlit like an angelic figure captured in a fresco. It’s very opera-culture. After three hours of X speaking more bluntly about racism than anything that’s ever been in front of a Met audience, O’Hara undercuts everything by following stale convention. He undermines the opera by not hearing and seeing that the death here is not for the glorification of the audience, their satisfaction at being cultural cognoscenti, but a condemnation. It needs to be upsetting like it is in Dead Man Walking. Like that opera, the context of X is the violence the state dishes out to marginalized people and communities, if only the staging didn’t soft-pedal this finality.