Peter Gelb’s first season as director of the Metropolitan Opera was coasting along at a breathless pace in late February, as the sold-out run of Tan Dun’s The First Emperor was bumping up against pre-production buzz over two additional spring premieres, each generating huge box office runs: Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice and Puccini’s Il Trittico. The last thing that the Gelb team expected to confront on February 28 was the bombshell from across Lincoln Center Plaza that New York City Opera, the perennial underdog to the Met, had named Gérard Mortier as the successor to retiring executive director Paul Kellogg, effective in 2009.
Underdog behavior will not come easily for the feisty and extraordinarily successful Mr. Mortier. With his spirited infusion of artistry at the storied Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in his native Belgium in the 1980’s, his fearless revival of the frozen-in-amber Salzburg Festival following Herbert van Karajan’s death, and his commanding leadership of the Opéra Paris, where he now presides over programming at the crown jewel Garnier house and the more contemporary Opéra Bastille, Mortier has few equals in arts management anywhere in the world. One would venture to say, with some sense of charity, that the Mortier portfolio dwarfs the credentials that Peter Gelb brought to his appointment at the Met. Gelb’s considerable first-year accomplishments notwithstanding, opera fans will eagerly anticipate the bag of goodies Mortier will bring to his post, even as the revitalized Met continues to chart exciting new journeys for its public.
The prospect of Mortier settling comfortably into the American arts culture following decades at the top echelons of European centers is intriguing. Given the radically different structures of finances, governance, and organizational hierarchy, stepping blithely from career-long behavior models honed in Europe into the New York opera world will test Mortier’s agility, while probably also exciting his flair for gamesmanship and competition that sustained his often rocky Salzburg tenure.
A larger issue may be the very disconnect between the cultural worth that European audiences and arbiters attach to such powerful institutions as the Salzburg Festival and Opéra Garnier and the struggle that their American counterparts endure for earning comparable recognition. The civic ethos unquestioningly invested in a strong arts policy throughout European capitals has fueled the professional passions of impresarios like Gérard Mortier. His acclimation to the American landscape will find a society more powerfully shaped by pop culture, sports, and the material life than by passions for Boulez, Messiaen, and even our home-grown pioneers, Peter Sellars and Robert Wilson.
European transplants to New York cultural powerhouses have not always fared well. The 1999 appointment of prominent German arts administrator Franz Xaver Ohnesorg to replace the late and beloved Judith Arron at Carnegie Hall unleashed a tumultuous two-year cycle of conflict, recrimination, and organizational strife that ended only with Ohnesorg’s resignation.
While the Ohnesorg example, exacerbated by a prickly and imperious personal manner, is unlikely to replicate itself with Mortier, the tight parameters of the Lincoln Center family — where collegial practices required of all constituencies and the fiendish competition for donors, board members, audiences, and press — will beg for greater political agility than Mortier has had to muster heretofore.
The added circumstance of sibling battles — opera-versus-opera — will also test Mortier’s hand, having long enjoyed full autonomy at prestigious cultural centers and currently being in complete charge of opera houses in Paris roughly the equivalent of the Met and City Opera. In previous Lincoln Center regimes Volpe and Kellogg experienced a good bit of head-butting, much of it over the still-unresolved strategic plan for the Lincoln Center campus makeover and New York City Opera’s still unresolved struggles for creating a friendlier venue — on campus or off — for their work. It should not have come as a complete surprise that Gelb, when asked to comment on his future working relationship with Mortier, turned to the military history example of the Treaty of Versailles.
Mortier is certainly not inexperienced with clashing cultures, having been recruited by the Salzburg Festival board to “de-Karajanize” the Festival (in Michael Steinberg’s apt phrase). After von Karajan’s storied reign of high culture and aristocratic maners, Salzburg leaders turned to Mortier to revive the Festival’s image and redirect it toward the inventive and questing spirit of the 1920 leadership team of Max Reinhardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Richard Strauss, pioneers all in the modernist aesthetics of Austrian culture.
Mortier seized the challenge and responded in immediate and dramatic ways. The keen curatorial eye and ferocious spirit for innovation that he had brought to the Monnaie gave Salzburg a much-needed jolt. His Festival debut in 1992 included a cluster of Mozart carryovers from the von Karajan years. But he also played some powerful calling cards with new productions, which collectively would set the tone for bold artistic innovation and a vastly expanded roster of musical guests.
First, there were four new productions of twentieth-century masterpieces long missing from the Salzburg Festival: the Salomé he himself had produced in Brussels, with Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting; quickly vanquishing the von Karajan legacy, he named Georg Solti and Claudio Abbado as conductors for Festival premieres, respectively, of Strauss’s Frau ohne Schatten and Janacek’s neglected masterpiece From the House of the Dead; and in what was the coup of the season, he mounted the first revival since its 1976 premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s exquisite and fearsomely challenging St. Francis of Assisi, tellingly, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the young Esa-Pekka Salonen in the pit — the first of many Mortier moves to include orchestras other than the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg productions. Subsequent seasons would be defined by other artistic focuses, all new to Salzburg — a Monteverdi theme in 1993 (with René Jacobs and Nikolaus Harnoncourt), a Stravinsky festival in 1994 (with Peter Sellars returning to build upon his directorial triumph with the 1992 St. Francis), and the Bartok-Schőnberg cluster in 1995, marking Robert Wilson’s Salzburg debut as director and designer of the Bluebeard’s Castle-Erwartung diptych.
Even as Mortier’s Salzburg tenure grew in richness of vision and artistic acumen, the audacious spirit of his seasons soon became unsettling to many in that culturally conservative region. Latent quarrels with Austria’s President Kurt Waldheim over a tainted history with the Third Reich flared into direct confrontation between Mortier and Waldheim’ successor, Thomas Klestil, in the 1990’s. Artistic venture and political skirmishes collided in high Austrian circles, and in 1999 Mortier announced that the 2001 Festival would be his last.
That final summer all eyes were trained on Salzburg, as early reports (from Bernard Holland in the New York Times) cited “a gentlemanly bowing out” process. But by the time Hans Neuenfels’s confrontational staging of Viennese bonbon Die Fledermaus hit the stage, Mortier’s irreverence toward Austrian conservatism was blatant, as David Patrick Stearns cited “this abrasively ugly production” by which Mortier’s “brave tenure as artistic director comes to a bad end.”
With Mortier’s artistic values and curatorial accomplishments abundantly known, there can be little doubt about his vision for City Opera. As the headlines read when his appointment was announced, “No Carmens! No Bohèmes!” Dropping the rhetoric, he then hinted at what his U.S. audiences might expect. With a nod toward the palpable presence of Stravinsky in the theater he will inhabit, through Balanchine’s legacy with New York City Ballet, his co-tenant at New York State Theater, he promised a 2009 season that would open with Rake’s Progress. He also hinted at special projects mounted in alternative spaces, possibly resurrecting the 1992 Salzburg triumph of St. Francis of Assisi in the vast cavern of Seventh Regiment Armory. European modernism will flourish, with a strong presence of Janacek, Bartok, and Messiaen. But City Opera’s commitment to American work (composers and directors/designers) will likely continue, given Mortier’s history with Peter Sellars, John Adams, and Robert Wilson.
One of many competitive bidding wars that may ensue between Gelb and Mortier will be Mark Morris, whose brilliant stage direction of this April’s Orpheus and Eurydice won huge acclaim at the Met. It was Mortier who first launched Morris’s career in 1988 with a then-scandalous appointment of the brash and largely unproven young American to replace Maurice Béjart as resident choreographer at the Monnaie, and Mortier will no doubt want to lure Morris back to City Opera, where he has directed other works.
These fiercely competitive spirits of Gelb and Mortier will also create a robust traffic of conductors, stage directors, and designers not currently part of the Met and City Opera families. Given Gelb’s commitment to fresh theatricality in Met productions, vibrant in staging and dynamically screen-worthy, and given Mortier’s career immersion in European “Regietheater,” privileging the director’s vision and the designer’s eye for spectacle, New York opera audiences can joyously anticipate journeys of discovery and quest, and the vitality of opera itself will benefit from this mightily enriched ecology, with a Darwinian jolt of “species survival,” as “top dog/underdog” designations blur and dissolve.
