In Heaven with Cherubini and Verdi, on Earth with Britten

by Christopher King

This essay appears in Issue 3 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Medea

an opera by Luigi Cherubini, with a libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman, at the Metropolitan Opera

New York City, September 27—October 28, 2022

Peter Grimes

an opera by Benjamin Britten, with a libretto by Montagu Slater, at the Metropolitan Opera

New York City, October 16–November 12, 2022

La Traviata

an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, at the Metropolitan Opera

New York City, October 25, 2022–March 18, 2023

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Cherubini’s Medea (1797) is the sensation of the fall season at the Metropolitan Opera. Minutes before the October 28, 2022 performance, as my companion and I inquired about different seats at the box office, we discovered that the entire venue was only two tickets short of selling out. This never happens! But a staging of Medea is also rare. It is a seldom performed work, not only due to Cherubini’s own relative obscurity but also due to an odd confluence of technical difficulty and a clouded translation history. Now it is at the Met for the first time, featuring the astounding Sondra Radvanovsky in the title role. Apparently, the Met conducted a long search before finding someone considered suitable.

The original libretto is in French as Médée, but the Met’s performance is in the Italian adaptation. There does not seem to be much public information about this choice, but since it fits into a larger trend over the last century to stage it in Italian, there may be nuanced musical reasons not immediately perceptible to a non-performer.