Gerald Finley’s Golaud in the Metropolitan Opera just-completed run of Pelléas et Mélisande wound up a year of outstanding Manhattan appearances by the Canadian baritone. Finley knows his place in the musical and theatrical framework—he knows when in a performance to recede, when to assert.
Gerald Finley in the Metropolitan Opera production of Pelléas et Mélisande / Photo by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
Early in 2010, Finley was at the Met singing Marcello in Zeffirelli’s lavishly detailed production of La Bohème. Marcello isn’t considered a star baritone role–that’s probably principally because he doesn’t get his own aria. But the role has been sung by the greatest baritones, and no wonder. The fact that it unfolds in duets and ensembles does not for one moment diminish its depth and importance. Finley’s performance exploited the character’s many opportunities to call attention to himself without violating the essential fellowship of this merry band of Bohemians. Finley’s Marcello was florid by virtue of Latin patrimony as well as individual inclination. In the opening scene Finley and his garret-mates were both manifestly cold in their unheated quarters as well as warmed by their own frisky temperaments. Here, Finley was spry as a mountain goat. But in act 3, listening to Anna Netrebko’s Mimi as she animatedly poured out her tale of love gone wrong, he was all tender, responsive stillness.
A personable swagger was in evidence when Finley came back to New York in March for a solo recital at Zankel hall. It was a varied program of many moods: somber, lyric, and madcap, all projected truthfully by him and pianist Julius Drake. At times, when he sang Ravel’s thumbnail portraits of fish and fowl as well as some of the zanier songs of Charles Ives, Finley’s high spirits seemed to convene a garden-party entertainment—perhaps Edwardian by dint of the date of musical composition as well as musical character—before friends and brethren.
Very much in prime at age 50, Finley has apparently decided that it is time to take on the more stentorian, patriarchal aspects of bass-baritone repertory. (This summer he’ll sing Hans Sachs at Glyndebourne.) Thus he was to be found singing the title role in Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah with the New York Philharmonic in November. Alternately hailed as savior and pariah, Elijah’s venting, hectoring, lamenting to the heavens is not really Finley’s thing, although certainly he did have sufficient prophetic authority. He supplied the appropriate vocal dimension, giving something of a grown-up choir boy sound to the declamation. There was much to be enjoyed in his vocal elasticity, the spin he put on extended vocal sounds, his control of tonal swell and diminution.
Jonathan Miller’s Pelléas is a difficult production to put over. John Conklin has designed a suite of rooms partially delineated by hinged flats that suggest architectural perimeters, the entire décor dated to roughly the same time that Debussy was writing at the end of the nineteenth century. Wide open spaces stretch behind the flats. But the Maeterlinck play and the opera Debussy made from it are set in an operatic equivalent to literature’s Arthurian romances, which play out amidst mystical castle and forest primeval. The blistered walls, ghostly decay and emptiness of Conklin’s sets do generate their own parallel enigma. But while I think I do suspension of disbelief as well as any other spectator, I found it nevertheless jarring that the singers are costumed and directed for the most part to act realistically as members of late Victorian gentry. That precludes some of the work’s magical elusiveness. Debussy’s opera is the quintessence of the Symbolist aesthetic, in which things are not meant to be explicit.
Dressed by Clare Mitchell at times to resemble Nicholas Nickleby’s uncle, Golaud certainly had his work cut out for him maintaining the role’s majesty and occasional remoteness. But there’s no question that his performance as well as those given by all of his colleagues, led by Simon Rattle in his Met debut, was beautiful and as persuasive as the production permits. The role gave Finley’s a chance to steep his customary mahogany tone into a Stygian desolation and menace. A lonely widower, devoted to his half-brother Pelléas, Golaud becomes so progressively unhinged by jealousy over his new wife Mélisande’s relationship with Pelléas that he murders him and wounds her.
Debussy both entwines the text into the orchestral fabric, as well as sometime putting a lot of sonic space around it. Finley’s comprehension of the prismatic Debussy articulation was never more evocative than in the opera’s opening scene. Golaud discovers the forest-stranded Mélisande, but can extract no coherent information from her about who she is and how she arrived there. There was a foreshadowing hint of ferocity in Finley’s delivery, as well as bewilderment and attraction. Rattle, Finley and mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená in this initial scene had immediately elicited our full involvement with an excursion into the uncharted.
