Met Opera 2023-24 Review: The Hours
Time and the hour run through the roughest day. —Macbeth (Violette Leonard)
What did I just witness? was the question that I kept asking myself, and failing to answer, after attending The Hours, the operatic book/film adaptation by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Greg Pierce. What was that? The experience of seeing The Hours defies description, but for your sakes, readers, I will describe mine to the best of my current ability.
When I first saw The Hours, way back at its November 2022 world premiere (!), the lack of subtitles in Act 1 (I was in the latecomers’ cinema) drove me batty. This time, I looked at the subtitles only when necessary, relying on my memory of the libretto and the singers’ diction, so that I could stay fully focused on the stage.
It begins in the dreams of novelist Virginia Woolf, with a chorus tossing out fragments of the classic opening line of Woolf’s masterpiece, Mrs. Dalloway: “flowers flowers flowers the flowers the flowers… Miss! Miss, miss, Mrs., Mrs. … she said she said she said she said” (which called to mind the book of the same name by the journalists who broke the Weinstein story), coalescing after a few minutes into the complete sentence: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” The sequence grabbed my attention immediately, and I was held in the opera’s thrall for the rest of the evening.
What a lark! Renée Fleming and Met Opera Chorus in The Hours (Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera)
It is thanks to the great Renée Fleming that this opera was created in the first place. After the success of her first collaboration with Kevin Puts, the song cycle The Brightness of Light, they decided to do an opera together. While they bounced ideas off of each other, Renée’s assistant Paul Batsel suggested an adaptation of The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, later made into an Oscar-winning film. The Hours is about a single day in the lives of three women in different times and places, all connected by Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs Dalloway. Renée loved the idea; she pitched it to Puts, who loved it; they pitched it to Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, who loved it, and the rest is history. The brilliance of operaticizing it (this is now a word) is that it allows the three stories to overlap, both musically and onstage. I find Renée’s character, Clarissa Vaughan, the hardest to get, because her troubles are based on regret rather than mental illness or depression, but Renée’s iconic, soulful voice won me over immediately.
In 2022, this role marked Renée’s return to the Met after a final Der Rosenkavalier in 2017 that many feared meant she was retiring from opera. Happily for us, it was only a major gear shift in the kinds of roles she sings, which will no longer include classic operas. Now, she is turning to new music and increased concert appearances.
Joyce DiDonato in The Hours (Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera)
As Renée mused on the delights of being “alive on this luminous morning in June,” another vocal line entered beneath hers — unmistakably Joyce DiDonato, whose Virginia Woolf appeared in a doorway, silhouetted against a sunset orange backdrop. The soothing return to nature in the earthy warmth of Virginia’s color palette is starkly set against the neutral neatness of Clarissa’s belted cream dress and the stifling artificiality conveyed by Laura Brown’s cheery aqua-green outfits (we’ll get to her in a minute).
In one of my favorite Act 1 exchanges, Leonard Woolf, sung by tenor Sean Panikkar, offered to have their maid, Nelly, bring Virginia a bun. Joyce declined quietly, with a note of “thanks, you’re sweet.” Panikkar insisted. Pivoting on a dime, Joyce barked out, “NO. If Nelly disturbs me while I work, I cannot guarantee her safety.” The audience and I laughed; as a writer, I can occasionally relate to that statement. Virginia pulled herself together for him, but the instant he shut the door, her hidden emotions burst out as she stopped pretending to be okay. Joyce paced around restlessly, hands thrust into the pockets of her burnt-orange cardigan. Most of the time, her movements were restrained, deliberate, conservative, but escalating into frenzy when Virginia began to lose it. Joyce was subtler, quieter this time than last season, but magnetic; even when she was silent, hardly moving, and someone else was singing on the other side of the stage, my eyes were drawn to her. “I pride myself on being able to inhabit a character,” Joyce said recently. That skill is the pinnacle of what makes her so special.
Kelli O’Hara in The Hours (Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera)
Kelli O’Hara was outstanding as Laura, slowly suffocating in her unfulfilling home. The impression she gave was one of glass — her bell-like voice never cracks, but Laura seems always on the verge of doing so, and Kelli, with the smallest of facial movements as her stunning high notes lingered in the air, made translucent Laura’s conflicted soul. The moment when she turned to her son, Richie, and took tiny, agonizing, snail-paced steps towards him, afraid to face him and start her day as Mom, was chilling. One longed to tell Laura to give herself a break, such as when she snapped “Are you a monster or a mother?” and when she followed up the line “You seem to have drifted into a still and foreign land” with a chastising “Stop trying to be a poet! You’re only a… what?” I could feel, not just see, her trembling with anxiety and self-loathing.
Leonard worries about being “no match for [Virginia’s] monsters.” What are the ladies’ monsters? Clarissa: her past. Laura: her oppressively perfect life. Virginia: hard to pin down, because the voices are only part of her deeper mental health struggles. “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” says Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (❤). Not so in The Hours, and not so in opera. Every person, and every character, is a whole world in themselves, and we care about them. When a “stabbing” migraine struck Virginia, and I watched her hold on to her desk in an attempt to weather the storm, I myself felt a small, sharp pain in my stomach.
Renée Fleming and Kyle Ketelsen in The Hours (Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera)
As Richard, the poet suffering from AIDS, Kyle Ketelsen effectively underlined Richard’s illness with muted, slightly breathy sound. In contrast, he was bursting with healthy vigor during the Wellfleet flashback (which I like as little as ever). He gave more than one exasperated sigh at the mention of his party, and got to deliver what the audience certainly thought was one of the opera’s funniest lines:
Ketelsen: “The spinster across the alley swapped out her knickknacks… Now there’s a lesbian clown.”
Renée: “How do you know she’s a lesbian?”
Ketelsen: “Look at the pants!” The laughter was loud enough to hear on the radio a few days later. The audience found a lot of lines funny that, though objectively amusing, I didn’t have the heart to laugh at, such as when the chorus asks Kelli, “How does it feel to be an ancient artifact?” (The irony, of course, is that Kelli is the youngest of the Three Divas.)
The height of Richard’s apartment building dwarfed Clarissa, like the immensity of the task that awaited her in trying to save him, and the tininess of one person in this great big world. During his wrenching suicide scene, several people gasped in horror when he dropped out of the window and out of sight. In reality, I had had my eyes closed since the beginning of the scene.
When you listen to a work without seeing it, it is an opportunity to judge the music and the singing on their own. I’ve also listened to The Hours this season over the radio, and I noticed that, for all the work’s merits, the conversations of the 1990s plane include a lot of high notes seemingly for the sake of high notes, dulling their impact. Clarissa’s world does include the charming flower shop scene, which Kathleen Kim stole with her vocal acrobatics and Queen of the Night-esque staccati (at which the audience howled with laughter), and Renée’s lovely aria “Here on this corner.” I also rediscovered the luxurious beauty of most of the music, such as the pensive woodwind motif that precedes Laura’s musings in her hotel room and the repetitive swelling of the strings when she begins to make her husband’s birthday cake. The latter reminds me of Philip Glass’s minimalist score for Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film, but lusher.
From left: Henry Baker Schiff, Luka Zylik, Mitzi Solerino, and Joyce DiDonato in The Hours (Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera)
Amid the large supporting ensemble, Sylvia D’Eramo and Eve Gigliotti made their marks as Kitty/Vanessa and Nelly, respectively. Sylvia’s poignant Kitty was full of uncertainty about Laura’s kiss, and no good at all at faking unconcern about a potential cancer diagnosis. Eve exuded a sympathetic mix of devotion and worry, trying to get Virginia to have a nosh (eat). The cast was nearly the same as it was for its 2022 premiere, except for the children and the Man Under the Bridge/Hotel Clerk (really Death). Last season, countertenor John Holiday played Death; this time, Eric Jurenas assumes the role for the second half of the run. Vanessa’s three children, played by Henry Baker Schiff, Luka Zylik, and Mitzi Solerino, sounded melodic on their own, but a smidge tinny together — the opposite of the kids last year, who sang best together. The scene where Virginia helps the children bury a dead bird and descends into demi-insanity is one of my favorites because of the intensity of the hurricane that momentarily possesses her. Vanessa is a smaller part than Kitty, but Sylvia’s anxious attempts to bring Virginia back to reality and distract her children were touching.
I stepped out of the theater for a few minutes during intermission to try to keep myself from getting too sucked in. What a lark! I thought, as I gazed at the illuminated buildings and the moon. What a thrill! to be alive on this luminous evening in May! My seatmate was attending her first opera — I LOVE meeting first-timers. She said she had seen and liked the film, and now came to check out the opera. I asked who was her favorite singer, and she answered Virginia. I nodded with approbation and informed her that Joyce is the greatest actor opera has. I’m not sure I’d recommend the weighty The Hours as the best first opera, since not all operas are this emotionally taxing, but the lady did get to see the cream of the operatic singing crop upfront. Joyce! Renée! Kelli!
From left: Kelli O’Hara, Renée Fleming, and Joyce DiDonato in The Hours (Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera)
Interestingly, the Divas have only two duets with each other, and both times, it’s Kelli and Joyce singing together — the highest and the lowest voices of the three. Never mind that, though, when there’s the Straussian, sublimely beautiful Final Trio. At the line “and you are not alone,” I felt myself inwardly exhale. With all the sniffles in the audience, I knew I wasn’t alone in needing to hear it, and certainly not alone in the way this opera made me feel. I wasn’t crying — it’s not one of those operas for me, I cry when the heroine is dying —, but my heart felt leaden. One more minute and I can breathe, I thought, but at the same time, regretfully, One more minute and this — this — is over. (Well, actually, last time I saw The Hours, it took me a month to recover.)
They repeated “and you try” over and over again, their voices following each other like strands in a braid. Rippling percussion tied the ends with a ribbon, threads of sound trailing off into the air.
