Metropolitan Opera Archives

Andrea Chénier received six performances this season.

Review 1:

Bernard Holland in The New York Times
For a First Night at the Met, Pavarotti in “Andrea Chénier”

The Metropolitan Opera's fashionable first-night audience was a blessing to be counted on Monday. The house's production of "Andrea Chénier" is scarcely six months old, but what an unhappy affair it is. The three long intermissions provided the evening's principal satisfactions, I am afraid to say. One's heart sank every time the house lights went down.

The Met has given us some powerful productions in the past few seasons, so it is hard to understand its settling for something like this. Nicolas Joel and Hubert Monloup offer a "Chénier" that is pretentious, ugly and confused. Clubfooted symbolism prevails: an oversize mirror that tilts ominously toward doomed French aristocrats, wrecked timbers in the Revolution's aftermath, an economy-size guillotine projected in silhouette at the end.

To get a picture of Act I's chateau setting, imagine yourself entering a Howard Johnson motel while dead drunk. There is the looming, fractured mirror, the geometric lobby carpeting, the ghastly blue-and-gold drapery and a hideous sofa to stoke the fantasies of any upwardly mobile suburban housewife. Act III's courtroom is like the entrance to an American city hall. There is more, but enough.

Mr. Joel's staging takes confusion as its watchword. Large numbers of people are crowded toward the front of the stage, where they mill aimlessly. If a metaphor for the chaos of the times is intended, it is a clumsy one. Secondary principals are egged on toward caricature, Paul Plishka's Matthieu being particularly egregious. If one was seeking good taste on Monday, the audience was perhaps the best place to look for it.

Giordano's sweetly lyrical music aims to please and almost always does. It is a little fragile to be supporting momentous doings like the Terror, but there are such powerful moments as Gérard's "Nemico della patria"; Juan Pons sang it with a flat-out ardor that brought down the house.

As a story, "Andrea Chénier" is muddied by all the minor characters necessary to prod along the plot, but it enjoys the built-in symmetry of master-servant relationships reversed. Chénier is the poet caught between higher and lower orders. Maddalena is the frivolous aristocrat who finds dignity and love in the final execution scene.

This is an opera that can be celebrated more for its parts than its whole.

Luciano Pavarotti has the principal one. Six decades have drained a lot of the color from his voice, but in the title role he holds up admirably well. The points of vocal stress are handled gingerly but they are handled. A 61-year-old tenor must by nature be a master of disguise; and so Mr. Pavarotti directs most of our attention to his powers of articulation, almost to the point of excess.

As Maddalena, Maria Guleghina lives for the moments when she can fill the Met with deafening soprano sound. Elsewhere she has little idea what to do with herself: the phrasing is confused, the sustained piano passages unsteady.

There were small pleasures. I was particularly taken by Stephanie Blythe's brief appearance as Madelon, a bereft mother of the Revolution. This is a dark voice of quiet authority. James Levine and his Met orchestra performed with relish. The brass playing at the final curtain provided a sliver of happiness to take home with us.

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