Molto Agitato
The Mayhem Behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
If the opera world is full of “intrigue, double meanings, and devious dramatics,” then no place exemplifies this more than the world-famous Metropolitan Opera, where politics, ambition, and oversized egos have traditionally taken center stage along with some of the world’s richest music. Drawing on her fifteen years as its press representative, Johanna Fiedler explodes the traditional secrecy that surrounds the Met in this wonderfully entertaining account of its tumuluous history.
Fiedler chronicles the Met’s early days as a home for legends like Toscanini, Mahler, and Caruso, and gives a fascinating account of the middle years when haughty blue-bloods battled stubborn adminstrators for control of a company that would emerge as America’s premiere opera house. She takes us behind the grand gold-curtain stage in more recent years as well, showing how musical superstars like Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and Kathleen Battle have electrified performances and scandalized the public. But most revelatory are Fiedler’s portrayals of James Levine and Joseph Volpe and their practically parallel ascendancies—Levine rising from prodigy to artistic director, Volpe advancing from stagehand to general manager—and their once strained relationship. Weaving together the personal, economic, and artistic struggles that characterize the Met’s long and vibrant history, Molto Agitato is a must-read saga of power, wealth, and, above all, great music.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fiedler is the author of an affectionately critical memoir of her father Arthur Fiedler of Boston Pops fame, and since she spent 15 years at the Met as its press representative, she is well placed to offer a lively history of an institution often involved in controversy and personality clashes. She is particularly good on its early history the Met began when the newly wealthy Mrs. Vanderbilt was turned down for a box at the old Academy of Music, then New York's opera house, and decided, in 1883, to start her own and gives a delicious picture of an era when opera in the city was essentially a social rather than a musical milieu, and the music (not that anybody listened very hard) was largely Wagner. Then came decades of expansion, the legendary rule of Rudolf Bing, the move to Lincoln Center and the long tenure of Anthony Bliss. The story comes up to the present with the dual regime of Joseph Volpe, who rose through the stagehand ranks to become a tough and admired general manager, and conductor James Levine, who has covered himself and the Met orchestra with musical glory for 30 years but seems unknowable behind his mask of warm geniality. Along the way, of course, are innumerable tempestuous scenes: with Callas, with the increasingly weird Kathleen Battle and with the often insecure Luciano Pavarotti. An orchestra member is raped and murdered behind the scenes. And always, there are union problems, and agonies about how to pay the bills. Fiedler's book is workmanlike, but to any opera buff who has read the New York Times carefully over the years, nothing much here is new. A book on London's Covent Garden that, by a strange coincidence, appears the same week, is infinitely more revealing and dramatic (see review above).
