Here are several statements by proponents of the ”opera is obviously and inherently theater” school of thought:
1. ”I believe that intelligent and creative stagings are vital to keep a repertoire of centuries-old works alive and relevant”
2. ”If opera wants to be anything more than a problematic curio cabinet, it has to be willing to confront the implications of its own texts. That’s why I love it when an enterprising director decides to stage an opera in a way that takes the problem bits head-on and challenges them”
3. ”Try telling Verdi and Wagner or anybody else that all you care about is the music. Concert opera performances are for people who don’t want to think”
4. ”Headphones are in fact a very modern way of listening. I think Americans, due to their usually pathetic language skills, tend towards the ‘music is all’ view”
5. ”A big yawn to those who enjoy sitting in the symphony hall and dozing off because you don’t have to be engaged by the director”
6. ”Opera doesn’t come to life until you put it on stage”
7. ”The way of bringing new blood into opera is to hire theater directors. It’s the director’s job to translate musical expression into a plausible emotional narrative in the stage action. And it can make you hear the music in new ways”
I find all of this mind-boggling but I am thankful that a couple of high profile commentators have indirectly addressed at least one or two of these nonsensical statements:
For many of us who came to love opera before director’s reign took hold, current notions of effective dramaturgy boggle the mind. When did the directors and impresarios decide that an opera was a random collection of notes, independent of its dramatic and visual elements — a mere musical shell, to be filled up with and bent out of shape by whatever modern hang-ups seem most likely to catch the public off guard? When did wild controversy, booing and academic apologias in the press replace straightforward storytelling as signs of theatrical prowess? When did “making people think” become the top priority in an art form once clearly intended to make them feel? And why the rush to “reinvigorate” something that is so palpably alive already? (In fact, the recognition that great works do not need wholesale reinvention in order to endure is precisely what I have always understood “classic” to mean.)
-- Louise Guinther, Opera News Editor
Opera is an artform intended principally to make audiences feel, not think. That, in fact, is what opera — what music — is all about. Prior to our modern age, there’s not a composer of opera (or of music generally, for that matter) who ever lived who thought otherwise. Whence, then, this perverse, noxious, and ass-backwards impulse to make opera audiences think first, feel after?
-- ACDouglas, culture blogger
Very well said but I don’t understand why they didn’t go further and emphasized the basic point which is that opera is first and foremost a musical phenomenon. In other words, the essential argument is posed in musical language.
Does anyone seriously believe that if the director were to take a backseat to the music, vocalists and conductor that this will encourage potential opera lovers to turn away from the art form? It’s incredibly silly and this is why I’ve never seen anyone answer the question. The drama and the music must always be evaluated separately. I don’t care if the libretto is of the highest quality, there is still something trivial about all of the stage business next to being delighted, stirred, overwhelmed or profoundly moved by a score. And I don’t care what style of music it is. Isn’t it the instinctive response of most sensitive people 99.9 percent of the time to turn inward and let it all transpire in their own head and imagination? Now even though I care very little about the theatrical/visual component I would still like to highlight this fine quote by an anonymous commenter because it nicely complements the excerpts by Guinther and Douglas:
I have nothing against a revisionist retelling of, say, The Little Mermaid or the Rusalka legend, but grafting one on to an already existing opera – where it will necessarily make nonsense of the libretto and the music – is, at best, a cheap, squalid way of doing it.It’s not illegal to write new works of musical theatre. You want to write a realistic stage musical about a woman imprisoned in her father’s basement, go right ahead. But Dvorak’s opera is not such a work and attempts to twist it into one are bound to come across as ludicrous, forced, and painfully naff. (And I’m writing about what sounds to me like an atypically MILD example of regietheatre perversion; I know there are far worse out there.) We have The Wizard of Oz, and we have Wicked. An attempt to stage the former with the sensibility of the latter would have been excruciatingly bad and an insult to the intelligence of everyone involved. And yes, I’m aware I’m talking about the single work of Western culture we probably have least reason to be purist about. What applies to The Wizard of Oz also applies, a fortiori, to anything else.All very well to make people think about the meaning of what they’re watching: that’s what the program notes are for; that’s what a blog like yours is for. Getting a director to draw a moustache on the opera does NOT make audiences think – except perhaps such smug thoughts as... "Weren’t they misogynistic back in the poor old misguided 19th Century! I’m glad I’m not like that!!” You can’t examine your own reaction to a 19th- or 18th-Century when the director won’t allow you to have one in the first place, by denying you the chance of experiencing the work itself.
I am bored to tears by today’s platitudinous, deadening encomiums about how “art challenges us to understand” or “forces the viewer to confront” some sociopolitical issue, “negotiates” or “privileges” or “valorizes” or “maps” this or that transgendered, transgressive, nomadic, or hybridized subject
It has always been obvious to me that contemplative listening of recordings in private (with amplification) represents the purest and deepest form of opera love. Those who recognize that one cannot truly know and love an opera unless one has devoted the many hours to aurally unpick, assimilate and internalize all of the harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, coloristic and structural details of the score. Or the acknowledgment that one must at least make a wholehearted effort to aurally unpick, assimilate and internalize most of the harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, coloristic and structural details. Apparently there are some in the opera world today who need to be reminded of the fact that listening to music is a major cognitive task that requires very considerable processing resources. The simpler task of reading libretti or studying dramaturgy just cannot be compared to the process of meticulous listening. Let me also stress that this type of opera lover always experiences a thrill or sees aesthetic value in passages that many others dismiss as “inferior, dull or mediocre”. A very important point that I must repeat it: This type of opera lover always experiences a thrill or sees aesthetic value in passages that many others dismiss as “inferior, dull or mediocre”
Two questions:
1. For those who disagree with me: Could you please explain why I am wrong in my deeply held belief that ‘contemplative listening of recordings (in private) represents the purest and deepest form of opera love’?
2. For those who agree with me: Are you hopeful that this generation’s tedious insistence on the physical and material aspects of operatic production rather than the musical will pass away?
Many thanks,
Pelleastrian
