NEW YORK – VIENNA / Met Opera live in the cinema / Village Cinema:
GROUNDED von Jeanine Tesori
19 October 2024
What opera can’t do
You should probably first ask yourself whether there are topics that cannot be “operated”. What prose can do, as well as theater and certainly film, can be blatantly out of place on the opera stage. For example, moral reflections on war and torn soldiers’ souls, as the performance of Jeanine Tesori’s “Grounded” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York showed. Submerging something like that in pleasing orchestral floods is devoid of any convincing power.
In the beginning there was a one-person play by George Brent from 2012, in which he was interested in what was going on with those soldiers who sit behind screens and use their joysticks to send drones as if it were a video game – but real, real people are killed.
The Metropolitan Opera of the over-correct Peter Gelb commissioned an opera about it, and George Brent agreed to blow up the story about the pilot Jess into a huge story (which is nonetheless extremely boring). There’s an awful lot of private life and an awful lot of psychological struggles for the main character. You first meet her as she appears to be flying through the air (of course she is on stage) and cheering the “Blue” of the sky arios. Then she allows herself to be “hit on,” as the beautiful new German word means, by a rancher who has dropped in at a soldiers’ bar, and she is promptly pregnant. When she stands at her friend Eric’s door, he wraps her in his arms, a little girl jumps in, and if mom had correctly said that the military and family don’t mix, we would have all the problems and also the tedious opera not.
But when she returns to the job after five years, there is a war with Iraq and she is needed with the “sitting force” that controls the drones – which means that the passionate flyer is “grounded”, i.e. landed on the ground. Now you have to deal with her remorse for the rest of the plot (which makes you wonder if she didn’t think about her job before, as an active fighter pilot?) The endlessly cheesy family life with a small child is tragically affected, she realizes that now she “the war” is, and only at the end, when she apparently ends up in prison because of a (deliberately?) failed operation, does she feel free because she no longer has to kill…
If one had seriously tried to make it an opera for today, it would have to “hurt”. Not so with composer Jeanine Tesori, who has so far been successful with musicals, film scores and a children’s opera and composes correspondingly pleasing music. She did the same for “Grounded!”, with Arioses, choral and orchestral sounds ultimately pleasant but uniform.
The Met now did everything in its power to at least turn this tragic musical, which masquerades as an opera and of course cannot convey anything serious about its message of war and threats, into a show that attracts the audience. Wherein director Michael Mayerwith the help of a set designer Mimi Lien Digitally created a lot of spectacular things, from time to time the optics enliven the evening when it’s not too much about the people. The soldier choir is of course a problem. This can only be tolerated on stage (apart from Verdi’s “Power of Fate”) in a humorous and parodic form (see “Regiment’s Daughter” or “Love Potion”). Here it is meant as a serious background, but choreographically it has to act like a boy band, which is ultimately embarrassing.
The composer has the role of Jess for the now 30-year-old Canadian mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo written that emerged from the Met’s “Young Artists” program and that we haven’t heard much about yet. That will change – an attractive appearance that fits well into the uniform and a strong, almost tireless voice that is constantly and aggressively required here. And in terms of acting, she suffers as much as she can. Why the figure of Jess occasionally doubles (Kirsten MacKinnon), it’s not really clear.
The sympathetic tenor is for love, compassion and lots of family kitsch with banalities Ben Bliss responsible. Incidentally, there are only two solo parts, Greer Grimsley as a commander who informs Jess of her superiors’ decisions, and Kyle Miller as “Sensor”, who sits next to Jess at the joysticks and, as a loitering nerd, has no conscience about what he is doing.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin For some time now he’s been trying to be a Jimmy Levine replacement (which can’t really exist) by simply directing everything. In the break conversation (this time with the not very confident Nadine Serra) he fulfills his task of finding the opera magnificent and hoping that the composer will write another one soon. Maybe she should stay on Broadway with her undeniable abilities.
Director Peter Gelb was, as was rumored, very upset that many reviews were more than negative (“At best, unremarkable, at worst, unbearably cheesy”). All you can say is that “well-intentioned” has never necessarily resulted in a “good” result.
Renate Wagner
