'Wild Man' Frank Corsaro Mouths Off

I was crying; Frank Corsaro was not. We were sitting in a nearly empty movie theater on the Upper West Side one recent Thursday afternoon, watching Where the Wild Things Are. Onscreen, sensitive young Max Records was doing a poignant robot dance to cheer up his mom, played by Catherine Keener. It was only about 10 minutes into the film, and I was already choking up. My companion stared at the screen pensively but, except for an occasional deep, skeptical sigh, seemed entirely unmoved. Frank Corsaro hates overly intellectual art, but he may hate sentimentality even more.

Mr. Corsaro is 84 years old; short; a fan of Rafael Nadal; a director whose credits include a 1980 operatic version of Wild Things; a perpetual wearer of baggy corduroy pants; and, despite a certain lack of name recognition, one of the major figures of 20th-century opera.

In an extraordinary career based at New York City Opera, Mr. Corsaro, fresh from Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, emphasized characters’ psychological motivations in a way that was unprecedented on the opera stage, revealing—some critics said inventing—depths that restored some of the works’ original power. He boldly used video and other new media in houses where painted flats had previously been the extent of the set design.

Dramatically vibrant, visually striking productions by directors poached from Broadway. An emphasis on young, attractive singing actors. This sounds like the Metropolitan Opera under Peter Gelb today. But it could just as easily describe the heyday, in the ’60s and ’70s, of Mr. Corsaro and City Opera, the Met’s less glamorous neighbor. Though Mr. Gelb is often lauded for a revolutionary theatricalization of opera, he is really just aping what Mr. Corsaro did across the Lincoln Center Plaza 40 or 50 years ago.

“We developed the most unique program in opera,” Mr. Corsaro said over apple pie and coffee after the movie, “which all of these other things are springing off of, rather badly and rather inadequately.”

“Mr. Corsaro’s 50-year association with City Opera has exceeded that of any other director,” general manager and artistic director George Steel said in a statement, “and has given the company over 40 productions, more than any other director. With his passionately realistic and theatrically bold and innovative productions, he established something of a house style.”

City Opera, where Mr. Corsaro directed an astonishing 41 productions in 34 years, opens its season this Thursday. As it struggles to regain its financial and artistic footing, opera is finally catching up to where the company was decades ago, and Mr. Corsaro’s long and controversial career is more relevant than ever. He will get some much-deserved recognition on Nov. 14 when, alongside John Adams, Marilyn Horne, Lofti Mansouri and Julius Rudel (who first brought him to City Opera), he will be presented with one of the 2009 NEA Opera Honors for lifetime achievement in a ceremony in Washington, D.C.

The fancy honor has hardly dimmed his brutally hilarious candor, which he clearly delighted in unleashing. (He doesn’t get interviewed that often.) For one thing, he was disappointed by Where the Wild Things Are.

“A very fundamentally Hollywood production,” he called it. “The beginning was lovely. … But it turned into a psychodrama. All the discussions, and the English-speaking monsters. What was it all about? I couldn’t follow any of it.”

It was, ironically, the same kind of reaction that audiences and critics once had to Mr. Corsaro’s own work. He was, as The Times wrote in 1970, “the wild man of directors,” accused of inserting sex, violence and psychology where none existed. His premieres typically ended, according to People, in “a cacophony of bravos and boos.”

Today, however, many opera lovers look back on his productions with fond nostalgia. Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Manuela Hoelterhoff recalled an unforgettable moment in one of his most famous productions.

“City Opera had a look and attitude very different from the Met, where I lived as much as possible as a teenager,” Ms. Hoelterhoff wrote in an email. “Then one night I strayed next door for La traviata, and saw Placido Domingo pick up Patricia Brooks and virtually dance around the set with her in his arms. I was stunned. This was not possible at the Met. Corsaro knew how to use his singers’ innate gifts to rethink a piece I assumed had to go a certain way.”