Since Anna Netrebko was removed from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in an ugly dispute over the war in Ukraine—a dispute she has been winning in both arbitration proceedings and, arguably, in the court of public opinion—the struggling house’s only hope has fallen to Lise Davidsen, a young Norwegian soprano who has steadily marched through Richard Strauss’s heroic roles and the lighter Wagner parts, with great things in store. Isolde and Brünnhilde lie on the horizon by the end of the present decade. She has also had some success in Italian roles. Last season, her Leonora in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino—a role originally intended for Netrebko in the Met’s overburdened new production—was warmly received, with the character’s signature aria, “Pace, pace, mio Dio,” stopping the show with sustained applause.
Much anticipation, therefore, heralded Davidsen’s return to the house this season in four performances of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, her first performances of the celebrated role at the Met after noted recent appearances in the role in Europe. Her house role debut, on November 12, was set aside as a gala occasion, with a beautifully set patrons’ dinner and inflated ticket prices for everyone. A short and well conceived video on Puccini’s relationship with New York and the Met preceded the performance to commemorate the centenary of the composer’s death.
Alas, the performance was disappointing. Davidsen certainly made a strong effort. The titular character of Tosca is a jealous opera singer who is suspicious of her revolutionary lover Cavaradossi, a painter who gets caught up in the lethal political intrigue of Rome during the Napoleonic Wars. The predatory police chief, Scarpia, has his eyes on Tosca in more ways than one, and he offers her a diabolical bargain: if she will give in to Scarpia’s advances, Cavaradossi will escape the hangman’s noose. Tosca feigns agreement but then stabs the police chief, exulting in her triumph before penitently forgiving him after he expires. She proceeds to Cavaradossi’s rescue, only to discover that Scarpia also had no intention of keeping their bargain, and that the painter’s execution—switched from a hanging to a firing squad—was all too real. Cornered and desperate, she calls out to God for justice before plunging from the ramparts of the Castel Sant’Angelo.
The range of emotions can be studied and reproduced, but Davidsen’s approach seemed too cerebral and too self-conscious to rate among the finest exponents of the role. Raw emotionalism fell to a Nordic coolness that neither embodied the character nor excited the audience beyond the level of a reasonably well sung performance. The show piece aria, “Vissi d’arte,” was the best moment—Davidsen performed it well as an encore in a solo recital she gave at the Met early last season—but the plot needs rage and anger and despair beyond the aria’s self-pity to score a true success. Much of the time, Davidsen seemed more preoccupied with not making a mistake than with unleashing the fiery passion of a temperamental artist. This is not at all to say that she is an untalented performer, but rather the opposite—that even extremely talented singers, which she most definitely is, will encounter roles that simply do not bring out the best in them. One can live and learn and focus on the extraordinary successes to be enjoyed in more fertile fields. The prospect of Davidsen’s movement into the heavier Wagner parts mentioned above remains tantalizing.
The hype around Davidsen nearly drowned out the much-anticipated Met debut of the young British tenor Freddie De Tommaso, cast as Cavaradossi. De Tommaso won some notice as the doomed hero in London. In the cavernous Met, however, the voice seemed more fragile than a gallant hero’s should be. Strong technique was in evidence, but volume was another matter. The scenes with Davidsen lacked chemistry, in part because she has the power simply to overwhelm him, and therefore she had to hold back. An appealing sweetness gave some of his tones a certain vibrancy, and his Act II cry of, “Vittoria, vittoria,” unleashed a mighty squillo that stood as his best singing all evening. The mismatch in height between the two leads also defied belief. The statuesque Davidsen, elevated even beyond her six feet by her costume tiara, evoked the hapless Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers’ films, while De Tommaso slouched a head below her, in a pose that suggested he was about to pull a slapstick prank worthy of Harpo. It undermined the drama, but, fortunately, did not get the laughs that emerged from the audience when Davidsen accepted curtain call plaudits from the performance’s much shorter conductor, Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who led a brassy but oddly unfocused reading of Puccini’s score.
The evening’s most stalwart vocal performance came from the Hawaiian baritone Quinn Kelsey, who sang a menacing Scarpia. The range of feeling is not as extensive as in the Verdi parts in which this talented singer excels (he sang Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Met earlier this season), but it demands sustained high tessitura broadsides and delicate passaggio work that he delivered with relish. Patrick Carfizzi turned in his usual campy Sacristan. Tony Stevenson’s Spoletta, one of Scarpia’s henchmen, was suitably vicious. Kevin Short’s burly bass-baritone gave a distressed Angelotti.
David McVicar’s traditional production arrived on New Year’s Eve 2017, replacing a much-maligned production of 2009 by the late Swiss director Luc Bondy. No one misses that beige monstrosity, which replaced the painstakingly realistic Franco Zeffirelli production with which so many of us grew up. But McVicar’s effort—with sets and costumes by John Macfarlane—is too similar to Zeffirelli’s look to mark it as truly original and too stylized to equal it in grandeur. A massive show curtain portraying the Angel of Death screams ‘Obvious!’ and the tilted perspective could lead one to imagine that he was watching the Zeffirelli effort from a bad seat in the wings. Met general manager Peter Gelb—hardly known for his self-effacement—eventually admitted that replacing the Zeffirelli production was a mistake. If only that were his only one! —or at least the only one happening in the house in this misfired revival.
