Maricarmen

(Waltraud Meier)

Em 1996, no Met, depois de atingida a glória, Waltraud Meier arrisca novos terrenos… e dá-se mal, muito mal. A sua Carmen foi absolutamente aniquilada pela crítica – sobretudo -, que a descreveu como uma fria germânica, almejando a graça latina.

Meier sofreu muitíssimo como o duro revés. Mas, como diria o outro, são “ossos do ofício”.

Doravante, regressou ao Met, apenas, no seu elemento natural, ossia Wagner.

Pessoalmente, considero Meier uma extraordinária intérprete, com uma veia dramática memorável. Embora a voz brilhe, a consagração só se dá quando representa. E como brilha a sua Kundry – a melhor da sua geração -, Isolda, Fricka, Venus, and so on…

Aos 55 anos, Meier regressa ao Met, desta feita para interpretar Marie, a protagonista feminina de Wozzeck (Berg).

O excelente artigo do The New York Times disseca a relação conturbada de Meier com o Met, quase sugerindo o que me parece óbvio: la vendetta! Depois do logro de Carmen, a Marie de Meier soa a um ajuste de contas com o público e crítica Metropolitanos. Oxalá!

É que – caro e fiel leitor -, ao seu jeito, Marie é também uma Carmen, ambas criaturas claramente afins com as vicissitudes da histeria…

«Ms. Meier is back at the Met now for a four-performance run as Marie in Alban Berg’s Expressionist masterpiece “Wozzeck,” which opens on Wednesday evening. At 55, she has short, dark hair, fashionably mussed; strong features; and a speaking voice with singing cadences. As usual when you meet a great diva, it was somehow disappointing to find her a mere ordinary, attractive woman. But answering a question, she glanced upward, and her profile, catching the light, both softened and strengthened. She was suddenly epic, mythological, like Isolde, the role for which she is perhaps best known.

At one point the idea of Ms. Meier singing Isolde, a dramatic soprano part, would have been a joke. She began her career in 1976, at 20, as a pure mezzo-soprano in the theaters of her hometown, Würzburg, and of Mannheim. There she sang the standard lyrical mezzo parts — Mozart’s Cherubino and Dorabella, Offenbach’s Nicklausse — and began taking on the heavier roles that would bring her fame: Verdi’s Azucena, Wagner’s Erda, Waltraute and Fricka.

Her first international appearance was in Buenos Aires in 1980, as Fricka in “Das Rheingold.” She made her debut at Bayreuth in 1983 as Kundry in Wagner’s “Parsifal,” her first time working with Mr. Levine. He became her Met champion, bringing her to the company in 1987 as Fricka in the premiere of the Otto Schenk production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. By the time she returned in the early 1990s, she had begun taking on traditional soprano roles like Isolde and Leonore in “Fidelio.” She had acclaimed runs at the Met as Kundry in 1992 and Santuzza in Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” in 1993. She sang Sieglinde in the first act of “Die Walküre” with Mr. Domingo on the opening night of the 1993-94 season, and was a frequent soloist in concerts with Mr. Levine and the Met Orchestra.

(...)

Yet if Ms. Meier was never really able to expand her Met repertory, to become one of the company’s anchors, in her core roles she could captivate even there. When she returned for three performances of “Parsifal” in 2006, Mr. Holland wrote in The Times that “her audience went crazy for her.” Two years ago, while she was in New York to sing Sieglinde in the final performances of the Schenk “Ring” production, she even achieved a degree of redemption at the gala celebrating the Met’s 125th anniversary, singing the final scene from “Carmen.”

At a recent “Wozzeck” rehearsal, deep within the Met, Ms. Meier hung on the neck of Stuart Skelton, playing the Drum Major, as they danced slowly and sensuously downstage, moaning, “Immerzu, immerzu” (“Keep going, keep going”) in a soft rasp. Laughing and swooning in a tight black top and white peasant skirt, she looked over at Alan Held playing Wozzeck, her jealous common-law husband, with a complex mixture of disgust and regret and love. It suddenly became clear that when you play Marie at 55, and you’re Waltraud Meier, the character simply isn’t the innocent she is sometimes perceived to be. Marie has seen it all. She is what Carmen would have been had she survived “Carmen,” and now set on yet another course toward catastrophe.

It is in that context that Ms. Meier’s run in “Wozzeck” finds its meaning, both for the Met audience and for her, its undercurrent of poignancy and triumph. This is her moment finally to convince us, even to seduce us. “

‘Wozzeck’ asks for focusing very strictly,” Ms. Meier said. “ ‘Wozzeck’ is not a piece where you open up.”

That is not a formula for being a popular favorite, at least not here. She will never be one of the company’s stars; this will not have been the place that made or nourished her or stretched her considerable abilities. But 15 years later Ms. Meier has finally made a kind of peace with New York.

“Now when I come back to the Met,” she said, “I think I do what I can do. If they like it, I’m happy. If not, I don’t doubt myself. Because I know what is important: the acting, the real truth, the authenticity. I succeed if there is a performance where I really felt something true and I dug into it, not just making the beautiful sound but expressing something.”

When she returns next season, it will be characteristically in Wagner, in a relatively minor role as Waltraute in “Götterdämmerung,” which by then she will have been singing, on and off, for 34 years. In a few seasons she will reunite with her favorite director, Patrice Chéreau, as Klytemnestra in a new Met production of Strauss’s “Elektra.”»