Antony and Cleopatra, Metropolitan Opera review — John Adams finds the tragic heroism that Shakespeare intended

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The Metropolitan Opera opened its Lincoln Center theatre in September 1966 with the premiere of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, a colossal flop that was retired from the company’s repertoire after eight performances. Shakespeare’s sprawling drama has now returned to the Met’s stage in a recent setting by John Adams. Although new to the Met, this co-production has already been staged in San Francisco (2022) and at the Liceu Opera Barcelona (2023), giving the creative team the opportunity to tighten and focus a work that has, thus far, received at least as much criticism as praise. 

The opera begins with a galloping rhythm in the orchestra, and from there the dramatic impetus rarely rests, so one is carried along by the lovers’ ill-fated journey. But unlike, say, Adams’s Nixon in China or Doctor Atomic, there are few arias or set pieces — the composer has said that he aimed for something akin to the “sung drama” of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande — and the vocal parts are more lyrically declamatory than melodic. Meanwhile, the orchestra acts as omniscient narrator, conveying not only colour, atmosphere and churning movement but also the characters’ complicated emotions. (The composer incongruously yet ingeniously employs a cimbalom — a Hungarian hammered dulcimer — to conjure Cleopatra’s exoticism.) 

Adams’s music is largely tonal but harmonically and rhythmically complex. And while he sets Shakespeare’s blank verse with impressive naturalness and intelligibility, the combination of the text’s richness with the score’s density means that this is not the kind of opera where one sits back and basks in the music. Rather, it demands sustained concentration. That said, there are moments of ecstatic lyricism, as in Antony and Cleopatra’s duet, “O love”, before the climactic battle scene near the end of act one. 

The three main characters — Antony, Cleopatra and Caesar — can all too easily come across as stock figures, thanks at least in part to their glamorisation by Hollywood, but Adams revels in their individual complexities, allowing them to inhabit the kind of tragic heroism Shakespeare surely intended. In this production by Elkhanah Pulitzer (who collaborated with Adams on the libretto), the action is updated to the 1930s, with the sliding panels of Mimi Lien’s sets suggesting a camera’s aperture, Constance Hoffman’s costumes giving a glittering nod to art deco, and Bill Morrison’s grainy video projections rather ominously evoking the rise of fascism.

The cast are uniformly excellent. Julia Bullock’s Cleopatra holds imperiousness and vulnerability in a delicate balance (and her scream when Antony dies in her arms is satisfyingly hair-raising). Gerald Finley gives Antony an amorousness to match his hubris, and he and Bullock’s chemistry brings to mind Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Paul Appleby’s Caesar is attractively ruthless and, in his mourning of Antony’s death, poignant. The Met Chorus, which is put through its paces in several key scenes, sings with vigour and precision, and the orchestra negotiates the score’s intricate and often jagged rhythms with confidence under the composer’s direction. 

★★★★☆

To June 7, metopera.org