The Metropolitan Opera has long been lucky in many ways, but it has never
enjoyed much success with world premieres. Excepting two Puccini
efforts (La
Fanciulla del West and Il Tritico), a pair of Barber operas
(Vanessa and the
undervalued Antony and Cleopatra), and Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra (which has
only recently found favor), the Met has a dismal record
in putting its considerable reputation behind new works. Does anyone remember
Cyrano or The Canterbury Pilgrims or The Man Without a Country? And what
about Madeleine, The Warrior, or The Robin Woman: Shanewis?
The list
goes on. Perhaps that’s why, until the present decade, the company
stopped presenting new works after it relocated to Lincoln Center. But as
this country’s leading opera house, the Met has doubtless felt pressure to
serve as more than a repository of tried and true repertory, and so ten years
ago it once more began commissioning fresh material. The first of these
efforts was John Corigliano’s rhetorical Ghosts of Versailles, a turgid work
that had its debut in 1991. A year later, the Met
veered in the opposite direction, giving audiences Philip Glass’s The
Voyage, a preternaturally chilly piece written to commemorate the 500th
anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. Now, in the Met’s latest
attempt
at expanding the operatic canon, we have The Great Gatsby, John
Harbison’s arguably noble but shockingly misguided attempt
to distill F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s grandly poetic and