Catching Up with Sciarrino

Those who have heard about Salvatore Sciarrino but not had a chance to experience his music can catch up with BBC 3's "Hear and Now." The show includes generous selections of Sciarrino's music and an interview with the composer.

BBC - Radio 3 - Hear And Now

Salzburg Report

Not everyone in Europe is delighted with Regietheater. Renaud Machart is covering the Salzburg Festival for Le Monde, and he reviews what sound like atrocious productions of Haydn's Armida and Weber's Freischutz. (See link below.) Christof Loy's minimalist set for Haydn is a great wall of plywood. Markus Stenz places Weber's opera in a concrete basement. Peter Seiffert's Max and John Relyea's Kaspar are singled out for praise, but not much else is. Summing up, he says: "This is not enough in a music festival considered to be the world's most prestigious."

Le Monde.fr : Le théâtre s'en mêle à Salzbourg

Regietheater, Considered

Heather Mac Donald has an essay on Regietheater--producer's opera or "Eurotrash" or whatever you might want to call it--in the current issue of the conservative-leaning City Journal. (Link is below.) She makes some familiar points, as well as some familiar dodges. She praises Wieland Wagner's post-war Rings, for instance, but fails to mention that in their time they were every bit as controversial as the productions she is decrying now. Rather she makes Chereau's 1976 Bayreuth Ring the locus classicus of all that's gone wrong in European opera. Many would aver that Chereau's staging was quite ingenious, somewhat refreshingly true to the political aspect of Wagner's intentions (a la Shaw's Perfect Wagnerite), and, in comparison to today's most scandalous productions, rather tame.

In fact, Mac Donald seems to make rather the same argument that has been made about cutting-edge productions since Wieland Wagner's day. I remember in my youth the big villains were Goetz Friedrich and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who, no doubt, hardly look dangerous from today's vantage.

Beyond expressing outrage and shock, she does not try to understand what might be compelling these directors, beyond making the usual cynical suggestion that they are simply trying to court scandal. Clearly Europeans have an ambivalent relationship toward their cultural past; the extended 19th-century repertory is justly celebrated, but it also is part and parcel of the world that erupted in the devastations of the 20th century. Also, it is legitimate to question whether the expense of staging an opera justifies a merely conventional, or decorative, production that simply gratifies the audience's complacency. When so many operas also carry with them unfortunate overtones, such as racism or nationalism or other outmoded prejudices and ideologies, what is a director to do? Mac Donald refers to the ineffable Calixto Bieito's Abduction from the Seraglio but leaves out the fact that the opera trades in stereotypes and what can only be described as orientalism. Just because it is a masterpiece does not mean we need pretend its worldview is our own.

She also wants to claim that the Metropolitan is a bulwark of sense against the insanity of Regietheater, but she seems to have conveniently forgotten Francesca Zambello's disastrous Lucia or Graham Vick's idiotic Trovatore. The coming administration of Gerard Mortier across the Lincoln Center plaza, she thinks, heralds the advent of Regietheater on the New York scene, and Mac Donald worries that if Mortier is successful, then Peter Gelb at the Met will be forced to import these kinds of productions, too. I acknowledge that Gelb is shaking things up at the Met, but, if history is any guide, I doubt the Met will pay too close attention to what the New York City Opera does.

On a personal note, I, too am troubled by the reports I have read of these productions. My sense is that I would hate them every bit as much as Mac Donald does. But not having actually seen them, except for glimpses on the odd DVD, I would not want to make a rush to judgment. It seems to me that being open-minded to new work and new approaches is a prudent maxim.

It would be useful, and enlightening, if operatic commentary could go beyond merely being reactive, as this essay so frequently is.

The Abduction of Opera by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal Summer 2007