An Opera Staple Takes a Stark Turn at the Met

As the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb has been on a campaign to make the house a place for theatrically daring productions with dramatically compelling casts. If this means shaking things up and riling segments of the audience, so be it. There are new audiences to court, as Mr. Gelb has often argued.
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But right now he may be thinking, “Be careful what you wish for.” The Met opened its season on Monday night with a new production of Puccini’s “Tosca” by the adventurous Swiss-born director Luc Bondy. When Mr. Bondy and the production team appeared on stage during curtain calls, the audience erupted in boos. If there were cheers among the jeers, they were drowned out.

The conductor James Levine and the cast, headed by the charismatic soprano Karita Mattila in the title role and the impassioned tenor Marcelo Álvarez as her lover Mario Cavaradossi, all received enormous ovations.

True, the reaction of an audience to a new production, especially when the opera is a staple of the repertory, is only one indicator of a production’s impact.

Still, the booing, if a little unfair, was understandable. Mr. Bondy’s high-concept staging featured stark, spare, cold sets and dispensed entirely with many of the familiar theatrical touches that audiences count on in this repertory staple: Tosca placed no candles by the body of the villain Scarpia after murdering him, and she did not exactly leap to her death at the end. Mr. Bondy had scoured the work, it seemed, looking for every pretense to flesh out, literally, the eroticism of the lovers and the lecherous kinkiness of Scarpia.

Mr. Bondy is a substantive creative artist with a long record of achievement in the theater and the opera house, mostly in Europe. And the idea of bringing a sacred-cow-skewering perspective to “Tosca” is fine in principle. Turning this favorite over to an avant-garde director represents a bigger risk for the Met than presenting the company premiere of Janacek’s bleak “From the House of the Dead,” which comes next month.

But “Tosca” is one of the bread-and-butter works of any opera company, and Mr. Bondy’s staging replaces Franco Zeffirelli’s 1985 production, a grandly realistic and thoroughly traditional show that divided critics but by and large delighted audiences.

There is no reason that the set for Act I, which takes place within the Church of Sant’Andrea Della Valle in Rome, has to evoke the actual place or be full of churchly splendor. Richard Peduzzi’s set here has a disorienting look, with tall brown brick walls and doors to mysterious alcoves. When the curtain goes up, Angelotti, the escaped political prisoner (in a stirring performance by the bass David Pittsinger), throws a rope through a window and climbs down into the church, as searchlights scan the scene.

A fair complaint about Mr. Zeffirelli’s set, which almost recreated the church, was that it overwhelmed the singers. In its starkly modern way, this new set towers over the singers just as much. Also, Mr. Bondy places crucial moments deep back in the stage and keeps the lighting oddly dim. The place seems to be the drab outer courtyard to a church, not the inviting interior.

Mr. Bondy would seem to be after mood, intensity and emotion, not logic. And some of the acting that he draws from his cast is intricate and involving. When Ms. Mattila enters, certain that Cavaradossi has been dallying with another woman, she exudes such jealousy and paranoia that her body twitches as she walks.

If Mr. Bondy wanted to rid his “Tosca” of stock cliché, his heavy-handed ideas are just as hackneyed. Baron Scarpia, the chief of police in Rome, charged by the royalists and the church with rooting out the republican revolt, was the baritone George Gagnidze, who, with a leathery but booming voice, had it in him to be chilling in the role. And during Act I, for the most part, he effectively contained Scarpia’s ruthlessness under a guise of aristocratic bearing.

But all dignity left him at the opening of Act II, which takes place in his apartment at the Palazzo Farnese, here an eerie room of garish yellows and dingy browns, with towering walls and huge maps of Italy. As Mr. Bondy presents the scene, Scarpia is having dinner, or an orgy, really, with three crudely voluptuous women, invented silent characters. As he sings his sexual credo, namely, that conquest of resistant beauties is what turns him on, the three women paw his chest and stroke his groin.

A director need not be slavishly deferential to a libretto. But what is so affecting about this opening scene as conceived by Puccini is that we see the powerful, fearsome Scarpia when he is alone at dinner: “my poor dinner,” he calls it, when it is interrupted, as he plots how to destroy Cavaradossi, a royalist sympathizer, and conquer Tosca. Here Mr. Bondy turns the twisted, complex Scarpia into a cartoonish lecher.

Many Puccini lovers and opera purists may feel that Ms. Mattila’s cool, gleaming voice is not quite right for the role. But what soprano today is a classic Tosca? There is not much competition right now. Ms. Mattila brings shimmering power, incisive attack, pliant lyricism and emotional honesty to her performance. Sometimes her sound turned hard-edged, her sustained tones wobbled, and her top notes splintered, though in Act III, when she tells Cavaradossi of having stabbed Scarpia to death, she leapt to a high C of ferocious intensity, then plunged down two octaves, mimicking the thrust of the knife into the villain’s gut.

Mr. Álvarez looked a little paunchy in his tight-fitting pants and coat, the work of the costume designer Milena Canonero. But what mattered was his ardent singing. Here was a true Puccini tenor, with warm, throbbing supple phrasing and some triumphant top notes, including a defiant high A-sharp when he sang “Vittoria” at the news of Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Marengo.

Mr. Levine conducted with vigor and sensitivity, there at the ready for his cast. He seemed immersed in the music, perhaps thinking that no matter what was happening on stage, he would conduct a first-rate “Tosca.”