What’s
Happening to Opera?
Something happened to the world of opera while I wasn’t
paying close attention during those thirty years I was directing musical
theater. The art form about which I am most passionate has been undergoing
something of a “sea change,” and I – along with many others – find it disturbing.
During the fifteen years I lived in Cincinnati – first as a student
at the College-Conservatory of Music, later as a wife and mother – I spent many
memorable hours at the Cincinnati Summer Opera. In those days the opera was
performed in a pavilion in the Zoological Gardens, and it was a wonderful and
unique experience.
I heard some incredible singers. Some world famous, very
great singers – some whose careers were winding down, but who still packed a
punch: Risë Stevens, Charles Kullman, Jan Peerce, Licia Albanese, Italo Tajo. As
time passed, I heard some young up-and-coming singers who had a future … chief
among them, Placido Domingo and Sherrill Milnes. I heard and saw Beverly Sills and Norman
Treigle in their prime. I don’t really know how many operas I saw, but it was a
bunch.
Some of the performances I saw in the mid-nineteen fifties
were probably a little shabby, with set pieces that could have used some paint and
costumes that were one step away from the trash bin, but they worked. They
showcased the music and the amazing singers. The orchestra was excellent, the
chorus quite good. The costumes, sets, and staging changed over time.
Eventually, I saw a few more contemporary operas. I saw the handiwork of the
great director Tito Capobianco, who was definitely a forward-thinker, but whose
passion and reverence for opera was always apparent.
Passion and reverence
for opera. Opera is a magnificent art form and deserving of that. Some of
the world’s greatest composers provided us, the audience, with works of musical
theater – for that is essentially what opera is – which fill our ears and eyes,
our minds, our hearts, our souls. Through these stories that unfolded on the stage, we looked into the past in a way that is seldom possible. And we loved what we heard and saw.
Opera is undoubtedly the most expensive of all art forms to
produce. Consequently, there must be an audience. In Europe, it seems the
audience is there: opera is a part of the European culture and tradition as it
is not in this country, and that is our loss. Without question, there needs to
be a way to make opera more appealing to more people.
Please notice I said appealing.
Generally the word more often used is accessible.
There has appeared over the past three decades in the world of opera, beginning
in Europe and spreading across the pond to our shores, a new thought about how
opera should achieve this. The argument is that operas should be re-imagined,
that directors can take a creative work and in order to make it more
interesting, layer it with their own “creative” thoughts, thus sometimes making
it all but unrecognizable.
Tradition: when I
speak of tradition, I certainly don’t mean to suggest opera should be produced
as it was in the nineteenth century with painted flats and none of the great
staging that can be achieved in today’s theaters. I am very much in favor of any
theater using the best and most up-to-date technology available and affordable.
Tradition is a great thing, as are respect and passion. Keeping this in mind, it’s possible to successfully
stage a much-loved opera in a new way. Taking a beautiful, treasured painting
and lighting it differently, giving it a new setting and background, perhaps a
new frame, enhances the painting – without altering it.
There seem to be some directors working today who believe their
responsibility is to point out the underlying meaning in the opera, to find in
the work that which makes it meaningful in today’s world, to search for “symbolism.”
But these works were written in another age, and the composer had no clue what
the world would be like in the twenty-first century. This symbolism, it would
seem, exists solely in the mind of the director – and in that case, the
director is ignoring one great rule of theater.
As a director, we
serve the play. Or the opera, or the musical show. Our vision needs to be
based on what we find in the text and the music, and sometimes even in the
stage directions the composer has provided. If we start to speculate on what
the composer might have meant, we
have broken that rule and are now imposing our own flights of fancy on a work
of art. We’ve taken that treasured painting and covered it with another layer
of paint which presents a totally different concept. At worst, we’ve smeared it
with excrement. And that seems to be what is happening more and more often in
opera world.
Many much more eloquent people than I have written at length
about this. Heather MacDonald’s carefully considered treatise, “The Abduction of
Opera,” is well worth reading. The Europeans have a phrase for it: Regietheater, or “Director’s Theater.”
You can Google it and read about it and draw your own conclusions, as
I have. It seems to me much is dependent on the integrity of each director. You
can also draw your own conclusions about that.
Opera will survive this, I’ve no doubt. But I hesitate to
encourage people who’ve never seen opera to attend a live performance of some
of the productions I’ve read about, most recently the Met’s production this
past season of Verdi’s Un ballo in
maschera. I think they would find them confusing and strange. It seems to
me that sometimes what is seen on the stage is at odds with what the words and
music are intended to convey. And when that happens, it ceases to be the opera
which the composer wrote. That can’t be a good thing.
When I listened to the Saturday afternoon broadcast of Un ballo in maschera recently, I didn’t
have to watch the strange things asked of the cast – the chorus in particular –
which made absolutely no sense. I just listened to the wonderful music and
appreciated what a genius Mr. Verdi was, and how beautifully it was performed
by singers and orchestra.
That’s the sad part. Opera is meant to be visual as well as
aural. Sight and Sound. Let’s hope
the sight comes back and joins the sound before too much more time passes.
Un ballo in maschera, Act III, Chicago Lyric Opera, 2010
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