What's Wrong With This Picture?

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 8:53 AM Eastern on 30 Jun. See below.]

The following are part of German-born director Elke Neidhardt's justification of her rewriting of the stage action and updating of the setting of Mozart's Don Giovanni in an Opera Australia production to be premiered at the Sydney Opera House on 5 July. All quotes have been taken from articles in Opera Australia, The Australian, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

• To create [opera] productions [today] that resonate with contemporary audiences, directors, perhaps more so than conductors, have to stay tuned to the spirit of the [contemporary] age. Audiences used to film and television will not, and should not, accept traditional [i.e., the composer's original] treatment of old material.

• [Today] it's virtually impossible to have that [viz., the coming to life of the Commendatore's statue in Don Giovanni] — you cannot portray that kind of miracle [today] unless you give a [today-acceptable] reason.

• [O]ffending a statue[!] is not good enough [reason for the downfall and demise of Giovanni]. That would be pretty hard to sell today.

• When watching Don Giovanni, audiences are required to believe in God and revenge and hell; in the notion that if we are not good boys and girls, we will be punished. Who buys into that today?

• In my treatment, [Giovanni is] a playboy who parties and beds women and takes drugs — these people exist more now than then

• Judged by the values of our own world, Giovanni is not that bad. He is thrilled by the conquest and he is not interested in forming relationships with women, but that is really all one can hold against him. Men who will not commit to relationships are common today — I don't think he deserves the demise he gets.

• You cannot do nodding, walking statues in the year 2008. You would be laughed off the stage anywhere else in the world except in Australia.

Oh? Is that a fact (may be applied to any or all the above).

Self-serving, self-involved, postmodern vandal!

(Our thanks to down-under blogger Sarah Noble of Prima la musica, poi le parole — who, in her excellent preceding linked post, displays more temperance on the subject than we're capable of mustering — for the links to the Australian press articles from which the above quotes were drawn.)

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Update (11:08 PM Eastern on 29 Jun): The above post brought the following aggrieved response posted to the Opera-L eMail list:

Oh please - enough of this prejudice. I mean prejudice in its etymological sense of pre-judging. This production has not even opened but is condemned.

This is such a common tendency on this list - judging productions on little evidence other than the written word. It seems to me there are so many self-appointed guardians of 'what Verdi/Wagner/ Mozart etc etc wanted'. Yet they were all theatrical and operatic progressives - concerned with meaning being conveyed to a contemporary audience.

Extending meaning to our time seems to be such a horror for some people. Any theatrical work only finds meaning in the minds of its audience.

Thankfully I live in a city where a 'conventional' production is greeted with the same outrage as avant-garde productions in the USA. We Europeans (not all of us I know - but opera often attracts a more conservative audience for all sorts of reasons) actively welcome re- interpretation. The houses are full on a diet of re-interpretation. Berlin audiences on the whole know their operas - but attract new audiences through radical re-interpretation.

Again and again on this list there is the same contempt evinced for 'Eurotrash' production - principally from the USA. I have asked this question before and never been answered - Are we all masochists in a city like Berlin?

Go to your conventional productions and enjoy them. We enjoy ours. You are not even seeing them but object often on the basis of a short clip on Youtube - do you want to dictate production styles for the world at large?

Cultural imperialism must have its limits.

Our posted response to those remarks (which we here reprint without further comment) read:

From Elke Neidhardt's own ignorant, even imbecile, remarks (those quoted in my S&F article), one is perfectly justified in prejudging her new production of _Don Giovanni_ to be yet another grotesque piece of Eurotrash, and yet another instance of the egregious, self-serving, _Regietheater_ vandalizing of yet another near-perfect opera masterpiece. Your perverse notion that these loathsome _Regietheater_ productions are simply efforts to "[e]xten[d] [the operas'] meaning to our time" is as ignorant and imbecile as anything Ms. Neidhardt had to say, for in every case -- no exceptions -- the "reinterpretations" produced by these pernicious _Regietheater_ vandals succeed only in trivializing and circumscribing meaning, never in expanding it, or in making it more "relevant". And that, at bottom, is the crux of the argument against these postmodern vandals and their _Regietheater_ travesties.

Update 2 (8:53 AM Eastern on 30 Jun): More from Opera-L in response to the above post.

I was going to change the Subject line to "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!" but decided to keep to the rules of the class. I will also hate myself the next day for wasting my time in such a useless effort, but.....

The idea that an opera, after it has been produced, cannot be interpreted by another artist in a different light is simply stunningly flaccid. Fact One. The composers did it themselves during their lifetimes: "You want a BALLET in my Tannhauser?!?!" (Gulp) "When do you need that by?" "My Lucia rewritten in French and changed?!?!" (Gulp) "And you need that when?" All composers (who had their operas performed) have the same history of easy compliance in making their operas audience friendly.

Second, artists were always adapting their image to the audience of the time (note to file: the baby Jesus was not actually born in Tuscany) but regarded the story itself as eternally relevant.

There is no intellectual argument that opera was meant, at the time it was composed, to be something to hang in the Louvre with guards around. It was not valid then and it is not valid now. Mozart, for example, by using Beaumarchais, was risking trouble because his plays were not just "pushing the envelope" but actually revolutionary. There were poor sods behind bars in the Chateau du Vincennes for much less! (In the newly refurbished donjon, you can see their graffiti still preserved.) If the regime had not been so tired and corrupt, it might have turned bad for our Salzburgian.

To which we responded (again, here reprinted without further comment):

My congratulations to you on invoking just about every lame straw man invoked by the "progressive" defenders and champions of Eurotrash to discredit both the person and the opinions of all those who take an opposite view of the matter.

Let me be as brief as possible in my response by saying that the creators of operas neither need nor require partners or collaborators once the work is finished. What the creators of operas need and require are gifted *servants* of which the director is one; servants who will faithfully and as free from distortion as possible *translate* the creator's work from its form on the printed page into its most effective and evocative concrete physical form onstage so that the work becomes apprehensible to an audience in a theater as its *creator* envisioned it, which vision is embodied fully in the score itself (music and text). When a director steps beyond the bounds of faithful translator he steps into territory in which he has no proper place nor any business being, and by so doing does a gross disservice to the opera, the opera's creator, and the audience alike. In short, a director is doing what he ought to be doing only when he and his work are perfectly transparent middlemen -- that is, transparent vis-a-vis the sense and spirit of the creator's original _Konzept_.

Does this mean or even imply that the opera director ought to be a slavish, unimaginative lackey? Not by a long shot. Perhaps the most effective and evocative staging ever of Wagner's impossible to stage _Ring_, for most pertinent example, was done in the early 1950s by Wieland Wagner, and that staging was the very antithesis of slavish and unimaginative.

To put the matter in the proverbial nutshell, all will be well if the opera director adheres rigorously and assiduously to what I've rather immodestly labeled The A.C. Douglas Opera Director's Prime Directive: Thou mayest do any bloody thing thou wilt in order to realize a dramatically and aesthetically effective and evocative translation of the score (music and text) into its concrete physical realization on the stage so long as what thou doest is consonant with the score at every point, and contradicts or diverges from it at none.