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The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Director’s Opera: Threat or Challenge?

  10th August 2021

10th August 2021


‘Is it a traditional production?’: this is one of the most frequent questions we receive from customers wanting DVD or Blu-ray performances of opera. An affirmative reply usually prompts a positive response, a negative one a polite refusal. Updated and controversial productions (which are more and more frequent, as they are in international opera houses) are looked on by many opera lovers with a mixture of scorn and dread. Why do directors persist in staging works in a manner that repels so many traditional fans of the genre?

The roots of ‘director’s opera’ (or Regieoper, the German term for the phenomenon) go back to the radical reforms of staging introduced by Wagner almost 150 years ago in Bayreuth, and subsequent ideas on the use of lighting and solid forms (rather than traditional scenic ‘flats’) which preoccupied Swiss architect and stage theorist Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) and the English director and designer Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966). Many of their ideas, and those of Emil Preetorius (1883-1973) were taken up by Wagner’s successors in Bayreuth, but it wasn’t until after World War II and the reopening of the Wagner Festival under the direction of his grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang that the most radical of these theories were put into practice.

Although Appia, Craig and Preetorius were largely concerned with the scenic dimension, the stripping away of all but the barest essentials of stage décor (which outraged many traditionalist post-war Wagnerians) had the effect of putting the focus firmly on the acting of the singers. Yes: at last opera singers were required not just to sing but also to engage dramatically with the text and the action! The results, particularly in Wieland Wagner’s productions, were revolutionary, and it is enormously frustrating that nothing more than photographic stills and a precious few filmed rehearsal segments are all that survive as a visual record of the ‘New Bayreuth’.

Even before the post-war Bayreuth revival, controversial productions with radical designs and a new style of singing-acting were being experimented with during the years of Germany’s Weimar Republic. One theatre in particular earned notoriety for its provocative stagings: the Kroll Opera in Berlin, the experimental arm of the Berlin State Opera. Under the musical directorship of the young Otto Klemperer, the late 1920s saw a string of radical productions, many with strikingly modern designs by Ewald Dülberg (1888-1933) – not just new operas by the likes of Hindemith, Weill and Stravinsky, but also Mozart, Bizet and Wagner. The 1929 Kroll production of The Flying Dutchman, with its rectilinear sets and modern costumes, attracted a storm of protest from conservative critics, yet in retrospect Klemperer remained convinced that it strongly influenced post-war Bayreuth style of Wagner’s grandsons.

The more recent movement towards Regieoper can also be traced back to Wagner (whose own voluminous theorising on the subject of ‘music-drama’ was a crucial influence on generations of directors): the centenary production of the Ring at Bayreuth, conducted by Pierre Boulez, directed by his compatriot Patrice Chéreau (with plenty of experience in spoken theatre but only one previous opera production to his name), and designed by Richard Peduzzi, Jacques Schmidt and André Diot. Boulez’s brisk, iconoclastic approach to Wagner’s monumental score was the perfect match for Chéreau’s bold production, which relocated the action to a period from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to the early 20th century, and embodied a trenchant critique of capitalism, power and greed, and their impact on mere mortals. Its first performances in 1976 were greeted with protests and jeers, yet subsequent revivals saw it gradually assuming the status of a classic, and anyone who has read George Bernard Shaw’s brilliant commentary on the Ring, The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) will immediately recognise its influence on Chéreau’s underlying concept.

Over the years, a pattern begins to emerge, of shocking and often unashamedly polemical productions causing scandal and derision, but with time assuming classic status. And sometimes, against all expectation, being hailed immediately as brilliant: think of David Pountney’s radical psychoanalytic take on Dvořák’s fairy-tale masterpiece Rusalka for English National Opera, or Jonathan Miller’s mafia-updated Rigoletto for the same company, one of their most successful productions ever (though it was booed when taken on tour to the States). These and other productions from ENO’s ‘Powerhouse’ years established a new style of production for British opera audiences; Glyndebourne soon followed suit, and eventually even the more conservative Royal Opera House succumbed, albeit with varying levels of success.

What’s remarkable is how many former bêtes noires like Chéreau, Peter Sellars, and the Alden twins David and Christopher, went on to be regarded as opera royalty. Sellars’s infamous production of Così fan tutte, relocating the action to a modern Cape Cod diner, had many critics and operagoers questioning their notion of the work as mere comedic farce, as Mozart’s work took on altogether darker, more contemporary sexual dimensions. The influence of this type of radical updating can be seen everywhere today, in recent production of operas ranging from Verdi’s La Traviata and Falstaff to Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus. The results may be variable, and in some cases downright distorted (a handful of recent productions of Janáček’s final masterpiece From the House of the Dead spring unhappily to mind), but they force critics and audiences to question previously held assumptions about works they thought they knew in intimate detail.

When it works, as in the Bavarian State Opera’s recent production of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, Regieoper can be full of rich insight, as revelatory as encountering the opera for the very first time. (The problem remains, however, that those actually seeing an opera for the first time may indeed be confused if the action unfolding before them is at odds with the synopsis they have diligently mugged up on before an evening out, or even with the surtitles being projected over the proscenium.) And a world where every production of Falstaff took place in late Tudor dress, or every Ring production had characters wearing winged helmets and brandishing swords and spears would soon become very dull indeed.

One aspect in which Regieoper has made a very positive impact is that so many of our opera stars can now act, to a level inconceivable just a few generations ago. The groundwork was laid for this by such pioneers as Klemperer’s Kroll Opera, and later by the brilliant Austrian director Walter Felsenstein, whose students included the radical German directors Götz Friedrich and Harry Kupfer, both themselves now of legendary status. By contrast, watching more ‘traditional’ opera productions (like those from the Met until just a few years ago), the viewer soon becomes all too aware of the very wooden nature of much of the action. Traditionalists may counter with the argument that the voices can never match those of yesteryear (a point surely claimed by every generation of veteran operagoers), yet with singers such as Lise Davidsen, Natalie Dessay, Véronique Gens and Jonas Kaufmann around, such a point would be very wide of the mark.

There is of course a middle-ground, typified by such thoughtful stage directors as Nicholas Hytner and David McVicar, combining psychological and expressive insight with sensitivity to the context of the original work. Yet arguably the groundwork for such achievements has been laid by those enfants terribles (from Wagner and Appia through Felsenstein to Sellars and co.) who have persistently pushed at the boundaries of what’s possible and/or artistically acceptable, in opera as in spoken theatre. Without them, operatic performances would have become museum pieces, like the comedic caricatures of popular imagination. Watching their work may sometimes prove uncomfortable or infuriating, but undoubtedly the continued challenge presented by such endeavours is beneficial to the genre in the long-term, and it will be fascinating to see how many present-day operatic mavericks become the legends of tomorrow.

A few recommendations:
Offenbach - The Tales of Hoffmann (Komische Oper Berlin, Voigtmann, Felsenstein) 109434 / 109435
Wagner - Der Ring des Nibelungen (Bayreuth Festival, Boulez, Chéreau) 0734057
Dvořák - Rusalka (ENO, Elder, Pountney) 109149 / 109150
Verdi - Falstaff (Glyndebourne, Janowski, Richard Jones) OA1021D / OABD7053D
Mozart - Le nozze di Figaro (ROH, Pappano, McVicar) OA0990D / OABD7033D

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