When does a stage director’s radical interpretation of opera represent an acceptable and even stimulating reappraisal of that work, and when does it cross the line into willful misrepresentation?
The question is something opera devotees never tire of debating, beyond the merits of Soprano X’s high C. It’s a particularly timely topic during intermissions at the Lyric Opera and Chicago Opera Theater, where both companies are presenting non-traditional stagings of standard works – Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Lyric, Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte” at COT. And these are hardly isolated examples. The past several seasons in Chicago have brought a slew of revisionist opera productions that have, at their most extreme, made traditionalists see red: Christopher Alden’s “Rigoletto,” David Alden’s “Macbeth” and Richard Jones’ “Hansel and Gretel” at the Lyric; Diane Paulus’ “Orfeo” and Mark Lamos’ “Acis and Galatea” at COT.
I greatly enjoyed the “Cosi” production and loathed the “Parsifal,” just as I admired, to varying degrees, the “Hansel,” “Orfeo” and “Acis.” Beyond individual opinion, taste and experience, are there any objective criteria to guide an opera-goer safely through today’s minefield of directorial whimsy?
The fact that we are accustomed to linking director and opera as if the composers were somehow less important — Patrice Chereau’s “Ring,” as opposed to Wagner’s, for example — reminds us we live in an age when the stage director is all-powerful.
Not so 40 or 50 years ago, when opera was driven primarily by singers and conductors. Today the artistic directors of our leading opera companies defer to the artistic judgments of the directors they engage. The latter determine the dramatic concept and the stage designs and, through the use (and sometimes misuse) of those elements, even influence how we hear the works. This is not inherently a bad thing, since there are many gifted stage directors all over the world who respect the operas they are presenting and know how to breathe theatrical life into them.
Moreover, there are no blanket principles for staging opera. Each work dictates, to an extent, the degree of interpretative latitude a director may take. Some operas — Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” for example — resist updating, wedded as they are to a specific time and place. Others — “Cosi,” as well as most Baroque operas — are fair game for directors of strong, clear vision.
A producer can do nearly anything he or she wants with “Cosi,” because the emotional dilemmas of the four principal characters are universal and timeless. Thus, setting the action in a hip singles bar, as Diane Paulus did in COT’s new production, wreaks no violence on the work; in fact, it enhanced our empathy for the lovers and made Mozart’s wondrous comedy feel more immediate.
The bottom line, in any operatic staging, is that music and drama remain on the same track. What derails Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s “Parsifal” — beyond his junking of the work’s Christian symbolism and the sheer ugliness of the physical production — is his dissing of both Wagner’s music and narrative. In a director’s apologia, Lehnhoff set forth his notion of Wagner’s swan song as an existential drama about modern man’s rootless search for identity. Wagner’s music, in his view, “speaks of hopeless human destinies.”
Ignoring the tone of music
On that assumption, the director virtually rewrote Wagner’s detailed scenario. At the end of the opera, the knight Parsifal renounces his kingdom and wanders off with Kundry down a railroad track, followed by the knights of the Grail. Only a tone-deaf director would ignore what the music is saying at that moment, as golden A-flat Major harmonies spread their redemptive glow from the orchestra to the stage. I pitied anyone coming to “Parsifal” for the first time who might believe this radical production was, as Lehnhoff insisted, a fair representation of what Wagner had in mind.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that every staging should be slavishly faithful to the original: what a boring operatic world it would be if that were so. But there is a vast playing field between literalism and vandalism.
European opera audiences, who are saddled with far more directorial ego-trips than we are, appreciate this all too well. Debate is raging furiously in London at the moment over the English National Opera’s new production of Verdi’s “A Masked Ball,” the opening scene of which reveals the male chorus sitting on toilets.
The iconoclastic director Peter Sellars infuriated Lyric traditionalists in 1988 when he turned the title character in Wagner’s “Tannhaeuser” into the defrocked evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who finds redemption in a terminal at O’Hare Airport. Sellars wished to give his audience a jolt of recognition such as Wagner’s public must have felt at the opera’s first performance. And he succeeded — not only because he is a brilliant theater man but also because every action on stage was justified by the music. The final act reduced many of us to tears.
A tough setting
The so-called legitimate theater has it easy, compared to opera. A theater director enjoys tremendous leeway to shorten, lengthen or revise a work (subject, of course, to the playwright’s approval in the case of a new work). As long as a reinterpretation is well done and makes sense on its own theatrical terms, few audience members are going to take offense. But an opera director has to deal with singers, a conductor and an orchestra. More important, he has to deal with the music and how music structures operatic time. His staging may support or contradict the music but it cannot ignore it.
That’s where Lyric’s “Parsifal” crossed the line and where COT’s “Cosi” stayed safely within it.
Lyric audiences are far more sophisticated than 25 or 30 years ago. They can absorb 20th Century fare such as “Jenufa” and “Billy Budd,” and even a difficult modernist opera such as Berio’s “Un re in ascolto” — provided the productions are intelligent and well performed. But, to judge from the scattered boos that greeted opening night of “Parsifal,” they are less willing to tolerate revisionism for its own sake, especially with an opera that is surrounded by a sacred mythos.
Grabbing an audience
Chicago Opera Theater has trained its public to be more adventuresome in terms of repertory and production style, but it also has the advantage of a far more intimate performance space at the Athenaeum Theatre: It’s far easier to grab an audience with an innovative production sung in a 575-seat auditorium than in a cavernous opera house that seats 3,500.
That’s exactly what happened on opening night of COT’s “Cosi.” Paulus and Jane Glover, the conductor, had found a fresh theatrical style to enhance what Mozart was aiming at. By the final curtain, listeners were laughing and cheering with pleasure. Perhaps the Lyric could learn something from Chicago Opera Theater’s example.
Forget Eurotrash productions and their domestic equivalent, Ameritrash. The size of the venue is not really the issue as much as how that space is used to engage an audience. Lyric should stick with talented stage directors who can bring fresh, thoughtful perspectives to the canonic repertory.
Also directors whose concepts, however provocative, support the composers’ intentions.
