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Crisis of faith:
the Metropolitan Opera revives La Juive
2003 Time Out New York advance

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

Critics sometimes charge that the Metropolitan Opera goes to great lengths to avoid stirring its placid, graying subscriber base. Of course, anyone who remembers the uproar that greeted Robert Wilson’s 1998 staging of Wagner’s Lohengrin might commiserate with the Met management. Wilson’s production put Met audiences in the unfamiliar position of having to think about what they were seeing, and the gasping and sputtering continue unabated to this day.

Imagine, then, what may be in store when Fromental Halévy’s La Juive (“The Jewess”) returns to the Met after nearly 70 years’ absence. Banned by the Nazis in the 1930s, Halévy’s 1835 masterpiece centers on the persecution of the Jewish goldsmith Eléazar and his daughter Rachel at the hands of Christians in 15th-century Konstanz, Germany. Much admired by Mahler and even Wagner, the dramatically canny score recalls the work of Halévy’s teacher Cherubini in the severe grace of its melodies. Were it simply the usual lurid yarn of a lost baby, adulterous intrigue and grisly vengeance, La Juive might prove less thought-provoking. Instead, in light of the Shoah, the worldwide resurgence of anti-Semitism and the festering situation in the Middle East, encountering La Juive is like gazing into an open wound.

“No other opera performed today has a political statement like this one,” says tenor Neil Shicoff, who sang Eléazar in 1999 when Met director Günter Krämer’s production premiered in Vienna. A slight, soft-spoken man whose shy smile and gentle brown eyes belie the volcanic intensity he summons in performance, the Brooklyn-born Shicoff seems fated to take on the role of the tormented goldsmith. His arresting stage presence and superb command of French language and style have made him today’s most admired interpreter of Offenbach’s Hoffmann and Massenet’s Werther, and he is also an ordained chazan (cantor) who had a pulpit for several years before undertaking an operatic career.

Nonetheless, Shicoff shrugs off overly narrow readings of the opera and his role in it. “The last thing audiences need is for me to lecture them on what everybody has done to the Jews. That’s not why I do the piece!” he says emphatically. “La Juive is about Jewish-Christian conflict, but it has a larger scope. It’s about the loss of humanity that occurs as people become fanatical and intolerant. If you turn on CNN, this is what’s happening today all over the place.” Throughout La Juive, Eléazar is torn between his love for Rachel and the bitterness toward his Christian oppressors, which eventually drives him to acquiesce in her destruction. “What’s important in this opera,” Shicoff stresses, “is that everyone loses in the end.”

The desolation at the heart of La Juive comes to the fore in a Sidney Lumet–directed video of the opera’s most famous aria, “Rachel, quand du Seigneur.” The soundtrack, with incandescent vocalism by Shicoff, is available as a CD single (Millennial Arts); the video, filmed at the Orensanz Center (a desacralized synagogue on the Lower East Side), will feature in the documentary Finding Eléazar: A Portrait of a Tenor and a Role, slated for release in 2004. Pale and haggard, his prayer shawl drawn like a shroud, Shicoff’s Eléazar seems to be devoured by his conflicting emotions. The video’s climax shows Eléazar tearing a Torah scroll, then collapsing face down on the ground in a bitter parody of the Yom Kippur liturgy.

“That was very difficult to do,” Shicoff murmurs after an uncomfortable pause. Lumet, he says, sees Eléazar as “someone who wants to meet God,” not unlike today’s suicidal terrorists. Shicoff’s own view of Eléazar, too, has darkened since he first sang the role. “I don’t know where it will take me,” he admits. “It changed me as an artist, and it’s changing me as a person.” On one point, though, the famously earnest tenor is firm: La Juive is not for those seeking a mindless evening’s entertainment. “It’s going to evoke real feelings of sorrow, real reflection. Goddamn it, I’m not doing elevator music.”

La Juive opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday 6.

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