What Opera Needs Today

The following from a poster on perhaps the Internet's most prominent opera list concerning Die Meistersinger:

The man with the solution to our woes is Peter Konwitschny who right-before-final-peroration interrupted Meistersinger in Hamburg with 'Franz, you can not sing about that anymore' from another mastersinger or stagehand, answered by the Eva in contradiction to that, and with the audience eventually all free to join in on the melee. In this age when so much opera has turned sterile, sugar-coated lately ..., we need this. In contrast with the 'intellectually brain dead, dramatically inert' Ring (the new Magic Flute no better) the Met will fortunately getting rid of soon, we need Wagner that is as edgy and provocative as this, and we are the better off for it. We need Konwitschny here in the U.S.

To which I predictably replied:

The very last thing any opera house needs today are self-involved, self-promoting Eurotrash criminals such as Konwitschny and his ilk. These pernicious vandals have today practically usurped the stages of the world's opera houses where they're given the freedom to put on display their own imbecile, politically "relevant" "vision" at the expense of the work's creator's vision; a vision they're duty-bound to serve in their only proper role: faithful servant.

If Konwitschny wanted to say something in his staging about Sach's closing monologue he could have -- were he aware of the fact, which I doubt -- simply cut the monologue completely as Wagner himself wanted to do, and ended the stage action with Walther's crowning as a mastersinger, and immediately closed the opera with the jubilant chorus that presently closes the work. It would have taken some informed research to ferret out Wagner's own draft scores to see how he might have gone about accomplishing that, but that's the sort of trouble faithful, conscientious directors of opera -- excuse me; faithful, conscientious directors of opera who actually know and understand opera -- are supposed to go to in order to best serve the vision of the opera's creator. Faithfully serving the vision of the opera's creator is in fact the opera director's Prime Directive, and any opera director who doesn't understand that should never be permitted within ten miles of an opera house stage.

This opera list has some 1500 active members, rabid operagoers all, and the above constituted the only two posts in that thread. Is the explanation merely the case that the subject is an old horse that's been beaten to death, or is it rather the case that in the face of the steamroller Regietheater (Eurotrash) trend in opera production today it seems pointless to argue for or against that which is apparently autonomous and unstoppable?

I don't know the answer to that question, but fear it's closer to the latter rather than the former.