268. Antony and Cleopatra (Barber)

• Opera in 3 acts
• Composer: Samuel Barber
• Libretto: Samuel Barber, Franco Zeffirelli, and Gian Carlo Menotti, after Shakespeare
• First performed: Metropolitan Opera House, New York, USA, 16^th September 1966, conducted by Thomas Schippers

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Characters

CLEOPATRA, Queen of Egypt	Soprano	Leontyne Price
OCTAVIA, Caesar’s sister	Soprano (Revision: non-singing)	Mary Ellen Pracht
CHARMIAN, Cleopatra’s attendant	Mezzo-soprano	Rosalind Elias
IRAS, Cleopatra’s attendant	Contralto	Belén Amparan
ANTONY, a Roman general	Baritone	Justino Diaz
CAESAR (Octavius), ruler of Rome	Tenor	Jess Thomas
AGRIPPA, a senator	Bass	John Macurdy
ENOBARBUS, his friend	Bass	Ezio Flagello
EROS, Antony’s shield-bearer	A young man’s voice (tenor or high baritone)	Bruce Scott
DOLABELLA, an officer of Antony	Baritone	Gene Boucher
THIDIAS, Caesar’s ambassador	Tenor or high baritone	Robert Goodloe
A Soldier of Caesar	Tenor (Revision: Baritone or bass)	Gabor Carelli
A Rustic	Baritone or bass	Clifford Harvuot
A Messenger	Tenor	Paul Franke
A Soothsayer	Bass	Lorenzo Alvary
ALEXAS, Cleopatra’s attendant	Bass	Raymond Michalski
First Guard	Baritone
Second Guard (Revision: Guard 1)	Tenor	Robert Schmorr
Third Guard (Revision: Guard 2)	Bass	Edward Ghazal
Fourth Guard (Revision: Guard 3)	Bass	Norman Scott
First Watchman	Bass	Paul De Paola
Second Watchman	Bass	Luis Forero
Dancers
MARDIAN	Tenor (Cut in revision)	Andrea Velis
MAECENAS	Baritone (Cut in revision)	Russell Christopher
LEPIDUS	Tenor (Cut in revision)	Robert Nagy
CANIDIUS	Baritone (Cut in revision)	Lloyd Strang
DEMETRIUS	Tenor (Cut in revision)	Norman Giffin
SCARUS	Baritone (Cut in revision)	Ron Bottcher
DECRETAS	Bass-baritone (Cut in revision)	Louis Sgarro
Captain of the Guard	Tenor (Cut in revision)	Dan Marek
Soldier of Antony	Bass (Cut in revision)	John Trehy
Sentinel	Bass (Cut in revision)	Peter Sliker

SETTING: Egypt and Rome, 40–30 BCE

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It was, as one paper¹ said, “the greatest musical event in the history of the United States” – and it became one of opera’s most notorious disasters.

The Metropolitan Opera House opened in September 1966, with a new opera based on Shakespeare by Samuel Barber, whose last opera (the rather dull Vanessa, 1958) won the Pulitzer Prize.

It starred soprano Leontyne Price, the first black opera singer both to appear on television and to open a Met season; Ms Price had spent a year in complete isolation, preparing for the rôle.

It was directed by Franco Zeffirelli, a couple of years away from his award-winning films of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo & Juliet. The production was lavish: 30 solo parts, 100 choristers, 200 supers, 47 dancers, several animals (horses, goats, and even camels), and a statue of the Sphinx that revolved. It was, The Daily News commented, “a pageant which makes the old opera house’s Aida look like a road show”. Zeffirelli’s sets were “stunning, imaginative, and acrobatic”, and the costumes “opulent”.

And the upper crust attended what the New York press dubbed “the social event of the year”. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife were there; so were the Rockefellers and Filipino president Ferdinand Marcos.

“There was almost continuous visual excitement in the production: the excitement of several hundred people being kept on their toes; a vast, brooding Sphinx dominating the second act; an almost incredible vision of Cleopatra, far in the distance aboard her many-oared barge; ships docking, and ships rocking with drunken celebrants – and then the final scene in Cleopatra’s tomb, in which Miss Price gave a couple of asps a couple of nibbles and expired.”

Daily News, 18^th September 1966

But it has become notorious as an enormous, kitschy flop. A decade later, The New York Times (8 September 1975) wrote: “The night has gone down in the annals of opera as a landmark of vulgarity and staging excesses.” Zeffirelli’s production was “haircurlingly awful”, and Ms Price’s costumes were of a “gargantuan ugliness” that “made her look like an incipient mummy”.

That, however, might be the judgement of hindsight. True, there were technical hitches: Leontyne Price was stuck in a pyramid in the dress rehearsal; the revolving stage played up, forcing last minute revisions; and the Met’s musicians went on strike.

But many pieces were applauded: Cleopatra’s aria, a dance, and the end of Act I; and Antony and Enobarbus’s arias in Act II. The work ended with 14 curtain calls.

NY Times music critic Peter G. Davis (9 January 2009) wrote: “As a survivor of that infamous Antony and Cleopatra première … I continue to have a problem reconciling the accepted myth and my own doubtless fallible memory. Yes, it was a rough evening, tensions ran high, and a lot went wrong… Despite all that and more, the musical side of the performance went smoothly. The reception at the end was, if not exactly ecstatic, warm and welcoming from an audience that seemed more than pleased with the opera. … Surely, everyone went home that night to await the reviews with relief that things had actually gone so well.”

Many of those reviews were merciless. Harold C. Schonberg (New York Times) called the opera “big, grand, impressive and vulgar”. Martin Bernheimer (Los Angeles Times) thought it was “well constructed, eminently palatable, theatrically valid, and a bore”. Peter Heyworth (the UK Observer) found the music “nebulous”; Barber’s score was undramatic and “as emotionally uncommunicative as the weakest scores of Strauss’s old age… Whole scenes came and went by without establishing any musical point or identity.” The Toronto Star thought the music was “at best only effective in a mood-setting sense, and heavily dependent on visual support”. Nevertheless, the Star observed that Barber gave Ms Price “some soaring moments of lyricism”, and “his native romanticism and traditionalism [were] qualities sympathetic to the subject he [had] chosen”. It concluded: “It may not be a masterpiece, but Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra is a stunning showpiece for the Met nonetheless.”

In their view, the New York Times wrote 20 years later (4 November 1984), Barber was “a sentimental reactionary who could never come to terms with the latest modernist innovations”; his music was tonal, and he was committed to “direct, lyrical, unabashedly emotional musical statements”. “Barber’s lushly neo-Romantic score was deemed anachronistic at a time of rampant, complex high modernism,” Anthony Tommasini (New York Times, 10 April 2003) commented.

In some ways, Barber was paying the price for the success of Vanessa. The Americans had praised it, and awarded it the Pulitzer Prize; but the Europeans had sniffed at it. It was too conservative, too tonal, too melodic, not challenging, not serialist or minimalist.

Barber had written a historical opera, with a death scene for the prima donna, just like an 1830s bel canto opera. “The very idea of a grand opera based on Shakespeare’s play seemed terribly retro to some,” Tommasini wrote.

What the critics wanted was the likes of Intolleranza 1960, by Nono, Schoenberg’s son-in-law and a rabid Communist, or Zimmermann’s violent, cacophonous Soldaten; or the electronic screeches and warblings of the avant-garde. So they still write proper operas in the 1960s? Outrage! Even the modernist German composer Henze had been chided for writing arias.

Poor Barber was crushed. He became depressed, drank heavily, and broke up with his partner of more than 30 years, the composer and librettist Menotti. He did not compose for several years.

At last, in the early 1970s, Barber and Menotti revised the work, cutting more than an hour of music, eliminating 10 characters, removing a ballet, and reducing the Roman elements.

That version, performed at the Julliard American Opera Center in 1975, helped to rehabilitate the work. The New York Times (1984) called it “a stirring American opera”. “The music is searing and overripe, yet usually manages to steer clear of vulgarity, and, on disk, at least, the stage action adds up to a compelling dramatic totality.”

It is hard to judge the original version, in the absence of the libretto or score. (It is, however, available to listen through Met on Demand.) The revised version, however, is a work of mixed inspiration, but works well overall. True, some of the languorous, exotic Egyptian music seems familiar from Hollywood; it would not be out of place in a sword and sandal epic. There are, as in many 20^th century operas, stretches where the music is subordinate to the dialogue or the stage action. (“To this ear it is more exciting orchestrally than vocally,” the Daily News thought.) But much of it is effective, if episodic. Musicologists suggest the opera’s ideal version is an amalgamation of the 1966 and 1975 versions.

The opera opens with a martial fanfare (representing Rome) and a “menacing, jeering” chorus detailing Antony’s dalliance with the Egyptian queen. There is an attractive appassionato orchestral passage at the end of the first scene, where Antony quits Egypt. Cleopatra’s andante aria “Give me some music” is pleasant, if somewhat tepid. The last scene of Act I features the famous description (Plutarch filtered through Shakespeare) of Cleopatra’s pleasure-barge; she appears from a distance, as if in a vision – a scene that impressed some critics. Antony, beguiled by far-off strains of music, resolves to return to Egypt and “let Rome melt in Tiber”. It has real dramatic impetus.

So does the Senate scene at the start of Act II, where Octavian declares war, and the senators shout for “Vengeance!” For the revision, Barber introduced a love duet, “Oh take, oh take those lips away” (words by Beaumont & Fletcher), sung by the royal lovers on the eve of the Battle of Actium; it is unapologetically a Big Tune, and a gorgeous one. The scene where the soldiers hear strange noises from underground (electronic instruments, originally electric guitar and ondes Martenot) is the most modernist scene in the work. Not everything comes off – the aftermath of the battle of Actium seems rather ragged, and due to the revision, some scenes seem a little disjointed, like the death scene of Enobarbus, now become a minor character. Antony falls on his sword, accompanied by drums and flute, an oddly austere choice that reminds me of Japanese Noh plays.

But the deaths of the two lead characters are theatrically effective. Cleopatra’s magnificent aria Cleopatra, “Give me my robe”, brings the opera to a moving, powerful close.

Why is Antony and Cleopatra not done more often? It is a work the Met could profitably revive. Sixty years have passed since that troubled reception, and its triumph now could vindicate an important American opera, one that has a high chance of pleasing audiences. But John Adams’s opera has once more cast it into the shade.

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Recordings

Listen to: Opening night broadcast, New York, 1966; Met on Demand.

Revised version: Esther Hinds (Cleopatra) and Jeffrey Wells (Antony), with the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, conducted by Christian Badea; Spoleto, 1983. New World Records.

Watch: Catherine Malfitano (Cleopatra) and Richard Cowan (Antony), with the Lyric Opera Orchestra, conducted by Richard Buckley, directed by Elijah Moshinsky, Chicago, 1991.

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Works consulted

• Sydney Edwards, “The Queen of the Nile’s long, lonely year”, Evening Standard, 17^th September 1966
• “Onstage, It was ‘Antony and Cleopatra’”, The New York Times, 17^th September 1966
• William Littler, William Littler, “In New York: A stunning showpiece for the new Met”, The Toronto Star, 17^th September 1966
• John Chapman, “Barber’s Opera? It’s an Eye-Popper”, Daily News, 18^th September 1966
• Peter Heyworth, “Miscarriage at the New Met”, The Observer, 18^th September 1966
• Donal Henahan, “Juilliard Rehabilitating ‘Antony and Cleopatra’”, The New York Times, 8^th February 1975
• Richard Dyer, “Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra”, essay accompanying 1983 recording, New World Records.
• “Recordings: Time Burnishes Barber’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’”, The New York Times, 4^th November 1984
• Anthony Tommasini, “Opera Review: Another Chance for a Notorious Work”, The New York Times, 10^th April 2003
• Peter G. Davis, “The Tragedy of ‘Antony and Cleopatra’”, The New York Times, 9^th January 2009
• David Salazar, “Opera Profile: Samuel Barber’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’”, OperaWire, 16^th September 2017

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1. The British Evening Standard: Sydney Edwards, “The Queen of the Nile’s long, lonely year”, 17^th September 1966 ↩︎