HD-Day

Today is a big, busy day for the Bergs for several reasons.  It is homecoming at Carthage.  It is the wedding day of Katie Wee, the daughter of very good friends of ours from church.  (Kathy and I are helping with the music.)  It’s a long-awaited, long-needed day at the dog groomer’s for Bobbi and Ellie. And amidst all of that excitement,  it’s also the kickoff of the tenth anniversary of HD-Simulcasts from the Metropolitan Opera.

I’m not going to say that any one of these is more exciting to me than any of the others (although I must say that dropping off our dogs at “Running With Scissors” is about as thrilling as life can get)  but the momentousness of this 10th anniversary of Met simulcasts demands a special word from the Messy Professor.

Ten years ago,  the Metropolitan Opera announced that it was going to beam live performances of six of its performances into approximately 100 movie theaters across the country- in somewhat the same way as had been done with a handful of rock concerts, wrestling extravaganzas, and drum and bugle corps performances.   For opera fans it generated a strange mix of excitement and bewilderment:  We’ll get to watch an opera at the movie theater, while other patrons in adjacent auditoriums are watching “The Matrix” and “Finding Nemo”?  And it will be a live performance, not taped?   And we can sit there and eat popcorn?   And when a singer finishes an aria, we’ll clap?   It was so hard to imagine what the experience would be like,  and also a little difficult to predict who might come to such a thing.  Would the typical opera fan be willing to take a chance on such a thing?  And would there be enough opera fans around the country to make this worth it for the Met, or would this be a one-time experiment that would be shut down the moment the sixth opera was over?  The questions that hung over this were enormous- but so was the palpable sense of wonder and excitement for opera nuts like me.

As it turns out,  during that first season of simulcasts the one and only Wisconsin movie theater to participate was Tinseltown in Kenosha- and those of us who worried that nobody would show up were in for a shock.  People streamed to Kenosha from all over the state (I met people from Madison, Milwaukee, Appleton, Green Bay at that first screening) to see that first simulcast,  and the auditorium was completely filled!   My best friend Marshall Anderson and I settled into our seats with all of these other fans to watch an abridged version in English of Mozart’s The Magic Flute,  in the eye-catching production of Lion King director Julie Taymor.  And before it was over,   everybody there knew that this wasn’t a strange experiment that would piddle away to nothing.  This was the start of something BIG.   And indeed, these HD simulcasts are now beginning their 10th season with the list of participating theaters numbering in the thousands (both here and abroad.) It’s been a phenomenal success for the Met and a thrilling boon for opera fans everywhere.

As I prepared for my lecture Friday morning to a local group called Adventures in Lifelong Learning,  I found a list of all of the simulcasts that had occurred over the previous nine seasons.  It turns out that there have been 89 of them up until now – and of those 89,  I have completely missed only 4 of them.  All of the others I have seen all or part of in the theater- either the live simulcast or the repeat simulcast on Wednesday evening. There have been a few snooze-fests (like Puccini’s La Rondine) …. a few things that were bewilderingly weird (like “The First Emperor”)  and a small handful of very rocky individual performances (like Olga Borodina’s Amneris- a part that’s way too much for her) … but mostly it has been a succession of one superb success after another, with some performances rising to the level of Stunning Mountaintop Experiences.  (I still get chills when I think of Anna Netrebko’s “Qui la voce” in the second simulcast, Bellini’s I Puritani…  or Juan Diego Florez bringing down the house with his final aria in The Barber of Seville … or Ramon Vargas’s melting perfection in Lensky’s Aria from Eugene Onegin …. or Stephanie Blythe’s chilling Principessa from Puccini’s Suor Angelica.   And those are just some of the most memorable moments from the first season!) And there have been instances of unexpected drama and exciting, such as the Tristan und Isolde from season two when the scheduled tenor, Ben Heppner, was ill- and both of his understudies were also sick- and an emergency replacement had to fly in from Germany ……. or the simulcast of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory in which Juan Diego Florez reached the opera house just minutes before curtain because earlier that morning his wife gave birth to a new baby boy!  And who can forget that stunning performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome with Karita Mattila taking on both the vocal perils of the title role as well as the challenge of the famous Dance of the Seven Veils (which for the first time in Met history featured complete nudity at the climax of the dance) as well as the searing (and gruesome) final scene in which the depraved Judaian princess sings to the decapitated head of John the Baptist.  You don’t soon forget something like that!

And today’s simulcast of Il Trovatore promises to be especially thrilling because of the presence of Dimitri Hvorostovsky, one of the world’s finest baritones, who is making a triumphant return to the Met after being diagnosed earlier this year with a brain tumor.  He interrupted his chemotherapy treatments in London to fly to the US and sing three Trovatore performances- the last of which is today’s simulcast.  Can you imagine the electricity that will be in the air?  And those of us lucky enough to be in the audience for the simulcast can be part of the excitement rather than just reading about it or hearing about it later.

Since the simulcasts have begun,  I have been giving a series of lectures for a local group called Adventures in Lifelong Learning.  These adult learners can sign up for whatever classes and presentations that interest them – and quite a few of them have been coming to my opera lectures…. including a few complete neophytes who (I’m happy to say)  seem to have been turned on to opera by experiencing these simulcasts.  Most who have come, of course, were already classical music fans – and a fair number of them were already opera fans (a few of them nearly as rabid as I am) but who just wanted to share in the fun.   It’s a group of very sharp and inquisitive people and I always have to be well-prepared to answer or comment on what are often perceptive and intriguing questions and/or observations.   It’s a pleasure to get to stand in front of this group of people on a regular basis.

Imagine my shock and delight when I walked into the room for yesterday’s lecture and found this spectacular cake awaiting me …..

to commemorate the beginning of my 10th year of opera lectures.  They also presented me with a lovely gift- two neckties ordered from the Gift Shop of the Metropolitan Opera!

There is no more effective way to win over my heart than with neckties.  But truth be told,  my heart was won over by ALL from the first moment I took the mic and began talking about opera with them back in the fall of 2006.  It has been nothing but a joy for me ever since, to talk about something I love so much and to be so deeply appreciated by these lifelong learners.   I’m not sure what could be any better than that.

So thank you, ALL.   And thank you, Metropolitan Opera.  May the fun continue for a long, long time to come!

Pictured in the photo at the very top:  Anna Netrebko in the second HD simulcast from the Met- as Elvira in Bellini’s I Puritani.  She has been featured in more leading roles in these simulcasts than any other singer.