I HADN’T PLANNED ON THE SIXTH OF March, 2020 bearing any special significance; it was just another Friday, capped by a Flying Dutchman for which I had to write a dispirited review. Would I have enjoyed it more had I known it marked my last trip to the Met, or any other theater, for the next nineteen months? Within a week, the opera house’s doors had been shut “temporarily”—through March 31—to keep the encroaching pandemic at bay; by the nineteenth, though, the rest of the season had been canceled. By the first of June, the opening of the 2020–21 season had been postponed till New Year’s Eve; and on September 22 the season was canceled altogether. From my first taste of staged opera as a not-quite-teen, I’d never gone without one for so long a time.
When the Met finally reopened on September 27, 2021, it was with a historic splash: the company’s first-ever opera with a Black composer. I didn’t catch till two weeks later, and my return to the Met after so protracted an absence proved more remarkable as an endurance test—Could I sit longer than three hours with a face mask uncomfortably in place? Could I keep it just didn’t blaze big enough to fill the space. Three weeks later, a splendidly cast and conducted —the season’s only Wagner—was shockingly under-attended, with barely half the 3800 seats occupied; but the opera itself filled the house in a grand-operatic way that Blanchard’s likely didn’t even aspire to. This, despite the vacancies, was the Met I remembered.
