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Self-publication: Contemporary Productions From “Self-publishing: an Operatic Experience” ─ a talk at Oxford and Cambridge Club, 8th October 2019 Context: My compendiums of short opera guides [Great Operas of Wagner and Great Operas of Puccini] are part of a wider self-publishing project. The flier said that I would touch on contemporary opera-productions, which can infuriate, although clearly some people enjoy or tolerate some of them. They are unpredictable. Any author of opera guides (or programmes) confronts the truism that information on any unpredictable subject risks being useless. Just as the purchase of a ticket to an unpredictable opera is a blind date and could be a waste of money. But, by selecting appropriate and useful information, I provide a crisp summary of real value, and help the user to evaluate the opera experience. ----------- Enjoyment is what opera is about, and brings me to the challenge contemporary productions present to a writer of opera guides, a challenge which nearly made me throw in the towel. My guides are necessarily based on the actual score and libretto: the work of the opera’s creator, the composer, supported by a librettist. An opera is the composer’s opera. And the work is billed and marketed as such: We talk of “Mozart’s Don Giovanni” and Puccini’s Tosca. We don’t have to: but we do. All operas have been composed with the intention of them being performed; aesthetically, the Work goes way beyond some good tunes, a CD, or a radio performance, or a streaming service. A performance purports to present the whole uniform Artwork, which originates with the Composer. We may turn on the car radio. But for the composer, the creator, music, stage action and words are inseparable. Especially since the middle of the 19th century, all great opera composers, not just Wagner, have carefully and tirelessly matched and meshed music, words and action so that each complements the others ─ the music depicting and reinforcing events, emotions and characters appearing on stage, and vice versa. Today, there can be a considerable difference between what you see on the stage, and the original conception of the Creators, way beyond the application of modern technology. This is a challenge for anybody compiling a guide, or even a programme. One cannot anticipate what a contemporary producer, or ‘director’, as he likes to be called, will dream up. Importantly, my guides enable the opera-goer to evaluate the performance for which an expensive ticket has been bought – you may have had a rollicking good time with your friends ─ but was the performance any good? Did you actually enjoy it, as well as the drink, the dinner, or the picnic? With my opera guides, you can consider whether the performance is faithful to the composer whose work the production purports to present. 1 You can compare “This is what I was expecting” with “this is what I am getting”. And you can talk about that. __________ The glue holding the performance together has come unstuck. For many years, audiences have welcomed authentic music, the Creator’s music, which a distinguished conductor strives to provide for the performance. Historical museum-type instruments, such as the theorbo, are to be seen in the pit. Some, like the brass section, make some interesting sounds. Yet, what you see on stage may well have no pretension to authenticity at all: it seems that little thought has been given to the notion of being faithful to the composer, the Work’s creator. Wagner’s grandson Wieland, who played havoc with his grandfather’s works, was probably responsible for the so-called Regietheater and Regieopera, a German invention whereby a director may devise how an opera is staged. And the creator's original, specific intentions or stage directions can just be changed. It’s odd. Maybe somebody thinks that you can sever the music from the action on the stage. Perhaps you can, in a car: but not in an opera house. Also, seemingly, opera houses panic at the risk of being portrayed like museums or art galleries, places where you can see, authentically, great works of the past: the actual Mona Lisa. So their productions have to be modern, sensational, even ‘make history’: of the variety described in Rupert Christiansen’s recent critique of a production of The Magic Flute. He refers to the likelihood that “Mozart and his librettist would surely be aghast at the meaningless, tasteless, pointless, gimmicky mishmash that the director-designer partnership have presented, presumably at great expense and investment of time”*. Far be it for me, or anyone else, to dictate what people should like or dislike. But it is reasonable that they should know in advance what they are spending their money on. And I don’t object to experimental opera or theatre, so long as it is described as such, and it is not a blind date, which you pay for several months in advance. I recently went to a performance of Don Giovanni: there was little or no apparent attempt to relate stage with the music ─ although apparently, in Paris recently, it was received ‘ecstatically’. On the evening when I saw it, the opening of the overture was interrupted, aurally and visually, by a paint-pot being thrown at the scenery behind. For one great French composer,† the opening bars of the Don Giovanni overture, ‘established the majestic and formidable authority of Divine Justice. Indeed, Mozart’s ominous chord of D minor gives an immediate sense of foreboding’. There’s not much ominous about a paintpot, but it does leave a mess if it falls over. * Daily Telegraph 22/7/2019 page 23 † Gounod. 2 Does all this matter? Yes. One reason, among many, is that, if the music and the stage are not in synch, there is the risk of distraction, minutes of the opera can pass by unnoticed ─ while the puzzled brain tries to figure out what on earth is happening. Or the brain gives up, and concentrates on something else. Tomorrow’s shopping perhaps? Or has a doze. Added to that, audience attention may be diluted because many newly- composed operas are in a style that many find difficult. Audiences, the paymasters, are not music graduates. They mainly consist of ordinary people like those who enjoyed my young granddaughter’s Cinderella, which has been performed frequently in Vienna; and, a couple of years ago, it ran for a fortnight in San José. Audiences want, even pay, to enjoy the opera experience – dare I say Mozart’s Magic Flute Or Mozart’s Don Giovanni ─ they don’t pay to be puzzled, nor to relapse into thinking about tomorrow’s shopping. An elderly, eminent New York critic and authority, Conrad Osborne, recently published a book‡ which The Wall Street Journal called “Without doubt, the most important book ever written in English on opera in performance”. Osborne maintains that, you have to ‘turn your brain off’ in a La Bohème updated to the time of the 1914-18 War, when you see the friends in the mock-duel scene apparently playing at trench warfare. Or, when you see that glorious high-baroque fantasy, The Rosenkavalier Presentation of the Rose, set in decadent nineteenth century Vienna. I could give even more distracting, even infuriating examples: Don Carlo with nudes descending into King Philip's study; or urinals on the stage in Un ballo in maschera. What about less outrageous examples? Well, I don’t go to the opera to be puzzled and distracted by some new-fangled political message that the director wants to promote. I go for pleasure. To listen, to see, to enjoy. Audiences are seemingly inured to watching productions in which the setting has been changed, or the costumes have been updated to dull and colourless modern dress, or there is a jumble of places and periods. The absurdity seems to have become ingrained and thus acceptable ─ you see Shakespearean actors in jeans declaiming “Methinks, Fare thee well, Forsooth, By my troth”. Or, “Away you scullion... I’ll tickle your catastrophe”. Modern dress is relatively cheap, and an audience can be relaxed by its familiarity. Like popcorn at a cinema, I suppose. And the absence of scenery, and the use of cheap clothes from the wardrobe backstage, are helpful for the smaller opera-houses, as they struggle to save money and even survive. If it makes complete sense, complements the music, and does not distract, an updated setting may be OK. Jonathan Miller’s famous Italian mafia production of Rigoletto largely worked, because a mafia gang has much in ‡ Conrad L. Osborne: Opera as Opera, The State of the Art (New York: Proposito Press 2018) 3 common with a renaissance ducal court. But modifications, the updating or relocation, rarely work other than partially: those items which are most convenient to adapt are of course adapted, leaving the rest as loose ends, puzzling anachronisms, distractions. For example, especially in historical works, the director’s conception will often not fit the words on the surtitles. Possibly he hopes he can rely on the audience not understanding the words, either because of poor diction (so ubiquitous), or because many people don’t understand German, Italian or Russian. So distracting anachronisms are just cut, or glossed over: “forget the work; forget the audience”. And the ordinary person sitting in the audience will have reverted to tomorrow’s shopping. Some alteration to opera is going to be necessary: we don’t have castratos. And lengthy recitative may need cutting, if it can be said to be redundant. Besides, taking advantage of modern technology can be justified and may be desirable artistically.

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