(Meagan Miller, a soprano I met during her time at Juilliard, made an exciting Met debut in 2013 as the Empress in Strauss’s FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN.)
Above: soprano Meagan Miller, photographed by Christian Steiner; click on the image to enlarge.
Saturday evening November 16th, 2013 – Meagan Miller won the Met Auditions in 1999 and tonight she conquered both the audience and one of opera’s most difficult roles in her long-awaited Met debut (and role-debut) as the Empress in Richard Strauss’s DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN.
Tonight’s performance surpassed overall the thoroughly satisfying season prima of this titanic opera; one can hardly blame conductor Vladimir Jurowski for occasionally succumbing to a desire to unleash the orchestra’s full force, even when he covered the singers. For the most part, Jurowski’s handling of the score was a marvel; the Met musicians were on peak form and the outstanding solo passages for cello and violin were played with poignant beauty by Jerry Grossman and David Chan respectively.
The production looks superb – it is one of the Met’s glories – and the large cast of singers threw themselves into the performance with unstinting generosity of voice and physicality.
The smaller roles, all of which are quite demanding, were very well taken and I took special delight in having a bird’s-eye view of the delicious Ashley Emerson as she and a quintet of other young women huddled into the far corner of the pit to sing the high-lying music of the Unborns. Once again the trio of David Won, Jeongcheol Cha and Brandon Cedel sang resonantly as the Nightwatchmen – their heartfelt ‘hymn’ closes the first act on a soulful note. Richard Paul Fink simply hurled the Spirit Messenger’s pronouncement’s into the House with venomous tone, and Maria Zifchak made her mark in the very brief solo passage of a Voice from Above.
Torsten Kerl held steady as the Emperor, one of the most brutally demanding tenor roles in the whole of operatic literature; Maestro Jurowski sometimes pushed the singer to extremes, but Mr. Kerl wisely refrained from shouting. His two arias – most particularly the riveting Act II monolog with cello solo – were very well crafted in terms of singing and dramatic expression. Johan Reuter’s Barak was sung with a lighter timbre than we sometimes hear in this music: the bass-baritone mined the music’s lyrical aspects with touching results and more than held his ground in the more stentorian passages. In the opera’s most haunting melody, Reuter sang ‘Mir anvertraut’ with spine-tingling warmth and tenderness.
As the Nurse, Ildiko Komlosi, who was something of a vocal cipher at the prima, came into her own tonight. After some parched sounds in the first scene, the mezzo got the voice in gear and delivered a subtle and keenly nuanced performance of this fiendish music. A mercurial actress, the slender and agile Ms. Komlosi held our focus whenever she was onstage. She managed the wide-ranging music with skill, applying her rather fluttery tone with canny dexterity and seizing comfortably on the role’s high notes and its many opportunities for verbal expression. Ms. Komlosi made a vivid impression tonight; the audience seemingly impressed by both her singing and acting.
Christine Goerke as the Dyer’s Wife was, if anything, even better than she had been at the prima, and that is saying a great deal. The role is vocally very congenial to the Goerke voice and her acting had a remarkably natural feel: she simply inhabited the persona of this bitchy but ultimately golden-hearted woman with every fiber of her voice and being. Her great success has opened The Met’s doors for her in no uncertain terms, and we can now look forward to experiencing her in some of opera’s most glorious roles.
From photographs and film, we know that Maria Jeritza, who created the role of the Empress at the premiere of FRAU, was a ravishingly beautiful woman. Meagan Miller matched Jeritza in this regard: her face and form are ideal for the role, and watching her was quite mesmerizing. But in the end it’s the voice that must count, and Ms. Miller had the power and vast range to give the music its due.
With an interesting quality of vibrant focus, Ms. Miller’s voice pings out into the large space with ease. Strauss makes unusual demands on the singer of the enigmatic Empress, including a high-D within moments of her first entry: Meagan Miller sustained this note for an extra miliisecond. From there, she sailed forward, leaping over one vocal hurdle after another like an Olympic champion. Deploying a glassy power which suits the cool character well, the entire first act went admirably; this was followed by a passionate rendering of the Nightmare Scene in Act II.
Faced with a choice between attaining her personal desire – the ability to bear children – and destroying the happiness of the kindly Barak, the character’s dilemma reaches its apex and its vocal pinnacle in the third act. Following the searing scene of dismissing her Nurse, Ms. Miller delivered a powerful performance of the Fountain Scene in which her inner conflict is voiced in mounting anxiety. The forces of her omni-present but unseen father Keikobad urge her to fulfill her feminine destiny while the despairing cries of Barak and his wife tug at her heart. In a stunning “Ich will nicht!” the Empress makes her choice, embracing her humanity. Throughout this long scene, Ms. Miller used her voice with exacting gradations of dynamic and with an expressive gleam of tone that easily filled the large hall, held in rapt silence by the power of the drama and by the singer’s radiant presence. The opera ends happily: the Empress and her husband are re-united and the Dyer and his wife will live happily ever after. Ms. Miller’s Met debut ended happily as well, with a sustained high-C to cap the opera’s final quartet and a very warm ovation at her solo bow.
~ Oberon
Oberon's Glade 