Maazel’s Back in Met’s Pit, and It Took Just 45 Years

[music composer]

Maazel’s Back in Met’s Pit, and It Took Just 45 Years

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Lorin Maazel at a recent rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera.

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By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Published: January 7, 2008

Right conductor, wrong podium? Not at all.

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 Excerpt from a dress rehearsal of the opening of Act III of “Die “Walküre,” conducted by Lorin Maazel

Metropolitan Opera Archives

Lorin Maazel, 32, at a rehearsal at the old Met in the ’60s.

Lorin Maazel, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, has been leading rehearsals across Lincoln Center Plaza at the Metropolitan Opera for the last two weeks. On Monday night he is to open a run of Wagner’s “Walküre,” 45 seasons after making his debut at the house.

That came in 1962, when top tickets were $11 instead of $375, Robert F. Wagner was mayor, and the Met was still on Broadway between 39th and 40th Streets.

For a symphony conductor so steeped in opera, Mr. Maazel’s absence from the Met has been an oddity. He has run two opera houses, the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Vienna State Opera; is now music director of the opera house in Valencia, Spain; has led 10 new productions at La Scala in Milan; and has conducted hundreds of other opera performances in houses around the world.

But his highest-profile jobs have been running orchestras, like those of Cleveland, Pittsburgh and, for the last six seasons, New York.

“I always considered myself a symphony conductor who would once in a while conduct opera,” Mr. Maazel said in an interview last week. “But that once-in-a-while became habit forming. It’s like a drug. The theater’s a wonderful place.”

Born in France to American parents and reared in the United States, Mr. Maazel made his Met debut in November 1962, leading Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” He was 32, a former child prodigy who had conducted the New York Philharmonic at 12, in 1942, a year before Leonard Bernstein made his unexpected and splashy first appearance with the orchestra.

The “Don Giovanni” cast was stellar: Cesare Siepi, Eleanor Steber, Gabriella Tucci, Roberta Peters and Nicolai Gedda. The New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg praised Mr. Maazel for his “strong, energetic leadership” and found his approach unsentimental, logical, balanced, with a “thorough understanding of the mood of the opera.”

Also in November 1962 he began a run at the Met of Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier.” Lotte Lehmann, considered one of the greatest interpreters of the Marschallin, staged the work with Ralph Herbert. Régine Crespin was making her Met debut in the role.

Now, at 77, Mr. Maazel said it was not for him to speculate on how he had changed as a conductor. “But one does grow older in constructive ways,” he said. “You become more mellow. Your perspective widens.” Mr. Maazel then evoked Wagner’s king of the gods, who renounces his daughter Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre.”

“I feel particularly close to old man Wotan, when he parts from his favorite child, which he has to do, for reasons of state,” he said. When asked to elaborate, he rejected any direct comparison, saying he was merely reacting as a parent. “I don’t like Wotan at all,” he said. “How could anyone like this very unpleasant, vindictive and vengeful person? Therefore his tenderness I find all the more touching.”

And by renunciation, he said he did not have in mind anything in particular, although his tenure with the Philharmonic ends after next season. “There’s a lot of music between now and then,” he said.

Wagner has a special resonance for Mr. Maazel. In the 1960s he became the first American to conduct at the Bayreuth Festival, the Wagnerite’s Valhalla, and the first non-German to conduct the “Ring” cycle there. Mr. Maazel the composer has also presented an orchestral condensation called “The Ring Without Words.”

The Met cast for Mr. Maazel’s five-performance run through Feb. 6 includes Lisa Gasteen as Brünnhilde, Adrianne Pieczonka as Sieglinde, Stephanie Blythe as Fricka, Clifton Forbis as Siegmund, James Morris as Wotan and Mikhail Petrenko as Hunding.

At least one current member of the Met orchestra, the violinist Sandor Balint, now 79, played for Mr. Maazel at his Met debut. He recalled fears among the players that this young wunderkind was going to be arrogant.

“He didn’t turn out to be that way at all,” Mr. Balint said. “He was really rather quiet and very efficient. He did not lean on people. It was easy to work with him.” After sitting through rehearsals last week, Mr. Balint said that little had changed.

Mr. Maazel said he felt a special bond with the house because his grandfather, Isaac Maazel, a Russian immigrant, played in the violin section of the Met orchestra before World War I. Mr. Maazel has photographs of Puccini and Mascagni autographed to his grandfather.

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Lorin Maazel conducts “Die Walküre” at the Met on Monday and Jan. 14, Jan. 28, Feb. 2 and Feb 6; (212) 362-6000 or metopera.org.