Sounds & Fury

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.

Ave Atque Vale, Dietrich

The great, near-legendary German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died today at his home in Bavaria at age 86. Celebrated worldwide as the foremost lieder singer of his generation and a world-class opera performer and first-rate musician, he was also an influential teacher and one of the 20th century's most prolific recording artists. We knew his work mostly through his recorded roles in the operas of Wagner and Mozart and through his recorded performances of Schubert's lieder and quickly came to appreciate his great artistry as both actor and singer. He was one of those rare performers who, over time, one comes to think of as living perpetually, the thought of his death at some point almost a thing beyond consideration. He immeasurably enriched the world of music and we should all be thankful that he lived at a time when his artistry could be faithfully preserved for us all and for unnumbered future generations to relish.

The New York Times obituary can be read here and a lovely tribute by tenor Ian Bostridge can be read here.

Atque in perpetuum, Dietrich, ave atque vale.

La Scala's Giovanni — The Webcast

Well, that was an unexpected and crushing disappointment. We listened to the live RAI streaming audio webcast but missed half of Act I (after Giovanni's duettino) as we had an appointment that couldn't be rescheduled, but got back in time to catch the whole of Act II. What we heard of Act I was rough going (rough in both senses of the term) both onstage and in the pit, and the principal culprit was conductor Daniel Barenboim. We'd never heard Barenboim conduct Mozart before but assumed from his piano playing that it would be set properly deeply in the man's very bones. Apparently not. Even though his tempi were pretty much on target most of the time, the orchestral playing was flaccid and ragged and lacked that crucial Mozartian spiritedness born of precision. That of course had its effect on the singers who were also having a rough time of it on their own, and the whole thing was largely a mess — not a train-wreck-type mess; merely a mess of the garden variety sort. Things got better in Act II for both orchestra and singers but the performance was nowhere near the kind of performance this stellar cast seemed to almost guarantee (see this S&F entry). To be fair about it, Mozart's music is arguably the most treacherous ever written as it offers absolutely zero wiggle room in performance. If one doesn't get it bang-spot-on-right on all fronts the music simply fails to "sing". Get it bang-spot-on-right and it "sings" transcendently. We don't know of any other music where that's the case.

Ah well. And so it goes. Perhaps things will straighten themselves out at some point in the production's run but we wouldn't bet the farm on it — unless, that is, James Levine miraculously gets well and feels he just has to head down to Milan to show them how it's done.

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.

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.

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.

The Biographical Is Key To The Creative

Our most recent entry which concerned the after-the-fact authority of the original sources consulted by Wagner vis-à-vis his Der Ring des Nibelungen has, in short order, brought to the fore a cognate matter which we here quote in extenso and verbatim:

Your various articles on Wagner and his works convince me that you have a defective understanding of Wagner's music dramas, the intentions that lie behind them and the intellectual context in which they were written. While it's true that works of art take on a life of their own once the artist has delivered them into the world, this does not mean that the art-work can be or should be detached from the ordinary and intellectual life of the artist who created them. I reject the romantic [sic] view that the artist is merely the channel of some sort of divine inspiration. Wagner's works are his works, and those works are inseparable from Wagner the ordinary man and cannot be properly understood without placing them within the context of his ordinary and intellectual life at the time of the works' creation.

The above idea concerning the output of creative artists is neither novel nor atypical and is, in fact, a bedrock assumption of perhaps the majority of arts criticism, both today and in the past. While we have no argument with that assumption when concerned with the output of creative artists of ordinary gift (which ordinary gift can indeed be substantial), we take strong exception to it when the output concerned is the product of a creative artist of transcendent gift such as Richard Wagner. As the great T.S. Eliot put it: "[T]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates."

In our not-so-humble opinion, the kind of thinking that proclaims that even in the case of a transcendent creative genius such as Wagner the created artworks cannot be separated from the ordinary man and can be understood properly only in the context of the ordinary and intellectual life of their creator serves only to lead one ineluctably into all sorts of false byways and into drawing false if authoritative-sounding conclusions concerning those artworks. Ultimately, such thinking results in producing what are essentially irrelevant intellectual maunderings regarding the artworks themselves, clever as those maunderings may be. As we've asserted here on S&F more than once, all Wagner's music-dramas are entirely self-contained works and require no scholarly biographical commentary of any sort whatsoever for one to comprehend them fully. Where genuine works of art are concerned, the facts of the ordinary and intellectual life of their creator, if he be a creator of transcendent genius, count directly for nothing in the artworks the aesthetic and affective core of each of which is always the product of mostly unconscious transformative processes which processes are as much a mystery to the creator as they are to us. Nor can those transformative processes be "reverse engineered" after the fact to better understand them and the works of art they produced — not even by the creator himself, much less ordinary folk such as us, no matter how deep or probing the scholarship or how convinced one may be that the results of such scholarship lead to a deeper understanding of the artworks in question. Such a conviction can be nothing more or other than a self-serving justification of the research time and labor expended. Which is not to say that such scholarship has no worth or value in itself. It most surely can be both worthwhile and valuable. It simply has no worth or value in gaining a deeper understanding of the artworks themselves in the case of artworks which are the product of transcendent creative genius.

We might add, if somewhat ungenerously, that the products of such scholarly researches in the case of Wagner's music-dramas are too often used by writers, especially if they're critics or academics, to make their discourse on the music-dramas seem wonderfully erudite and objectively verifiable, that last a great (if false) comfort to both the writer and his readers. While we can sympathize with that feeling of comfort, that comfort is always misplaced. As with all genuine works of art, not only ones produced by creators of transcendent genius, once one goes beyond questions of craft and process there's no objectively verifiable anything except, perhaps, place and date of creation. One might even say that's a hallmark and necessary condition of all genuine works of art and a principal source of their affective power and resonant nature.

We Need More Of This

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 2:03 AM Eastern on 7 Mar. See below.]

A conductor with enough integrity and possessing sufficient balls to give a decisive thumbs-down to a Regietheater hijacker, that is; decisive enough to strip the hijacker of his next contracted-for assignment.

Franz Welser-Möst, music director of the Vienna State Opera, is so critical of Jean-Louis Martinoty's two recent Mozart productions [Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni] that a planned third [Così fan tutte] has been cancelled, reports the Kleine Zeitung. [...] From the outset, said Welser-Möst, Martinoty dismissed everything in the pit as a collateral matter.

RTWT here.

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Update (2:03 AM Eastern on 7 Mar): Here are detailed reviews of the Le Nozze di Figaro and the Don Giovanni noted above editorially in square brackets. The reviews appear on the blog Likely Impossibilities with which blog we were previously unfamiliar but with which blog we were impressed; impressed enough to add it to our exclusive Culture Blogs listing on our left sidebar. Our thanks to Opera-L's Martin Rommel for calling our attention to these reviews.

Phantom Entry

In an online opera forum in which we participate, one member wrote in a thread having to do with the perennial argument concerning "traditional" versus Regietheater opera stagings:

There may be degrees between bloated ancien-regime production, "Carmen" on Mars (betraying my personal bias, I say why not?), or doing everything on milk crates and folding chairs.

And another member wrote:

[T]he emphasis today has shifted to a, for me, unacceptable level of control by directors who know nothing about singers, singing and opera - nor do any of those things matter - as long as they can put their own signatures on productions.

There has to be a middle ground!

On reading both of which we responded instantly without so much as a moment's thought:

In matters of Art the middle ground is never the best, or even the right, solution. The middle ground all but guarantees mediocrity and while that may be acceptable or even the most sane solution in politics, in Art it's the Kiss Of Death.

The fundamental problem with today's Regies is not so much that they want to "put their own signatures on productions" above all else (any opera director absent the ego to not want his signature on a production above all else is an opera director unworthy of the title and the job) but that they are either incompetent to come to grips with or don't understand and respect or, understanding, refuse to accept the irrefutable and ineluctable central circumstance that in opera the composer, NOT the librettist, is the dramatist. This is true of all opera from the most flimsy, soap-opera-y Italian melodramas to the great music-dramas of Mozart and Wagner. This directorial incompetence or failure or refusal of understanding underlies all Eurotrash Regietheater outrages. The solution is NOT to aim for a middle ground in staging opera, but to engage opera directors who understand, respect, and are competent to deal with that central circumstance of all opera.

We were able to write that instantly without so much as a moment's thought because it's something we've written before in a previous entry here on S&F — or so we were certain. Turns out, there is no such entry, and we never did write it on S&F before — that is, not explicitly although the idea is implicit in almost everything we've written here concerning Regietheater. Time to make good the lapse; ergo, this entry.

Is It Any Wonder Classical Music Is In Trouble (One In A Series)?

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (2) as of 11:34 PM Eastern on 16 Jan. See below.]

In a recent post on a classical music blog which we charitably refrain from identifying, we found this, um, remarkable statement: "It is especially crazy [of Anthony Tommasini] to omit Monteverdi [from a list of the ten greatest composers in history].... He didn't invent opera, but he wrote operas that are in a class with Mozart's...," to which, in the post's comments section, and exercising utmost restraint, we responded laconically, "Not on this planet."

We could have understood if perhaps not agreed with the statement had the author instead written, "Monteverdi didn't invent opera, but he wrote operas that are in a class with Gluck's." But Mozart's!? Mozart, the composer of operas that to this day represent the very pinnacle of the operatic art? And this an assertion made not by some opera-ignorant dummy, but made by one who's fairly knowledgeable about things operatic.

But our astonishment didn't end there. Another, even more appalling assertion awaited us.

In a following comment in that comments thread, another commenter declared that he "think[s] Hendrix and Beethoven are pretty much musical peers," and closed his comment by opining in response to our above laconic remark, "ACD- you are a hoot" to which we responded in our next — and last — comment in that comments thread, "This from someone who believes 'Hendrix and Beethoven are pretty much musical peers'."

Not only was this person not shamed by this retort, he was positively defiant: "ACD- yes, musical peers. If you don't get that it's your problem, not mine. Maybe you need to be 'Experienced'," in response to which comment the blog's author offered reassuringly, "ACD has, ah, firm views on the classical canon versus the rest of the world. Good luck!"

We swear we seriously considered we'd fallen down the rabbit hole unwittingly and perhaps should immediately begin looking around for Alice to inquire of her the fastest and safest way back.

But, alas, it was no wonderland or looking glass world we'd fallen into, but still resident in the 21st-century world of postmodern culture where ideas, notions, and thinking such as that put in evidence above not only abound, but are fairly typical.

Is it any wonder classical music is in trouble?

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Update (12:34 AM Eastern on 15 Jan): Blogger Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue Of Midnight, the author of the unidentified blog post referred to in our opening graf, has expressed her dismay that we left her blog and her post unidentified as she asserts she's unashamed of what she wrote. We take her at her word and here supply the link to that previously unidentified post. It can be read in full here.

Update 2 (11:34 PM Eastern on 16 Jan): Oh dear. We've so far received five (count 'em!) eMails the substance of all of which is most succinctly expressed in the following eMail which we here, with permission, make public.

I see that Lisa Hirsch deleted a comment of yours to the post "Top Ten Composers: A Fool's Errand" on her blog Iron Tongue of Midnight. What dastardly thing did you say this time? Enquiring minds want to know. :-)

Carol _______

The fact of the matter is our comment wasn't in the least "dastardly". It was deleted by Ms. Hirsch so that she — in a true-to-form, junior-high-school-girl fit of pique — could make a public show of deleting it (i.e., she first published the comment which she didn't have to do, then deleted it so that it would show up publicly in the comments section as a comment by us deleted by her).

Our deleted comment was in response to a comment addressed to us by John Marcher (he of "Hendrix and Beethoven are pretty much musical peers" fame) in reply to our writing:

Had you written something along the lines of, "In their respective domains, I think Hendrix and Beethoven are equally important and, in that sense, musical peers," instead of the blunt, patently absurd, "Hendrix and Beethoven are pretty much musical peers," no one, least of all myself, would have lodged any complaint or criticism.

Perhaps in future you'll develop the skill to write what you actually mean.

To which Mr. Marcher replied:

ACD- I did indeed write what I mean and I think it reasonable to assume the readers of Lisa's blog bring to the table a level of musical knowledge eliminating the need to have every statement explained as if one were sitting in class on the first day of Music 101. That the two [i.e., Hendrix and Beethoven] operate in different domains is a priori.

In response to which we wrote:

This has nothing whatsoever to do with "bring[ing] to the table a level of musical knowledge eliminating the need to have every statement explained as if one were sitting in class on the first day of Music 101," and everything to do with the wording and apparent clear intent of your blunt, patently absurd initial comment. Had, for instance, say, Leonard Bernstein made such a blunt comment, everyone would have known the tacit underlying context of that comment and filled in the blanks, so to speak. But I and most others have no idea who John Marcher may or may not be. All we have to go on are the words John Marcher wrote, and the words John Marcher wrote have to be taken at their unambiguous face value; in this case a face value that's, as I've repeatedly remarked, patently absurd; something that could have been written only by a typical moron of the postmodern sort.

See the difference?

That was the entire content of our comment which Ms. Hirsch saw fit to first publish then delete in such a way as to have it show up publicly in the comments section as a comment by us deleted by her. Needless to say, because of this action (which is tantamount to not publishing our comment), and as we previously promised, we will never again submit a comment to any post on Iron Tongue Of Midnight.

On Hearing A Performance of Le Nozze di Figaro

If one glances at — and we do mean merely glances at, not study — a few pages of a Wagner score of any of the mature works, one is not in the least surprised that the music sounds as it does. If, however, one does the same with the score of a mature Mozart opera, one cannot help but be surprised that the music sounds as it does. We mean, the notation on those pages looks almost childlike-simple, and a mere glance leads one to expect music that sounds not much more profound or affecting than, say, a first-year-harmony student's orchestration of "Jingle Bells" or some other such trivial stuff. And when that childlike-simple-looking notation produces music as sublime and transcendent as, say, "Dove sono" or "Contessa perdono" one is not merely surprised but astonished and fully ready to believe that, indeed, Mozart was — had to be — nothing less than God's very amanuensis.

On Acting In Opera

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 3:15 AM Eastern on 11 Sep to correct an incomplete sentence.]

The question raised on an online opera forum was: "So... What do YOU prefer? Overacting or underacting?" Bypassing the obvious response to this very badly worded question ("Neither!"), the underlying but tacit sense of the question raises a most interesting matter, especially in regard to the difference between acting in stage and screen plays as opposed to acting in opera.

How great actors achieve their most affecting performances has always been a mystery to us. But what is no mystery is that, without exception, the principal characteristic of every genuinely affecting performance by an actor is that the actor appears NOT to be acting. Invariably, whenever an actor appears to be acting, no matter how virtuosic the performance, the performance comes across, be it ever so subtly or subliminally, as being in some way "wrong" or false, and as a consequence loses some measure of its affective power.

This is especially true in opera where, if the opera is worth its salt as dramma per musica, the music does most of the singer-actor's work for him dramatically, and any attempt by the singer-actor to "enhance" or augment the work done by the music in that respect, no matter how virtuosic that attempt, serves only to diminish or blunt the affective power of the performance and can often transform instantly what might be something powerful or even sublime into the ludicrous.

In opera, the trick for the singer-actor is neither to enhance nor augment by virtuoso acting the work of the music in that respect, but rather to give it point vocally using a minimum of gesture. Accomplishing that successfully requires, first, an understanding that that's what's required, an understanding most singer-actors lack; and, second, a special skill in musical and dramatic judgment and discernment and in dramatic technique not required of stage or movie actors, and, unhappily, a skill possessed by far too few singer-actors although a skill more in evidence today than in eras past, so, we suppose, we all ought to count our blessings on that account at least.

But try getting any of this across to a typical tenor or soprano — or to a TOF (True Opera Fan — like a teenage movie fan only worse; much worse).

Good luck with that.

Ave Atque Vale, Sir Charles

One of the genuinely gifted conductors of this century and the last, Sir Charles Mackerras, died today at age 84 of cancer reports Australia's The Sydney Morning Herald. He was a champion and conductor of the works of Janacek, and a fine conductor of the operas of Mozart, his 2002 recording of Idomeneo for EMI with Ian Bostridge, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Lisa Milne, Barbara Frittoli, and Anthony Rolfe Johnson with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus being a first-rate example.

He will be missed.

Atque in perpetuum, Sir Charles, ave atque vale.

A Kind Of Progress Of Sorts

Alex Ross, in remembrance of Cesare Siepi, the just deceased "supremely sensual Italian bass," as Alex put it, has posted a video clip of Signor Siepi singing the title role in Mozart's Don Giovanni in the ultimate encounter between Giovanni and the Commendatore in a 1954 Salzburg Festival production of the opera conducted by the great Wilhelm Furtwängler.

A conductor (in)famous for his at-times glacially slow tempi (we once heard a Rheingold conducted by Furtwängler that clocked in at some 3 1/4 hours!), Furtwängler here turns Mozart's dramatically spot-on framing tempo of Andante for the entire alla breve encounter into a quasi-Adagio, later on becoming a plodding Adagio verging on a Largo, all of which we suspect was intended by Furtwängler to lend to the encounter what he considered to be the proper requisite mix of gravitas and terror, but instead distorts and all but enervates the dramatic impact of the entire climactic scene.

We might understand such liberty of tempo applied to any number of works by other composers of opera, but perhaps more than anyone Furtwängler should have known better than to second-guess the musico-dramatic directions of a master musical dramatist such as Mozart. When Mozart writes Andante, he means Andante and not Adagio or any other tempo because Andante is what the drama requires at that point to make its proper musico-dramatic point, have its proper musico-dramatic effect, and produce its proper musico-dramatic affect.

We're fairly certain that what Furtwängler did then no conductor today could do without being roundly (and justifiably) savaged for the impertinence.

A kind of progress of sorts.

Traditional v. Regietheater Opera Stagings

When speaking of contemporary productions of non-contemporary opera (i.e., those works created prior to the mid-20th century or so), there invariably arises argument that faces off so-called "traditional stagings" against Regietheater stagings of these works; argument that typically becomes quite heated on both sides, a commonplace and characteristic trait of such argument of which commonplace trait, as regular readers of S&F are quite aware, we're by no means innocent. We think that if one were to poll these regular readers they would, almost to a man, declare we favor "traditional stagings" and come down adamantly against all manner of Regietheater and would like nothing better than to see the latter consigned ignominiously and forever to the trash bin of opera history.

We take full responsibility for such an apprehension as we haven't always made clear enough (or clear at all) our position on "traditional" versus Regietheater stagings, so, let us here and now and on the record, so to speak, try to set things straight as it concerns our thinking on this matter.

First, what is meant by the term "traditional staging" is not always clear to us. Sometimes it seems meant to signify an opera production staged in literal obedience to the original creator's stage directions but employing modern-day stagecraft to make the stage picture convincing to contemporary audiences, and at other times seems meant to signify an opera production staged not only in literal obedience to the original creator's stage directions but a production staged in literal obedience to the way the work was staged originally (as far as that's discoverable), even to the use of naturalistic painted flats and the like if talking about a pre-20th-century work. Except as a one-off novelty, that latter approach is, of course, perfectly ridiculous, the former being always perfectly respectable if rather unimaginative.

And then we have Regietheater staging which is a whole other animal and at its two polar extremes can be either illuminatively imaginative, which is to say illuminative of the sense and spirit of the opera creator's original vision and concept as made manifest in the score — music, text, and stage directions — (an exemplar of which in the Wagnerian world would be the Wieland Wagner Bayreuth staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen of the 1950's, and in the opera world in general, Julie Taymor's staging of Mozart's Zauberflöte for the Met), or unabashedly deconstructionist and illuminative only of the Regie's own vision and concept, the sense and spirit of the original creator's vision and concept a thing of only passing concern (an exemplar of which in the Wagnerian world would be Patrice Chéreau's 1976 Bayreuth staging of the Ring, and in the opera world in general, Calixto Bieito's staging of Mozart's Entführung for the Komische Oper in Berlin), this latter approach more vulgarly (but justifiably) known as Eurotrash. Between those two polar extremes are those now myriad Regietheater opera stagings that tend more toward the one extreme or the other with varying degrees of success in terms of realizing the sense and spirit of the original creator's vision and concept as made manifest in the score.

For the record, we wish to declare here and now that while we find traditional stagings of opera in the above first sense of the term to be innocuous enough as they do not obtrude themselves in any way on that which is of first importance in opera (viz., the drama as made manifest in the music and text), and while we recognize the importance and irreplaceable value of such stagings in introducing newcomers to a work, we much prefer Regietheater opera stagings of the above first sort. It seems to us that absent such stagings our great 400-year legacy of opera will more or less quickly degenerate into a collection of museum pieces, and by virtue of that alone, drift ineluctably toward and ultimately beyond the margins and beyond the concerns of contemporary culture. Not a good thing; not a good thing at all.

Not So Postmodern

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

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

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

Quest

Since it went into production several years ago, we've heard surprisingly little about director-actor Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of Mozart's The Magic Flute. That it was an "updating" that put the story and action in a World War I setting, and that conductor James Conlon was doing the musical honors along with stellar bass-baritone René Pape is pretty much all we knew about it.

Then, yesterday, we read Sunday's piece on the film by Los Angeles Times classical music critic Mark Swed that explained, sort of, why we'd heard so little about it. Writes Mr. Swed:

[The film] was made in 2006 as part of an extensive international celebration of Mozart's 250th birthday. That spring, just as the Salzburg Festival was gearing up to stage every one of Mozart's 22 operas and when no civilized city with an opera house was without Mozart, Branagh's film was shown at Cannes, out of competition but with hopes of attracting distribution. It didn't succeed.

Shown at the Toronto and Venice film festivals four months later, Branagh's Flute was not disliked, but it failed to generate much enthusiasm. Since then the film has had limited release in parts of Europe, Asia and South America and has been moderately well received. French and British DVD versions have been released. But the film has never been shown in the United States, and there is no word about a domestic DVD.

Mr. Swed did manage to finally get his hands on a DVD of the film in Amsterdam, and found it to be "a joy."

Uh-huh. Pretty much par for the course for Mr. Swed, we thought, who seems to have a penchant for finding many of the grotesque outrages of Regietheater to be "a joy."

Ho-hum. BAU.

Then, further down, we read these intriguing grafs:

Branagh's Flute fascinatingly re-imagines Mozart's opera. All the music is intact and excellently conducted by James Conlon, music director of Los Angeles Opera. The English actor and humorist Stephen Fry translated the German libretto into colloquial English and supplied pertinent new dialogue. The cast is attractive. Young characters are played by young singers. Good teeth must have been a priority of the filmmaker.

Branagh's vision of the Great War is awful and magical at the same time, which is very strange and surely British. The film opens with bright sun, lush fields and bouncy soldiers in the trenches. This is cinema with a smile as big as [Ingmar] Bergman's, but the sweetness doesn't last. During the overture's development, soldiers charge, shells blast, bodies fly. No composer dealt with darkness and light quite like Mozart, and Branagh is on continual lookout for every mood flick.

Branagh has a deft touch with Mozartean contrasts between magic and realism. Half fairy tale, half war drama, the film also goes its own way. Sometimes Branagh supplies reason where Mozart relied on fantasy, and other times he takes the opposite route. The dragon becomes threatening poison gas. Papageno is the birdman whose pigeons test the air underground. Actual flutes, though, fly. The Queen of the Night arrives atop a tank and later darts through the sky like a kinky Tinkerbell. Surreal lips fly in space. So do Mary Poppins umbrellas.

Uh, OK. Now you've got our attention.

Off we go to Netflix posthaste.

Nothing.

Amazon.

Nothing.

Out of sheer desperation, we head over to that rich mine of the weird and wonderful, YouTube, to see whether anyone has pirated a clip or ten from the film.

Pay dirt!

Here's the film's opening sequence with music by Mozart (the overture to the opera) and images by Branagh.

And here's the scene of Papageno's meeting with Monostatos.

OK. Just those two did it for us (there are more excerpts on YouTube).

WE WANT TO SEE THIS FILM (or a DVD of same)!

NOW!

We're going on a hunting expedition.

Stay tuned.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 8:53 AM Eastern on 30 Jun. See below.]

The following are part of German-born director Elke Neidhardt's justification of her rewriting of the stage action and updating of the setting of Mozart's Don Giovanni in an Opera Australia production to be premiered at the Sydney Opera House on 5 July. All quotes have been taken from articles in Opera Australia, The Australian, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

• To create [opera] productions [today] that resonate with contemporary audiences, directors, perhaps more so than conductors, have to stay tuned to the spirit of the [contemporary] age. Audiences used to film and television will not, and should not, accept traditional [i.e., the composer's original] treatment of old material.

• [Today] it's virtually impossible to have that [viz., the coming to life of the Commendatore's statue in Don Giovanni] — you cannot portray that kind of miracle [today] unless you give a [today-acceptable] reason.

• [O]ffending a statue[!] is not good enough [reason for the downfall and demise of Giovanni]. That would be pretty hard to sell today.

• When watching Don Giovanni, audiences are required to believe in God and revenge and hell; in the notion that if we are not good boys and girls, we will be punished. Who buys into that today?

• In my treatment, [Giovanni is] a playboy who parties and beds women and takes drugs — these people exist more now than then

• Judged by the values of our own world, Giovanni is not that bad. He is thrilled by the conquest and he is not interested in forming relationships with women, but that is really all one can hold against him. Men who will not commit to relationships are common today — I don't think he deserves the demise he gets.

• You cannot do nodding, walking statues in the year 2008. You would be laughed off the stage anywhere else in the world except in Australia.

Oh? Is that a fact (may be applied to any or all the above).

Self-serving, self-involved, postmodern vandal!

(Our thanks to down-under blogger Sarah Noble of Prima la musica, poi le parole — who, in her excellent preceding linked post, displays more temperance on the subject than we're capable of mustering — for the links to the Australian press articles from which the above quotes were drawn.)

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Update (11:08 PM Eastern on 29 Jun): The above post brought the following aggrieved response posted to the Opera-L eMail list:

Oh please - enough of this prejudice. I mean prejudice in its etymological sense of pre-judging. This production has not even opened but is condemned.

This is such a common tendency on this list - judging productions on little evidence other than the written word. It seems to me there are so many self-appointed guardians of 'what Verdi/Wagner/ Mozart etc etc wanted'. Yet they were all theatrical and operatic progressives - concerned with meaning being conveyed to a contemporary audience.

Extending meaning to our time seems to be such a horror for some people. Any theatrical work only finds meaning in the minds of its audience.

Thankfully I live in a city where a 'conventional' production is greeted with the same outrage as avant-garde productions in the USA. We Europeans (not all of us I know - but opera often attracts a more conservative audience for all sorts of reasons) actively welcome re- interpretation. The houses are full on a diet of re-interpretation. Berlin audiences on the whole know their operas - but attract new audiences through radical re-interpretation.

Again and again on this list there is the same contempt evinced for 'Eurotrash' production - principally from the USA. I have asked this question before and never been answered - Are we all masochists in a city like Berlin?

Go to your conventional productions and enjoy them. We enjoy ours. You are not even seeing them but object often on the basis of a short clip on Youtube - do you want to dictate production styles for the world at large?

Cultural imperialism must have its limits.

Our posted response to those remarks (which we here reprint without further comment) read:

From Elke Neidhardt's own ignorant, even imbecile, remarks (those quoted in my S&F article), one is perfectly justified in prejudging her new production of _Don Giovanni_ to be yet another grotesque piece of Eurotrash, and yet another instance of the egregious, self-serving, _Regietheater_ vandalizing of yet another near-perfect opera masterpiece. Your perverse notion that these loathsome _Regietheater_ productions are simply efforts to "[e]xten[d] [the operas'] meaning to our time" is as ignorant and imbecile as anything Ms. Neidhardt had to say, for in every case -- no exceptions -- the "reinterpretations" produced by these pernicious _Regietheater_ vandals succeed only in trivializing and circumscribing meaning, never in expanding it, or in making it more "relevant". And that, at bottom, is the crux of the argument against these postmodern vandals and their _Regietheater_ travesties.

Update 2 (8:53 AM Eastern on 30 Jun): More from Opera-L in response to the above post.

I was going to change the Subject line to "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!" but decided to keep to the rules of the class. I will also hate myself the next day for wasting my time in such a useless effort, but.....

The idea that an opera, after it has been produced, cannot be interpreted by another artist in a different light is simply stunningly flaccid. Fact One. The composers did it themselves during their lifetimes: "You want a BALLET in my Tannhauser?!?!" (Gulp) "When do you need that by?" "My Lucia rewritten in French and changed?!?!" (Gulp) "And you need that when?" All composers (who had their operas performed) have the same history of easy compliance in making their operas audience friendly.

Second, artists were always adapting their image to the audience of the time (note to file: the baby Jesus was not actually born in Tuscany) but regarded the story itself as eternally relevant.

There is no intellectual argument that opera was meant, at the time it was composed, to be something to hang in the Louvre with guards around. It was not valid then and it is not valid now. Mozart, for example, by using Beaumarchais, was risking trouble because his plays were not just "pushing the envelope" but actually revolutionary. There were poor sods behind bars in the Chateau du Vincennes for much less! (In the newly refurbished donjon, you can see their graffiti still preserved.) If the regime had not been so tired and corrupt, it might have turned bad for our Salzburgian.

To which we responded (again, here reprinted without further comment):

My congratulations to you on invoking just about every lame straw man invoked by the "progressive" defenders and champions of Eurotrash to discredit both the person and the opinions of all those who take an opposite view of the matter.

Let me be as brief as possible in my response by saying that the creators of operas neither need nor require partners or collaborators once the work is finished. What the creators of operas need and require are gifted *servants* of which the director is one; servants who will faithfully and as free from distortion as possible *translate* the creator's work from its form on the printed page into its most effective and evocative concrete physical form onstage so that the work becomes apprehensible to an audience in a theater as its *creator* envisioned it, which vision is embodied fully in the score itself (music and text). When a director steps beyond the bounds of faithful translator he steps into territory in which he has no proper place nor any business being, and by so doing does a gross disservice to the opera, the opera's creator, and the audience alike. In short, a director is doing what he ought to be doing only when he and his work are perfectly transparent middlemen -- that is, transparent vis-a-vis the sense and spirit of the creator's original _Konzept_.

Does this mean or even imply that the opera director ought to be a slavish, unimaginative lackey? Not by a long shot. Perhaps the most effective and evocative staging ever of Wagner's impossible to stage _Ring_, for most pertinent example, was done in the early 1950s by Wieland Wagner, and that staging was the very antithesis of slavish and unimaginative.

To put the matter in the proverbial nutshell, all will be well if the opera director adheres rigorously and assiduously to what I've rather immodestly labeled The A.C. Douglas Opera Director's Prime Directive: Thou mayest do any bloody thing thou wilt in order to realize a dramatically and aesthetically evocative translation of the score (music and text) into its concrete physical realization on the stage so long as what thou doest is consonant with the sense and spirit of the score at every point, and contradicts or diverges from it at none.

Met Saturday Broadcast: Die Entführung aus dem Serail

We listened to the Met's Die Entführung this afternoon, and while we don't do reviews here of live opera broadcasts except in the special case of performances from the Bayreuther Festspiele, we do want to go on record, brief as it will be, as saying that this performance of Die Entführung — with its newly written or rewritten speaking parts nicely paced — was first-rate from beginning to end for the most part. On balance, the performance was just what a performance of this delicious Mozart bonbon should be. The singers were dramatically convincing and in fine Mozartian voice, also for the most part; the band — which surely has to be the best pit band in the business bar none — beyond mere praise; and conductor David Robertson a Mozartian marvel. His reading of this score today — which reading was our first experience of his Mozart — was sensitively and expressively nuanced and colored, his handling of ensemble at once precise and fluid, and his choice of tempi perfect throughout. In short, a reading fully worthy of Mozart and of this music.

We would have liked to have been in the house for this one.

Amadeus Revisited: A Brief Note

I’ve just finished viewing a tape of Milos Forman’s film, Amadeus, for the I’ve-lost-count number of times, and, as always, it was as engaging and moving an experience as it was on first viewing; a work of genuine cinematic art. And also as always, each time I view the film, I marvel at those who criticize it on the grounds that its portrayal of Mozart is as “a foul-mouthed idiot savant”; a portrayal that’s “a caricature” of the historical Mozart, as one prominent cultural critic put the matter.

I’m no Mozart expert, but I’ve studied enough of the literature to know that both those charges are ill-considered, not to say purblind. These critics seem to forget that this film is a work of fiction, not biography. And they seem to forget as well who it is that’s telling the story in Amadeus: crazy old Salieri, of course, not some historian or objective outside observer. But even though Amadeus is Salieri’s story about Mozart and a work of fiction, the film’s portrayal of Mozart captures and embraces in a brilliantly dramatic, theatrical, and, as is befitting of Mozart, comic way the awesome contradiction between the to all appearances ordinary man — a man, pace Maynard Solomon, as much child as man — and an astonishing body of work that in number, multifariousness, and profundity beggars the imagination as I’ve elsewhere put it on this blog. As I've also written,

Had Amadeus's Mozart come across as a "foul-mouthed idiot savant," and a mere "caricature," he would not have — could not have — captured as he did the hearts and minds of millions world-wide, most of whom knew Mozart previously only as a synonym for the precocious much in the same way Einstein has for almost a century been a synonym for genius. The Mozart of Amadeus is as warm-blooded, fully fleshed-out, and as true to the essential spirit of the historical Mozart ... as are the principal characters of Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro as warm-blooded, fully fleshed-out, and true to the essential spirit of the archetypes they represent. That's the genius of Amadeus as it is of the stageworks of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, God's amanuensis.

I wrote that more than two years ago, and nothing in the intervening time, and after numerous viewings, has given me cause to alter my judgment about the film or its portrayal of the man Mozart and his astonishing gift.