Viewpoint: Long Live the King
Pape in costume for the Met's new Boris
© Nick Heavican/Metropolitan Opera 2010
A new opera season is upon us once again, with projects and productions great and small on offer at opera houses all over the world. The Met will begin a new Ring staging on September 27, when Robert Lepage's much-anticipated production of Das Rheingold has its premiere. In June 2011, San Francisco Opera will present three full cycles of Francesca Zambello's realization of the Ring, a staging that makes bold use of various all-American archetypes. With these two productions high on everyone's list of the new season's must-see opera events — and with the dust barely settled in Los Angeles after Achim Freyer's highly unconventional Ring for Los Angeles Opera — it seems the Ring is in the air, now more than ever. Will it ever lose its popularity or its ability to stimulate controversy? In this issue, Philip Kennicott, culture critic of The Washington Post, looks at the Ring in the cultural landscape of the early twenty-first century.
Another blue-chip event in the Met season is the premiere of the company's first new staging of Boris Godunov in nearly forty years. (After the majority of our pages had gone to press, OPERA NEWS learned that director Peter Stein, who was interviewed for this issue by David Cote, had withdrawn from the Boris production. Stein has been replaced as director by Stephen Wadsworth, whose participation in the Met's new Boris will be covered in our October issue.)
René Pape and his Boris colleagues will be singing in Russian, naturally, although it is instructive to recall that linguistic fidelity to this opera — or any other Russian opera — was not always a matter of course at the Met. When the Metropolitan Opera presented the U.S. premiere of Boris, in 1913, the opera was sung in Italian, despite the participation of a Boris who had been born a subject of the tsar — Polish bass Adamo Didur. A few seasons later, when the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin brought his internationally acclaimed Boris Godunov to the Met, he sang in Russian while the chorus (and other principals) sang in Italian; the same polyglot effect occurred in 1943, when the magnificent Ukrainian-born bass Alexander Kipnis sang in Russian in an otherwise all-Italian performance. Ezio Pinza, a popular Met Boris beginning in 1939, sang the opera in Italian; in the 1950s and '60s, distinguished Boris interpreters such as George London, Cesare Siepi, Jerome Hines and Nicola Rossi-Lemeni (and their fellow cast members) sang the opera in English. As of the premiere of August Everding's 1974 staging, the Met started to sing Boris in Russian, a practice that seems highly unlikely to change, and for which I, for one, am grateful.
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As has been our recent custom in the September issue of OPERA NEWS, we are happy and proud to announce the recipients of this season's OPERA NEWS Awards. On April 17, 2011, at a gala dinner at the Plaza Hotel, we will honor Jonas Kaufmann, Riccardo Muti, Patricia Racette, Kiri Te Kanawa and Bryn Terfel — and celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of OPERA NEWS. This year, OPERA NEWS is sponsoring a drawing that will offer a lucky winner a trip to New York to join us in the festivities on April 17. Details can be found at the entry page at www.operanews.com/onawards. 
F. PAUL DRISCOLL
The opinions expressed in OPERA NEWS do not necessarily represent the views of The Metropolitan Opera Guild or The Metropolitan Opera.
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