Back in October, I reviewed the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Thomas Adès new opera, The Exterminating Angel, noting at the time that I’d also be reviewing the November 18 performance as broadcast in movie theaters—thanks to the continuing miracles of the digital age, Met performances are broadcast in high def to theaters in 70 countries around the world.
I attended the broadcast in suburban Virginia—Ballston, to be precise—and everything was excellent—sound, video, etc. A lot of people will prefer seeing live opera this way, because the subtitles on the screen make it easy to follow what the folks are singing about. The Exterminating Angel is in English, but unless you’re a true adept, and I’m not, the words are hard to follow. In opera, it’s the music that counts, not the words, and mere verbal intelligibility tends to fall by the wayside. If you go to the Met itself, they show the libretto (in English, of course) in little screens embedded in the seat in front of you. But then if you read the libretto you can’t follow what’s happening on the stage. In a movie broadcast, you can do both.
There was a big crowd of opera lovers for the show—impressive, I would say, since the audience for contemporary opera ain’t that great. It was a little shocking to me to see how old the crowd was. There was one young couple sitting next to me and I was tempted to ask them if it wasn’t awful to be surrounded by so many geezers but decided not to intrude. Any sort of “artsy” presentation is going to draw an older crowd—older than “average” in part, I think, because old folks tend to stay at home, but still it was surely enough to make anyone actually in the opera biz to wince. They see it all the time, I’m sure, but I suspect that it never gets easier.
However, now that we’re living in a new age of sexual accountability, it’s a very open question if the Met will outlive its audience. Justin Davidson, writing in Vulture, says that “The Met May Not Survive the James Levine Disgrace”. Opera has been on life support ever since the sixties, and now the painfully believable accounts of Levine’s sexual abuse of teenagers, extending over decades, may be enough to sever the oxygen hose.
