Teresa Berganza, one of the truly great mezzo-sopranos of the 20th century and now in her late 70s, has given a controversial interview to Le Figaro. In it she castigates today's opera directors, at least the ones who "respect neither the time nor the music." She's not the first, she won't be the last, but she's over-simplifying and distorting every bit as much as she accuses the objects of her ire of doing.
Here's her contention (translated and slightly paraphrased): "I do not love what they do today, these stagings that respect neither the time nor the music. For me, opera is a religion, and it must be respected as such. Would we say to young people, 'The painter Tintoretto is too outdated, let's add some red or bright yellow to them to keep up with the latest trends?' The ones who do that should end up in prison. We should do the same with some directors."
There has been much approving buzz on social media. "Quite right," say the purists, "directors are there simply to facilitate the singers and allow them to serve the music. That's all we want!" But it is lazy and it is wrong simply to say that any and every director who changes a period setting, or for that matter who introduces, let's say green blood to Verdi's Macbeth (step forward, David Pountney) is a vandal daubing paint on a masterpiece.
The confused phrase for me is "these stagings that respect neither the time nor the music." Those are two different things. If by "respecting the time" she means that every opera should be set in period, well, stagecraft has moved on. Post-Jonathan Miller, Peter Brook and countless others, we know that there are other prisms to explore, that taking a skewed view on a work can throw light and new context on otherwise hidden truths. Yet there are other ways to "respect the time"--a staging of Alban Berg's Lulu or Strauss' Salome for instance that somehow replicated the enormous impact those works must have made in their time, when this kind of expressionistic music-drama was sending bolts of lightning through the arts firmament, would to my mind be true to the time. In other words, finding a context today through which to imitate, or rather newly create, the artistic proportions, as it were, of 1937 (the year of Lulu's première).
Same goes for Otello, or one of the Monteverdis. It doesn't matter when it happened--these great, epoch-changing works made their audiences' nerve ends tingle and the hairs stand up on the back of their necks. If directors don't get back to that, they are emphatically not respecting "the time."
Or the music. These composers, most of them, weren't in it for the canary-fanciers, which is to say they weren't just creating pretty tunes to show off pretty voices. Or if they were in the odd instance, what then? Once a composer has created a work it belongs to the world and the world may see more in it than the composer himself did. As long as the music is not tampered with, every director and every conductor and every singer is free to interpret--as long as it somehow conveys the work's spirit.
This isn't new. The green-blooded Macbeth I mentioned was from 1990. I missed that one, but I did see Richard Jones' from Glyndebourne a few years ago where his witches were grouped into three choruses of immaculately-dressed Stepford Wives--perfectly robotic, perfectly heartless. And perfectly terrifying. Much more frightening in fact than any traditionally-dressed equivalents in the many period stagings I've seen. Verdi, as a man of the theater, would I'm sure have approved.
But Verdi would never have seen anything like that in his time. He couldn't have, because The Stepford Wives came along in 1972, as a novel. The famous film followed three years later and, together, they added something new to our cultural frame of reference (best to forget the 2004 movie remake).
Just as Wagner knew nothing of the hippies or the modern traveller communities referenced by Harry Kupfer's Ring at Bayreuth in the late 1980s, yet they lent a perfect context for what Kupfer saw as the gods' free-wheeling naïveté.
Sometimes, often, it goes too far. Calixto Beito's chorus sitting on toilets in an English National Opera Un ballo in maschera was a notorious case in point. Beito, ever controversial, has some interesting things to say, but his grasp of stagecraft is too strident for most tastes. In other, less subtle words, you don't need to bang a nail into someone's brain to get them to understand your point. And there are scores of directors less intelligent than Beito.
Yet artists must be free to take risks, to experiment and, yes, to fail. It is the job of artistic directors and their ilk to make sure that only the best and brightest are given their stages. Traditional productions can, believe me, be just as idiotic as the worst experimental settings. In many ways, in fact, the period, the costumes and all of that are far less important than one simple question: Does the staging work on its own terms, and does it therefore work on the drama's? Only by pursuing that goal, relentlessly and tirelessly, can our directors be true "to the time and the music." But more clearly, to the work. To the art.
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