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Missing Opera's Lost Generation of Stars at a Gala for Volpe
Galas are a big part of operatic tradition. You need to have one every few years. At the Met they have become practically part of the standard opera landscape. This Saturday's season-ending gala, a tribute to the departing general manager, Joseph Volpe, is being billed as a particular blockbuster. Yet, inevitably, people are already comparing it to another blockbuster gala in recent memory, the 1996 celebration of James Levine's 25th year at the house, which went on for more than seven hours.
Length is one measure of a gala, but the event rises and falls on the question of who is going to sing. Or who is not going to sing. At Mr. Volpe's gala, a whole generation of singers seems to be missing in action.
The point of a gala is to present a cross section of an era: generally, all the big current stars will perform, as well as a range of beloved elder statesmen and -women returning for a last farewell. The Levine gala represented the final Metropolitan appearances of James King, Bernd Weikl, Carlo Bergonzi, Ileana Cotrubas, Alfredo Kraus, Gwyneth Jones and Grace Bumbry. An august company indeed.
So it's interesting that Mr. Volpe's gala, celebrating a nearly 16-year reign that is being bruited (an inevitable accompaniment to the passing of the baton) as one of the Met's most illustrious, is focused so firmly on the present. Plenty of contemporary stars will raise their voices to Joe: Renée Fleming, Deborah Voigt, Susan Graham, René Pape, Dmitri Hvorostovsky. And there will be a few grand figures from earlier eras, including the redoubtable Plácido Domingo (still very much a part of the Met scene), Kiri Te Kanawa, Frederica von Stade and Mirella Freni. Luciano Pavarotti is tentatively scheduled, but health problems may prevent him from performing. There will be relatively few touching farewells. Most singers appearing on Saturday are still active; most are still fairly young. A perusal of the schedule reveals what could be called a generation gap. Ms. Fleming and Ms. Voigt are in their 40's. Mr. Pavarotti is 70.
Where are the singers in between: the stars of the 1990's, of the early years of Mr. Volpe's tenure? Where are the stars now in their 50's? There are precious few of them.
Where, for example, is Jerry Hadley, the tenor whose star burned so brightly in the 1980's? He appeared in the news last week, for his arrest on a drunken-driving charge. (He didn't actually start the car.) News reports said he was 54, awfully young to be a has-been, but a recent recording of Bernstein's "Mass" documents a voice that is not in great shape.
I don't mean to pick on Mr. Hadley. He is far from the only 50-something whose prime is past. It's true that you can point to a few prominent singers of this age: the ever-reliable Dolora Zajick, for example, will offer a gala contribution, as will Thomas Hampson, still a star baritone, and James Morris, growl and all. But when you look at the soprano and tenor voices, there is a yawning void.
Richard Leech. Sharon Sweet. Susan Dunn. Francisco Araiza. June Anderson. Cheryl Studer. Carol Vaness. An entire catalog of singers is absent from Mr. Volpe's gala, and from the Met in general. (Neil Shicoff sings there from time to time, but he won't be singing at the gala.)
The blight extends to some singers in their 40's, like Aprile Millo, once a Met fixture, or Dawn Upshaw, another former Met regular who has since moved away from opera to colonize her own, predominantly contemporary terrain. So what has happened? The fault is not Mr. Volpe's, although the problem is symptomatic of a kind of approach to opera that has dominated the Met and other houses during his tenure. Career development is not a high priority in today's opera world. What is a priority is finding the latest stars and getting them up in front of the public, in as many places as possible, and in as many attractive roles as possible, regardless of how well suited they happen to be to a particular role. Mr. Araiza is a perfect example of a fine young singer who sang himself ragged by trying to force his way into heavier roles.
And despite the Met's careful work grooming and encouraging the artists in the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, its track record for helping its rising stars has been spotty. There are many examples of singers who were used a lot, then cast aside when they ran into trouble. It is easy to blame the rise of jet travel, which enables singers to take on too much work, for short-lived careers. But a more significant cause is a lack of proper education, not only about how to sing, but about which roles are appropriate for which voices and, equally important, how to say no.
Mr. Volpe's gala will be as long and as uneven, as occasionally exciting and frequently tedious, as such galas generally are. But what it will leave us with is not a picture of Mr. Volpe's tenure as much as a snapshot of the state of opera today: the state of a company that is not always as supportive of singers as it could be, and the state of a field that is looking anxiously to guardians of a tradition who seem, on Saturday's program, to be few and far between.
Ms. von Stade, Ms. Freni and Ms. Te Kanawa, whatever their vocal estates, can still deliver some serious wattage in the performance department. One wonders what, in 20 years' time, will be the state of future Met farewells.
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