Metropolitan Opera Archives

Arabella received six performances this season.
Note: Adam Klein made his company debut on 1/19/72 as a child performer. This performance marks his debut as a tenor.
Adam Klein made his company debut on 1/19/72 as a child performer. This performance marks his debut as a tenor.

Review 1:

Justin Davidson in Newsday
A Gilded Tapestry Of Human Foibles

It was the particular gift of Richard Strauss to make miracles out of the banal. In "Arabella," the exquisite prenuptial opera that returned to the Metropolitan Opera Monday, he took ordinary human foibles — pettiness, stupidity and distrust — and wove them into a gilded tapestry. By the end, a self-righteous bumpkin and a moronic young soldier have married into a family that treats its offspring as bartering chips. But they all produce that unbelievable music, an urgent, flickering landscape of moods, desires and personalities.

The man in charge of sculpting that music Monday was Christoph Eschenbach, who made a powerful Met debut in the pit. The orchestral music tumbled and swirled while onstage, in 19th century Vienna, the characters picked their way through wordy and elaborate courtships, tangling themselves in passion and politesse. Eschenbach captured nicely those conflicting forces in the score, whipping up the orchestra to a precision froth. In the central act in which Mandryka, the rich country squire, woos Arabella in the midst of a glittering ball, Eschenbach controlled beautifully the way waves of party music keep surging around the couple's intimate space and then retreating, leaving a quiet lyrical haze.

Renee Fleming, Eschenbach's onetime protégée, sang Arabella, a young lady who gazes out at the world from inside the cocoon of her beauty. She grows from girlishness to a wise, resigned pragmatism in a single evening, and Fleming handled the role's subtleties with a star's aplomb and a voice that is quickly becoming classic.

In the final scene, Arabella descends a staircase at a stately pace to offer a healing glass of water and a forgiving aria to her hapless fiancé. Fleming carried off the moment with regal magnetism. When she began to sing again, bathed in the phosphorescent foam of Strauss' music, her voice was still fresh and sure at the end of the night. The long, slow notes planed weightlessly and the character finally became what her fatuous suitors had called her: an angel.

It's not easy to share a stage with a great Arabella, but Strauss anticipated even that problem: her younger sister Zdenka is so cowed that she passes herself off as a boy so as not to have to compete. The beautifully light-voiced Barbara Bonney occasionally found herself overwhelmed by the orchestration, but she compensated with enormous charm and vocal finesse.

It's standard practice to put a dull lump of a singer onstage if the voice is right, but for "Arabella," the Met fielded a cast that makes one wonder if we should be settling for anything less. Hans Joachim Ketelsen was the perfectly uncouth Mandryka, his baritone blunt, his manner full of pomp and swagger. Raymond Very fit into the uniform of Lieutenant Matteo, not just because his tenor was sweet, but because he conveyed just the right degree of dim-witted sincerity.

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