The Metropolitan Opera Season That Vanished
The New York Times
May 2020
When the coronavirus shut the Metropolitan Opera’s doors on March 12, the company was hours away from bringing up the curtain on a revival of Rossini’s bubbly Cinderella adaptation, “La Cenerentola.” Massenet’s brooding “Werther” was to open a few days later.
Those operas and others vanished with the final eight weeks of the Met’s season. So we asked some of the singers who had been waiting years to perform them to give us some musical phrases that they — and we — lost. Here are their voices, and edited excerpts from the conversations.
Jamie Barton was looking forward to an onstage catfight.
I have had the great privilege of singing some extraordinary performances in my career, and many have happened at the Met. But the biggest thing I was looking forward to was having a catfight with Diana Damrau on the stage of the Met in Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda.” Diana was one of the first people I saw in performance there, and to get to work with her — it was a highlight of the last couple of years, knowing it was coming.
Queen Elizabeth is a fascinating character. If you ever saw the Meryl Streep movie “The Iron Lady,” this is Margaret Thatcher in her heyday. I love me some Giovanna in Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena”; I love me some Adalgisa in “Norma.” But I feel like my face gets stuck in a perpetual expression of worry in those parts; how many ways can you express that? So to be able to switch it up and do Elisabetta, a character who is very flawed and yet so powerful and sure of herself, I was really looking forward to that.