Sounds & Fury

What!? No Nazis Or Leather Trench Coats?

(Our thanks to Slipped Disc for the link.)

Tonight's The Night

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (2) as of 2:34 AM Eastern on 31 Jan. See below.]

Tonight's the night we all find out whether we're in for a splendid future of Wagner performances at the Met or its very opposite, for tonight is when we find out whether the Met's new Principal Conductor and presumptive Music Director Designate, Fabio Luisi, knows his Wagner or not. We praised Maestro Luisi's reading of Siegfried this past October by saying it was "a luminously spirited and beautifully nuanced reading of the score" and declared it "the finest reading of this score of our experience" because it realized near-perfectly the unique scherzo-like quality of this music-drama within the context of the tetralogy. Tonight's Götterdämmerung is when we find out whether Maestro Luisi conducted Siegfried the way he did because he understood its unique character, or whether it's the case that he simply hears Wagner that way generally. If the former, it's a fairly safe bet Maestro Luisi does indeed know his Wagner and, assuming he does Götterdämmerung the same justice in understanding, we're accordingly pretty much home-free Wagner-wise at the Met for the foreseeable future. If the latter, the future prospect at the Met Wagner-wise couldn't be more dismal as, Siegfried excepted, there are few things more distressing or more perverse than Italianate mature-period Wagner.

We anxiously await the Met's Live Stream audio of Götterdämmerung this evening beginning at 6:00 PM Eastern. We're hopeful, but just a bit fearful nevertheless.

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Update (11:42 PM Eastern on 27 Jan): Rest easy, Wagnerians. In Fabio Luisi's hands we're home-free Wagner-wise at the Met for the foreseeable future. An absolutely first-rate reading of the score tonight. Pure Wagner, musically and rhetorically, with not a trace of the Italianate anywhere within earshot.

We're going to sleep like a baby tonight.

Update 2 (2:34 AM Eastern on 31 Jan): Our eMail (some five at last count) tells us that our above comment concerning Maestro Luisi's conducting of Götterdämmerung has been somewhat misunderstood and we take full blame for that misunderstanding which seems due our comment's too-exuberant language. We meant merely to say (and did say, as a matter of fact) that Maestro Luisi did a fine job in his reading of the score vis-à-vis that reading being "pure Wagner musically and rhetorically" sans any trace of the Italianate. We did NOT mean to suggest that Maestro Luisi's reading was superlative Wagner. It was not. A reading that's superlative Wagner is a very rare thing indeed and not to be had today in the opera house on a consistent basis except in those cases where Christian Thielemann happens to be on the podium.

The above, just for the record.

The Lepage Staging Of Die Walküre: A Brief Rant

We just had our first extended look at the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen for the Met via a YouTube video of the complete Met HD film of Die Walküre and it's even worse than we imagined it to be from the manifold verbal descriptions read and production photos viewed. This Die Walküre staging is, in short, the most wooden, most vapid, least evocative, and most utterly empty staging of a Wagner music-drama it's ever been our displeasure to witness, Le Machine accomplishing nothing but constrain the action of the singer-actors (who moved to and fro seemingly willy-nilly along the thin strip of real estate provided them downstage doing vaguely appropriate things most, but by no means all, of the time) and make itself impotently conspicuous merely by its looming, hulking, contribute-nothing presence.

What a colossal and colossally expensive blunder on Peter Gelb's part. We can only hope Mr. Gelb has the courage and nerve to accept the blunder head-on, retire this entire Ring production from the Met's stage forever after this year's complete cycle is concluded, and not attempt to amortize the cost of Le Machine by mounting revivals of the production in future.

What an appalling squandering of time, talent, and money.

More On The Regietheater vs. "Traditional" Front

It might be thought we devote an inordinate amount of space on S&F to the matter of Regietheater stagings in opera the subject being almost an idée fixe on this blog since its inception. In our estimation, however, the subject can never be addressed too often as, save only the financial concerns of opera production, it's today the single most pressing and fundamental production problem in the world of opera; one that it seems will be with us well into the foreseeable future.

Recently, on a venerable online opera forum, the battle between advocates of Regietheater opera stagings and what, for want of a better term, is called "traditional" stagings broke out anew. Wrote one forum member, an inveterate champion of Regietheater opera stagings of even the most extreme sort:

I have nothing against the "romantically pictorial" [style of opera staging; i.e., "traditional" staging] or whatever you want to call it assuming that a) it's done in an interesting manner and b) it's not the only choice at the buffet. Taking a) first. My issue with a lot of example of this style of production is that it makes for very handsome still photographs but a very dull theater experience.

To which we responded:

More sophistry from the champion of Eurotrash.

So, the "Romantic-pictorial" style of opera production tends to "mak[e] for very handsome still photographs but a very dull theater experience," does it? You mean as opposed to the Regietheater style of opera production that so often tends to make for Eurotrash — grotesque, wholly irrelevant distortions of the sense and spirit of the composer's concept of whatever opera it corrupts?

What you savage in the "Romantic-pictorial" style of opera production is IN NO WAY an inherent characteristic of that style any more than the Regietheater style of opera production is inherently Eurotrash. In the right hands, either style of production can make for vital, dramatically exciting and illuminating theater the only constraint on both being that the sense and spirit of the composer's concept — the *composer's* concept, NOT the director's — be kept inviolable throughout. That's relatively easy to accomplish with the "Romantic-pictorial" style of opera production; hugely more difficult with Regietheater which style of opera production requires a director possessing enormous insight and gift both musically and dramatically in order to carry off successfully. Is it any wonder, then, that Regietheater opera productions so often and so overwhelmingly end up degenerating into unmitigated Eurotrash?

Not a bit of it.

And so the beat goes on.

Something To Be Thankful For

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 4:20 PM Eastern on 26 Nov to make more specific a few vaguely worded generalities.]

This Thanksgiving we felt it meet and very American to view two classic movies from classic Hollywood's golden age; that period in the 1930s just before the beginning of the two-decade forced dismantling of the studio system that had ruled Hollywood almost since its very beginnings: the big-budget swashbuckler, The Adventures Of Robin Hood (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1938); and the humongous-budget epic, Gone With The Wind (Selznick International, 1939), and what a startling comparison the two made.

The much celebrated GWTW was almost painful to watch so hokey and hammy was it throughout — from the vulgarly employed three-strip dye transfer Technicolor photography, to the maudlin script (by Sidney Howard), to the overwrought Hollywood music (by Max Steiner), and to the performances of the actors the stellar and iconic performances of Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara) and Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) notwithstanding.

Watching TAORH, on the other hand, was an unalloyed joy on all fronts: from the beautiful and beautifully executed three-strip dye transfer Technicolor photography; to the sparkling and literate script (by Norman Reilly Raine and Seton I. Miller); to the lushly Romantic music (by Erich Wolfgang Korngold); and to the performances of all the actors from bit players to stars including a bravura and iconic performance by Errol Flynn who, even to this day and like Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in GWTW after him, seems the very incarnation of the essence of the movie's central protagonist. This was Hollywood mythmaking at its finest, an exemplar of classic Hollywood moviemaking, and we all ought to be thankful this Thanksgiving season for the miracle of cinema which, unlike, say, theater or opera, preserves intact a dynamic artwork and permits us to see the work at firsthand and in perpetuity as it was intended to be seen, and exactly as it was seen by its very first audiences.

A small thing to be thankful for in the larger worldview, perhaps, but eminently gratifying nevertheless.

Heather Mac Donald Nails It Yet Again

Heather Mac Donald (no, that's not a typo; that's how she spells her name) — perhaps the best writer on opera on the planet and an inveterate enemy of Regietheater as it's mostly practiced today in opera houses worldwide (see her previously S&F-linked 2007 article, "The Abduction of Opera") — has nailed the critical idiocy surrounding the Met's new production of Don Giovanni and given what is easily the most detailed and trenchant review of that production extant.

The Metropolitan Opera has just opened a searingly erotic Don Giovanni, yet the New York Times has dismissed the new production for its “timidity.” Other members of the New York press corps are even more contemptuous. The New York Observer sneers that the “new Don Giovanni is worse than bad: it’s nothing.” And the New York Post calls the staging “dreck.” What has inspired such critical contumely? The riveting production is a faithful rendering of the opera’s music and libretto.

RTWT here.

Say What? We Think Not.

Say what? A longtime musical partnership riven over a performer's choice of cadenza(!)? We think not. Even given that pianist Hélène Grimaud's decision to use a cadenza written by the most decidedly un-Mozartian Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) in her planned recording with conductor Claudio Abbado of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 instead of using Mozart's own, written-out cadenza is nothing short of bewildering and in questionable taste, it is, after all, a cadenza — something that by its very nature is and has always been a performer's choice, especially so in Mozart's time. Yet, because of that choice, it's been reported, Maestro Abbado has called an end to his participation in the recording and to his longtime musical partnership with Ms. Grimaud as well.

As we've said, we think not. There's something else going on there and it's got nothing to do with cadenzas (no, we've no idea what that something else might be).

Damn shame.

Giovanni As Heard Via The Met's Live Stream

We listened last night to the Met's live audio stream of its new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni conducted by the Met's newly named Principal Conductor, Fabio Luisi. How was it? In a word: empty. It's almost as if Luisi's fleet-to-über-fleet tempi left no time or room for expressive or dramatic nuance — either from the pit or onstage.

Hugely disappointing.

Jeez!

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 5:12 PM Eastern on 22 Sep. See below.]

We just finished watching/listening to our DVR copy of PBS's telecast of last night's season-opening concert by the New York Philharmonic and a more inapposite program would be hard to imagine. What, pray tell, was a bloody singer doing onstage last night as the soloist — the only soloist — for three bloody numbers(!)? This was the New York Philharmonic's season-opening concert fer chrissake. You know, the opening concert of a symphony orchestra. There should have been no singer within sight or earshot last night short of being part of a Mahler symphony or Beethoven's No. 9 or the like.

Someone at the Philharmonic seriously needs to get his (her) shit together.

Jeez!

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Update (5:12 PM Eastern on 22 Sep): Oops. Forgot to make mention of the curious close to the Tannhäuser overture in this concert. We've never seen the score for this work, but the broad, essentially three-against-four rhythm of the close of this overture sounded rhythmically out of sync to us in this performance.

But perhaps that's just us.

(Added 22:01) Just listened to this again. Turns out our hearing was out of sync, not the NYP. Seems we were "playing" the thing mentally at a somewhat different tempo and conflated what we "heard" with our inner ear with what we were hearing with our outer.

Weird.

Illogical But All But Inescapable

Robert Cushman, theater critic for Canada's National Post, in a column titled, "No One Should Take Opinion As Gospel, Not Even Our Critic’s", comments on a plainly illogical albeit universally and commonly experienced phenomenon:

When somebody fails to appreciate something you yourself have deeply enjoyed, it’s hard not to feel personally affronted. This isn’t logical — why should your own pleasure in something be lessened by somebody else failing to share it? — but it’s human. You may feel that your whole value system is under attack.

We think Mr. Cushman didn't quite capture the essence of that feeling as it applies to one's response to the opinions of arts critics one respects which opinions are 180 degrees contrary to one's own. It's not so much that one feels that one's value system is under attack — although that's most decidedly a key part of it — or that it lessens one's own pleasure (or challenges one's displeasure as the case may be) in the thing in question, but rather that it feels like a betrayal of the keenest, most personal sort. How could he?!, one says to oneself in utter dismay. Did he perhaps have a premature or otherwise Senior Moment, or suffer a transient ischemic attack, or is it simply that he'd been smoking or snorting some funny stuff before making his evaluation? One feels almost compelled to resort to such extreme explanations in order to attempt to dismiss or mitigate that feeling of betrayal. Such self-defensive tactics, however, are rarely if ever successful and the feeling persists despite one's recognition of its arrant illogicality.

It may be human, as Mr. Cushman observes, but that doesn't make the feeling any easier to bear.

On Hearing Bach In A Berlin Subway Played On An Accordion

We are halfway up the steps of the Gleisdreieck platform when I hear a tune that I know like breathing. It’s Bach’s A-minor fugue for organ, BWV 543, twisting in the air. But before you get too anxious about where this is going, let me add that the lines of monumental fugue pouring down the refuse-strewn steps are coming from an accordion. And [my wife] Jane and I know the performer. We’ve been hearing this guy for the last three months. He’s been following us around town like a musical stalker, little snippets as the U-bahn doors open briefly at stations up and down the U9 and U2, chords swelling from the far side of impenetrable crowds mobbing the platforms at Zoo or Alexanderplatz. He’s the phantom of the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, and the songs from his subway squeeze box form a ludicrous soundtrack to this city, this time of year, this late in history: pretty, archaic tunes familiar from countless films, melodies that might coax harried commuters to cough up half a euro.

[...]

He’s up there, in the passage by the ticket machines, seated on a little stool, his back against the oily tiles like he’s some kind of indigent addict. Everything about him shocks me. First of all, he looks about fifteen. He’s a blond, crew-cut, scrofulous, anemic, and slightly lankier E.T. His instrument is an old Russian chromatic-button bayan, a massive thing that must be half his weight. The waterfall of sound issuing from the intricate machine is better than good. It’s pure architecture, big enough to fill this train station with the hint of more livable worlds. The chords form a map of forgotten possibilities, and the long, braided fugue subject unfolds as painfully as any sound you might pick to accompany this scarred place.

He heads into the home stretch, that phantasmagoric cadenza. As his arm extends, cuffing the drooping bellows like it’s a willful pet terrier trying to break free, all I can think about is putting him in a story.

[...]

[T]his Russian busker will never have any stage grander than the bowels of Central European mass transit systems. The guy plays the accordion, for God’s sake. He’s looking at subway stations and wedding receptions for the rest of his life. It doesn’t matter in the slightest if it sounds, down in those resonant tunnels, fuller than the organ in the Berliner Dom.

[...]

My brain seizes on a line from Broks, the story-telling neuropsychologist that my German students struggled with: “Great music cancels the distinction between the external world and our inner life.” And nothing in evolutionary biology can explain why it does this to us. “Experience is a first-person business,” Broks says. “Science operates in the third person.” Music is — what? A surprise counterpoint between the two. I’m sorry, but in Berlin, pretty Berlin, in the spring, as we stand there listening to the Russian busker play Bach, when nothing in me is strong enough to survive the annihilating past, this music makes me want to know what happens next.

A train from Ruhleben thunders in to the platform and disgorges its content. People walk past this one-man band at varying speeds, each making complex real-time cost-benefit analyses, calculating the trade-offs between net present enjoyment and future arrival. The accordionist lays into the bass of Bach’s tremendous final pedal point, herding the profusion back towards tonic. My wife and I stand transfixed. For as long as it takes this man to reach the final cadence, we are here, anyhow, going nowhere, present to the endless unlikelihood of existing at all.

—Novelist Richard Powers from his essay, "What Does Fiction Know?"

A Further Remark On Britten's Turn Of The Screw

A member of an opera forum asks concerning Britten's Turn Of The Screw, "Why does Miles Die?"

I had always assumed that Quint had taken him, but it is clear that Quint says he has failed. So why does Miles die? The Governess says something to the effect of "what have we done between the two of us?" Has the conflict been too much for the boy?

To which we responded:

I don't blame you for being confused on this point in Britten's opera. As I've previously noted [in this S&F entry], Britten and his librettist stripped the opera of all the ambiguity of the original tale and made the spirits of both Quint and Miss Jessel very solid, real things for the children and the governess and — and this is key — the audience. There's no ambiguity in the opera as there is in the original tale that those spirits might have been delusions on the part of the children, or that the children may even have been innocent of any such presence, or of the governess who might in fact be a pathological neurotic case. The power of Miles's final cry ("Peter Quint — you devil!") and, in fact, the power of the entire tale depends on that ambiguity (who is Miles calling a devil; Quint or the governess?). In the opera, Miles's death seems almost off-the-wall and pointless.

Glyndebourne Turn Of The Screw Review — Twitter-Style

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 7:20 PM Eastern on 23 Aug. See below.]

Beautiful staging, but all wrong. Needs more dark, more gothic (lowercase "g"). Mostly bright, 1950s quasi-Mies or -International Style just doesn't cut it. See the full opera for yourself here for the next couple weeks or so.

⚫ Fine performances from all, musically and dramatically, chamber orchestra included. The kid was super-fine.

⚫ Still can't accept a tenor as Quint. The character demands a dark baritone.

⚫ Britten and his librettist stripped the opera of the ambiguity of the original tale. Bad decision, huge loss.

⚫ We're crazy for Glyndebourne. That beautiful, intimate theater is one day going to force us to spend money we don't have just to experience it in the flesh. We'd love to hear and see the entire Mozart canon done there, one opera after the other in chronological order. Heaven!

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Update (7:20 PM Eastern on 23 Aug): For a further remark on this opera, see this S&F entry.

A Metaphor For A Metaphor (Or, Tit For Tat)

As just about all know by now, Konzept Regietheater (aka Eurotrash) is very big on metaphor the rationale and justification most frequently given being that it's desirable, even necessary, in order to make whatever non-contemporary operatic masterpiece is targeted more "relevant" to our 21st-century Zeitgeist and sensibilities. In that same spirit we herewith offer our metaphor for Konzept Regietheater itself (sorry to have to use a link but embedding of this item is not permitted). After all, turnabout is fair play.

2011 Bayreuther Festspiele Tannhäuser

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 2:34 AM Eastern on 31 Jul. See below.]

The 2011 Bayreuther Festspiele opened yesterday with a new production of Tannhäuser by Brechtian Regie Sebastian Baumgarten.

And what was the Konzept underlying this Regietheater Tannhäuser? Why, ecology, of course. Got to make this fussy old German Romantic opera "relevant", y'know. And what did this "relevant" Tannhäuser look like? Here's Bloomberg's Catherine Hickley:

[Baumgarten's] staging transposes Wartburg castle to an organic waste recycling plant and features a pregnant Venus living in a cage with giant tadpoles and furry, ape-like nymphs. The recycling-plant set, designed by Joep van Lieshout, remains largely unchanged through the opera’s three acts. It comprises a big green tank of nutrition (we’re told it’s a celery product), a blue tank of biogas (made from human excrement) and a long red storage cylinder of alcohol (distilled celery juice.) The program notes contain a detailed diagram explaining how this represents the full energy cycle from food and alcohol, through digestion and waste back to gas and energy.

Sounds like the proper setting for Eurotrash.

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Update (2:34 AM Eastern on 31 Jul): The three-act set (yes, the graphics are part of the set):

Director Chosen For The Bayreuth Bicentennial Ring

Katharina Wagner, co-director of the Bayreuther Festspiele, confirmed her choice of director for the Festspiele's 2013 bicentennial production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen today, 2013 being the bicentennial of Wagner's birth.

And who might that director be? Frank Castorf. And who might Frank Castorf be? A German theater director who, since the early '90s, is also the artistic director of Berlin's Volksbühne theater, Germany's second largest state-owned theater, that's who. And just what sort of director might Herr Castorf be? This from The New York Times, c. 2007:

Under his direction, actors ignored huge portions of the classical texts they performed, stripped naked, screamed their lines for the duration of five-hour productions, got drunk onstage, dropped out of character, conducted private fights, tossed paint at their public, saw a third of the audience walk out as they spoke two lines at an excruciatingly slow pace, may or may not have induced a theatergoer to drink urine, threw potato salad, immersed themselves in water, recited newspaper reports of Hitler’s last peacetime birthday party, told bad jokes, called the audience East German sellouts and appeared to but did not kill a mouse [onstage].

Yes indeed. Herr Castorf sounds just about right as Katharina's choice.

And the beat goes on and the hits just keep on comin'.

A Matter Of Priority

In an article for the Metropolitan Opera Guild publication Opera News titled, "Coda: Lost Horizons", senior editor Louise T. Guinther writes:

For many of us who came to love opera before Regietheater took hold, current notions of effective dramaturgy boggle the mind. When did the directors and impresarios decide that an opera was a random collection of notes, independent of its dramatic and visual elements — a mere musical shell, to be filled up with and bent out of shape by whatever modern hang-ups seem most likely to catch the public off guard? When did wild controversy, booing and academic apologias in the press replace straightforward storytelling as signs of theatrical prowess? When did "making people think" become the top priority in an art form once clearly intended to make them feel?

When indeed.

Nothing in the above linked article will come as news to regular readers of S&F (and we thank one of those readers for pointing us to this article as absent that heads-up we would not have known about it as we don't ordinarily read Opera News), but it does contain a key thought we don't recall ever articulating explicitly before; viz., that opera is an artform intended principally to make audiences feel, not think. That, in fact, is what opera — is what music — is all about. Prior to our modern age, there's not a composer of opera (or of music generally, for that matter) who ever lived who thought otherwise. Whence, then, this perverse, noxious, and ass-backwards impulse to make opera audiences think first, feel after?

We're not really sure, but that it's in some fundamental way bound intimately to our present-day scientific and technological modes of thought concerning all things — cosmic or terrestrial, sacred or profane, mystical or quotidian — is a certainty.

Is that a step forward for art and for us as a species; a development to be applauded and welcomed rather than savaged and rejected? We confess we don’t really know the answer to that question, either. What we do know, however, is that in matters of art, and in matters of music most particularly, whenever the rational trumps the emotional — whenever the emotional is in some fundamental way conditional upon the intellectual — impoverishment is the ineluctable consequence.

That, too, is a certainty.

Beautiful Or Really Spooky?

We vacillate between one and the other and can't decide. There's of course no reason at all why it can't be both, but that rather skirts the question, doesn't it.

You decide for yourselves.

(Our thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for link.)

Mark Twain At Bayreuth

We've been to Bayreuth only once (a guest of one of our father's business associates): in the late '50s where we saw part of the Wieland Ring (his original staging). We really couldn't appreciate what we were seeing then as at that time in our life we thought Wagner a vulgarian, his operas (that's what we called all his stageworks at that time making no distinction between his operas and his music-dramas) even more contemptible than Italian opera. From that experience we can attest to the following by Mark Twain (c. 1891), perhaps the most perfect, the most poetic description we've ever read of the experience of the "old" Bayreuth (i.e., "old" as opposed to the Bayreuth of the 21st century):

All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation sat in a deep and solemn gloom. The funereal rustling of dresses and the low buzz of conversation began to die swiftly down, and presently not the ghost of a sound was left. This profound and increasingly impressive stillness endured for some time — the best preparation for music, spectacle, or speech conceivable.

[...]

Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments. There was something strangely impressive in the fancy which kept intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his grave of what was going on here, and that these divine sounds were the clothing of thoughts which were at this moment passing through his brain, and not recognized and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former time.

[...]

Yesterday the opera was "Tristan and Isolde." I have seen all sorts of audiences — at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons, funerals — but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for fixed and reverential attention, absolute attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders. You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that they are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with one impulse and shake the building with their applause. Every seat is full in the first act; there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man would be conspicuous, let him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act. It would make him celebrated.

[...]

This opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven. But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.

A Rationale For Making Cuts In Opera

In an online opera forum in which we frequently participate and in which an extended discussion ensued concerning our thoughts on and suggested cuts to the Met's new production of Don Carlo, a member opined:

I am amazed at all the hubbub concerning Don Carlo. Have we not all seen and heard this opera many times? What is there left of the story that we don’t already know. If we were to go see this opera again, don’t we go for the music and the singing? We all seem to agree that the music is glorious, then why would we want any of it cut? When I listen or see an opera I want all the music. These productions that make cuts, what are they accomplishing? Do you go to the opera not to listen to the music?

To which our response is...

If listening to the music were really what sophisticated operagoers go to the opera for, then composers of opera since its beginnings have squandered much of their time composing operas, and producers of opera much of theirs staging those operas. Composers of opera should instead have spent their time writing, say, symphonies with vocal parts like, for instance, Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, and producers of opera should have spent theirs...well, looking for other work.

The truth of the matter is that opera — genuine opera; opera as dramma per musica — is NOT about the music, nor is it about the singers (and we here exclude bel canto opera as that genre of opera is, by and large, not genuine opera at all but merely an elaborate showcase for singers). In the minds of opera composers, opera producers, and sophisticated operagoers, opera is first and foremost about the drama — or more correctly, about the music-drama; about dramma per musica; drama where the drama is made sensible or articulated through music supported by the armature of the text which armature provides those narrative and concrete details that music alone is incapable of providing, the whole or gestalt made visible by its acting out onstage. Wagner may have made all of that explicit both in his theoretical writings and in his stageworks the mature examples of which are a veritable apotheosis of opera as dramma per musica, but it is not his invention. Dramma per musica has been the ideal and the goal of opera from opera's very beginnings as a distinct artform in the late-16th, early-17th century the first fully developed example of which is usually attributed to Monteverdi and his L'Orfeo of 1607. That that ideal became corrupted early on and seemingly forever by 17th-century Italian theater owners and producers who, in their commercial greed, wantonly pandered to the sensibilities and appetites of the opera-going groundlings who couldn't have cared less about opera as dramma per musica and which opera-going groundlings, then as now, are always in the vast majority, doesn't alter the ideal one whit.

And that's why "want[ing] all the music" is rarely the first consideration. Sometimes, when the dramma per musica has gone off-track by becoming bloated or obscured for reasons having little to do with the realization of the dramma per musica per se (we omit here those cases where the creator's own dramatic sense is defective or wanting as that's another discussion entirely), judicious cuts become necessary to free the work to be realized as its creator envisioned it in its ideal form absent all commercial or other compromise. Needless to say, the aesthetic judgment and operatic knowledge of the cutter is here paramount when the creator of the opera is no longer available for consultation or to do the work himself. Too often cuts are made for reasons commercial or practical which are compromises just as pernicious as the compromises which resulted in the dramma per musica going off-track by becoming bloated or obscured in the first place, and in such cases artistic disaster is almost certain to result, not to speak of a betrayal of the creator of the opera and of his creation.

And so to sum up in brief: When practiced responsibly, "what [is] accomplish[ed] [or attempted to be accomplished] by productions that make cuts" is the freeing of the dramma per musica of its commercial or other compromises that have, in one way or another, hampered or prevented the work from being realized in its ideal form as its creator envisioned it. It's actually quite a noble task when done responsibly, circumspectly, and knowledgeably.