Fifty years from now, the next Edith Wharton, if she could have seen the crowd that gathered to see Ms. Mattila on the evening of Sept. 21, 2009, could easily begin her great novel of New York exactly the way the last one did. So little has changed.

And now she’s had her first opening night with the company, performing Tosca, that part of parts, for the first time outside her native Finland. The new production, by Luc Bondy, replaces one of the supersize Franco Zeffirelli stalwarts that keep Peter Gelb up at night with anxiety and that he is, little by little, getting rid of. (Richard Eyre’s Carmen will supplant Mr. Zeffirelli’s in a New Year’s Eve premiere this year. Two down; many, many choristers and goats to go.)

The Zeffirelli Tosca was one of the better liked of the Master of Excess’ Met offerings. The hulking but attractive sets were closely modeled on the real Roman locations described in the libretto. The use of the Met’s hydraulics system, which allowed the entire third-act set to distractingly lower halfway through, was eventually dropped, and in recent years the result was big but lovable, and actually somewhat illuminating. The opera and the Sardou play on which it’s based are both set in a very specific time and place, and the drama of the piece is directly tied to the situation in Italy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. This is not to say that there aren’t other, and even better, ways to do Tosca than Mr. Zeffirelli’s. But once the production was streamlined a bit, it was clear that there were certainly worse ways.

When the curtain opened on Act I on Monday night, it seemed as though Mr. Bondy’s production, surprisingly for those in the audience expecting something zany, would be as traditional, in its way, as the one it was replacing. Indeed, while the old production’s elaborately Baroque Sant’Andrea della Valle was replaced with a much starker Romanesque interior—as if everything had been stripped from Mr.

Zeffirelli’s walls—the new set’s massive scale felt familiar.

But the realism at the beginning turned out to be misleading. “Our Tosca is set in the time of Napoleon,” Mr. Bondy says definitively in the Met’s season book, and this was plausible until the arrival of Scarpia and his henchmen, who were dressed like ominous Victorian types out of a Dickens novel, though Scarpia’s coat was made of a distinctly fascist black leather. Things got even more complicated in Act II, with Scarpia’s room in the Palazzo Farnese done up with mid-century (20th century, that is) modernist furniture and vintage maps of Italy hung on the walls as if to remind the singers and audience where the action is actually taking place. Then for Act III it was back to stark stone, a gorgeous re-imagining of the roof of the Castel Sant’Angelo as a precipice overlooking the sea.

And here, another Wharton quote comes to mind: “An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

Only instead of translating languages, it’s resetting the history that seems to be the new obsession.

It’s possible that with all the cross-temporal stylization around Scarpia and the act he dominates (the second), Mr. Bondy is making a point about how his evil—the torture and police deceptions and craven backroom deals, found mostly in Act II—transcends time and place. As he says in the season book, “Cruelty is not specific to a certain time or era.” Indeed, comparing older versions of the set designs to the end result shows that the Act II set was changed to make it less abstractly timeless and more explicitly modern, as if to place as close to our own time as possible the scene in which the torture of Cavaradossi takes place. All this is well and good, but it strands the two protagonists, Tosca and Cavaradossi, in comparative irrelevance; if Scarpia’s part of the story is the part that’s interesting and topical, there’s less reason to care about the part that’s merely traditional.

Making Scarpia and his surroundings stand out also creates an odd imbalance in an opera so focused on its diva. Puccini provided in Tosca a character—an opera singer herself—who embodies the medium: Her intense emotions are constantly kept in check by a corrective sense of restraint. It’s the effort to restrain her emotions, and not the emotions themselves, that makes the tension almost unbearable.

Both the music and libretto indicate that Tosca’s fury and jealousy are always checked almost immediately after they flare up. In Ms. Mattila’s and Mr. Bondy’s conception, though, these emotions are worn far too much on her sleeve. This was Tosca on the warpath from her first entrance, tearing sheets off benches, throwing chairs, stabbing paintings, noisily collapsing to the ground at the end of her big Act II aria.

There was little sense of her religiosity, her modesty—the things that make her great act of violence so shocking and devastating. Tellingly, after killing Scarpia, this Tosca didn’t arrange candles and place a crucifix on the body; she lay down on a couch and slowly fanned herself, as if the murder were all in a day’s work. Ms. Mattila was physically fearless throughout, as always, but for once that wasn’t what she needed to be.

And she sounded uneasier in the part than she looked. She did some lovely soft singing, but especially in the last two acts, her voice spread under pressure at the top of her range, and the end of “Vissi d’arte” was rough going. But she was certainly spared the boos that were accorded the production team during their bows, which were spurred perhaps by loyalty to Mr. Zeffirelli, or perhaps by the simulated blow job given to Scarpia in the second act. Mr. Bondy seemed pleased by the catcalls; though much of the production ended up being rather conventional, the boos proved that he had done something “controversial,” “provocative.”

Yet controversy and provocation—indeed, everything on stage—take a backseat on opening night, which is really one of life’s great pleasures. An immaculately dressed young man seated in a box, hair swept back and gold scarf tight around his neck, perched on his chair and eagerly scanned the other boxes. He gesticulated and pointed and whispered to his friends about the people he had identified. He looked just like Wharton’s Larry Lefferts, “the foremost authority on ‘form’ in New York.”

Meanwhile, on Times Square, thousands of people (from the looks of it) gathered to watch the show on the NASDAQ jumbotron, in folding chairs that have been put out in the street to improve the cultural condition of the city. That’s democracy—or at least, noblesse oblige.

zwoolfe@observer.com

Ms. Mattila was warmly received after the first night of the revival of the Met’s 1980 production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893) on Jan. 29, but I doubt that her performance will inspire fevered memories. It has been widely reported that the Met is making a new production of Tosca for the magnificent Finnish soprano in the 2009-10 season, and I think she’ll fit the role of the great diva—from the beginning, a petulant and tempestuous character—better than she did the doe-eyed Manon, the pretty, middle-class French teenager who, brought into a life of luxury in pre-revolutionary Paris, cannot help but destroy Des Grieux, the young student who’s besotted with her.

Her beautifully “cool” Nordic sound may be a detriment in shaping a role that demands warm-blooded Italianate tone color and legato, but there’s no reason why a non-Italian singer can’t make a splash as Manon. To my eyes and ears, Ms. Mattila barely registered dramatically in Act I (the superb Dale Travis, as the old roué Geronte, acted rings around her) and gave a rather tarty and brazen Lulu-type characterization—more redolent of Weimar Germany than the ancien régime—in Act II. Only in the two final, tragic acts was the 47-year-old soprano truly convincing, seeming to bring her own experience as an older and wiser woman to the fore.

Her Des Grieux was Marcello Giordani. When he’s good, this tenor is a kind of latter-day Carlo Bergonzi, a singer whose timbre isn’t memorable but whose style and professionalism are an anchor for any production. The Met is asking a lot of him this year: Not only did he sing Edgardo to Natalie Dessay’s Lucia on the season’s opening night, but the house is bringing him back in March to sing the title role in Verdi’s powerful Ernani, which once belonged to Luciano Pavarotti.

I was looking forward to hearing Mr. Giordani sing at the New Year’s Eve Concert at La Fenice in Venice, but he pleaded illness (and was replaced by the sturdier, no-nonsense tenor Walter Fraccaro). During Act I of Manon Lescaut, I feared that Mr. Giordani still had the same Euro-bug in his throat: His singing was messy and frequently off pitch. But in Act II he somehow got hold of his instrument and used it well for the rest of the night.

This opera, so flawed and yet so thrilling, needs younger singers and a fresh production that will get rid of the kitschy early-80’s glamour of the Met’s current staging and burrow down to the fervid passion of the score. If there was a true streak of giovinezza in the performance, it came from James Levine and his wonderful orchestra, who offered sharp rhythms, sinuous phrases and cashmere textures that maximized the ardor of Puccini’s post-Wagnerian idiom.

ITALIAN MUSIC IN the 20th century was inevitably altered by the irresistible wave of modernism, but the lyric warmth and theatrical verve of the Italian tradition survived within it, as the long career of Luciano Berio (1925-2003) shows.

It was the New York Philharmonic that premiered Berio’s most famous work, Sinfonia, in 1968. The once-famous Swingle Singers—the smooth, scat-driven a cappella group that helped provide the soundtrack to the Age of Aquarius—took on the eight amplified vocal parts at the premiere. Last week it was the turn of the frighteningly competent Synergy Vocals group from London. Lorin Maazel, seemingly a little weary from all the Wagner he’s been conducting over at the Met recently, led a firm but dispassionate performance on the night I attended (Jan. 31).

Sinfonia, a work that not only uses texts by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Samuel Beckett but that was shaped by contemporary streams of structuralist and semiotic theory, escapes the expressive prison that enclosed so much music of its time—but only just. Johannes Brahms was also a deeply intellectual composer, but in his eloquent Fourth Symphony, which Maazel conducted smartly after intermission, he never let it show. That’s not so easy anymore.

The composer Steven Stucky, who introduced the performances of Sinfonia, maintains that listeners don’t need a special background “to enjoy it.” I disagree: I think you need a background in the late 1960’s, a vital, destructive and fractured time that helped create an atmosphere for a music that shared the same attributes. To enjoy Berio’s collection of 14 Sequenzas for solo instruments, however, you need only have a love of music, a love that a marathon concert at the Rose Theatre on Feb. 2—by Philharmonic musicians and guest artists—would have extravagantly confirmed.

In a style that dispensed with the comforts of regular phrases and tonal centers, Berio offered up music of coloristic variety, polyphonic brilliance and technical innovations that challenge the most virtuosic of performers—and created the finest suite of unaccompanied pieces since Bach. Among the fine performances I was able to hear, I especially enjoyed the ravishing feast of subtle detail that the flutist Robert Langevin brought out in Sequenza I; the cool mastery and charcoal timbre of the pianist Amy Briggs Dissanayake in Sequenza IV; and the sheer endurance in Sequenza XII of the bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann, who gave a sleek and unruffled cohesion to an unruly bear of a piece.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

For Mr. Pavarotti's farewell appearance as Mario Cavaradossi in Tosca , the red velvet barn was turned into something of a rock arena. Patrons were allowed to bring in cameras, with the result that the grimness of Puccini's darkest opera (and Franco Zefirelli's opulently gloomy production) was enlivened by the hissing and twinkling of flashbulbs. During the final, endless curtain calls, a red banner reading "We love you, Luciano" was unfurled across the Dress Circle, and parents led children down the aisle as if hoping to burn into their memory the tenor's megawatt grin.

Sadly, the Met was less festive in the casting of Mr. Pavarotti's last hurrah: Both the Tosca of Carol Vaness and the Scarpia of Samuel Ramey were painfully wobbly, as if foreshadowing other retirement evenings to come. In the pit, James Levine, who had conducted Don Giovanni in the afternoon, seemed to be phoning it in. But after Mr. Pavarotti took that final curtain call, what was left in the air was not his bewhiskered grin but the sound of that inimitable honeyed voice. It may have frequently faded to near inaudibility; it could only be produced from a seated position (with a glass of water nearby). And it never quite attained the golden power of its youth. Nonetheless, what we heard, in all its penetrating ease and eloquence, was incomparably Pavarotti . At 68, the most beloved tenor since Caruso still possesses the world's most recognizable voice-the one we can virtually see in its gleaming, aphrodisiac nakedness.

Ms. Mattila's Salome is an aphrodisiac of another order-the dream-seductress whose charms suddenly turn so ghastly that you wake up in a cold sweat. Strauss' adaptation of Oscar Wilde's dramatic poem, in which incest, volcanic adolescent sexuality and religious fanaticism collide in an act of unspeakable depravity, was shocking when it had its premiere, in Leipzig, in 1905. (It was banned for 27 years at the Met, after its first American performance in 1907 aroused the ire of J.P. Morgan's daughter.) But it has never seemed more shocking than it does in the Met's new production by the German director Jürgen Flimm.

Mr. Flimm, who gave the Met a powerfully reimagined Fidelio in 2000, chose not to set this Salome at King Herod's court in biblical Judea, nor in some Surrealist dreamscape à la the famous Peter Brook–Salvador Dalí production of 1949, nor in the crypto-Fascist world of the Nikolaus Lehnoff staging for the Met, in 1989. Instead, he and his designers, Santo Loquasto (sets and costumes) and James Ingalls (lighting), have gone straight to the Pandora's box in which so many of our most deliciously depraved fantasies have incubated-Hollywood. We are in a cartoonishly contrived Middle East-half artificial sand dunes that might have been borrowed from The Road to Morocco , half glitzy palace of a tackiness unworthy of a Holiday Inn in Abu Dhabi. A dinner party of bored Beautiful People assembled by Herod (a stolid Allan Glassman, who on opening night substituted for an indisposed Siegfried Jerusalem) and his wife, Herodias (an equally stolid Larissa Diadkova), is in progress. The Prophet Jochanaan (Albert Dohmen in a robust début) is ranting against this ungodly lot from his unseen cell in a cistern under rickety scaffolding. As time goes by, the only visually ominous element becomes a group of figures on the horizon wearing face-obscuring black robes and white wings-"angels in purdah" was my best ecumenical guess.

Into this disingenuously goofy setting (today's avant-garde German directors specialize in this sort of compounded irony) arrives opera's ultimate Bad Girl, the party wrecker par excellence. She's a glamorous blonde in slinky satin-Jean Harlow out for trouble. It's clear from her suggestive sashaying about that she herself has seen too many Harlow films, and our first response is to laugh at such a familiar icon of lowdown libido on the loose. But it's a measure of Ms. Mattila's fearless identification with this awful tart that we become inexorably, utterly appalled. Gradually, we realize that the production's ingenious conceit is inspired by the opera's most famous scene-the "Dance of the Seven Veils," for which Ms. Mattila becomes Marlene Dietrich in male evening drag, executing (according to Doug Varone's choreography) a wicked parody of cheesy, high-stepping eroticism.

If this production of Salome is about anything, it's about stripping. It layers veils of Hollywood kitsch onto Strauss' (and Wilde's) kitsch-the better to shock us with the Bad Girl's ultimate unveiling. True to Strauss' feverish score (which was rather over-feverishly conducted by a reckless Valery Gergiev), this took place after Ms. Mattila had disrobed, fleetingly, down to her birthday suit, before allowing herself to be covered with a simple black garment. Then-when the executioner emerged from the cistern brandishing the Prophet's head-she really went to work.

I have never, in more than 40 years of opera-going, experienced anything as shattering as this magnificent singer's frenzied monologue of demented lust. Matching her own beautifully crazed movements with every bar of Strauss' beautifully crazed music, she brought herself to a state of physical and vocal ecstasy that was so powerfully sustained as to make us complicit in the character's madness. When it was all over, when Ms. Mattila reappeared onstage to a thunderous standing ovation, I realized that what we felt was not just the satisfaction of seeing a fascinating character revealed. We had witnessed, even more thrillingly, an unforgettable musical and dramatic creation-art laid bare.