Sounds & Fury

Things May Be Looking Up

Here are two news items from the worlds of opera and the spoken-word theater: here and here, respectively.

1: The heirs of Francis Poulenc are nun too pleased with Dmitri Tcherniakov's 2010 production of Dialogues des carmélites. They've taken the Bavarian State Opera to court, alleging the concept, in particular the final scene, misrepresents the 1957 opera.

2: Simon Stone, the resident director of Belvoir St. Theatre, an Australian company, jumped head first into a pail of boiling oil when he took it upon himself to rewrite [Arthur Miller's] Death of a Salesman. Not only did he cut the play's epilogue, but he altered the manner in which Willy Loman, Arthur Miller's protagonist, meets his death. In the original play, Willy dies in a car crash that may or may not have been intentional; in Mr. Stone's staging, he commits suicide by gassing himself. On top of that, Belvoir neglected to inform ICM Partners, the agency that represents Mr. Miller's estate and licenses his plays for production throughout the world, that Mr. Stone was altering the script. [...] No sooner did ICM get wind of the changes than Belvoir was informed that if the company didn't perform Death of a Salesman in its entirety — complete with epilogue — the production would be shut down....

Things may be looking up on the staging front — finally.

Whatever Became Of The Breastplates?

The excellent Wagner-dedicated website The Wagnerian has up a chapter excerpt from author David Littlejohn's 1992 book The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera titled "Whatever Became of the Breastplates?" that comments in brief on stagings of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen from Wagner's own staging at Bayreuth in 1876 down to the present day (or rather, the present day as of 1992). For Ring newcomers especially (but by no means exclusively) the chapter makes for most interesting reading and closes with the following thought, even more salient today than when it was written:

Chaos, as Wagner himself sometimes suggested, is likely to be the rule, rather than the exception, in our world (and in productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen that try to reflect or comment on that world) until another cruel divine order emerges to force things back into unity. Rings devoted to the evils and collapse of Eastern European communism are surely on the drafting boards already, now that Rings devoted to the evils and collapse of capitalism and fascism are becoming routine. Be grateful if you have the opportunity to see a contemporary Ring that is as compelling to look at as it is to listen to; thoughtfully (not narrowly or spitefully) of our time; on the whole generous to Wagner, rather than mean-minded and reductive; one that makes provocative sense, and still seems to grow out of the music, which is (fortunately) larger than all of these postmodern Konzepts put together.

Read the full text here.

A Great Idea Gone Horribly Wrong From The Get-Go

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is arguably the very incarnation of that mythical entity, The Great American Novel. Someone had the splendid idea of having the novel read aloud serially on the Web a chapter at a time in downloadable segments. Here's the result so far.

What's wrong with this picture (apart from the misspelling of the novel's title we mean)?

Carl Orff’s Meretricious Claptrap

Following a few brief, general introductory remarks, venerable classical music critic Martin Bernheimer began his Financial Times review of this past Wednesday's opening concert of the Carnegie Hall 2012-2013 season featuring the splendid Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the baton of its music director Riccardo Muti thusly:

Riccardo Muti, whose aesthetic preferences are sometimes surprising, chose to inaugurate [the orchestra's] vaunted Manhattan visit with the meretricious claptrap of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. So much for intellectual and/or emotional challenge.

On reading this we simultaneously smiled and winced (a neat trick, that), for while we could not help but agree with Mr. Bernheimer's bitingly laconic assessment of the work, we nevertheless harbor "an ongoing, undiminished, and fairly mindless fascination with it," as we've previously remarked here on S&F. As we went on to say:

Its unrelenting ostinati; its primitive, propulsive rhythmic drive; its unsubtle tonic-dominant harmony sans any trace of chromatic coloring — in short, its very "dumbness" — is what seems to attract. It's a sort of invigorating mind-rester: primally engaging, and no thought required. And it's weird. Very weird. The text, I mean, its weirdness sharpened by being written and of course sung mostly in Latin.

But as Mr. Bernheimer neatly put it concerning other music on the CSO's program for the following night's concert, "one didn’t have to love the music on this occasion to admire the music-making," so it is with a particularly brilliant reading of Carmina recorded and released on vinyl LP in 1958 by Capitol Records featuring (of all groups!) the Houston Choral, Houston Youth Symphony Boys' Choir, and Houston Symphony Orchestra with the great and inimitable Leopold Stokowski on the podium which recording was subsequently remastered and transferred to CD by EMI. (It's paired on this recording with a reading of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite about which reading the less said the better.) As we wrote about this recorded performance of Carmina:

Lord knows I'm no Stoki fan generally which in my day was enough to get one run out of Philadelphia on a rail were one reckless enough to admit to it in public. But of all the recorded readings of this work of my experience Stoki is the only one to get everything right sans any minuses. He draws from the at that time less than world-class Houston forces performances that the best of the era would have been proud to have produced, and draws from the soloists — Virginia Babikian, Clyde Hager, and Guy Gardner — performances to match. A truly sterling reading. [Our full and more detailed commentary on Carmina and this recorded performance can be read here.]

This EMI remastering is a tough-to-impossible CD to find new, but one well worth the search.

Wagner's Huge Blunder

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 1:48 AM Eastern on 25 Sep. See below.]

We've never given the close attention to Wagner's three canonical operas (for none of which have we ever so much as glanced at a score) — Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin — that we've given Wagner's music-dramas (with the exception of Die Meistersinger which, while recognizing it as a masterpiece, we've never been able to "connect" with because entirely too sunny and diatonic a work for our tastes and temperament) and have for decades been mildly dismissive of all three calling them Wagner's practice pieces on his way to becoming Wagner.

On our recently learning that Anna Netrebko is scheduled to sing the Lohengrin Elsa in Dresden in 2016 (with Thielemann on the podium), we were moved to again listen to the work which we haven't listened to for a great many years and on doing so were struck anew by its remarkable Act II Prelude and first scene which for the first time in Wagner's oeuvre give unmistakably clear intimation of the Wagner to be — specifically, the Wagner of the Ring (that Act II Prelude and first scene is almost a working draft of the Act II Prelude and first scene of Götterdämmerung) — and by a huge blunder by Wagner that, in a single stroke, turned Lohengrin into another German Romantic opera instead of the perfect operatic version of a tragic fairytale of the Hans Christian Andersen sort it could otherwise have been embodying all the profundity that lies at the heart of all great fairytales: Wagner had Lohengrin not only fall in love with Elsa, the woman he was sent to save, but actually marry her — a double-whammy blunder that shows a Wagner still a fair way off from becoming Wagner.

So, why is it a huge blunder? Because it instantly transforms Lohengrin, a divinely charged and empowered personage, into an ordinary (if extraordinarily noble and brave) human being with all the presumptive foibles native to the species. More Wagnerian would it have been to have Elsa unrequitedly in love with Lohengrin and ultimately come to realize that such a love is tragically impossible of fulfillment or consummation and must of necessity be unrequited and rebuked and conclude with her dreams brought to an end by Lohengrin's ineluctable departure and return to Monsalvat and the Grail, that departure and return untimely brought about and hastened by her betrayal of her vow to never question Lohengrin as to his name, lineage, or from whence he came.

That's the profound stuff of great fairytales. What the still-not-yet- Wagner Wagner gave us instead is but the sentimental stuff of conventional opera.

---

Update (1:48 AM Eastern on 25 Sep): We've received a number of eMails pointing out that Wagner intended the Lohengrin-Elsa falling in love thing to evoke the Zeus-Semele myth and that the Eros-Psyche myth is another parallel. We're perfectly aware of all this but maintain our above expressed opinion nevertheless. It's our position that Wagner's idea here was both ill-conceived and ill-executed as drama. Wagner set his Lohengrin tale against a real-world German-historical background and was even compulsively insistent on historical accuracy in the settings and costumes and then attempted to insinuate centrally that which belongs entirely to the fantastic world of myth and fairytale and, in our less than humble opinion, managed the merger quite clumsily. What he ended up with as consequence was neither fish nor fowl but a German Romantic opera with its supernatural component distorted and crudely integrated dramatically.

As we've above suggested, Lohengrin is, after all, but a practice work by Wagner on his way to becoming Wagner.

The Lepage Staging Of The Ring: A Brief Summing-Up

Thanks to the Met and PBS we've now seen all four parts of Robert Lepage's staging of Wagner's Ring and so it seems at least a brief summing-up is in order concerning it. Yes, we're well aware we didn't do even a bullet-point review of Götterdämmerung. There was simply nothing there to impel or compel us to undertake the tiresome and unrewarding task. Suffice it to say that it was pretty much more of the same-old-same-old with Mr. Lepage's employment of Le Machine ranging from his trademark stupefying Busby Berkeley symmetricality thing to the occasionally evocative to the at least visually attractive to the unobtrusive and un-tricky, to the totally flat and boring as at the close of Götterdämmerung. And more of the same-old-same-old as well with Mr. Lepage's seeming habit of leaving his singer-actors to their own devices dramatically for the most part sans any "directorial shaping of the musico-dramatic realization of Wagner's cosmic vision" as we put it previously. The singer-actors all gave their professional best which is considerable as did the Met Male Chorus but we would single out only Jay Hunter Morris for his convincing Siegfried, and Iain Paterson and Wendy Bryn Harmer for making come fully alive Gunther and Gutrune, respectively; two too often innocuous characters as they're typically sung and played. As for conductor Fabio Luisi, his reading of the score gave full due to Wagner rhetorically and stylistically notwithstanding that Maestro Luisi tends to run rather too fleet through some of the dramatic high points and climaxes not the least of which is the climax of the three intertwining leitmotifs that form Götterdämmerung's — and the tetralogy's — close.

There. Don't ever say we didn't review Götterdämmerung.

Regarding the staging of the entire tetralogy, if one were inclined to be kind about it one might say Mr. Lepage is, by slow degrees, learning how to best employ the Frankenstein contraption that's at the very heart of his staging of the Ring. The problem with that, however, is the very way in which Mr. Lepage seems to approach everything concerning the employment of the contraption. His focus seems to be on what he can get the contraption to do that will result in some visually arresting effect at any particular moment rather than on how the capabilities of the contraption can best be exploited to express, frame, or support the dramatic content to hand. It's a tail wagging the dog approach that's all but guaranteed to come up with the wrong way to go pretty much every time.

Of course, saying that Mr. Lepage is by slow degrees learning how to best employ Le Machine is not saying very much and is of little comfort given Le Machine's appalling initial and ongoing cost. The Met (and its audiences) deserve far more and far better considering the huge investment involved. On the other hand, occasionally evocative or visually attractive or unobtrusive and un-tricky employment of Le Machine is preferable to their opposites and since it's an almost sure bet that Le Machine and Mr. Lepage or his Lepage-trained surrogate will be with the Met for the next decade or so of Ring performances, we suppose the Met (and its audiences) ought to be thankful for small favors as there's but one other way out for the Met from under Mr. Gelb's colossal economic and artistic blunder: cease throwing good money after bad, have done with it entirely, and live to try again another day the wiser for the experience.

But we all know that's not going to happen, don't we.

Of course we do.

And so it goes.

The PBS Telecast Of The Lepage Staging Of Siegfried

We're going to make brief, bullet-point work of this as writing our music-drama-by-music-drama commentary on the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen has become a most tiresome and unrewarding exercise. So, in brief and bullet-pointed:

⚫ In Acts I and II of Siegfried, Le Machine showed that it could be something more and better than it's been so far and actually create some genuinely evocative settings while at the same time accommodating the singer-actors by functioning as a stage for all their actions (not just a few tricks) instead of as a mere 21st-century high-tech version of a 19th-century scenery flat in front of which the singer-actors can do their thing. Most impressive. On the other hand, the very same genuinely evocative settings are achievable without having to construct a special piece of machinery costing $16M to achieve them.

⚫ In Act I, and for the first time in this tetralogy so far, it appeared the singer-actors were not left to their own devices but had their every movement shaped by a director who, for the most part, seemed to know his business. Also for the first time in this tetralogy so far, the singer-actors actually faced the person with whom they were exchanging sung dialogue instead of singing their lines facing the audience bel canto opera style (and it's about bloody time, too!). Perhaps the director was responsible for that as well.

⚫ The Siegfried (Jay Hunter Morris) actually looked (and acted) every inch a Siegfried, and although his fine voice is not terribly big it was big enough and used with intelligence.

⚫ The dragon looked a bit silly but we've seen worse.

⚫ Conductor Fabio Luisi, treating this music-drama as the Ring's scherzo as it is, made a fine if just a tad too-fleet job of it, and Jay Hunter Morris (Siegfried), Gerhard Siegel (Mime), Bryn Terfel (The Wanderer), Eric Owens (Alberich), Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde), Hans-Peter König (Dragon/Fafner), and Patricia Bardon (Erda) all did themselves proud.

⚫ Memo To The Powers That Be: Fire the idiot who suggested Mime should wear spectacles (complete with a jeweler's loupe, no less). Fire as well the idiot who suggested that Erda be blond and blue-eyed and leave her subterranean abode to stroll about with The Wanderer.)

The PBS Telecast Of The Lepage Staging Of Die Walküre

We just finished watching our recording of this telecast which was our second viewing of an HD film of Die Walküre the first of which we viewed this past January. We wrote then that this staging was...

...perhaps 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, for the most part, 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.

We saw nothing in this viewing to alter our opinion of this staging except to note that we missed a couple adjectives in our above assessment; namely, silly and idiotic.

Silly were the costumes (this entire Ring is in urgent need of a new costume designer) and the entirely redundant shadow play pantomimes projected behind Siegmund's Act I telling of his and his family's early history, and of how he managed to lose his weapons and end up wounded and weaponless at Hunding's hut. And idiotic (and we use the term advisedly) was the giant "eye" (at least it looked like an eye, presumably symbolic of Wotan's lost eye) that slowly appeared downstage center out of nowhere and for no reason at the beginning of Wotan's great Act II monologue and within which are seen images referring to those things of which Wotan is singing at the moment (e.g., Alberich's theft of the Rhinegold, the ring, Erda's warning, etc.) as if Wotan's words and their leitmotif-rich music were insufficient on their own. (One can almost hear Mr. Lepage saying to himself: "The man will be sitting there singing almost all by himself for some twenty minutes and NOTHING ELSE IS HAPPENING! Can't have that. The audience will be bored out of their skulls. Have to put something in there to liven things up.") Needless to say, that "eye" served only to trivialize Wotan's deeply searching and deeply mined confession which confession, along with the immediately preceding scene that provoked it, is the very linchpin not only of Die Walküre but of the entire tetralogy.

And speaking of that immediately preceding provoking scene wherein Fricka, sung by the big-voiced Stephanie Blythe, forces Wotan to see and understand what a conniving self-deceiver he's been, was itself trivialized by none other than Stephanie Blythe herself by virtue of her transformation of Fricka into a wounded-wife character out of some Italian soap opera. Whether she did that on her own hook or at Mr. Lepage's ignorant direction the responsibility for the trivialization lies squarely at Mr. Lepage's feet and it's unforgivable.

So much for the dramatic aspects of this production. As to the musical, James Levine made a rather better job of it than he did with Das Rheingold but, still, nothing to write home (or a blog entry) about; and principal protagonists Bryn Terfel (Wotan), Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde), Jonas Kaufmann (Siegmund), and Eva-Maria Westbroek (Sieglinde) all performed respectably, Mr. Terfel bettering his Rheingold Wotan by an order of magnitude. The only outstanding voice and characterization in this production belonged to Hans-Peter König who made one helluva Hunding.

And so it goes — or, rather, has gone so far.

Onward to Siegfried.

The PBS Telecast Of The Lepage Staging Of Das Rheingold

We've just finished watching our recording of the PBS telecast of the Met's Robert Lepage staging of Das Rheingold and what a two-and-a-half-hours waste of our time it was. On the Lepage staging of Die Walküre we'd written previously that it was...

...perhaps 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 ... and make itself impotently conspicuous merely by its looming, hulking, contribute-nothing presence.

The same could be said of this staging of Das Rheingold. Dramatically, it was leadenly static and absent any hint of "directorial shaping of the musico-dramatic realization of Wagner's cosmic vision" which, it seems, was "left to the dictates and requirements of Le Machine and the whims and inclinations of the individual performers, each according to his or her wont," (to quote ourself), and musically no more than merely competent on all counts from all performers, from the conductor (James Levine) on up. It also badly miscast vocally the two principal protagonists — Bryn Terfel (Wotan) and Eric Owens (Alberich) — each of whom should have been singing the other's role. To detail all the myriad badness of this staging would take far too much of our time and in the absence of payment in serious money for the effort we refuse to undertake the task except to point out that this is a Rheingold absent a Walhall (we kid you not). The only thing positive one could say about this staging is that it isn't a Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept Regietheater) staging — although on second thought, perhaps that would have been preferable.

Wagner's Dream: A Promotional "Documentary" For The Met

The film Wagner's Dream, a two-hour "documentary" by Susan Froemke made as a tool to promote the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen directed by Robert Lepage, was televised last night by PBS and contrary to the film's purpose it unwittingly served to reveal instead just why this appallingly expensive production of the Ring is the appalling artistic failure it is.

The film showed us the basic workings of Mr. Lepage's brainchild — the colossal $16M Frankenstein contraption we've previously labeled Le Machine — and the hugely complex controls and manipulations necessary to make it work, and spent most of the rest of the time showing us the performers learning to navigate its territory and adapt to its peculiarities without doing themselves lethal injury. There were also scenes showing the lead singers rehearsing their music, talking about their roles, and coming to grips with their insecurities; Met General Manager Peter Gelb doing his spiels; a few brief opera patron comments on the production; and a few visits with Met radio hosts Margaret Juntwait and William Berger doing their thing, and that was pretty much it for the film.

Notice anything missing? Here's a clue: what's missing is what's missing in the actual production of the Ring itself: any semblance or hint of directorial shaping of the musico-dramatic realization of Wagner's cosmic vision by Monsieur Lepage. That, it seems, was left to the dictates and requirements of Le Machine and the whims and inclinations of the individual performers, each according to his or her wont.

Marvel ye not, then, at the production's appalling artistic failure.

Heather Mac Donald Goes Baroque

When thinker and writer Heather Mac Donald feels moved to write a piece on opera classical music-lovers are sure to be richly rewarded by its reading even if, going in, one has no interest at all in whatever particular thing Ms. Mac Donald has chosen to write about (on coming out we assure you one's interest will be more than a little aroused whatever that particular thing may be).

This time, for the quarterly magazine City Journal, Ms. Mac Donald has chosen to write about two opera productions given in New York earlier this year: Telemann's Orpheus presented by New York City Opera, and a new original pasticcio opera titled Enchanted Island put together for the Metropolitan Opera by British playwright Jeremy Sams who also wrote the English libretto for the new work. Wrote Ms. Mac Donald about these two productions:

Few Baroque operas (and all by Handel) have clawed their way from oblivion to the margins of the standard repertoire, a source of chagrin to anyone who loves the period or simply hungers for broader musical experience. The Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera offered radically different solutions to this lacuna earlier this year. NYCO revived an unknown opera by Georg Philipp Telemann in a beautiful and expertly performed production at El Museo del Barrio. The Metropolitan Opera crafted an entirely new work from music by eight Baroque composers, set to a new libretto in English.

The Met’s venture was the riskier proposition, bound to trigger grumbling among Baroque aficionados who resented the missed opportunity to stage an historical work. But while the revival of existing operas such as Telemann’s Orpheus at NYCO contributes more to our musical knowledge in the long run, the Met’s Enchanted Island must also be counted a resounding (and insufficiently appreciated) success.

Read the full text here.

A Trenchant Commentary On Konzept Regietheater

Whoever posted this video to YouTube seems to have missed the point of this trenchant (and hilarious) Backa Teater (Gothenburg, Sweden) production of Carmen entirely.

Clearly, this production was done to skewer today's pervasive Konzept Regietheater (i.e., Eurotrash) opera productions, those who relish them, and all those responsible for conceiving, participating in, and producing them.

And a splendid job the Backa Teater theater company made of it, too.

The Met's New La Traviata As Seen On PBS

It was one of those need-to-watch-TV-cause-we're-bored-silly nights. Problem was, there was nothing on TV worth watching. And so, faute de mieux, we turned to New Jersey's PBS HD channel which was airing the Met's HD film of La Traviata in the staging by Willy Decker and vowed to watch the whole thing through no matter what, except in the case the voices were not more than merely competent in which case we would be done with it and watch the news on CNN instead.

The voices were indeed more than merely competent for the most part, the standouts being that white-haired Russian guy whose singing was spectacular and that French person who, after a somewhat rocky start, did honor to her role as principal protagonist. And it didn't hurt matters that this opera is the sort of opera that's mother's milk to conductor Fabio Luisi who did a splendid job in the pit.

And then there was the staging.

To put this in perspective, one must first ask oneself what Traviata is at bottom. And the most honest answer to that question is that Traviata is, at bottom, nothing more than a soap opera in the typical Italian-opera mold. Its music, Italian-opera-lovely as some of it is, and its text declare it so and no staging can transform it into something greater which, we suspect, is what Herr Decker attempted (unsuccessfully) to do with his staging which staging, we hasten to add, while decidedly Regietheater is NOT Konzept Regietheater (i.e., Eurotrash). The staging maintains throughout the concept of the opera's creator and does not attempt to substitute its own Konzept in place of it. It merely reimagines the realization of the opera creator's concept which is, of course, what makes it a Regietheater staging.

We found that elegant but starkly bare staging to be hockey-puck devoid of anything that could be called evocative or resonant, and found the sledgehammer-symbolism of that ever-present clock thing and the equally ever-present silent figure that's supposed to represent Death (yeah, yeah, we get it, Willy; her time is running out) embarrassingly hokey as was that sparse IKEA (or was it Walmart) furniture not to speak of all that singing while lying down or crawling about the floor.

Mr. Gelb, we suggest, should do lots more along the lines of vetting these stagings before committing the Met to live with them beyond their initial presentation. We wonder just how many seasons this vapid entry will have to run in order to amortize its cost.

On Musical Masterpieces

So you, a musically well-educated musician, hear a piece of music new to you, are gobsmacked by it and passionately declare it a masterpiece. Your companion, an equally musically well-educated musician, disagrees. He says it's merely a pleasing, well-made piece of music. Do you imagine you could successfully defend your assessment of the piece as a masterpiece?

If you answered Yes, we suggest you think again and reflect on what the legendary teacher of composition Nadia Boulanger (and we here use the word "legendary" most advisedly) had to say on the matter:

I can distinguish music that is well-made and music that isn't. Yet, what distinguishes well-made music and a masterpiece, that I cannot tell. I won't say that [an objective criterion to distinguish the two] doesn't exist, but I don't know what it is. It all comes down to faith. As I accept God, I accept beauty, I accept emotion. I also accept masterpieces. There are conditions without which masterpieces cannot be achieved, but what defines a masterpiece cannot be pinned down.

Just so.

(The above quote was transcribed from a lovely film on Mademoiselle Boulanger by Bruno Monsaingeon which can be viewed here.)

Ave Atque Vale, Nora

The gifted humorist, essayist, journalist, screenwriter, and filmmaker Nora Ephron died today at age 71 from pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia according to The New York Times.

We first encountered Ms. Ephron's work in a short humor piece she did for Esquire magazine in the '70s, if our memory can be trusted, titled simply, "Crabs" (we can't seem to locate it online and so can't link to it), which, it struck us at the time, was one of the most perfect pieces of humor we'd ever read. She once said of writing (this a close paraphrase as we can't locate the source of the verbatim quote): "Beginnings and endings are easy. It's the stuff in the middle that's hard." That's no doubt true (as it is of life as well) but one would be hard-pressed to discern that in Ms. Ephron's writing so effortlessly does it all seem to flow whether it be for the page or the screen. The film When Harry Met Sally for which she wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay is a case in point and a sterling example of Ms. Ephron's pitch-perfect, bitingly humorous but deeply sympathetic and insightful commentary on contemporary male-female behavior and interaction, and her short, best-selling, thinly-veiled autobiographical novel Heartburn another case in point and a sterling example of her ability to find humor (if at times of the dark sort) in even the most painful personal experience. Hers is a voice absent which the world will be a poorer and less bright place. She will be sorely missed.

Atque in perpetuum, Nora, ave atque vale.

A Failure Of Arts Criticism

It began late yesterday innocently enough as these things go: a naïve inquiry on an online opera forum by someone who wondered whether Regietheater stagings of opera are "really drawing people to go to opera live? Or buy it on DVD, etc.? Or is it driving people away?"

As we don't really know the answers to those questions in hard-facts terms we felt fairly certain we could easily avoid becoming involved in any back-and-forth arguments that ensued on one side or the other — that is, until we read this from a steadfast cheerleader for and champion of Regietheater of even the most extreme sort (i.e., Eurotrash):

For most of us [Americans], our experience with Regietheater is at [a distance]: we read a review or two consisting of a sort of laundry list of "shocking" effects: nudity, urination, bloody violence, depictions of drug use — or even something as minimally titillating as setting the action of "Il trovatore" in a hotel suite. This type of review represents a failure of arts criticism because there is no attempt [by the arts critic] to put these elements in context, or, more to the point, to try to grasp the drift of the director's take on the work.

Say what? "A failure of arts criticism because there is no attempt [by the arts critic] to ... try to grasp the drift of the director's take on the work"(!)? That's a bit like saying that it's a journalistic failure because in merely describing the brutal murders perpetrated by a particularly sadistic serial killer the journalist made no attempt to try to grasp the killer's view of the matter.

That was just one perverse, purblind step too far for us, and so we shot back:

"The director's take on the work"(!)? Why should anyone be concerned with an opera director's take on the work? It's of no importance whatsoever. It's not — or, rather, ought not to be — part of an opera director's job to have a "take on the work". His job — his sole job — is to realize onstage, in the most vivid and compelling manner possible, the opera creator's take on the work; i.e., to realize onstage the concept and vision of the opera's creator as made manifest in the score (music, text, and stage directions). Period. Full stop. Any opera director who goes beyond that in his staging of an opera is involving himself in areas he has no business being much less meddling in. And to preempt the favorite straw man of Regietheater cheerleaders and champions, that does NOT mean or even imply that opera stagings should be of the "Tosca with bonnet, shepherd's crook and Empire waist, [or] Valkyries with horns, or humped Rigolettos wearing funny hats" sort, as one [forum member] here put it. It means that honest and conscientious opera directors must find evocative and resonant new ways to stage an opera for contemporary audiences without tossing aside or ignoring in any meaningful way the full spirit and sense of the opera creator's concept and vision as made manifest in the score.

Any hack opera director can be outrageous and provocative in his stagings of opera. It takes an opera director of genuine gift to be able to stage an opera in conformance with the inviolable (or, rather, ought to be inviolable) principle above set forth.

We await a coherent, reasoned rebuttal.

Stay tuned.

And Speaking Of Wagner

It's an irony of sorts that the works of the rabidly anti-Semitic Wagner have, over the centuries, often been best understood and performed by Jews, from the hugely gifted Hermann Levi, a Jew and the son of a rabbi, who conducted the Bayreuth world premiere of Wagner's deeply Christian-themed Parsifal to the notable Jewish Wagner conductors of our own era such as Fritz Reiner, Daniel Barenboim, and the great Georg Solti. Here is yet another who speaks with deeply-felt passion about Wagner and his music-dramas and operas: Iván Fischer.

(Our thanks to The Wagnerian for the link.)

Our Last Word On The Lepage Ring

We've been so involved with other matters these past couple months that we've given rather short shrift to this blog in terms of time spent on new entries. We banged out a number of short ones during that period, all of them dashed off as if we had the gift of being able to write first-rate copy to deadline — a gift we time after time have proved to ourself we sorely lack — and ultimately had to spend more time fixing them up after publication than it would have taken us to do them properly before clicking the PUBLISH button.

During our last fixing-up excursion we discovered to our chagrin that we never published here our in-a-nutshell critique of the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen that we wrote in response to some remarks by a member of an opera forum in which we participate which response we intended to reprint here to make part of the S&F record but never did. We herewith correct the oversight below (with some needed sprucing-up).

While I take your point (and it's a reasonable one), saying we ought to accept the lesser of two evils [viz., Lepage's staging of the Ring as opposed to a Eurotrash one] with some measure of relief 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.

Lovely

Since we began some five months ago to again watch television with some frequency thanks to Verizon's FiOS TV, we've been repeatedly surprised to find that the most creative and arresting things to be seen thereon are regularly to be found among none other than that lowly and most often justly despised breed, the TV commercial. For example, this for Air France airlines. The music is from the Adagio of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 (K. 488) (yes, we know; it sounds more like Gluck than Mozart, piano part notwithstanding).

Peter Gelb, Take Note

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 10:49 AM Eastern on 21 Apr to reinstate in the opening graf a critical conditional clause mysteriously gone missing.]

In our long-running and continuing war against Eurotrash Regietheater, we've often remarked, both here and elsewhere, that at the root of the problem when the staging goes bad in those rare cases where the Regie is actually making an honest effort to reimagine the concept of the opera's creator rather than blatantly foisting his or her own pea-brained Konzept on an innocent public while hijacking the opera creator's music and text to his or her own purpose is that the Regie is taking his cues from the opera's text rather than its music, and that such a process is a lethal error on the Regie's part. It was therefore gratifying to read the following from stellar singer-actor and intelligent musician Jonas Kaufmann in a piece today for The New York Times by classical music critic, book author, and opera scholar Peter G. Davis:

Too many directors arrive at the opera house these days knowing little or nothing about music. Most come from the spoken theater, focus only on the text and don’t understand how to give the music its space [we would have said, "give the music its due"]. It may seem obvious to you and me, but a brilliant theater director does not automatically translate into a brilliant opera director. If I am a crack racecar driver, that doesn’t qualify me to be an ace pilot as well.

I sometimes feel that directors devise all these elaborate concepts because they don’t trust the power of the music and are terrified of boring the audience. Opera is a truly magical art, but the magic originates primarily in the music that we singers [we would have added, "and the conductor and orchestra"] work so hard to communicate.

Yes indeed.

Peter Gelb, take note.