'Regietheater'
Bob Harper
http://www.city-journal.org:80/html/17_3_urbanities-regietheater.html
Let's hope opera management in this country will call this crap what it
is and will act accordingly.
Bob Harper
Don Phillipson
news:46af9555$0$37746$5fc...@dreader2.news.tiscali.nl...
> > http://www.city-journal.org:80/html/17_3_urbanities-regietheater.html
> I have no idea who Heather MacDonald is, but I presume some
> reactionary dumb twit who thinks Europe is a degenerate country with a
> perverted culture.
> There many many many opera performances in many countries all over
> Europe every year, many more than braindead Heather can imagine, and
> the vast majority of them are performed and staged very traditionally
> indeed.
The article entitled Regietheater identifies and describes
a recent genre or style, and its author writes for a New York
City magazine about introductions of this new style in
New York. What is the relevance of EM's complaint that
she omits "many many many opera performances in many countries" ?
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
Christopher Webber
>The article entitled Regietheater identifies and describes a recent
>genre or style, and its author writes for a New York City magazine
>about introductions of this new style in New York. What is the
>relevance of EM's complaint that she omits "many many many opera
>performances in many countries" ?
I can't speak for EM, but it seems to me that the "relevance" of his
"complaint" might be to do with the fact that Ms Macdonald's heartfelt
article displays a deal of small-town insularity, and is patently out of
touch with the world of music *theatre*, as (opposed?) to The Good Old
Fashioned Opery, where folk did not pay their big bucks to be affronted
by stimulating, provoking, essentially modern theatrical performances.
But what's new? There's always been a sizeable minority of Opera Buffs
who've barely tolerated theatre. The canary-fanciers who boast about
keeping their eyes closed so as not to sully the sublime music are at
least honest about it. They probably watched Wagner's original
productions with their eyes shut too. Theatre has to move with the
times, or it is - like so many of the shows I guess Ms Macdonald might
prefer to behold - artistically dead in the water.
Who formulated this catch-all but unenlightening term "Regietheater"?
Certainly not the Catalan Calixto Bieito, whose work in opera and
zarzuela over the years has been consistently stimulating, honest and
cogent (whatever its perceived lapses from Good Taste), and who would
not understand himself to be part of any movement apart from his own.
And what - if anything - does "Regietheater" mean? EM has put his finger
on the worst line of the attack, which looks on the face of it as if it
equates to "European (especially German) = Bad, American = Good".
Strange, when many of the directors most under the candy-striped hammer
(e.g. Sellars, the Aldens) are in fact Americans!
I know that this is *not* how the great majority of intelligent and
feeling theatregoers think, thank goodness, on either side of the pond -
but such nostalgic laments as Ms Macdonald's can lead... well, to
misunderstanding.
--
___________________________
Christopher Webber, Blackheath, London, UK.
http://www.zarzuela.net
david...@aol.com
book on Italian opera by Philip Gossett. The review ends with an
interesting discussion of opera direction today. Here are the final
paragraphs of the review. -david gable
A staging should arise from the music. The policy that now governs
most operatic productions of imposing a staging absolutely extraneous
to the music and only tenuously relevant to the libretto assumes that
the opera as it has come down to us is uninteresting and needs a total
makeover to be worth mounting. The fundamental assumption is that the
public is incapable of taking any pleasure in the drama and the music
of Handel's and Rossini's operas, and needs to be distracted to ward
off boredom. Gossett does not take a position very different from mine
as he writes that "we need directors who attempt to think through the
Italian repertory anew, not directors who impose extreme settings in
order to stir life into works in which they do not believe."
Nevertheless, I think we need a fundamental reform of the assumptions
underlying stage direction today.
In the early nineteenth century, the stage director (who was often the
librettist) was chiefly concerned that the singers would get on and
off the stage at the right time without bumping into each other or
upsetting the scenery, and that the indications of the libretto were
followed. The actions and gestures of the chorus were regulated, but
(except for making sure that the necessary events of the plot were
carried out) dramatic interpretation was largely left to the
individual singer. In the first half of the nineteenth century, power
resided in the singer. When the director of the Paris Opera in 1830
needed to save money, he lowered the salary of the orchestral
musicians, explaining that he couldn't touch the fees paid to the
principal singers or economize on the scenic effects. But it was the
singer who was at the center of the production.
Dissatisfaction with traditional staging was first manifest in regard
to Wagner's operas already before the end of the composer's life. The
stimulus came from French and English experiments in stagecraft, above
all from Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig, who felt that the
naturalistic staging of Wagner at Bayreuth was unworthy of the
symbolist character of the drama and the music, and that the scenery
should be replaced by new effects of lighting. In the French and
German theater of the first half of the twentieth century, the stage
director as a creative force was finally invented with figures like
Aurélien Lugné-Poë, who directed theater productions in Paris, and Max
Reinhardt, who did so in Berlin and Vienna; but it was some time
before this was to have a great influence on opera outside Germany.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the power in opera was
little by little displaced from the singer to the conductor. It was
the temperamental and masterful orchestra director who became the star
as much or even more than the divas. One spoke more and more of
Beecham's La Bohème, Toscanini's Meistersinger, and after the death of
Callas the conductor reigned unchallenged. Now he has been pushed to
the side by the stage director: today we speak of Zeffirelli's Bohème
and Peter Stein's Pelléas. Sometimes, in such productions as Jonathan
Miller's Rigoletto and Patrice Chéreau's Ring of the Nibelungs, there
has been a gain, and singers have learned how to act convincingly
instead of restricting themselves to a few stock gestures and
grimaces.
Gossett makes a distinction between "displaced" and "radical"
stagings. In the first, a story is moved either temporally or
geographically, but the subject, characters, situations, and actions
are basically unchanged. In the radical staging, "the operatic text is
treated as 'a sheer, unprescriptive stimulus to the free play of
theatrical imagination'" (so Gossett, quoting Roger Savage). The
displaced staging has a long and traditional history, and it was
already forced upon many composers by the censors even before the work
was produced: Un Ballo in Maschera was shifted from Stockholm to
Boston, and Rigoletto was moved from Paris to Mantua. Staging in
modern dress, starting with Shakespeare and transferred to opera, has
become traditional.
The radical staging is a more contemporary phenomenon, and it is
prompted by changes in the critical atmosphere in which the
recapitulation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has been characterized as
the work of a frustrated rapist; a politically correct Rite of Spring
sacrifices a male virgin as well as a female; Jane Austen's Mansfield
Park is radically reinterpreted by means of a glancing allusion to the
slave trade; and it has been seriously suggested that the singer of
Schumann's cycle A Woman's Love and Life ought to indicate by her
performance her disgust with the male chauvinism of the work.
Radical stagings are, I believe, largely a fad; most of them are
ideological frivolities hoping to be taken seriously, and they are
likely to disappear as they tend to interfere with the pleasure one
has at public entertainment. In any case, the problem of modern
staging of opera is a much more general one, and touches the nature of
operatic form: it is the modern belief that the director must innovate
and may invent stage business that has nothing to do with the music.
It is true that the radical stagings contain the most egregious
examples: a Tamino and a Priest in The Magic Flute (at the Théâtre des
Champs-Élysées in Paris) who bounce up and down on a trampoline while
the priest tells Tamino to Mozart's most solemn music that he might
never see Pamina again; a Brünnhilde in Siegfried (at the Stuttgart
Opera) who brushes her teeth at a washbasin in a motel room while
Siegfried pleads his love; a Lulu(at the Paris Opera) who kills her
husband not in a closely confined salon but in a crowded entrance hall
with hordes of servants carrying drinks up an immense staircase for a
fashionable party (when the police arrive to arrest Lulu, they hurtle
down the staircase as if they had all been invited to the party)-
examples of this sort of absurdity are easy enough to find.
But nonradical stagings may also make musical nonsense even when they
have some dramatic sense: a Wotan in Die Walküre (at the Théâtre du
Châtelet in Paris) who pauses on the way to punish Brünnhilde for her
disobedience in order to kiss the brow of his dead son while the music
clearly represents his savage desire for vengeance. The gesture is
dramatically but not musically appropriate, since it makes Wagner
inept, as if he did not know how to write the proper music to
illustrate kissing the brow of a dead son.
One of the first stage directors to become famous for the invention of
stage business irrelevant to the music and even the text of the
libretto was Jean-Pierre Ponnelle: I saw his work first at Arles,
where he did Rossini's Elisabetta, Regina d'Inghilterra. During most
of the arias there was always some kind of activity on the side, which
I found comprehensible since the diva was Montserrat Caballé, who, as
is well known, had it in her contract that no director could make her
do anything on the stage that she did not want to do. Since she
preferred to do nothing but walk out majestically, sing, and then
leave the scene, some distracting movement to catch the eye might seem
to be welcome. One stage director of Caballé in a San Francisco
production of Verdi's Ernani took a different tack, and slightly
darkened the stage for all of Caballé's scenes.
The relation among music, words, and action is the basis of opera:
staging should enhance the music, not downgrade its interest or
importance. Even the finest stage directors today, like Jonathan
Miller, can be misled by our present system, which demands innovative
staging. Miller felt that Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande had to be
"rescued from the reproduction tapestry world of Maeterlinck's Middle
Ages" and placed it at the time of its composition, in the early
twentieth century. I, too, find the false Gothic of Maeterlinck's play
somewhat distasteful; but Debussy's music clearly calls up a
temporally undefined and very distant past, not a recent or
contemporary world, and the alienating distance was lost in the New
York production. Miller is one of the few directors to be conscious of
what Gossett calls the work's integrity; but in opera music is
primary, not illustrative as in a film. Music and drama enhance each
other at every point, and a dramatic effect unrepresented in the
music, or not consonant with the music, has no right of entry. The
best model for an operatic production would be the example of Georges
Balanchine: even in non-abstract works like The Prodigal Son, almost
every dance movement and every gesture was never a purely
choreographic effect but the direct expression of, and response to, a
detail in the score.
Charles Rosen, "Opera: Follow the Music," The New York Review of
Books, v. 53, no. 15, October 5, 2006
Christopher Webber
>A staging should arise from the music.
A prescriptive, false premise that disqualifies what Rosen goes on to
say, elegantly though he says it.
It might arise from the music, of course. It might arise from the text.
It might arise from the character and demands of the performance space.
It might arise from the available roster of performers. It might arise
from... damn near anything. The important thing is whether it works. In
theatre, that is all that matters.
This indefensible assumption that opera could or should be a "pure" art
form (whatever that might be, I for one do not know) is the bane of life
for practitioners and audiences alike.
James Kahn
>Don Phillipson <d.phillips...@ncf.ca> writes:
>>The article entitled Regietheater identifies and describes a recent
>>genre or style, and its author writes for a New York City magazine
>>about introductions of this new style in New York. What is the
>>relevance of EM's complaint that she omits "many many many opera
>>performances in many countries" ?
>I can't speak for EM, but it seems to me that the "relevance" of his
>"complaint" might be to do with the fact that Ms Macdonald's heartfelt
>article displays a deal of small-town insularity, and is patently out of
>touch with the world of music *theatre*, as (opposed?) to The Good Old
>Fashioned Opery, where folk did not pay their big bucks to be affronted
>by stimulating, provoking, essentially modern theatrical performances.
>But what's new? There's always been a sizeable minority of Opera Buffs
>who've barely tolerated theatre. The canary-fanciers who boast about
>keeping their eyes closed so as not to sully the sublime music are at
>least honest about it. They probably watched Wagner's original
>productions with their eyes shut too. Theatre has to move with the
>times, or it is - like so many of the shows I guess Ms Macdonald might
>prefer to behold - artistically dead in the water.
This is ridiculous. There's a vast chasm between the extremes of
"theatre" that distracts and detracts from the music, and an
"eyes shut" experience. To counter the arguments in this article
by constructing such a false dichotomy would seem to suggest an
inability to construct a good rebuttal.
>Who formulated this catch-all but unenlightening term "Regietheater"?
>Certainly not the Catalan Calixto Bieito, whose work in opera and
>zarzuela over the years has been consistently stimulating, honest and
>cogent (whatever its perceived lapses from Good Taste), and who would
>not understand himself to be part of any movement apart from his own.
>And what - if anything - does "Regietheater" mean? EM has put his finger
>on the worst line of the attack, which looks on the face of it as if it
>equates to "European (especially German) = Bad, American = Good".
>Strange, when many of the directors most under the candy-striped hammer
>(e.g. Sellars, the Aldens) are in fact Americans!
Hmm, a bit touchy are we? This equation was your invention, not
the author's.
>I know that this is *not* how the great majority of intelligent and
>feeling theatregoers think, thank goodness, on either side of the pond -
>but such nostalgic laments as Ms Macdonald's can lead... well, to
>misunderstanding.
I'm touched by your magnanimity, but the fact is, her criticisms
strike this reader as valid, and ought not to be construed by an
intelligent reader as "nostalgic laments" for purely conventional
old-fashioned and uncreative staging. There's plenty of room for
creativity without doing violence to the art form. And while a case
can be made for the importance of "theatre", in opera the theatrical
should not upstage or eclipse the music.
--
Jim
New York, NY
(Please remove "nospam." to get my e-mail address)
http://www.panix.com/~kahn
Richard Loeb
news:f8omqq$qev$1...@reader2.panix.com...
The usual cop out - he is "his own movement". The only movements the
audiences have had from watching his operatic productions are bowel
movements! A check of reviews world wide show him to be a charlatan and a
fraud without the least bit understanding of the lyric stage. The horrors he
has put on the stage faileth human understanding - I am all for new ideas
but the audience should never be ridiculed or spat on which is exactly what
this fool has done. Shame on the opera houses who hire him! Richard
Ian Pace
"Richard Loeb" <loe...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:X4Sdnc2ph9bDfDLb...@comcast.com...
> The usual cop out - he is "his own movement". The only movements the
> audiences have had from watching his operatic productions are bowel
> movements!
Mozart's letters would suggest he would rather enjoy that (and some of the
other things that are being done in his name - please don't tell me that he
and his librettists wrote operas involving such moments as 'Batti, batti'
(just like he said he would do to Constanze on 19th May 1789) and 'Marten
alle Arten', or the three of the Queen of the Night's attendants 'locking
Papageno's lips' without knowing all that those implied)..
Ian
david...@aol.com
wrote:
> >[Rosen:] A staging should arise from the music.
>
> A prescriptive, false premise that disqualifies what Rosen goes on to
> say, elegantly though he says it.
Au contraire: a prescriptive true premise, prescribed by the very
nature of the genre. In opera, the dramatist is the composer. That
is THE fundamental condition of the genre. As the more absurd
stagings abundantly prove, nobody is legally bound by these
fundamental conditions, but the results are NOT stagings of the
opera: they reduce the opera itself to a mere pre-text.
-david gable
david...@aol.com
> Mozart's letters would suggest he would rather enjoy that (and some of the
> other things that are being done in his name - please don't tell me that he
> and his librettists wrote operas involving such moments as 'Batti, batti'
> (just like he said he would do to Constanze on 19th May 1789) and 'Marten
> alle Arten', or the three of the Queen of the Night's attendants 'locking
> Papageno's lips' without knowing all that those implied)..
What an insanely illogical reply! What these moments did NOT imply is
95% of what happens on the stage in the more licentious productions of
our time.
-david gable
Eric Grunin
<bob.h...@comcast.net> wrote:
>Let's hope opera management in this country will call this crap what it
>is and will act accordingly.
This is all because the opera houses won't play modern music: the
endless repetition of a tiny repertory inevitably tends towards
decadence.
Nobody needs to tart up 'Die Soldaten', 'The Rake's Progress', or
Mahagonny; in fact these Xtreme makeovers generally leave even Puccini
alone due to his relatively modern sensibility.
The tendency becomes a crisis due to the generally trivial libretti,
because the #1 priority of a director is not 'to serve the music' but
to avoid boring the audience. So if he finds that he cannot make the
story compelling he will do something drastic, because that's his job.
This doesn't excuse the often ridiculous results, of course.
Regards,
Eric Grunin
www.grunin.com/eroica
david...@aol.com
> The tendency becomes a crisis due to the generally trivial libretti,
> because the #1 priority of a director is not 'to serve the music' but
> to avoid boring the audience.
In short, the director can't conceive of an audience not being bored
by Mozart, Verdi, or Wagner.
> This doesn't excuse the often ridiculous results, of course.
Nothing does.
-david gable
A. Brain
news:D-CdnX5gQZuo7jLb...@comcast.com...
Thanks for a fascinating article. I have forwarded
it to some friends and some of the local "authorities"
who have occasionally been guilty of mounting
such productions. Like "Macbeth" set in a mental
hospital and one production of an opera that
featured a row of toilet stalls on stage.
Meanwhile, I'm wondering if Wadsworth--a
traditionalist only in the sense of eschewing
ridiculous and offensive stagings--was
behind some of the better productions
I've seen.
--
A. Brain
Remove NOSPAM for email.
Eric Grunin
> On Jul 31, 11:48 pm, Eric Grunin <a...@b.c> wrote:
>
> > The tendency becomes a crisis due to the generally trivial libretti,
> > because the #1 priority of a director is not 'to serve the music' but
> > to avoid boring the audience.
>
> In short, the director can't conceive of an audience not being bored
> by Mozart, Verdi, or Wagner.
Close: the director can't conceive of an audience not being bored by
Shickaneder, da Ponte, Piave, Boito, or Wagner the librettist, either
because their stories are shallow, badly told, repellent, or
deadeningly overfamiliar. In his heart he cannot fall back on the
wonderful music because that is the one aspect of the production from
which he is explicitly excluded.
There is some truth to this view of the librettists. Has any other of
their work survived? When the better of their contemporaries
(Beaumarchais and Scribe) are done today, they need significant
reinvention for a modern audience, and even the best (Schiller,
Shakespeare) are not performed 'come scritto'. (Have you ever seen an
uncut Hamlet? I have, and it wasn't pretty.)
There's an illustrative scene in the film 'Meeting Venus'. They're
mounting a new production of Tannhauser, and one of the singers has
done his part at all the major houses; each time the director gives
him new blocking, the singer says, "ah yes, like at Covent Garden,"
"like at Bayreuth," "just like the Met." This infuriates the director,
because it emphasizes that there's nothing new to be said about the
work, and that because the music is absolutely fixed he has very, very
few choices. And he has to assume that if he's bored, the audience
will be, too.
Regards,
Eric Grunin
www.grunin.com/eroica
david...@aol.com
> Close: the director can't conceive of an audience not being bored by
> Shickaneder, da Ponte, Piave, Boito, or Wagner the librettist, either
> because their stories are shallow, badly told, repellent, or
> deadeningly overfamiliar. In his heart he cannot fall back on the
> wonderful music because that is the one aspect of the production from
> which he is explicitly excluded.
In my opinion, this exhibits a profound misunderstanding of the genre,
opera. In opera, the dramatist is the composer, not the librettist,
and in the case of every one of the best known operas of Mozart,
Verdi, and Wagner, the composer played an active role in shaping the
libretto while it was being written. (Wagner, of course, was his own
librettist.) Figaro, Tristan, and Otello stand comparison to the
greatest works of spoken drama, not because of Da Ponte, Wagner the
librettist, or Boito, but because of what Mozart, Wagner the composer,
and Verdi made of what these librettists supplied them.
The libretto does matter, of course, but the function of the libretto
does not require it to stand comparison to the text of a play by
Shakespeare, Ibsen, or Beckett. A libretto is not a play: it consists
of words written to be set, words that are "musicabili," music-able,
as Verdi would have said, not words intended to stand on their own.
Librettists are conscious of their role in adapting what they write to
the demands of the genre, conscious of their role in providing the
bare bones the composer needs to erect his drama: the composer is
responsible for the living flesh. The principal if not the only
function of the libretto of Otello was to preserve the bare bones of
Shakespeare's plot so that Verdi's music could play a role analogous
to Shakespeare's verse.
Boulez has interestingly distinguished among three Wagner's, Wagner
the composer, Wagner the poet, and, mediating between these two,
Wagner the dramatist, the Wagner who conceived the drama the composer
wanted to write. Wagner the versifier may have been the least gifted
of these three, but he also matters the least, because, in an opera,
the composer's settings of the poet's verse not only matter far more
than the verse itself, they engulf the verse, even masking its
weaknesses, assuming there are any. In Wagner's Tristan, the quality
of the verse is by far transcended by the extraordinary conception
erected by the dramatist and the composer.
Italy in the 19th century was an opera factory, and the ottocento
librettist often resembled the Hollywood screenwriter, a professional
cranking out hackwork on demand well versed in the tricks of the
trade. In any case, librettists were not ill informed about the genre
to which they contributed, least of all such brilliant librettists as
Da Ponte, Wagner, and Boito. Da Ponte and Mozart both knew they were
doing something absolutely unprecedented when they adapted
Beaumarchais' Figaro, arguably the greatest play of the late 18th
century, for the operatic stage. Neither Wagner's librettos nor
Boito's will stand up as verse today, but they are brilliantly crafted
in other respects. (Wagner's and Boito's verse also exhibits the
inestimable advantage of resorting to the most obvious forms of verbal
music. Most of the subtle "music" characteristic of Auden's finicky
and sophisticated libretto for The Rake's Progress is completely lost
in a live performance, while much of the assonance and alliteration in
Wagner's and Boito's verse carries across the footlights, as when
Margherita and Faust describe "La fuga dei liberi amanti/Speranti,
migranti, raggianti" in the exquisite little "Lontano" duet from
Boito's Mefistofele.)
Late in the 19th century, many composers abandoned the traditional
approach to opera: Wagner had already begun this process by writing
his own libretti. In writing the libretto for Boris, Mussorgsky made
a more direct use of Pushkin than Da Ponte and Boito made of
Beaumarchais and Shakespeare. Finally, Debussy, Strauss, and Berg
swallowed up much of Maeterlinck, Wilde, and Büchner whole. But
nobody attends a performance of Boris or Pélléas or Salome or Wozzeck
because of Pushkin or Maeterlinck or Wilde or Büchner, and, while
Debussy's Pélléas shows no signs of disappearing, nobody goes to plays
by Maeterlinck at all any more.
Most of the ambivalence about the genre opera, most of the suspicion
and disdain with which the audience for spoken theatre and
instrumental music views it, is due, not to the exceedingly rare near
perfect triumphs, of course, but to the flaws in the less perfect
examples without which there would be no repertory. The greater
importance of the composer in the conception of opera has led to an
anomalous circumstance without analogy in the spoken theatre: the
opera based on the disastrous libretto that nevertheless holds the
stage. No libretto has been more ridiculed than Cammarano's libretto
for Verdi's Il Trovatore, but the opera survives because Verdi
believed in something he saw in Gutierrez's El Trovador and set the
wretched libretto supplied him. He breathed life into a cripple.
(Nor is that peculiar species, the rabid fan of Italian opera, either
oblivious to the faults in the librettos of Italian opera or
indifferent to them because he or she cares only about the singing:
these myths are slanders.)
-david gable
Richard Loeb
A member of the list has posted references to an
article by one Heather MacDonald in City Journal.
One gains an understand of where this person
comes from by considering some of the following:
The "City Journal" is the publication of
something called the Manhattan Institute, which
is an extreme-right-wing organization that
receives millions of dollars in funding from a
group of foundations that are well -known as
funding sources for lunatic-right propaganda
operations. Those foundations include the Castle
Rock Foundation (Coors Family), John Olin
Foundation, Bradley Foundation, and the Scaife Foundation.
Among her non-operatic subjects, Ms. MacDonald
has written that "About Abu Gharib: Don't believe
the charges. American troops treat terrorists
with Geneva-convention politeness perhaps too
much so"; and about domestic spying: "Civil
Libertians should shut up and go along with
increased surveillance, because protests will threaten national
security"
In other words just another shrill
über-right-wing harridan of the Coulter variety
(and another non-practicing lawyer, although I
will assume that her Adams Apple is
normal-sized). Given these facts, her opinions
about opera are best consigned, along with the
rest of her mugwump spewings, to the waste-bin.
"Bob Harper" <bob.h...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:D-CdnX5gQZuo7jLb...@comcast.com...
James Kahn
>The real problem is that opera is a grotesque hybrid, an intrinsically
>wrong-headed attempt to meld two very different arts.
These "two very different arts" have been melded for thousands of
years, at least since the ancient Greeks. Who are you to say it's
"wrong-headed"? Okay, so you don't like opera. Don't try to
dress up your lack of appreciation of an art form into some higher
esthetic sense.
>The fact that
>most of the best composers have never written a successful opera during
>their maturity that still regularly is on the boards should tell you
>all you need to know. OTOH, and tellingly, many, perhaps most, of the
>operas in the standard repertory are in fact by composers who do not
>have an equally significant non-operatic presence.
Which proves what, exactly, since it goes both ways? In any case,
there have been a number of composers besides Mozart who have successes
in both opera and instrumental music: Tchaikovsky, Britten, Strauss,
Janacek, to name a few obvious examples.
Christopher Webber
>Shame on the opera houses who hire him! Richard
Have you seen his shows, or are you going on received opinion? I
certainly have, and am favourably disposed to his work as a result of my
experiences.
Richard Loeb
news:C6kxEtAi...@217.169.1.80...
Right - I had the great misfortune to see his Ballo at the ENO - brutal male
rape, men reading newspapers while sitting on the toilet, a corpse being
dragged around the stage at various times. What does male rape have to do
with Ballo???? where is it indicated in the text or the sources????
Richard
Christopher Webber
> In opera, the dramatist is the composer. That is THE fundamental
>condition of the genre.
Sigh. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You are surely aware, David, that
this argument is as old as the hills, and the "purists" are no more
"right" now than they ever were.
There can be no absolute truths regarding such a mixed and pragmatic
form. I saw a "Mahagonny" in Madrid last week staged in a disused
abattoir. The production took its tone from that setting, and Brecht's
stage directions, rather than Weill's music for sure. And it was
entirely appropriate in those circumstances. If you were doing it at
Drottningholm (or the Met) you'd do something different with it.
Talking of the Met, they do operas there (such as those by Mozart) which
in "pure" terms make no sense in the venue whatsoever. It's down to the
talent of the practitioners on both sides of the footlights that they
get away with it.
But I am clearly not going to convince anyone who's made up their mind
about fundamentalist truths!
Christopher Webber
>one production of an opera that featured a row of toilet stalls on
>stage.
That was Bieito's "Masked Ball", which was in fact a highly successful
staging, minutely rehearsed and scrupulously true to the spirit of
Verdi's music. Did you see it, or are you going on received opinion?
Richard Loeb
of Abduction from the Seraglio but here are a few facts about the staging
"Bassa Selim is lord of a brothel, rather than a harem, and keeps Konstanza
on a leash in a cage. Bieito has decided Mozart's opera is about
prostitution and the slave trade, and he has hired real hookers to prove it.
The opera opens with Osmin using one. He sings his first aria naked in the
shower, giving his genitals a good scrub. Later he urinates in a glass and
forces Blonde to drink it. Then, while Konstanza sings "Martern aller
Arten", he hacks up a whore with a knife, finally offering the soprano a
pair of bloodied, severed nipples. No wonder she shoots herself at the end."
Now thats enlightening isn't it?????? It teaches us so much about what
Mozart was trying to tell us in his singspiel. Richard
"Richard Loeb" <loe...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:VNudnZrroaokHS3b...@comcast.com...
Richard Loeb
"Christopher Webber" <zarz...@zarzuela.net.invalid> wrote in message
news:tVfK$zBMEIsGFwG$@217.169.1.80...
"Highly successful" - it sold tickets, all else is just opinion.
"Minutely rehearsed" = what did you want them to do - ad-lib???
"True to the spirit of Verdi's music" - OH REALLY?????????????? Richard
Christopher Webber
>No libretto has been more ridiculed than Cammarano's libretto for
>Verdi's Il Trovatore, but the opera survives because Verdi believed in
>something he saw in Gutierrez's El Trovador and set the wretched
>libretto supplied him. He breathed life into a cripple.
The ridicule here is foolish - not the libretto itself, which deals
splendidly with human archetypes without messing around with that modern
bane, "psychological motivation". Can you show me how and why, and in
what places, Cammarano's work is "crippled"?
But I believe we've been around this particular roundabout before. It's
another penny-in-the-slot rationalisation for people who choose to
believe that "bad" or "trivial" libretti are there to be rescued by
"great" dramatic music. The truth with "Trovatore" (as with "Lucia",
another classy Cammarano effort) is that these composers were inspired
by his libretti to give of their very best.
It's not clear when and how Verdi read the original Spanish play, which
was performed in Madrid, but never in Italy. It's been suggested that a
singer friend of Giuseppina Strepponi saw it in Madrid, and recommended
it to her. She probably translated it for Verdi (presumably) to read. He
sent that hand-written translation straight to Cammarano and off they
went.
gmu...@erols.com
>
> >Let's hope opera management in this country will call this crap what it
> >is and will act accordingly.
>
> This is all because the opera houses won't play modern music: the
> endless repetition of a tiny repertory inevitably tends towards
> decadence.
>
> Nobody needs to tart up 'Die Soldaten', 'The Rake's Progress', or
> Mahagonny; in fact these Xtreme makeovers generally leave even Puccini
> alone due to his relatively modern sensibility.
Interestingly, this was also a point made by a Romanian director,
Lucian Pintilie, better known today for his movies. He staged a
controversial, carnavalesque Carmen at the Welsh National Opera if my
memory is correct. But when he presented a contemporary work at the
Avignon Festival, "Orestia" by Aurel Stroe, he basically saw no need
to re-interpret was was a new work, even though that new work was
inspired by antiquity.
Regards,
George
Christopher Webber
>What does male rape have to do with Ballo????
You may have read something about that Swedish King's biography...
Christopher Webber
>"Highly successful" - it sold tickets, all else is just opinion.
Not quite. It was scrupulously rehearsed, with Bieito (as he always
does) relying on the performers themselves to come up with the goods for
their own characters. Everything is *not* pre-ordained in a Bieito show,
I can tell you that for sure. Nor, with respect, is he that extreme: he
had the chutzpah to treat "Ballo..." as a comic opera with some curious
sexual permutations and a disastrous ending, which is a perfectly
defensible line ... and from the *music*. Listen to Oscar's stuff, for
goodness' sake!
I agree that it sold tickets. Lots of them. Is that bad too?
Christopher Webber
>Now thats enlightening isn't it?????? It teaches us so much about what
>Mozart was trying to tell us in his singspiel.
Which was .... what precisely? How would your interpretation (whatever
that word means, and granting for the moment that it might mean anything
at all) differ from that which you impute to Bieito?
I find his reading - if that's what he said, of course - rather fun than
otherwise. Grand Guignol humour goes back a long way, and as for the
rest, I don't remember ever seeing a production of "Entfuhrung" which
didn't have at least one whip in it somewhere!
david...@aol.com
wrote:
> > In opera, the dramatist is the composer. That is THE fundamental
> >condition of the genre.
>
> Sigh. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You are surely aware, David, that
> this argument is as old as the hills, and the "purists" are no more
> "right" now than they ever were.
This is not an argument, it's a definition. Either an aesthetic
object meets certain conditions or it fails to be a poem or a play or
an opera or a whatever, although the whatever may be some entirely new
genre.
-david gable
david...@aol.com
wrote:
Un Ballo in Maschera is not about the historical king of Sweden. The
sexuality of the historical king of Sweden is entirely irrelevant to
the opera.
-david gable
david...@aol.com
wrote:
> I agree that it sold tickets. Lots of them. Is that bad too?
Of course, many tickets to any production of any opera are sold
because people want to hear the opera and without regard for the
production itself. I go to the opera every chance I get despite the
fact that I virtually never like the productions I see.
-david gable
Richard Loeb
I say again what does male rape have to do with Ballo??? The fact that the
King may have been gay has absolutely nothing to do with it - or do you
think all gays rape other men????? Richard
david...@aol.com
> I say again what does male rape have to do with Ballo??? The fact that the
> King may have been gay has absolutely nothing to do with it - or do you
> think all gays rape other men????? Richard
There's a perfectly good reason for introducing male rape into Ballo,
and that reason has absolutely nothing to do with the opera: to
shock. Pour épater la bougeoisie
-david gable
Richard Loeb
If you find the description of Abduction I just posted here "rather fun"
then our ideas of humor are far apart. And its very different just having a
whip on stage than forcing someone to drink urine - or don't you think
so???? BTW its not for me to explain anything - I didn't stage the work -
its for the director to explain, enlighten, illuminate in his staging
Mozarts ideas regarding this work. - do you honestly think thats what
happened here??? I hope you are not of those who think there is no such
thing as bad direction; just bad perception - if so then our little
conversation here is over. Richard
Richard Loeb
news:h0TZ3EE+...@217.169.1.80...
You can't be serious - you think male rape,and bodies being tossed about is
comic opera????? I never said selling tickets is bad - but tickets sales are
not necessarily an indication of the quality of the show. You know as well
as I do people show up because it is the "place to be." And where again in
Oscars music is any of this nonsense justified??? What about the text??????
I have read a few interviews with him and he says he carries about the score
and gets inspiration from the music - well, bully for him. What about the
text ?? Richard
david...@aol.com
> I hope you are not of those who think there is no such
> thing as bad direction; just bad perception - if so then our little
> conversation here is over. Richard
Richard, you're dealing with a prime defender of the narcissistic anal-
expulsive school of opera production here, the typical architect of
which is the resentful and psychologically wounded little boy who
takes his revenge by mooning the audience and dresses it up with
aesthetic double talk.
-david gable
Christopher Webber
>Un Ballo in Maschera is not about the historical king of Sweden. The
>sexuality of the historical king of Sweden is entirely irrelevant to
>the opera.
What in the music gives you that idea?
Christopher Webber
>I hope you are not of those who think there is no such thing as bad
>direction; just bad perception - if so then our little conversation
>here is over. Richard
Not at all, Richard. Of course there is. I've done some of it myself.
But you did evoke "what Mozart was trying to tell us" as a whip with
which to beat poor old Calixto. I asked you whether you had your own
opinion about "what Mozart was trying to tell us"? I've no inkling
myself, and (ducks for cover) have never so far thought it an important
question either to raise, or answer. I have a fancy Mozart himself might
have giggled if anyone had asked him what he "meant" by it. His answer
might have been along the lines of "500 Talers".
I'm rather more interested in what this (comparatively minor) piece
itself has to entertain us, here and now. That's why the Bieito show
sounds fun. There's nothing there which you mightn't see in a
bog-standard Hollywood shocker, so what appals you so much about people
seeing it on the operatic stage?
Christopher Webber
>I go to the opera every chance I get despite the fact that I virtually
>never like the productions I see.
Ah, a fully paid up Friend of King Gama!
Christopher Webber
>You can't be serious - you think male rape,and bodies being tossed
>about is comic opera?????
Potentially, of course. It all depends on the treatment and context.
Grand Guignol works because of its comic-horror component, does it not?
I'm not at all keen on the Real Thing, but this - you may have noticed -
is happening in a theatre, and I am very keen indeed on Jacobean
tragedy, which certainly deals in all these horrors and worse, often to
hilarious and shocking effect. Have you read any Marston (or indeed
Howard Barker?) Bieito's productions are tame in comparison to what they
thought up!
Richard Loeb
serious and tell us alot about the characters and their relationships. (You
really should give Mozart more credit - this piece is not a little ditty he
just tossed off - so to speak. ) Whether this piece is "major" or "minor" is
of no difference to me. I don't mind how a work is staged to tell the
truth - I have seen outer space Rings, post-Chernobyl melt-down Rings,
etc(yes I'm a Wagnerian) and though none of them were perfect, all had alot
to tell me about the characters and their relationships. But I have a great
big problem when 1) a director decides to put his own agenda on a work
regardless of what is in the text and 2) what we are seeing on stage works
against the music 3) the director thinks his primary purpose is to shock the
audience. I really think that the director read that re Ballo Gustavo was
gay and decided to take that as a launching point for some kind of gay
sadism/masochism fantasia. Its all too boring - I don't care about that (if
I was into that I could get it elsewhere and better too) I don't have to be
shown that. That production failed because it showed me nothing, taught me
nothing, clarified nothing that I didnt't already know. The fact that it had
gratuitous sex and violence on the stage didn't help. As for the Abduction -
I haven't the faintest idea what he was thinking except that he was showing
the audience his fantasies about what went in in a harem????? I have no
other explanation. Who cares what his fantasies are???Richard
Richard Loeb
"Christopher Webber" <zarz...@zarzuela.net.invalid> wrote in message
You have it backwards - if the director want to emphasize that you have to
show us in the music where it is. We don't have to show you where it isn't.
Richard
Richard Loeb
I understand but to achieve the desired effect such material must be treated
very, very carefully. Knocking us over the head with it can have, as in our
directors case, entirely the opposite effect. IMHO Ballo is hardly Grand
Guignol - there is too much real emotion in it to qualify. Richard
Christopher Webber
>Richard, you're dealing with a prime defender of the narcissistic anal-
>expulsive school of opera production here, the typical architect of
>which is the resentful and psychologically wounded little boy who takes
>his revenge by mooning the audience and dresses it up with aesthetic
>double talk.
Assuming that I am cast here in a supporting role, as the "defender" and
not the "architect", what's your evidence that Calixto Bieito, for
example, is "resentful and psychologically wounded"? Or at least, any
more than the rest of us!
Thinking about it, maybe that's why he connects up so well with
audiences... he certainly retains a boyish enthusiasm for life and art.
Perhaps the critics have enjoyed unusually sheltered, cosseted and
uneventful lives to be so shocked by his games?
I rather thought I started off defending Western theatre from
transatlantic neo-cons, but the show seems to have moved on...
Simon Roberts
>
>On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:36:52 -0700, Bob Harper
><bob.h...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>>Let's hope opera management in this country will call this crap what it
>>is and will act accordingly.
>
>This is all because the opera houses won't play modern music: the
>endless repetition of a tiny repertory inevitably tends towards
>decadence.
>
>Nobody needs to tart up 'Die Soldaten', 'The Rake's Progress', or
>Mahagonny; in fact these Xtreme makeovers generally leave even Puccini
>alone due to his relatively modern sensibility.
Good point, but this "tarting up" is also done to new performances of unfamiliar
old music (or somewhat familiar music that's rarely staged) - e.g., the recent
Handel revival, and the Salzburg Zaide on DG DVDs (forget the staging; it even
has contemporary music woven through it).
Simon
Christopher Webber
>You have it backwards - if the director want to emphasize that you have
>to show us in the music where it is. We don't have to show you where
>it isn't.
My point was of course rhetorical. I am not a person who believes that
music can "tell us" anything, text or no text, except what we as
listeners choose to read into it.
You have I think said or implied that Ballo is not "about" a
historically homosexual Swedish Monarch, and I'd tend to agree with you
(though we must admit that Scribe's addition of a [Page] Boy Friend for
the King was gleefully seized on by both Auber and Verdi, who both gave
Oscar the most distinctively characterful music in their respective
operas.)
What, then, is Ballo "about"? Need it be "about" anything at all, to be
the great opera which it is? Does it need to justify itself on moral
grounds, rather than purely aesthetic ones? I note that you wrote with
distaste of the "gratuitous sex and violence" in the Bieito Ballo. Is
stage sex and violence OK then if it is *not* morally gratuitous? Who is
to decide where the gratuity line lies? Do you think we should have the
Lord Chamberlain back?
One of the paradoxes of this debate, it occurs to me, is that Bieito et.
al. are being attacked, not because they believe these pieces are
"about" something, but because those offended by their work seem to
think that the operas are "about" something else! But what??
That Bieito has the communicative talent (and the opportunity) to share
his feelings concerning what these works are "about" with audiences
across the world, seems to be his misfortune, in the eyes of his
detractors, rather than something to celebrate. Doubtless if he was a
film auteur people would be queuing up to praise him...
Well, there's another dose of "aesthetic double-speak" for Mr Gable to
enjoy!
Christopher Webber
>I understand but to achieve the desired effect such material must be
>treated very, very carefully. Knocking us over the head with it can
>have, as in our directors case, entirely the opposite effect. IMHO
>Ballo is hardly Grand Guignol - there is too much real emotion in it to
>qualify.
Does Grand Guignol preclude "real emotion"? I would have thought that
"Phantom of the Opera" for example (even my namesake's horrific effort,
but more notably the wonderful Ken Hill version) has plenty of that...
but "real emotion" is an interesting phrase. "Real" as opposed to what?
Laughing at what we most fear is not evidence of emotional anaesthesia,
I would say, rather the reverse.
Christopher Webber
>the Salzburg Zaide on DG DVDs (forget the staging; it even has
>contemporary music woven through it).
As an incomplete torso (no arms or legs hacked off here!) it is surely
Fair Game?
Bob Harper
> I found the following on another group which may be of interest::
>
>
> A member of the list has posted references to an
> article by one Heather MacDonald in City Journal.
>
> One gains an understand of where this person
> comes from by considering some of the following:
>
> The "City Journal" is the publication of
> something called the Manhattan Institute, which
> is an extreme-right-wing organization that
> receives millions of dollars in funding from a
> group of foundations that are well -known as
> funding sources for lunatic-right propaganda
> operations. Those foundations include the Castle
> Rock Foundation (Coors Family), John Olin
> Foundation, Bradley Foundation, and the Scaife Foundation.
>
> Among her non-operatic subjects, Ms. MacDonald
> has written that "About Abu Gharib: Don't believe
> the charges. American troops treat terrorists
> with Geneva-convention politeness perhaps too
> much so"; and about domestic spying: "Civil
> Libertians should shut up and go along with
> increased surveillance, because protests will threaten national
> security"
>
> In other words just another shrill
> über-right-wing harridan of the Coulter variety
> (and another non-practicing lawyer, although I
> will assume that her Adams Apple is
> normal-sized). Given these facts, her opinions
> about opera are best consigned, along with the
> rest of her mugwump spewings, to the waste-bin.
>
>
>
And the point is?
Bob Harper
Richard Loeb
news:IlGDjBKr...@217.169.1.80...
Of course Ballo doesn't have to be "about" anything - (I take that to mean
it needs no agenda) - no it can just play in a traditional production and.
depending on the director, make its dramatic points. And there is a danger
in that of course in that it can be all too "comfortable" and easy where the
audience just sits back and takes it in. As I said I am all for innovation
but the line that divides the points necessary to make points germane to the
work and points added in that have no basis in the text or sources can be a
fine one or one etched in a gully three feet deep. Where that line is is up
to each listener - I never said we need a Lord Chamberlain (can you
imagine????) just expressing my opinions with, I hope, sensible reasons for
stating them. And to think we went all through this without
name-calling!!!!!! Richard
Richard Loeb
For me it does (preclude real emotion)- I don't connect at all emotionally
to Grand Guignol - its all artifice in a very high form (and Phantom did not
send me into paroxysms of emotional distress) - in the eyes of the beholder
I think Richard
Bob Harper
(snip)
>
> Richard, you're dealing with a prime defender of the narcissistic anal-
> expulsive school of opera production here, the typical architect of
> which is the resentful and psychologically wounded little boy who
> takes his revenge by mooning the audience and dresses it up with
> aesthetic double talk.
>
> -david gable
>
Bingo! David, you and I may disagree about much, but I thank you for
your defense of opera from those who would pervert it--emphatically
including Sr. Bieito and his acolytes like Mr. Webber.
Bob Harper
Simon Roberts
>
>Simon Roberts <sd...@comcast.net> writes:
>>the Salzburg Zaide on DG DVDs (forget the staging; it even has
>>contemporary music woven through it).
>
>As an incomplete torso (no arms or legs hacked off here!) it is surely
>Fair Game?
I suppose any music is "fair game" (whatever that means) for anything; but since
the added music is in a style that is entirely foreign to Mozart's, the effect
is if nothing else a trifle jarring, like finishing Bruckner 9 with half an hour
of random movements by Vivaldi.
Simon
Simon Roberts
>
>A. Brain <abr...@NOSPAMatt.net> writes:
>>one production of an opera that featured a row of toilet stalls on
>>stage.
>
>That was Bieito's "Masked Ball", which was in fact a highly successful
>staging, minutely rehearsed and scrupulously true to the spirit of
>Verdi's music.
I dare say it's defensible or even laudable on various grounds, but in what
way(s) was a row of occupied toilets *scrupulously* true to the spirit of
Verdi's *music*?
Simon
Eric Grunin
> On Aug 1, 5:18 am, Eric Grunin wrote:
>
> > Close: the director can't conceive of an audience not being bored by
> > Shickaneder, da Ponte, Piave, Boito, or Wagner the librettist
> In my opinion, this exhibits a profound misunderstanding of the genre,
> opera.
<<very intresting comments snipped>>
Just in case it wasn't clear: My comments are an attempt to describe
the director's perspective, which is very different from mine.
It occurs to me now that the screed which provoked this thread is a
cheap shot. Bad productions are naturally quarantined by poor audience
response -- management has a limited tolerance for declining
attendance.
Regards,
Eric Grunin
www.grunin.com/eroica
Christopher Webber
>I suppose any music is "fair game" (whatever that means) for anything;
>but since the added music is in a style that is entirely foreign to
>Mozart's, the effect is if nothing else a trifle jarring, like
>finishing Bruckner 9 with half an hour of random movements by Vivaldi.
Mmm. Decidedly post-modern! The early 21st c. seems very keen on this
musical timeshifts: what did you think of Berio's "Turandot"? I must say
that I found it effective and oddly beautiful. To take the music onto a
different plane entirely seemed an emotionally satisfying conclusion.
I recall a "Zaide" production in London years ago, with a new script
written by Italo Calvino, which juxtaposed various bits of the Mozart
score in shifting order to create (very convincing) alternative
scenarios. The process was utterly absorbing, and a good lesson about
how, with music, context is almost everything.
I agree, though, that an unfinished work such as "Zaide" is a better
candidate for radical deconstruction than a Bruckner symphony.
jrs...@aol.com
> I agree, though, that an unfinished work such as "Zaide" is a better
> candidate for radical deconstruction than a Bruckner symphony.
Keep in mind that the example raised was Bruckner 9, which is
unfinished.
--Jeff
Richard Loeb
If I can jump in,
I have expressed my problems with the end of Turandot previously here - in
my opinion Puccini painted himslef into a dramatic corner which all the
music in the world and all the directors cannot fix - I didn't mind the
Berio but it did seem to go on and overstay its welcome. I don't think I
have ever heard the complete Alfano ending (am I right in that??? isn't
there a more complete version than normally heard on recordings and in
performance) Richard
Bob Harper
all. It was, rather, an eloquent protest against the 'trendy nihilism'
espoused by Calixto Bieito and his ilk. It should come as no surprise
that those who find the very notion of standards abhorrent should rail
against it, nor that they resort to ad hominem attacks in justification
of their venom.
Bob Harper
Christopher Webber
>I dare say it's defensible or even laudable on various grounds, but in
>what way(s) was a row of occupied toilets *scrupulously* true to the
>spirit of Verdi's *music*?
Oh dear, I'd hope we'd flushed those toilets away. Well here goes...
Simon, maybe you need to look under those toilet seats to study what
lies beneath. The undeniable fact that the image always got a beaming
laugh from the audience (even the occasional round of applause) was due
to its comedic rightness more than its shock value. It was funny, and
intentionally so.
Humour is difficult to analyse, but I'm sure you'd agree that it's very
much a component of this particular score. Verdi's dark-dwarf music for
his rebellious male choruses conveys quite graphically (a) a sense of
masculine club, (b) secrecy, (c) solemnity, and (d) the ludicrous
conspiratorial air. Verdi himself, unusually for him, is commenting
directly on their goings on (c. f. the unusually saturnine scoring) as
he also does, for instance, with the Council of Ten in "I Due Foscari".
The infamous image hit all that comedic sense off quite beautifully --
in my opinion, of course. Really, the solemnity with which some people
have condemned it with bell, book and candle (as it the sky were about
to fall in) is almost as funny as the image itself.
Christopher Webber
>I thank you for your defense of opera from those who would pervert
>it--emphatically including Sr. Bieito and his acolytes like Mr. Webber.
And I thank you, Bob! You've quite made my day - I've never to the best
of my knowledge been called an "acolyte" before, though I have been
called a lot of other things. I am genuinely flattered. Do I get a cowl?
And would you prefer me to pay you in cash, or in kind?
--
"THE ZARZUELA COMPANION" (Scarecrow Press)
Christopher Webber, Foreword by Placido Domingo
http://www.zarzuela.net
Christopher Webber
>I have expressed my problems with the end of Turandot previously here -
>in my opinion Puccini painted himslef into a dramatic corner which all
>the music in the world and all the directors cannot fix - I didn't mind
>the Berio but it did seem to go on and overstay its welcome. I don't
>think I have ever heard the complete Alfano ending (am I right in
>that??? isn't there a more complete version than normally heard on
>recordings and in performance)
I agree with you 100% about Puccini's self-painted corner, and also that
the Berio could have been shorter. The "complete" Alfano version is
longer, yes, but struck me as not less unsatisfying than the standard
conclusion. I think it may be downloadable through Operashare, but
others will know more than I do about that.
Bob Harper
> Bob Harper <bob.h...@comcast.net> writes:
>> I thank you for your defense of opera from those who would pervert
>> it--emphatically including Sr. Bieito and his acolytes like Mr. Webber.
>
> And I thank you, Bob! You've quite made my day - I've never to the best
> of my knowledge been called an "acolyte" before, though I have been
> called a lot of other things. I am genuinely flattered. Do I get a cowl?
> And would you prefer me to pay you in cash, or in kind?
Well, that you seem to have a sense of humor (American Exceptionalism at
work again in the spelling, I'm afraid) argues that not all is lost :)
No cowl, I'm afraid, only cassock and surplice are appropriate. No
payment necessary; that might be interpreted as simony. :)
Bob Harper
Simon Roberts
>
>Simon Roberts <sd...@comcast.net> writes:
>>I dare say it's defensible or even laudable on various grounds, but in
>>what way(s) was a row of occupied toilets *scrupulously* true to the
>>spirit of Verdi's *music*?
>
>Oh dear, I'd hope we'd flushed those toilets away.
Sorry, you can't; if you're going to defend a production on the grounds of its
"scrupulous" truthfulness, you're stuck with defending all of it.
>Simon, maybe you need to look under those toilet seats to study what
>lies beneath. The undeniable fact that the image always got a beaming
>laugh from the audience (even the occasional round of applause) was due
>to its comedic rightness more than its shock value. It was funny, and
>intentionally so.
I dare say. But (a) you don't in fact know why "the audience" was laughing
(they may have found it just funny, like graffiti on the Mona Lisa, rather than
have been appreciating its "comedic rightness"; or did you poll them?) and (b)
you seem to have an unconventional understanding of what "scrupulous" means,
which was the point of my original comment.
Simon
Allen
Allen
Christopher Webber
>(b) you seem to have an unconventional understanding of what
>"scrupulous" means, which was the point of my original comment.
As an "acolyte" of Mr Bieito, perhaps I should pay the Simon-y Bob
Harper rejects to you instead!
Like Humpty-Dumpty in "Alice", when I use a word it means just what I
choose it to mean, neither more nor less. Unlike him, I hope I go on to
explain that word by extrapolation, if not by bald dictionary
definition. In this case, I'd hoped the carefully constructed (unquoted)
remainder of my post had explained what I meant. Alas, it seems that you
yourself have scrupulously ignored it, and I'm too bored with ENO's
toilets to rake through them all again.
Feel free to re-read my first reply if you're interested in thinking
about how what you saw scrupulously followed where Verdi led, but I
think we're disagreeing on semantics rather than the intellectual and
emotional contents of that on-stage plumbing.
[And people at ENO do know their opera, you know. It's not like Covent
Garden. The laughter was genuine, and informed, at least when I heard
it.]
Simon Roberts
>
>Simon Roberts <sd...@comcast.net> writes:
>>(b) you seem to have an unconventional understanding of what
>>"scrupulous" means, which was the point of my original comment.
>
>As an "acolyte" of Mr Bieito, perhaps I should pay the Simon-y Bob
>Harper rejects to you instead!
For what it's worth, I don't agree with Bob re "Regietheater" and often find the
results interesting, persuasive and even revelatory (and months ago came to the
defense of the Entfuehrung production that got whatsername's knickers in a twist
in the article cited at the start of the thread). Not scrupulous, though.
>Like Humpty-Dumpty in "Alice", when I use a word it means just what I
>choose it to mean, neither more nor less.
Which is a trifle unfortunate, given the word in question....
Unlike him, I hope I go on to
>explain that word by extrapolation, if not by bald dictionary
>definition. In this case, I'd hoped the carefully constructed (unquoted)
>remainder of my post had explained what I meant. Alas, it seems that you
>yourself have scrupulously ignored it,
I omitted it because it was irrelevant to the point I was making. Your comments
were interesting, but hardly showed that what the director did was "scrupulous."
>[And people at ENO do know their opera, you know. It's not like Covent
>Garden. The laughter was genuine, and informed, at least when I heard
>it.]
I didn't doubt that the laughter was genuine. I was questioning how you knew
that "the audience" (all of it, as opposed to bits of it) was laughing for the
reasons you gave.
Simon
david...@aol.com
wrote:
> [And people at ENO do know their opera, you know. It's not like Covent
> Garden.
Note the reverse snobbery here.
> The laughter was genuine, and informed, at least when I heard
> it.]
You can tell all of this from hearing an audience laugh.
-david gable
Ian Pace
in Die Entfuhrung - both of these productions (neither of which I have seen,
I should point out) sound like cheap sensationalism masquerading as
radicalism. But I will defend having explicit sexual matters on stage in
opera (though not so much in the 'bums on stage = bums on seats' David
Freeman approach) and also modern reinterpretations by directors. It's all a
matter of how it's done, and what it achieves.
Ian
Ian Pace
"Christopher Webber" <zarz...@zarzuela.net.invalid> wrote in message
> Richard Loeb <loe...@comcast.net> writes:
>>You have it backwards - if the director want to emphasize that you have to
>>show us in the music where it is. We don't have to show you where it
>>isn't.
>
> My point was of course rhetorical. I am not a person who believes that
> music can "tell us" anything, text or no text, except what we as listeners
> choose to read into it.
>
Ian
Ian Pace
"EM" <emmemmme...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:46b0bea3$0$37747$5fc...@dreader2.news.tiscali.nl...
> "Richard Loeb" <loe...@comcast.net> - Wed, 1 Aug 2007 08:18:33 -0400:
>
>> In other words just another shrill
>> über-right-wing harridan
>
> which is why I wrote in my initial reaction to the article: "I have no
> idea who Heather MacDonald is, but I presume some reactionary dumb
> twit who thinks Europe is a degenerate country with a perverted
> culture."
It's a problem when articles like this seem almost to give cheap
sensationalism a good name, isn't it?
Ian
Christopher Webber
>> The laughter was genuine, and informed, at least when I heard
>> it.]
>You can tell all of this from hearing an audience laugh.
Yes, David, I can. After years of being laughed at, on stage and off, I
am highly sensitised to its multitudinous guises, and feel well
qualified to judge.
ex-neo-con
> "EM" <emmemmmemnmme...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:46b0bea3$0$37747$5fc...@dreader2.news.tiscali.nl...
>
> > "Richard Loeb" <loeb...@comcast.net> - Wed, 1 Aug 2007 08:18:33 -0400:
>
> >> In other words just another shrill
> >> über-right-wing harridan
>
> > Thanks for clearing that up. I suspected something along those lines,
> > which is why I wrote in my initial reaction to the article: "I have no
> > idea who Heather MacDonald is, but I presume some reactionary dumb
> > twit who thinks Europe is a degenerate country with a perverted
> > culture."
>
> It's a problem when articles like this seem almost to give cheap
> sensationalism a good name, isn't it?
>
> Ian
Well, yes, that's the heart of the issue. Evidently Ms. MacDonald has
forgotten that there's no such thing as bad publicity. In fact, I'm
surprised that MacDonald isn't celebrating the production: coming from
a quarter that's committed to defending capitalism, why didn't she
notice that the production makes for great box office. (Of course,
the real problem for her [of which she's unaware] is that productions
like the Entfuhrung she cites can't be tolerated because they
undermine the Protestant virtues that are so necessary for Western
capitalism to thrive.)
I have no problems in principle with _Regietheater_. In fact, I've
greatly admired some of the productions I've seen (admittedly on DVD)
by Kupfer (Bayreuth Hollander, Bayreuth Rheingold, and Vienna
Elektra), Flimm (Met Fidelio), and Chereau (Bayreuth Ring). In fact,
I I wouldn't want to see naturalistic productions of a lot of works,
especially Wagner. And, yes, I've seen videos of more radical
productions that failed (e.g., Peter Mussbach's Frankfurt Wozzeck)
while their more realistic counterparts shined (e.g., Adolf Dresen's
Vienna Wozzeck).
The main problem I have with the production MacDonald describes is
that the concept seems so stupid. Surely there are many more subtle
and not-so-subtle and effective ways than the Bieito's to update
Entführung and to mine it for some important political messages.
Anyone who has spent much time in academe knows that there are plenty
of incompetents and mediocrities out there who've risen to prominence
despite the meagerness of their achievements. (Usually they're good
at politics and self-publicity.) Likewise, there are a lot of
wrongheaded but brilliant and enormously capable folks who've made it
to the top because their work has proved so marketable. The same is
true in the operatic and wider classical music worlds.
Let's face it: Bieito is no Chereau. Or Kupfer. Or Flimm. Or Sellars.
But the guy is a _Kleinmeister_. We don't cast aspersions _ottocento_
opera because of Rossini's, Donizetti's, Bellini's and Verdi's lesser
(and now forgotten) Italian contemporaries. Neither should we do the
same with respect to _Regietheater_.
I am the ...
ex-neo-con
Johannes Roehl
> I can't see any good reason for having male rape in Un ballo, or
> urophilia in Die Entfuhrung - both of these productions (neither of
> which I have seen, I should point out) sound like cheap sensationalism
> masquerading as radicalism.
As one of the few persons in this group who has actually SEEN Bieito's
Entführung in Berlin, I may not be qualified for writing in this
thread, but a few remarks anyway:
It made a little scandal at first, but nevertheless became to be quite
popular and apparently audiences liked it a lot. It is somewhat cheap to
claim that all these people were sensationalist idiots. This is
obviously an ad-hoc-move to save the idea that guys like Bieito are
"destroying opera" and scaring audiences away etc.(Very much like the
claim that people who like e.g. Schoenberg or Stockhausen only pretend
to do so, because as we all know noone really likes this terrible
noise). And note that this is a rather inhomogeneous audience as the
"Komische Oper" was the socialist "People's Opera". It's not only an
artsy crowd, university students and academics etc., but people whom you
wouldn't expect to attend opera at all in more stratified societies
(like Britain and, as far as the arts go, apparently the US as well).
In my limited experience it is impossible to judge a staging like this
Entführung without having actually seen it. I was of course sceptical as
well after the rumours and the press and so on, but it was actually much
better than it sounded from descriptions. It is even quite funny at
times, but obviously the darker elements are stressed, but it really is
no way as disgusting as some descriptions let it seem.
I agree that Bieito is exaggerating and neglecting the lighter, comical
side of the piece, but then traditional stagings have it the other way
round which is one-sided as well.
Because this is not a simple Singspiel as far as the music is concerned.
The "Martern"-Aria is a full-scale tragic opera seria piece. And if it
may be somewhat crude to actually torture another woman of the seraglio
(or here brothel) to illustrate Konstanze's anguish, it takes her
predicament seriously. If she doesn't feel threatened by the Bassa,
what's the whole point of the piece? If it wasn't really serious, why is
the clemency of the Bassa so impressive? Obviously Bieito disagrees on
that later point, he sees the "happy ending" as a sham. In the
atmosphere of sexual repression and torture of his seraglio there can be
no happy ending, obviously. In the discussion after the performance a
guy from the Komische Oper made the point that the finale seems
comparably shallow as far as the music is concerned, so the doubts about
a happy ending may have some foundation.
(I actually prefer the idea that the ending is flawed because Konstanze
DID actually fall in love with the Bassa, but feels bound by her promise
to stay with Belmonte, but that'S not Bieito...)
Certainly Bieito is not terribly subtle here and I would never defend it
as the best way to do Entführung, but the whole thing comes off
amazingly well and rather consistent. But you have to experience it.
There's no short cut.
Johannes
Ian Pace
"Johannes Roehl" <parr...@web.de> wrote in message
news:5hcd7lF...@mid.individual.net...
> The "Martern"-Aria is a full-scale tragic opera seria piece.
I find it hard to hear it that way. Does no-one else think that aria is
very, well, camp?
ex-neo-con
>
> The real problem is that opera is a grotesque hybrid, an intrinsically
> wrong-headed attempt to meld two very different arts.
I'm not sure that you can say this without flattening out the history
of the genre. You're presupposing way too much here, including the
relatively recent (I mean the past two-and-a-half centuries or so)
ways we conceive things such as music, text, drama, dance, etc. You
just can't project the conceptual world of twenty-first Western
society onto, say, Monteverdi or Lully or Rameau or Gluck or even
Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi.
> The fact that
> most of the best composers have never written a successful opera during
> their maturity that still regularly is on the boards should tell you
> all you need to know. OTOH, and tellingly, many, perhaps most, of the
> operas in the standard repertory are in fact by composers who do not
> have an equally significant non-operatic presence.
This argument doesn't square with the way composers took on the
projects they did. This is sort of like saying, "Verdi was an
inferior composer because he didn't write any symphonies"--that is,
because he wasn't formed by an Austro-Germanic culture, where the
prestige of instrumental music was so high, he must be second rate.
Likewise, one could argue that Brahms was superior because he wrote so
many instrumental works and never turned his hand to opera, perhaps
because he was very much formed by nineteenth-century German liberal
culture.
Composers don't do what they do for purely aesthetic reasons. That's
an argument worthy of, well, Heather MacDonald.
ex-neo-con
Eric Grunin
> Eric Grunin wrote:
> > It occurs to me now that the screed which provoked this thread is a
> > cheap shot
> As the OP, I don't think Heather Mac Donald's piece was a cheap shot at
> all. It was, rather, an eloquent protest against the 'trendy nihilism'
> espoused by Calixto Bieito and his ilk.
'Trendy nihilism'?? Ridiculous. A vulgar surrealist, perhaps.
> that those who find the very notion of standards abhorrent should rail
> against it, nor that they resort to ad hominem attacks in justification
> of their venom.
I have no idea what you're talking about, as I see no ad hominem in my
posts, and if you think rmcr posters find "the very notion of
standards abhorrent" we're not speaking the same language.
Ms MacDonald may be a very nice person. But what makes this a 'cheap
shot' is that she has literally fifty years of opera history from
which to pick the most bizarre productions, so it's an easy task with
a misleading result.
Regards,
Eric Grunin
www.grunin.com/eroica
Richard Loeb
news:kf7si.15532$gX5....@newsfe2-win.ntli.net...
I don't know about that but its very hard to bring off dramatically - first
you have a very long introduction as long as the aria itself so that
dissipates any anger on Konstanze's part that lead into the aria- then you
have the aria itself during which Bassa Selim must be given some kind of
superfluous stage action to do just to fill in time. There are other areas
of this score that show us that this is not the mature Mozart (some of the
aria placements) Although I certainly agree that a production must be seen
to fully appreciate or despise, I can't help feeling the writer is really
pulling hard on the directors behalf. There is too much intimated apologia
throughout. Richard
david...@aol.com
> > "Johannes Roehl" <parrhe...@web.de> wrote in message
> >news:5hcd7lF...@mid.individual.net...
> >> The "Martern"-Aria is a full-scale tragic opera seria piece.
Of course it is.
> > I find it hard to hear it that way. Does no-one else think that aria is
> > very, well, camp?
No. Nor could anybody before the late 20th century have thought it
was. Konstanze deadly earnest, and so is Mozart.
-david gable
number_six
do spare an occasional thought for the defense of the West /itself/.
If Europe and North America were under Sharia, then you would not even
be having this conversation.
Lookingglass
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1185969386.2...@r34g2000hsd.googlegroups.com...
On Aug 1, 5:18 am, Eric Grunin wrote:
> Close: the director can't conceive of an audience not being bored by
> Shickaneder, da Ponte, Piave, Boito, or Wagner the librettist, either
> because their stories are shallow, badly told, repellent, or
> deadeningly overfamiliar. In his heart he cannot fall back on the
> wonderful music because that is the one aspect of the production from
> which he is explicitly excluded.
In my opinion, this exhibits a profound misunderstanding of the genre,
opera. In opera, the dramatist is the composer, not the librettist,
and in the case of every one of the best known operas of Mozart,
Verdi, and Wagner, the composer played an active role in shaping the
libretto while it was being written. (Wagner, of course, was his own
librettist.) Figaro, Tristan, and Otello stand comparison to the
greatest works of spoken drama, not because of Da Ponte, Wagner the
librettist, or Boito, but because of what Mozart, Wagner the composer,
and Verdi made of what these librettists supplied them.
The libretto does matter, of course, but the function of the libretto
does not require it to stand comparison to the text of a play by
Shakespeare, Ibsen, or Beckett. A libretto is not a play: it consists
of words written to be set, words that are "musicabili," music-able,
as Verdi would have said, not words intended to stand on their own.
Librettists are conscious of their role in adapting what they write to
the demands of the genre, conscious of their role in providing the
bare bones the composer needs to erect his drama: the composer is
responsible for the living flesh. The principal if not the only
function of the libretto of Otello was to preserve the bare bones of
Shakespeare's plot so that Verdi's music could play a role analogous
to Shakespeare's verse.
Boulez has interestingly distinguished among three Wagner's, Wagner
the composer, Wagner the poet, and, mediating between these two,
Wagner the dramatist, the Wagner who conceived the drama the composer
wanted to write. Wagner the versifier may have been the least gifted
of these three, but he also matters the least, because, in an opera,
the composer's settings of the poet's verse not only matter far more
than the verse itself, they engulf the verse, even masking its
weaknesses, assuming there are any. In Wagner's Tristan, the quality
of the verse is by far transcended by the extraordinary conception
erected by the dramatist and the composer.
Italy in the 19th century was an opera factory, and the ottocento
librettist often resembled the Hollywood screenwriter, a professional
cranking out hackwork on demand well versed in the tricks of the
trade. In any case, librettists were not ill informed about the genre
to which they contributed, least of all such brilliant librettists as
Da Ponte, Wagner, and Boito. Da Ponte and Mozart both knew they were
doing something absolutely unprecedented when they adapted
Beaumarchais' Figaro, arguably the greatest play of the late 18th
century, for the operatic stage. Neither Wagner's librettos nor
Boito's will stand up as verse today, but they are brilliantly crafted
in other respects. (Wagner's and Boito's verse also exhibits the
inestimable advantage of resorting to the most obvious forms of verbal
music. Most of the subtle "music" characteristic of Auden's finicky
and sophisticated libretto for The Rake's Progress is completely lost
in a live performance, while much of the assonance and alliteration in
Wagner's and Boito's verse carries across the footlights, as when
Margherita and Faust describe "La fuga dei liberi amanti/Speranti,
migranti, raggianti" in the exquisite little "Lontano" duet from
Boito's Mefistofele.)
Late in the 19th century, many composers abandoned the traditional
approach to opera: Wagner had already begun this process by writing
his own libretti. In writing the libretto for Boris, Mussorgsky made
a more direct use of Pushkin than Da Ponte and Boito made of
Beaumarchais and Shakespeare. Finally, Debussy, Strauss, and Berg
swallowed up much of Maeterlinck, Wilde, and Büchner whole. But
nobody attends a performance of Boris or Pélléas or Salome or Wozzeck
because of Pushkin or Maeterlinck or Wilde or Büchner, and, while
Debussy's Pélléas shows no signs of disappearing, nobody goes to plays
by Maeterlinck at all any more.
Most of the ambivalence about the genre opera, most of the suspicion
and disdain with which the audience for spoken theatre and
instrumental music views it, is due, not to the exceedingly rare near
perfect triumphs, of course, but to the flaws in the less perfect
examples without which there would be no repertory. The greater
importance of the composer in the conception of opera has led to an
anomalous circumstance without analogy in the spoken theatre: the
opera based on the disastrous libretto that nevertheless holds the
stage. No libretto has been more ridiculed than Cammarano's libretto
for Verdi's Il Trovatore, but the opera survives because Verdi
believed in something he saw in Gutierrez's El Trovador and set the
wretched libretto supplied him. He breathed life into a cripple.
(Nor is that peculiar species, the rabid fan of Italian opera, either
oblivious to the faults in the librettos of Italian opera or
indifferent to them because he or she cares only about the singing:
these myths are slanders.)
-david gable
Thank you for an enlightening essay.
Bob Harper
Bob Harper
Lookingglass
david...@aol.com
> I don't know about that but its very hard to bring off dramatically - first
> you have a very long introduction as long as the aria itself so that
> dissipates any anger on Konstanze's part that lead into the aria- then you
> have the aria itself during which Bassa Selim must be given some kind of
> superfluous stage action to do just to fill in time. There are other areas
> of this score that show us that this is not the mature Mozart (some of the
> aria placements) Although I certainly agree that a production must be seen
> to fully appreciate or despise, I can't help feeling the writer is really
> pulling hard on the directors behalf. There is too much intimated apologia
> throughout. Richard
Compositionally, there is absolutely nothing at all immature about
"Martern aller arten," which is an incredibly elaborate sonata form in
concertante style.
-david gable
Eric Grunin
This may be hard to believe, but yes, you really can tell, especially
if you've had a lot of stage experience (as Christopher claims and as
I have).
Regards,
Eric Grunin
www.grunin.com/eroica
Eric Grunin
> On Aug 1, 9:07 am, Christopher Webber <zarzu...@zarzuela.net.invalid>
> wrote:
>
> > I agree that it sold tickets. Lots of them. Is that bad too?
>
> Of course, many tickets to any production of any opera are sold
> because people want to hear the opera and without regard for the
> production itself. I go to the opera every chance I get despite the
> fact that I virtually never like the productions I see.
You're not making a strong case here -- you might see a badly directed
rarity, but would you bother with a stupid Figaro?
I note again that [1] it's the warhorses which are beaten to death by
these eccentric directors [2] it's the lack of new repertory that has
produced these monsters. Kind of like inbreeding.
Regards,
Eric Grunin
www.grunin.com/eroica
Eric Grunin
<<eyewitness impression snipped>>
> Certainly Bieito is not terribly subtle here and I would never defend it
> as the best way to do Entführung, but the whole thing comes off
> amazingly well and rather consistent. But you have to experience it.
> There's no short cut.
Thank you for posting this.
Regards,
Eric Grunin
www.grunin.com/eroica
A. Brain
"Christopher Webber" <zarz...@zarzuela.net.invalid> wrote in message
> A. Brain <abr...@NOSPAMatt.net> writes:
>>one production of an opera that featured a row of toilet stalls on
>>stage.
>
> That was Bieito's "Masked Ball", which was in fact a highly successful
> staging, minutely rehearsed and scrupulously true to the spirit of
> Verdi's music. Did you see it, or are you going on received opinion?
I must have seen it, but I don't recall the details.
Was he the guy who did the Macbeth in a mental
hospital too?
I'll check with Houston Grand Opera and find out
what I can.
I'm not averse to subtle new "takes" on characters
or motivations. A "Ball" in Chicago took the
homoerotic thing with Oskar a little too far for
some tastes, but I barely noticed it. And a
recent "Aida" here might have been improved,
I think, by a suggestion of Amneris having an
interest in Aida. (Lesbian sex is always a hit
in the U.S., on screen, on television, porn
channels, etc.)
But Peter Sellars and (apparently) this Bieto
guy are for the birds.
I'm off to Santa Fe in a couple of weeks where
I've seen very little "Eurotrash" though last year's
"Flute" came close. Usually, we see highly effective
but "traditional" stagings and productions there
as well as here in the "Bayou City".
--
A. Brain
Remove NOSPAM for email.
Richard Loeb
news:MPG.211b42d7e...@news.sf.sbcglobal.net...
>> In article <xdWdnWR2_bOmDS3b...@comcast.com>,
>> loe...@comcast.net says...
>> "Christopher Webber" <zarz...@zarzuela.net.invalid> wrote in message
>> > Richard Loeb writes:
>> >>Now thats enlightening isn't it?????? It teaches us so much about what
>> >>Mozart was trying to tell us in his singspiel.
>> >
>> > Which was .... what precisely? How would your interpretation (whatever
>> > that word means, and granting for the moment that it might mean
>> > anything
>> > at all) differ from that which you impute to Bieito?
>> >
>> > I find his reading - if that's what he said, of course - rather fun
>> > than
>> > otherwise. Grand Guignol humour goes back a long way, and as for the
>> > rest,
>> > I don't remember ever seeing a production of "Entfuhrung" which didn't
>> > have at least one whip in it somewhere!
>> > --
>> > ___________________________
>> > Christopher Webber, Blackheath, London, UK.
>> > http://www.zarzuela.net
>>
>> then our ideas of humor are far apart. And its very different just having
>> a
>> whip on stage than forcing someone to drink urine - or don't you think
>> so????
>
> It's not real urine, you know, and nobody is really being forced. Get
> a grip. And read some Artaud.
>
> wr
Who said they were real?? "Get a grip": is no way to continue a discussion.
If you have something substantive to add go on, otherwise in the kill file
you will happily go. Don't waste my time. Richard