‘Palestrina’ Falls Short of Its Lofty Aspirations

It took 80 years for “Palestrina”--Hans Pfitzner’s massively bloated, endlessly meandering, unabashedly self-serving essay in Germanic intellectual kitsch--to reach innocent America. Better never, perhaps, than late.

This aesthetic endurance contest, imported from Covent Garden in London to the Metropolitan Opera House Monday night as musical centerpiece of the 1997 Lincoln Center Festival, has long had its prominent champions. Thomas Mann found fascination in Pfitzner’s exploration of the social, political and moral issues separating the artist from church and state in 16th century Rome. Bruno Walter, who had conducted the Munich premiere in 1917, was still sending support to Pfitzner from Beverly Hills in 1949 when the impoverished composer, his reputation clouded by Nazi sympathies, died in Salzburg.

“Palestrina” lasts four hours and 40 minutes and seems to last longer. The so-called “musical legend” demands a huge, male-dominated cast, a vast staging apparatus and an orchestra of grandiose proportions in the pit. The opera has survived the decades only in the bigger houses of Germany and Austria, where its spiritual arguments apparently retain some relevance and its post-Wagnerian accents still bear resonance. The rest of the world has remained essentially immune to Pfitzner’s indulgent demands.

The current production was first mustered at the Royal Opera House in January. It represents a noble effort to validate a challenge predicated on bilious bilge, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof.

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Christian Thielemann conducts with such sweeping urgency that the endless stretches of lush busy-music sound almost as compelling as the brief stretches of bona fide inspiration. Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s gently modern staging scheme--lean, spare and, for the most part, deftly focused--avoids bombast and cheap sentiment wherever possible. Tobias Hoheisel’s delicately stylized decors make a virtue of restraint within the context of excess. And the international ensemble, led by Americans as the tortured polyphonist of the title and his formidable churchly antagonist, offers strength in depth.

Nevertheless. . . .

Pfitzner’s presumed masterpiece (everything is relative) still emerges as a triumph of pompous alienation if not obfuscation. No wonder its detractors liken it to “Parsifal” without the laughs.

The first act rambles onward and sideways for nearly two hours, the orchestra chugging along prettily, piling leitmotif on leitmotif as the characters debate the meaning of life, the relevance of art, the validity of change and other rarefied profundities. Palestrina, the creative protagonist--and a thinly disguised stand-in for Pfitzner himself--engages his quasi-nemesis, Cardinal Borromeo, in convoluted philosophical battles, composer confronting cleric, idealist confronting pragmatist, tenor confronting baritone. Then our cultured hero undergoes extended soul-searching as otherworldly colleagues intone encouragement and angelic voices dictate the “Missa Papae Marcelli” to him in a single blessed night.

Poor Palestrina disappears in the somewhat shorter second act, which takes us to the Council of Trent and introduces an array of primary singers milking secondary cameo opportunities as they bicker. A stagy blood-bath brings down the curtain, and not a hemidemisemiquaver too soon. The last act, mercifully even shorter, provides easy resolution, most of the dramatic action having taken place during intermission. Palestrina is hailed as the savior of civilization, his enemies beg forgiveness, and the heavens grant benediction to the guardians of conservative art.

Goodness gracious.

Pfitzner wove his cumbersome musical tapestry around his quasi-historical text with reasonable, patently uneven craft bolstered by supreme conviction. If only someone had told him that less is more.

Lehnhoff, the resourceful director, acknowledges the inherent egocentrism by having each of the nine ghosts of composers past who visit Palestrina in Act 1 carry a bust of, yes, Hans Pfitzner. Call it an in-joke.

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The most engrossing European performances of the opera in our time have at least served as grateful vehicles for great singing actors. Julius Patzak, for instance, managed to make the protagonist genuinely pathetic yet still heroic, and Hans Hotter summoned nearly superhuman force as his ecclesiastic adversary. Tenor Thomas Moser and baritone Alan Held, the present contenders, are not exactly in the same league. Still, Moser sings with affecting clarity and power, and Held, an incipient Wotan of quality, exerts canny persuasion on a rather intimate scale. Ruth Ziesak sounds sweetly ethereal and exudes sympathy as Palestrina’s young son, and splendid support is provided by such paragons as Kim Begley (the shifty Novagerio), Sergei Leiferkus (the arrogant Spanish ambassador), Robert Tear (the bumbling Bishop of Badoja), Anthony Rolfe-Johnson (the doddering Patriarch of Assyria) and Franz-Josef Selig (the cavernous Pope Pius IV, a.k.a deus ex machina).

The Met, which accommodates 3,800, yawned with empty seats at the first of three performances. But those who came--and stayed--applauded lustily.