Music: The Met, the Moor and the Eye

Domingo opens season in a blazing TV performance of Otello

As operagoers moved through the gala ritual of the Metropolitan's opening night last week, they were met with an unfamiliar sight. Television lights glared down on the huge Chagall murals and curving marble staircases. Cameras panned the red-carpeted lobby. On the Grand Tier balcony, presumably sophisticated first-nighters pressed around to gawk at Met Tour Director Francis Robinson's TelePrompTer as he beamed at interviewees. The occasion was a live broadcast to public television's 282 U.S. stations, as well as to Canada and Mexico. "It's like a political convention," complained one elegant buff. At least the women who had come to be seen in their new dresses and old jewels could parade, not just for the other 4,000 ticket holders, but for an international audience of perhaps 4 million.

The real show was inside, however, and what a show it was. Audience and TV viewers alike were treated to a full-scale display of all the elements that can make opera truly grand: a masterpiece of the repertory—Verdi's Otello—opulent staging, brilliant conducting by Met Music Director James Levine, and a cast of top singers giving a blazing performance.

Tenor Placido Domingo was masterly in his first Otello in New York (he has performed it 40 times elsewhere and recorded it for RCA). Dramatically, he projected a strong warrior but a vulnerable man, a noble nature whose obliviousness to evil turned all his strengths—his depth of feeling, his decisiveness, his simplicity—to fatal weaknesses. The cruelly demanding role requires Otello to sing full-out the moment he walks onstage, with the famous cry of triumph, Esultate!, and scarcely ever allows him to let up thereafter. Domingo's voice was exhilaratingly equal to it all—dark and thrusting in the declamatory passages, freely soaring in the lyrical settings.

Baritone Sherrill Milnes' lago was a virile, magnetic figure, believable as a military officer, charming when he needed to be, capable of holding his twisted, demonic drives in check with a keen intelligence. No moment in the opera was more splendidly sung or powerfully acted than the second act S i, pel ciel, with Otello looming over him with upraised hand, like a malign marionette master. In this scene Verdi transcended Shakespeare, said Shaw. Watching Domingo and Milnes, one could only agree.

The S i, pel ciel is one of the biggest climaxes in a score that sometimes seems to be nothing but climaxes. But Verdi and Librettist Arrigo Boito knew that after the massive choral scene in Act III, enough was enough. Hence the rightness of the subdued, wistfully melancholy fourth act, a sort of spacious postlude. This act is Desdemona's great moment. Soprano Gilda Cruz-Romo made the most of it, although in the earlier acts her singing had somewhat lacked color and shading. Poignant and dignified, she spun out the Willow Song and Desdemona's final prayer in long, crystalline legates.