Sounds & Fury

Of Rotten Eggs And Eurotrash

Howls of indignation could be heard emanating from the champions of and cheerleaders for Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater at the decision by Deutsche Oper am Rhein to cancel its new Burkhard C. Kosminski Nazi-themed staging of Wagner's Tannhäuser because of angered objections by certain segments of the opera-going public. "Deutsche Oper Am Rhein capitulates to morons who never even saw the production," sputtered one prominent Eurotrash champion, a card-carrying member of the "progressive" crowd whose members champion The New in opera stagings of canonical operas provided, of course, that those new stagings bear no resemblance to nor have any connection with anything the opera's creator could have had in mind.

Well, as one doesn't have to actually eat a rotten egg to judge it rotten, one doesn't have to actually see a Eurotrash staging of a canonical opera to judge it Eurotrash and therefore self-indulgent, self-serving crap no matter how well executed. A descriptive sentence or ten describing the physical staging is, in most cases, all that's required to make that determination.

And so it is in this case.

An Inexplicable Error Of Judgment

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 10:19 AM Eastern on 4 May. See below.]

We yesterday viewed for the first time in a decade or so the Coen brothers' film Fargo and the viewing served to confirm for us our previous assessment of the film as one of the most perfectly realized films ever made save for a single, egregious, and inexplicable error of judgment; an error that would require but a single, simple edit to set right.

And the inexplicable error? The out-of-order placement of one of the film's final four scenes.

As released, the film's final four scenes (described below in sharply truncated form) are:

Final Scene 1: It's snowing. Marge discovers the killers' car in front of a cabin. She finds Grimsrud stuffing his buddy-in-crime into a wood chipper, announces her presence, and shoots Grimsrud in the leg as he tries to escape. He falls to the snow-covered ground. Marge, gun in hand and pointed at him, carefully approaches him.

CUT TO...

Final Scene 2: Camera moves fairly slowly down an empty, snow-covered road along which, we discover after a bit, Marge is driving her police cruiser. It's still snowing. Then the interior of the cruiser, Marge at the wheel. Grimsrud sits in the rear seat which is separated from the front seat by a wire screen, hands cuffed behind him. Behind Marge's cruiser a squad car, gumballs spinning, punches through the white of the falling snow. It approaches in slow motion. An ambulance punches through after it. Then another squad car. Marge hears their distant sirens, brings her cruiser to a halt and sets its gumballs spinning to await them.

FADE OUT. FADE IN ON...

Final Scene 3: A shabby motel next to a highway on a snowy, windswept plain. The terrified Lundegaard is discovered in the motel by two cops who've been alerted he's on the run and who capture and cuff him while he screams in terror and frustration.

CUT TO...

Final Scene 4: Marge and Norm's bedroom. Both are in bed. Norm tells Marge his design won the competition for the three-cent stamp. Marge tells him how proud she is of him. Norm reaches over to rest a hand on Marge's pregnant belly. "Two more months," says Norm. Marge absently rests her own hand on top of his. "Two more months," she says.

FADE OUT. FINIS.

And the out-of-order scene? The above Final Scene 3 of course. It should have been Final Scene 2 and the above Final Scene 2 should have been Final Scene 3.

This is no minor clumsy misstep. It not only jarringly defeats what should be, both logically and dramatically, a seamless transition from Marge's police cruiser and the approaching ambulance and squad cars to Marge and Norm's bedroom but, worse, much worse, virtually shatters the film's until-then pitch-perfect-ness and prior unbroken perfection of realization at which one cannot help but feel cheated, even robbed, by the filmmakers.*

Perhaps one day the Coen brothers will come to see the matter as we do and correct the error with the simple edit that would be all that would be required to set things right.

Uh-huh.

Not in this life.

* Just between us chickens, we would have ended the film with the transposed Final Scene 3 (what shows above as Final Scene 2) and done away with Final Scene 4 altogether. That transposed Finale Scene 3 is hugely powerful visually, partly because it evocatively echoes the film's opening sequence, and powerful dramatically because Marge's last words in that scene, thoroughly banal as the writers intended them to be ("And [all that killing]. For what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than money, you know. Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't unnerstand it.") — words addressed as much to herself as to Grimsrud in the rear seat who, blank-faced and unhearing, is paying no attention whatsoever — neatly sum up her entire wonderfully implausible character (played to absolute perfection by Frances McDormand) and her equally wonderfully implausible outlook on life and the world.

---

Update (10:19 AM Eastern on 4 May): Following is the opening sequence of Fargo (best viewed full screen and in 720p HD resolution) with its strangely haunting music by Carter Burwell based on an old Norwegian folk melody. This opening theme is also used over the closing credits and the harmonic skeleton of which is used often throughout the film. Like everything else about the film (the single exception being the subject of this S&F entry), we can't imagine music more perfect.

One Helluva Composer That Wolfgang

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 2:04 AM Eastern on 13 Apr to add a footnote.]

Viewed the Met's 2012 La Clemenza Di Tito for the first time this afternoon courtesy the Met HD film, PBS, and my HD DVR. Music-making, singing, acting, staging all splendid cum gorgeous. Bravo tutti!

Clemenza may not be on the same exalted level as Mozart's Big 4 mature works, or even his early Idomeneo with which Clemenza might more rightly be compared, opera seria to opera seria, but it ain't chopped liver either and is a more than respectable product of a frantic, health-impaired, deadline-determined, mere 45 days or so worth of work.*

One helluva composer that Wolfgang. One helluva composer indeed.

* The report by Mozart's first biographer Franz Niemetschek that Mozart finished the opera in 18 days having begun it on the coach journey from Vienna to Prague where the work was to have its premiere is almost certainly in error. Mozart had received the Caterino Mazzolà reworking of Metastasio's original libretto for Clemenza in mid-July of 1791 and set to work on the music immediately thereafter putting aside his work on both Die Zauberflöte and the Requiem for the purpose. Clemenza received its premiere in Prague on 6 September 1791 with Mozart conducting.

Mad Men: Season 6

Mad Men is back for its sixth season with a two-hour opener tonight. We haven't seen it yet (we're DVRing it so we can watch without having to sit through the plethora of seemingly interminable commercial breaks; a nice irony, that) but we'd be willing to bet, sight unseen, it's just more of the same of the past five seasons. The show just never seems to grow — or grow up.

And what is more of the same? Here's the very best in-a-nutshell critique of the show we've ever read. It's by culture writer Daniel Mendelsohn from a lengthy article he wrote for the 24 February 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books titled "The Mad Men Account":

The writing [in Mad Men] is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish. Worst of all — in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues” — the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.

Should the Mad Men sixth season opener astonish us by disappointing our expectations we'll come back here with an update — and an apology.

Meanwhile, don't hold your breath.

Forcing American Audiences To Cease Their Nostalgia Trips

In this week's issue of The New Yorker, in a piece titled "Shock Tactics", New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross writes:

[T]he injection of a mild strain of Regietheater [in opera stagings in American opera houses] ... is a healthy development because it forces American audiences to see opera as something other than a nostalgia trip. [...] [I]t's because we endlessly repeat the same old pieces that we feel the need to reinvent them in ever more drastic fashion.

Yes, well, certainly an interesting view of the matter. Consider, however, that by that same sort of reasoning it might be "a healthy development" if American symphony orchestras did away with repeating year after year performances of, say, those same old Beethoven symphonies the way Beethoven wrote them and instead reinvent them just a bit by injecting some orchestration or other that never occurred to Herr Beethoven such as, say, kazoos in place of bassoons; or, say, slide whistles in place of flutes; or, say, musical saws in place of violas. After all, if that were done, American audiences would surely be forced to see those symphonies as something other than nostalgia trips.

Yes indeed. They most assuredly would.

Soul-Satisfying

Few things in music are as soul-satisfying as Renaissance choral polyphony sung supremely well, especially at Eastertime.

(Our thanks to The Rest Is Noise for the link.)

An Introduction To Opera

On a heavily populated online opera forum, a member asked:

I am curious about people's first recordings of opera (I mean the first two or three, not the first thirty). What were they? At what age did you first listen to them? Were they a gift, bought, borrowed, or stolen (OK, you don't have to answer the last one)? What impact did they have on you? How have they held up over the years, as you have heard and learned more?

That provoked a (predictable) deluge of responses. Here' ours:

My proper introduction to opera, per se, occurred quite late (viz., when I was in my early 30s) and quite by accident (a double entendre as will presently be made clear).

I grew up within a musical milieu peopled by serious-minded musicians, instrumentalists all, who regarded, as did I, the whole domain of opera to be nothing other than fodder fit only for the delectation of musical groundlings and the proper butt of uncharitable jokes. In my younger years I'd occasionally tune into the Texaco Saturday Met opera radio broadcasts (which almost invariably turned out to be something from the Italian or French rep) and despite Milton Cross's enticing intros never managed to last beyond the first half-hour or so of the first act so trashy if superficially pretty and appealing did it all sound to me.

Fast-forward to 1970. I've been laid up for the better part of a year courtesy of a near-death-dealing motorcycle accident. Bad business that, but it's not all terrible. I've plenty of time on my hands, and I'm taking full advantage of it by reading like mad and listening to dozens of LPs I'd bought one fevered afternoon of record buying at a Sam Goody 50%-off sale some few years previous but still haven't gotten around to auditioning. (Not as ridiculous as it sounds. I bought over 250 LPs that out-of-control afternoon.)

One of the albums I'd plucked from Goody's shelves was the then-new Solti-Decca release of the first _Ring_ opera, _Das Rheingold_, an opera of which I never before heard so much as a measure and a recording I bought not because I had any intention of listening to the opera itself (what an idea!) but because that then-new recording had quickly gained a reputation among audio freaks, of which I was one, as being a kick-ass test of one's speaker system.

So one afternoon of my enforced confinement I pull the still un-played _Rheingold_ album from its place of storage, think to myself, "Forgot about this. Time I gave it a whirl to see just how great these speakers of mine really are," remove its still-intact shrink-wrap, and start the first LP going on the turntable.

With hobbling gait I almost make it back to my comfy armchair when the soles of my feet more than my ears become aware of that solitary, 16', four-measure opening E-flat pedal, and my first thought is that something's gone badly awry with my stereo system. I mean, no opera can possibly begin like that. After assuring myself that my stereo system is operating just fine, I start the LP going again, this time no longer intending to test my speakers but intending instead to find out just what sort of opera it is that can begin in such an un-opera-like manner.

One-hundred-and-thirty-six measures later (i.e., the full length of the _Rheingold_ prelude) such is my astonishment that I'm struck virtually dumb. I simply can't believe what I've just heard. No composer — not the divine Wolfgang, not even great Bach himself — should be able to do that much with such a paucity of harmonic and melodic material stretched over 136 measures; essentially not much more than a single arpeggiated major triad repeated over and over.

Hobbling back to the turntable as quickly as I'm able, I start the LP going again at the beginning, and again listen, more carefully this time. I end up replaying those opening 136 measures some dozen times before I let the first of the three Rheintöchter finish the opening phrase of her song. And when she does, further astonishment. She and her two sisters are bantering among themselves in dramatic real time, their banter sounding as natural as the dialogue of a spoken stage play, but they're all...singing! And the singing is lovely. Not bel canto lovely, but a different kind of sung lovely I've no name for because I've never heard anything like it before. Then a nasty-sounding baritone comes on the scene and interrupts their playful banter with some rather less playful banter of his own, also sung, and his singing, like the singing of the Rheintöchter, is in dramatic real time and as natural as spoken dialogue in a stage play and, in its own jarring way, electrifying. Inseparably intertwined with all this rather than merely accompanying it as it would in any respectable opera is a huge orchestra making rich continuous comment on all the goings-on in the manner of the chorus in a classical Greek drama, enriching and deepening immeasurably both drama and meaning, the gestalt effect positively riveting.

At this point it becomes abundantly clear to me that, in terms of opera, I'm not on solid ground anymore but hopelessly adrift in waters wonderful strange and considerably over my head. This is a new and gripping musico-dramatic experience; one which bears but the most superficial resemblance to opera as I understand it. No recitative, no arias, no duets, trios, quartets, or choruses. Nothing from and among the singers but a single continuous stream of back-and-forth natural-as-speech sung dialogue, the whole interwovenly fleshed out and deepened by the huge orchestra acting as the work's principal "voice". As I've said, astonishing. And as I continue listening almost each succeeding new measure brings with it something new to astonish and by opera's end I'm utterly floored by the evocative and eloquent magic of it all.

That initial encounter with Wagner and his _Ring_ tetralogy set the stage, so to speak, for my subsequent Wagner attachment, and the deeper I immersed myself in the _Rheingold_, and over the ensuing weeks, months, and years in the entire _Ring_ tetralogy and then deeper still in _Tristan_ and _Parsifal_, that which initially captivated the Wagner-naïve musical snob continued, as it continues still, to captivate the seasoned and informed devotee I became. While in strictly musical terms Bach and Mozart are still my ne plus ultra composers, transcendent geniuses both, in musico-dramatic terms I now know there has never been, nor is there ever again likely to be, a genius as all-encompassing prodigious and transcendent as Richard Wagner who today still bestrides the domain of opera like a colossus, and whose music-dramas have since shaped or influenced the course not only of opera, but of all Western music.

Grin And Bear It

As it had no choice but to do, the Met is reviving its production of the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen beginning 6 April 2013 with Das Rheingold and continuing in three complete cycles ending 11 May 2013 with Götterdämmerung. Grin and bear it. After this mandatory revival perhaps we'll be rid of the thing forever.

A member of a venerable online opera forum asked:

The new [Met] Ring, I loved it, in the Met and in HD. The sets were fantastic, and elastic. The singing was very good as well. So why exactly are so many against it?

To which we replied:

Because it ended up being a Robert Lepage spectacular (actually, a spectacular that failed as a spectacular; but that's quite beside the point) with Wagner's music serving as sound track and Wagner's drama given only lip service. Mr. Lepage's focus seemed to be on what he could get Le Machine to do that would result in some visually arresting effect for its own sake at any particular moment rather than on how the capabilities of the contraption could best be exploited to support, express, or frame the drama moment by moment from work's beginning to end. It's a tail-wagging-the-dog approach that's all but guaranteed to result in shallow (at least attempted) coups de théâtre pretty much every time, precisely as it did in this production.

After a repeat viewing of the Met's HD film of the tetralogy (via our HD DVR recordings of the HD PBS telecasts), we saw nothing to alter that opinion. For our comments on each of the music-dramas as telecast, you might want to consult the following S&F entries:

Das Rheingold
Die Walküre
Siegfried
The Lepage Staging Of The Ring: A Brief Summing-Up (Götterdämmerung)

On another online opera forum, a member remarked to us that we ought to be grateful and accept the Lepage staging of the Ring as the lesser of two evils. After all, at least the Lepage staging was not a Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater staging, to which we replied:

While I take your point (and it's a reasonable one), saying we ought to accept the lesser of two evils with some measure of gratitude is hardly an answer to the problem. The Lepage staging of the Ring is in every way unacceptable, especially for a company with the prestige and stature of the Met. And what makes it unacceptable is NOT fixable except by doing away with it altogether as it's flawed conceptually. The Lepage staging centrally features Le Machine as the looming, hulking, impotently conspicuous star of the show as it could not otherwise be, and that's utterly and fundamentally perverse.

And when I say the staging must be done away with altogether, I mean doing away with both Lepage and his humongous, dead-weight, ill-conceived, Frankenstein contraption to which contraption he's devoted entirely. The ONLY way such a contraption could justify itself is if it were capable of becoming THE ENTIRE STAGE ITSELF, perfectly plastic and malleable, and by so doing become invisible or transparent as a contraption. That's nowhere in the cards with Le Machine, either technically or practically; ergo, it has to go, along with its creator who cares infinitely more for it than for Wagner's great work which work both he and it were supposed to serve.

And so it goes.

The Met's François Girard Staging Of Parsifal

We watched the entire Met HD film of its production of the François Girard staging of Wagner's Parsifal the other night courtesy of a YouTube bandit — Blessed be he or her! — who posted a digital copy of the Met's HD film to YouTube spread across three HD videos, one for each act (all of which have now been taken down on a just and justified copyright infringement complaint by the Met) and were both surprised and hugely disappointed by the staging. From the very brief snippets we'd seen of that staging previously, all of which gave promise of its being truly splendid, and from all the enthusiastic talk about it on online opera forums, opera blogs, and in much if not all the mainstream media, we suppose we expected far too much. The very best we can say about the staging is that it's not Eurotrash as monsieur Girard at least recognized his responsibility and obligation to Wagner and Parsifal by trying, to the extent of his gift, to realize the full spirit and sense of Wagner's vision and concept rather than impose a vision and concept of his own devising. The resulting staging, however, is, in our not so humble opinion, seriously flawed and in places just out-and-out off the rails, and while not Eurotrash, is badly misguided and largely ineffective. What rescues the production are the sterling music-making and gripping onstage dramatic performances by all involved which music-making and dramatic performances are so strong as to almost convince one the staging is on an equal par — or so we imagine is the reason of this staging's widespread acclaim.

Too bad (for us). We were really looking forward to and had high hopes for this.

Netflix's New Drama Series, House Of Cards: Some Brief Remarks

We take a momentary break from our hiatus from blogging to note briefly Netflix's small revolution in the delivery of original TV-type series drama to audiences worldwide.

We've just finished viewing Friday's premiere of all 13 hour-long episodes of Season 1 of the new Netflix original drama series House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright, and Kate Mara, an American remake of the brilliant 1990 BBC series of the same name starring Ian Richardson, Diane Fletcher, and Susannah Harker, and it's a splendid effort both substantively and in its revolutionary method of delivery (all 13 episodes of Season 1 available at the same time on the Internet for instant streaming directly to your properly equipped viewing device of choice). The drama's production is visually gorgeous and the performances largely first-rate throughout. The writing, however, is only occasionally so, we're sorry to have to report, and is fairly uneven both within and across episodes (all told, there were some six writers involved) and around Episode 8 the drama begins going badly off the rails and thereafter quickly degenerates into a series drama of the typical American TV network sort for the most part. But even at the series's best, Kevin Spacey's bluntly brutal Francis (Frank) Underwood is no match in Machiavellian machination for Ian Richardson's deliciously wicked Francis Urquhart, and Robin Wright's barbed, athletically coarse Claire Underwood is no match in seductive Lady Macbeth-ness for Diane Fletcher's coolly smooth patrician Elizabeth Urquhart, nor is Kate Mara's Zoe Barnes a match for Susannah Harker's Mattie Storin in quietly inviting beauty. You may think we're being biased in our assessment by our often evident Anglophilia. You might very well think that. We couldn't possibly comment.

That is all. We now resume our interrupted hiatus.

Taking The Ol' Uzi Out Of Storage

BEGIN RANT

The next time I hear a pop singer sing some pop crap rendition of our national anthem at a national event, I'm taking the ol' Uzi out of storage, much-needed new gun control law enforcement notwithstanding, and loading it with just enough ammo to "correct" her (or him).

Oh to hear some measure of nobility and dignity restored to the performance of that time-honored song of praise no matter how achieved.

(This entry provoked by certain of today's Inauguration ceremonies.)

END RANT

Quotable: Floating Utterly Free

Gillian Moore, head of classical music at London's Southbank Centre, commenting on Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 in a Guardian article promoting the Centre's January opening of its year-long The Rest Is Noise festival the festival based on material drawn from New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross's prize-winning book of the same name:

[Schoenberg's] String Quartet No. 2, written in 1908 in the middle of an extreme marital and psychological crisis, starts with a richly harmonised minor key melody which would not have frightened Brahms. But by the end of the piece, a soprano has — highly unconventionally — joined the quartet and she sings "I feel the air of other planets", to music which is fractured, atomised, ethereal and floating utterly free from the gravitational pull of 600 years of harmonic tradition.

On The Appropriate Camera Shot Syntax For Filmed Staged Opera

Now that (digitally) filmed staged opera performances have become a regular and popular inhabitant of our cultural landscape, it's time the one responsible for determining what appears or doesn't appear in a shot — viz., the film's director — recognizes the special requirements of the camera shot syntax peculiar to the successful presentation of filmed staged opera and cease assuming, as filmed staged opera film directors almost always do today, that the camera shot syntax appropriate for works created originally and specifically for film is equally appropriate for the presentation of filmed staged opera. It most decidedly is not. Filmed staged opera requires its own camera shot syntax, and it's one that couldn't be more simple or straightforward.

One of film's most powerful expressive tools, a tool unique to cinema, is the close-up in its various forms — from the extreme close-up that focuses on some minute detail, to the "head(or face)-shot", to the "head-and-shoulders-shot", to the "one-shot" (i.e., half-to-full-length one-person close-up most often referred to as a "medium close-up"), to the "two-shot" (i.e., half-to-full-length two-person close-up, also most often referred to as a "medium close-up"), etc. — and so, quite naturally, the close-up is used with great frequency in works created originally and specifically for film. It might even be called film's workhorse shot.

In the filming of staged opera, however, the close-up should never be used with anywhere near that sort of frequency and in fact ought to be used only with the utmost discretion. Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann notwithstanding, opera singers, generally speaking, are not meant to be seen up close when working but are most favorably and advantageously viewed when seen at a discreet distance. Ditto certain parts of a production's set or costumes (certain sets and costumes in Julie Taymor's Zauberflöte for the Met spring instantly to mind). Therefore, in filmed staged opera, and barring any special circumstances, the workhorse shot should always be the so-called "medium-shot", unexciting in itself as it may be: a shot that includes all those onstage who are part of the central action at any point in time, or are a dramatically meaningful part of the reaction to that action, close-ups being interjected only when dramatically clarifying or revealing, or interjected only occasionally and fleetingly as visual spice. Further, and contrary to the standard shot-hierarchy of film where the "long-shot" (i.e., the so-called "establishing-shot" that shows the entire overall setting of the action) is used only rarely, typically only at scene's opening, in a filmed staged opera the long-shot should be used fairly often so that the film audience is regularly provided a satisfying overall orientating view; a view available at will at all times for an audience in the opera house.

And excepting special effects, that's pretty much it. That would seem to give short shrift to those benefits film is able to provide an audience; benefits not available to them live in the opera house. But that's not the way filmed staged opera is experienced in practice when done properly where the shot "palette", so to speak, and shot tempo are used with intelligence and real dramatic understanding. Rather, filmed staged opera done in that way is almost invariably experienced as a satisfying simulacrum of the Real Deal. While there no doubt will be those who care little for or are indifferent to opera as genuine dramma per musica and who will object bitterly to being deprived of constant, up-close-and-personal views of their favorite songbirds, there's nothing for it. About such fans one can say only: let 'em eat cake.

The Glyndebourne Tristan: An Object Lesson In Doing Things Right

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 3:47 PM Eastern on 27 Dec to restore a one-word but important qualifying parenthetical and to clean up some overblown language.]

The Guardian has posted until 6 January 2013 videos of the 2007 revival of Glyndebourne's 2003 Nikolaus Lehnhoff über-minimalist staging of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (Act I, Act II, Act III), a staging that's an object lesson in just how powerful a Wagner music-drama can be when the opera director stays out of Wagner's way by doing — and doing only — what he ought to be doing: viz., discovering, to the utmost capacity of his gift, the most vivid and compelling way to realize onstage the full sense and spirit of the opera creator's concept and vision as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions), as we've put it previously. This holds true even when the resulting staging turns out first-rate but is imperfectly realized and dotted here and there with (mostly) small but outright conceptual blunders as it is in this case. Of course, it doesn't hurt matters in this case that the cast is also first-rate, both as singers and as actors, and that the performance of one of that cast, Nina Stemme as Isolde, is the equal of every iconic performance known to us of that impossible role. On the other hand, it doesn't help much (and most especially in this music-drama) that the conductor, Jiří Bĕlohlávek, turns in a less than profound reading of the score; competent, conscientious, and lively as it may be. Negatives notwithstanding, all in all a thoroughly worthwhile and rewarding expenditure of some five hours of our time. We suspect it might prove to be for you as well.

The "Creative Soul" Of The Opera Director

As it typically does whenever the subject of Regietheater is discussed in an online opera forum, the arguments on both sides of the aisle tend to get, shall we say, a bit uncompromising. No surprise there. For better or worse, it's the nature of the beast. We reprint below a short exchange from the most recent such argument in which we were involved simply in order to make it part of the S&F record.

A forum member wrote, in part, the following in response to a 2010 S&F entry ("It's The Music, Stupid!") that apparently had been cited on the forum within the context of an ongoing argument concerning Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater:

[S]ome directors are deliberately trying to stage an opera in a way that is at odds with the music. They don't want you absorbed in the story, they want you to actively question the work. [...] I simply cannot agree that directors should abandon attempts to apply their ideas and concepts to a work. That is the creative soul of the occupation.

To which we responded (here reprinted with language somewhat polished):

No, that is the "creative soul of the occupation" of a Eurotrash/Brechtian Regie, not that of an honest opera director. The "creative soul of the occupation" of an honest opera director resides in his attempt to discover, to the utmost capacity of his gift, the most vivid and compelling way to realize onstage the full sense and spirit of the opera creator's concept and vision as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions). Attempting anything beyond that involves the opera director operating within territory he has no business even so much as stepping foot into much less messing about with.

And so ought it to be in saecula saeculorum.

Beczala's "Black List"

Today, on a venerable online opera forum, a member linked this interview (in German) wherein the well-known Polish tenor Piotr Beczala declared his refusal in advance to be part of any opera production by certain Regietheater Regies (which, for obvious professional reasons, he declined to name) with a reputation for staging Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater productions of the established operatic repertoire — his "Black List", as he called it.

This brave declaration was hailed roundly by an overwhelmingly large percentage of the responding membership of the forum but was just as roundly pooh-poohed by the usual suspects, one of whom is a member of the certified classical music "smart set", a set identified in this recent S&F entry. Wrote this usual suspect:

But Leontyne Price says never sing on principal, only on interest. So difficult to keep up with all these pearls of wisdom from great thinkers whose qualification to theorize on the nature of art consists mostly of the ability to make a pretty noise in the throat.

To which we responded:

You mean as opposed to all those pearls of wisdom from great thinkers whose qualification to theorize on the nature of art consists mostly of their desperate, urgent need to justify and make acceptable their parasitic hijacking of the original works of others, or the theorizing of those great thinkers whose qualification to theorize on the nature of an artform consists of a view of that artform that's long been jaded by their having been obsessive-compulsively addicted to that artform for reasons other than art? I of course dismiss the theorizing of academic types as their theorizing on an artform is provoked and corrupted by things external to art and is therefore ipso facto worthless.

Usual Suspect's immediately following sally attempted the less snarky, more sober approach, managing only to dig himself into an even deeper hole:

I see nothing particularly brave in what Beczala said. Essentially he states he will refuse to work with "crazy" directors who try to "reinvent" the opera without bothering to define what constitutes either craziness or reinvention.... I would call it brave, for example, if Beczala had named names, said, "I worked with Fritz Krank in Graz on a terrible 'Traviata' in which I had to sing my cabaletta nude in a children's swimming pool filled with Jello." But he offers neither names nor concrete examples of what he considers "crazy." (What he says about a crocodile in "Lohengrin" is hypothetical and therefore pointless....)

To which we responded:

Since when does being hypothetical equate with being pointless? And in the case of Lohengrin, Beczala's hypothetical crocodile is perfectly on point given the recent infamous Bayreuth Eurotrash Lohengrin — the so-called "Rat" Lohengrin — with its army of rat-costumed Brabantians complete with tails.

In any case, the man is setting forth a principle and his stated rejection of any staging of Lohengrin — actual or hypothetical — in which a crocodile takes the place of the swan illustrates that principle in a way perfectly comprehensible to all — to all, that is, other than cheerleaders for and staunch fans and defenders of that malignancy known as Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater.

We await (but do not expect) any further argument.

Stay tuned.

Confessions Of An Apparent Reactionary Middle-Brow Bourgeois

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 8:10 PM Eastern on 15 Dec to restore a missing parenthetical in the last graf.]

I sat myself down a few days ago to give myself a good talking to. "With each passing day, ACD, you're beginning to appear more and more like a reactionary middle-brow bourgeois where it concerns the domain of classical music," I admonished myself. "More and more you come down on the side polarly opposite the certified smart set in classical music — i.e., the professional practitioners and print-published classical music critics — and, to be perfectly blunt about it, you're beginning to piss me off. Wake up and smell the proverbial coffee! Get a grip! You're fast beginning to appear a champion of the flat-earthers where classical music is concerned!"

I confess I had to agree with my Admonishing Self. But things are even more dire than my Admonishing Self imagined. I daily find myself more and more beginning to feel resentment against and contempt for the certified classical music smart set; to feel they're doing the domain of classical music not only a disservice but real harm in their appreciation and championing of postmodern idiocies such as the idiocies of the avant-garde that include the embracing of Cagean and Stockhausen-esque and Minimalist (uppercase M) aesthetics; idiocies such as the falsifications and absurdities of Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater (Regieoper); idiocies such as the denial of and the declaring null and void the by-their-very-nature-generated boundary line between classical and pop musics; idiocies such as the idea of effectively transforming the classical music concert hall into a quasi-mosh pit on the grounds that it will free the audience to experience and enjoy the music more fully and will, in addition, bring into the concert hall a new and younger audience; etc., etc., etc.

Well, it seems there's no help for me. That all the above makes me appear a reactionary middle-brow bourgeois where the domain of classical music is concerned is undeniable and I must accept that as there's nothing for it until such time — if ever such time arrives, as improbable as that may be — as I can honestly appreciate and champion what the current certified classical music smart set now appreciates and champions. Until that time what I must earnestly strive to do is find an honorable and honest way to not feel resentment against and contempt for the current certified classical music smart set. After all, I've no reason to suspect that smart set of being dishonorable or dishonest in their enthusiasms (other than, perhaps, a subconscious falling victim to a persistent if subterranean fear of appearing in a 22nd-century edition of Slonimsky) and they have as much right to hold them as I have to reject them (the enthusiasms, that is). A new year will presently be upon us, the traditional time for the making of resolutions. Let that be my very first.

Kaufmann On Regietheater

This video of a Jonas Kaufmann interview (don't be dissuaded by the French title; the interview is conducted in English) wherein Kaufmann expresses his thoughts on Regietheater is a most intelligent discussion of the subject (with due allowance made concerning Kaufmann's careful laudatory comments about the current Hans Neuenfels Eurotrash staging of Lohengrin at Bayreuth — the so-called "Rat" Lohengrin — in which Kaufmann sang the eponymous role). And we don't say that merely because Kaufmann's thoughts on Regietheater closely parallel our own; in particular as expressed in our July 2010 S&F entry titled "It's The Music, Stupid!".

Well, on second thought, maybe we do.

Staging Wagner: From Wagner To The Birth Of Eurotrash

We used the occasion of our Sandy-enforced from-the-world-isolated downtime (we were without electric power from Monday a week ago to Monday last; it's sobering to be confronted so directly by just how utterly dependent on electricity is modern everyday life) to read a book we purchased some four years ago but never got around to reading titled Wagner and the Art of the Theatre by Patrick Carnegy (Yale University Press, 2006) and a most informative read it proved to be. The book surveys the high points of the history of Wagner stagings, mostly in Germany with a side trip to Russia, from the Romantic naturalism of Wagner's own staging to the Brechtian "critical" realism of the so-called Bayreuth "Centennial Ring" of Patrice Chéreau of 1976 and as such traces the history of the emergence of what we today refer to as Regietheater; a development which was the product of pressures social, political, and aesthetic.

What we found especially interesting was the huge influence upon this slow but sea-change shift in the staging of Wagner's works of the theoretical writings of the then mostly obscure Swiss "theatrical visionary" Adolphe Appia at the turn of the century; an influence that can be observed in all manner of opera stagings of even the present day. Appia was a devout Wagnerian and it was Wagner's works that provoked and impelled the formation of his theories of mise en scène. He was convinced that Wagner's devotion to 19th-century realism (or rather illusion of the real) in his stagings of his own works was not only misplaced but effectively worked to sabotage and betray those works.

Appia was right and Wagner should have realized his misstep himself for after Tristan he no longer referred to his music-dramas as examples of Gesamtkunstwerk but as "deeds of music made visible," a belated recognition by him of the primacy of the art of music in music-drama which, contrary to his original theoretical formulation of Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner finally realized can never be on an equal footing with the other arts but will always reign supreme among them. It was precisely this that Appia seized upon. His solution to the problem of mise en scène in the staging of Wagner's works is complex but is grounded in the conviction that the music, not the text, should always be the controlling factor in determining the mise en scène and that that mise en scène should always be suggestive rather than literal and formed to great extent by light modeling and shaping solid structures and the space defined by them as well as the living bodies (i.e., the singer-actors) that interact with those structures and move about within that space. On Appia's stage, scene painting on drops and flats and the like was, for the most part, consigned permanently to the dust bin of theatrical history. (As we read about Appia's theories we could not help but experience a delicious stab of self-satisfied pleasure when we saw how similar was our own modest thinking in the matter of staging Wagner's music-dramas as set forth in our 2005 S&F entry titled "Staging Wagner's Music-Dramas" which can be read in full here.)

What we also found especially interesting was how honest and essentially Werktreue were the early Regietheater stagings of Wagner's works in the sense that none, it seems, attempted to supplant the spirit and sense of Wagner's original theatrical concept by the imposition of the director's own but instead worked to achieve a heightened and more revelatory realization of the drama embodied by the music through the spirit and sense of that original theatrical concept using the music itself as the controlling guide.

The first of these Wagner stagings in a major theater to break, at least in part, with the traditional way of staging Wagner's works as established at Bayreuth by Wagner himself and after him by his wife Cosima who ruled Bayreuth for some 23 years after Wagner's death is generally acknowledged to be the Gustav Mahler/Alfred Roller Tristan of 1903 at the Vienna Court Opera where Mahler had reigned as the theater's conductor and general director since 1897. It proved a great success but didn't manage to extend its influence beyond productions mounted at the Court Opera. The next steps were taken by the Russian director Vsevolod Myerhold with his 1909 Tristan for the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Fyodor Komissarzhevsky with his 1918 Lohengrin for the Theater of the Council of Working Deputies (the former Zimin Theater), I. Prostorov's Rienzi of 1923 for the same theater, and, much later, the legendary Sergei Eisenstein with his 1940 Walküre for the Bolshoi.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, the great conductor Otto Klemperer had become director of the Kroll Opera in Berlin in 1927 and there, with stage designer Ewald Dülberg, staged in 1929 a Fliegende Holländer that pretty much jettisoned Wagner's original theatrical concept for its own and jettisoned as well the principles of Appian mise en scène in favor of the principles of so-called "critical" staging as devised and promoted by Bertolt Brecht; principles that are the very antithesis of everything Wagnerian; principles producing stagings calculated to force an audience to think rather than feel during a performance; to adopt an actively critical attitude toward what's being performed onstage before their very eyes. This production set the keynote, as it were, for the post-war, Brecht-influenced German productions meant to counter the hugely successful and essentially Werktreue New Bayreuth productions of the Appia-influenced Wieland Wagner in the 1950s and '60s; Brecht-influenced productions such as the 1970 Ring of Ulrich Melchinger, the 1972 Tannhäuser of Götz Friedrich, and the 1973 Ring of Joachim Herz from which the 1976 Bayreuth "Centennial Ring" of the Frenchman Patrice Chéreau took its cue (something of which we were previously unaware).

Thus was born Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater; Regietheater that's today the norm rather than the avant-garde exception.

(We hasten to make clear that the immediately foregoing declaration is ours and NOT that of the book's author Patrick Carnegy who not only holds that Konzept Regietheater is a perfectly legitimate enterprise but actually applauds its practice.)

For those with a more than passing interest in the staging of Wagner's operas and music-dramas we warmly recommend Wagner and the Art of the Theatre for its informed historical survey of the high points of that staging's development from its beginnings up through 1976 and a small bit beyond. We think you'll find the time spent reading its 400 easy-reading pages time well spent.

Whither Classical Music?

John Simon, the often reviled but brilliant literary, theater, music, and film critic whose acerbic, barb-tongued, (too-)often just plain nasty commentary has appeared in such wide-ranging publications as The Hudson Review, The New Leader, The New Criterion, National Review, New York Magazine, Opera News, The Weekly Standard, and Bloomberg News and who now writes his own blog Uncensored John Simon has up on that blog a new article titled "Whither Art?" the "art" of the title referring to the fine arts generally but painting in particular.

As we read the article it struck us that were one to substitute classical music along with mutatis mutandis adjustments everywhere painting is referred to, pretty much everything Mr. Simon has to say would read just as on-point. (In fact Mr. Simon himself suggests just that in one brief sentence in one brief paragraph: "The problem for most arts is that so very much has already been done in them, propelling more recent practitioners into horrible distortions, obscure byways, or downright dead ends. This is true also in music, otherwise we would have been spared Stockhausen, Cage, Glass and their likes." See also our August 2004 S&F entry titled "Whither Genuine Art?".)

Writes Mr. Simon:

As I have often said and sometimes written, the history of art extends from Anonymous to Untitled, from when only the work mattered to where only the name in the signature does.

What reminds me of this is a reproduction in The New York Times (10/16/12) of an untitled painting by Franz Kline, which, at the forthcoming auction, “is expected to bring $20 million to $30 million” and make me sick to my stomach. I recall a time, long ago, when Kline yelled at me at a party, “You are full of shit!”, and I replied, “Maybe, but at least I don’t smear it on canvas and peddle it as art.”

Art today is the result of a tacit conspiracy among artists, art historians, art critics, art dealers, nabobs who don’t know what to do with their money, and all the people who don’t know anything about art. And why shouldn’t it fetch that much when the article about the Kline painting notes that one by Clyfford Still, resonantly entitled “1949-A-No. 1” went for $61.7 million? Even Clyfford with a Y should raise a cautionary eyebrow.

Read the full text here.