An Explanation

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 2:37 PM Eastern on 3 Sep. See below.]

We've received several eMails concerning our somewhat provocatively titled post, "Devil's Spawn Make Bid For Bayreuth Festspiele", asking what we had against Nike Wagner and Gerard Mortier that prompted us to assign to them such parentage. The answer is that both are rabid promoters of Regietheater of the most Eurotrashy sort. The more grotesque the better. With Nike we have the additional objection that she's a longtime champion of opening the Festspiele to the production of works of other composers which is simply unthinkable and a gross and insupportable perversion of Richard Wagner's purpose for establishing the Festspiele, and a perversion of what the Festspiele is and must remain to ensure its future.

Our objection to those two certainly does NOT mean we have no objections to those other two: the frontrunners for the co-directorship of the Festspiele, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner. The latter is in every way objectionable, and has no place in the directorship of the Festspiele. Eva is the most sensible choice at this juncture (as some of you might know, the board of the Stiftung chose her for the directorship several years ago, but failed in their attempt to get papa Wolfgang to step aside at that time), but she too has a predilection for Eurotrash Regietheater, but it's a predilection tempered by common sense, and not nearly as extreme and ideologically mindless as Katharina's and those other two.

We trust that answers any similar lurking questions on this matter that haven't yet made their way into our inbox.

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Update (11:29 AM Eastern on 27 Aug): Even as we typed the sentence, "The answer is that both are rabid promoters of Regietheater of the most Eurotrashy sort," in our above, we said to ourself, "Don't do it, Douglas. Close the gates on the morons preemptively. Don't use that shorthand language even though you're entitled to use it given that Eurotrash Regietheater has been a veritable idée fixe on this blog since its inception over four years ago. Spell it out in detail yet once again to prevent the moronic charge that ossified 'traditionalists' such as you insist on pretending that the 20th and 21st centuries never happened, and are satisfied only when operas are staged as they were staged by their creators and have since been staged before the middle of the last century."

We should have taken our own advice. So far, some half-dozen variations of the above charge have infested our inbox in response to the shorthand language of that above quoted sentence.

Why is it that champions of Regietheater make the automatic assumption that all who speak against it speak against it because they're stuck-in-the-mud "traditionalists"?

Well, perhaps some are. We, however, as we've demonstrated repeatedly and made abundantly clear on this blog, are most decidedly not to be counted among them. Our objection is NOT to Regietheater per se. Our objection is to Regietheater become Eurotrash; Regietheater in which the Regie hijacks a universally acknowledged masterpiece of another to express his own personal "vision" and promote his own personal agenda in the process of which the vision of the work's original creator is distorted beyond all recognition, and the work itself invariably diminished by being robbed of its manifold layers of meaning and response that are at the very heart of what's responsible for the work being the universally acknowledged masterpiece history has declared it to be.

So, those of you tempted to heap abuse upon our head by the moronic charge that we're a "traditionalist" would do well to save yourselves the trouble as your virtual crayon-scrawled missives will be consigned instantly to the cyber bit bucket unremarked and unanswered.

That is all.

As you were.

Update 2 (2:37 PM Eastern on 3 Sep): For a qualification of our above comment on Katharina Wagner, see this post.