Not So Postmodern

We've just finished reading for the second time the second edition (1947) of musicologist and music historian Edward J. Dent's classic (and brilliant) 1913 study of the Mozart operas, Mozart's Operas: A Critical Study, and found it just as rewarding a read as we did first time around. This time, however, we found ourself smiling at a graf on the penultimate page of the book that previously somehow evaded our notice. Writes Dr. Dent talking about current (1913) German stagings of Die Zauberflöte:

For the interpretation of Die Zauberflöte, we ought naturally to pay considerable respect to the traditions of the German stage; but we have the authority of many German critics for believing the older "traditions" to be extremely corrupt, and we have the evidence of our own senses ... for the vanity and pedantry of modern German producers and conductors whose one aim seems to be to produce the opera in a way that no one has ever seen before, regardless both of tradition and of the original libretto and score.

And here we've always imagined the willful, self-indulgent, self-involved distortions of the intent of the original creator of an opera as made manifest in that opera's score (music and text), which distortions are the hallmark of Eurotrash Regieoper everywhere, to be a pernicious excrescence endemic to our postmodern age alone.