# The worst opera stagings



## PrimoUomo (Jul 7, 2013)

I simply love the staging of Rinaldo on the DVD from Teatro Prinzregenten de Munich.




It is simply the most horrible i'd ever seen... Rinaldo, Godffredo and Eustazio are freemasons in a christo-islamic church-like waiting room???... It is so horrible that i like it and on the same time i hate it.


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## Pip (Aug 16, 2013)

Just about everything from Bayreuth this year,particularly the new Castorf Ring.


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

it's always fun to see updated Handel because it doesn't lend itself well to it. I like the one above because it never takes itself seriously and it's colourful. I can't stand this one, on the other hand:


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## MAuer (Feb 6, 2011)

Burkhard Kosminsky's Tannhäuser the Nazi staging in Düsseldorf this past Spring must surely rank right up there with "worst" opera productions.


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## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

I don't like any of them.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

Christoph Schlingensief's _Parsifal_ (Bayreuth 2004).

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/08/emparsifalem_at.html


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

I paid a bundle to see Die Walkure in DC and walked out on their American Ring. HATED it!


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Looks like the new Bayreuth Ring and others can be added here. From Norman Lebrecht:


A lifelong Wagnerian quits Bayreuth in despair
August 20, 2013 by Norman Lebrecht 

John Manger, former manager of two London orchestras, is a Wagner addict. Try as he might, he cannot resist the lure of a Ring. Living in Australia, he craved a regular supply of immolation scenes. Back in Britain, he has been feeding his habit wherever he can. And where better than Bayreuth? We asked John to send some impressions of this summer’s operas. They are not for the faint-hearted. Read on:
We left at the end of Walkure Act 2, and didn’t go back. Cost me an arm and a leg, of course, because the Ring is sold as just one ticket, so if you try and return it to the box office, for further sale to other suckers, you get no money back, even though Festspielhaus will make money out of the resale.
I am only too well aware that almost every new Ring production gets howled down: Wieland Wagner, Götz Friedrich, Chereau, Ponnelle, Hall, Kupfer, etc etc, all had the treatment – which, history tells us usually only lasts for one season, after which productions can quickly achieve ‘classic’ status, it would seem. Well, not this time, I am certain! Castorf is a jerk. He has no interest in the music, the drama, or the actors, it would seem. Thank goodness the music was good – note, the music and not necessarily the singers. Castorf suffuses every scene, every dramatic moment, with distracting puerile video clips projected onto various surfaces of the sets, portraying either off-stage action, with a strange voyeuristic obsession with Rhinemaidens, Erda, Fricka, and other women in the plot, or footage of the heroic working classes doing their thing in the oil fields. There are other features such as humping crocodiles, Rheingold set in a motel on 1950s Route 66, Wotan transmogrifying, in Walküre Act 2, from what looked like a rabbi into the low-life motel owner of Rheingold – for no obvious reason. And Castorf is clearly a woman-hater of the worst kind: every female role is cast as a blowsy ****, without exception. And that was just a small part of the Ring!!
And so it went, and got worse, but we weren’t there to see it. With the exception of Petra Lang, Johan Botha, Klaus Florian Vogt (a bit wet!), the singing never went beyond beta plus.
We came away profoundly relieved to not be there, which I never thought could happen to me. No production thrilled, moved or, let’s be honest, did anything except annoy/irritate/alienate. The orchestra was uniformly fine, with Nelsons the pick of the crop, to my ears, with his voluptuous Lohengrin. Petrenko was good, but not really as great as some of the reviews implied: I think many were just relieved that the orchestra was not as bad in the Ring as what was going on on stage! Thielemann, Böhm, and Barenboim, to name but three, have been much finer.
In Lohengrin and Tannhauser, the omnipresent undercurrent in both was the dehumanising of the ‘masses’ as portrayed by the various choruses. For example, all wore numbers on their clothing, even the rats in Lohengrin; all were subjected to ruthless control by ‘hauptmen’ of one sort or another; all were rendered featureless and characterless, and, in the case of the pilgrims in Tannhauser, had all their gold and precious possessions taken rudely from them prior to whatever journey one felt they might be going on. Now, I wonder where all that comes from? In a festival that is attempting to cleanse itself of its murky past, why the adherence to barely concealed anti-semitism, holocaust allusions and so on? This was not a cleansing but, to my mind, a clear demonstration that this place and the directors it employs, are holding on firmly to precisely what they are claiming to abhor: they are anti-Semites and just can’t stop themselves. It is in the character of the place, it is their obsession, they need it to be otherwise it might as well become Salzburg or Aix, or any other festival. 
And the sad truth is that none of this nonsense is in the music! Wagner treats his choruses with dignity and grandeur, but the current Bayreuth arts management does the opposite. Wagner eschewed well-worn musical, dramatic and philosophical juggernauts: Bayreuth currently embraces them. Wagner’s staging illuminated the music and the drama: Bayreuth ignores them. The Tannhäuser set was a constant throughout, must have been hugely expensive, and contributed absolutely nothing to the action or the drama, nothing.
Stagecraft was appalling in that, for example, tedious projections of German bon mots were unreadable for most of the audience because of stage clutter: Wolfram murders Elizabeth by pushing her into a gasification tank and then sings ‘O du mein holde…’ to a pregnant Venus; Tannhüuser is just a slob, in the Gazza mode; fatuous staged goings-on through the intervals are supposed to illuminate the action, such as a mass held on stage between Acts 2 and 3 to tell us, in case we didn’t know, that Rome is a Catholic place; when the pilgrims return from Rome, cleansed, we assume, they all carry Jaycloths and start polishing everything in sight to cleanse that too. We, the audience, are treated as morons. Thanks.
Which begs the question of what exactly the point of Bayreuth has become. Horrifyingly, I think it is heading towards a situation whereby it can only define itself by its own vile history, from which it will choose not to escape…. Whichever way one looks at it, that era of Winifred etc, is needed by the modern Bayreuth to give it purpose. It clearly is not the artistic tour de force that it has been, nor should it be given the funds that are poured into it. And, from current evidence, it does not have the artistic leadership to drag it away from the rather silly rut it has driven itself into. That Katharina Wagner is, I think, embarking on a new production of Tristan does not feel me with any kind of hope – only further despair.
Will I apply to go again? Yes, just in case a good production with a good cast does miraculously appear. So, yes, I am trapped. Pathetic, isn’t it?


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

The very people who should be upholding Wagner's art, hate it and are doing everything to destroy it. There is no other explanation for what is going on.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

DavidA said:


> Looks like the new Bayreuth Ring and others can be added here. From Norman Lebrecht:
> .....


That does sound terrible. I'm glad I didn't pay those prices for _that_.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Teresa Berganza on modern opera producers:


I hate what they do today, these stagings that respect neither the period nor the music. For me, opera is a religion, and must be respected as such. Are we to tell young people: “Tintoretto is outdated, we should add red or bright yellow to his paintings to make them more modern?” The first to do that it would find himself in prison. We should do the same with certain (opera) directors.


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## Hoffmann (Jun 10, 2013)

I considered posting this under the thread "I hate Regietheater!!!", but it seemed more germane here.

"Opera News" published an interview with Ferruccio Furlanetto" back in May (2013). In the course of the interview, Furlanetto talked about a difficult experience with an opera production that, I think, is instructive:

_" Furlanetto's old-school professional decorum is almost as impregnable as King Philip's regal power. No colleague, no opera house, no onstage opera moment recollected elicits a negative word. Only one fissure cracks this decorous façade. Four years ago, at the Opéra Bastille, in a hyper-modern Paris Opera production of Verdi's Macbeth directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, Furlanetto suffered. Since then, he has not been shy about proclaiming what he endured.

"It was the worst experience that I have had in this business," he acknowledges now. "I found myself in this very new, very controversial production, and I detested it. It was the hardest time of my career - one and a half months of depression. The fact that I don't wish to work with this director ever again doesn't mean he shouldn't work, so I will not cast aspersions, but since then I have come to enforce my own personal blacklist where directors are concerned. What I really could not accept in this situation was the following - we opera singers today are most of the time signing contracts three and even five years in advance. When we sign, there usually isn't any director named - yet. Certainly in this instance in Paris there was not. Then the time comes, we arrive ready to work and find ourselves in an impossible situation with only two alternatives - stay and perform for the money only, or leave and lose everything. To sue cannot lead to anything positive. Why haven't we the right to say, this is not what I signed on for - I want to be paid and go? Instead, one's only choice is leave and save your dignity, or stay and be a prostitute. What I couldn't forget or forgive was that I was put in this position. I stayed for the second reason. And this is not right."

There is silence on the telephone line, but Furlanetto is merely gathering breath. "I grew up with the greatest professionals in opera," he goes on emphatically. "Professional directors meant they were absolutely in control - of music, of text, and they also had ideas, and they were prepared. They brought with them a culture in which to create. Now I find myself increasingly working with people who come from German Schauspiele, from the traditional theater, from avant garde theater, but not from opera. It's a different kind of thinking. It's an approach that believes that knowledge of music, knowledge of the text and of the language in which the opera was written, is not that important. I believe that with such an approach, we are in big trouble. It is a terrible, terrible wave of - what can I say? Amateurs. We find ourselves, highly professional singers of my generation, constantly in the hands of amateurs! I don't think this happens in any other profession. Why should we be put in this situation? The problem, I think, is with the opera administrators today. They are making these choices. Why? I really don't know. Maybe they are afraid to appear conservative. But a truly innovative director like Patrice Chéreau has proven you can make glorious operas without being traditional. To do so, however, you need extra talent. And there have never been many directors with extra talent."_
_- Opera News May, 2013_

Ferruccio Furlanetto sounds like a class act. Here is the full interview:

http://www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2013/5/Features/The_Lion_Speaks.html


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## mamascarlatti (Sep 23, 2009)

Very interesting, Hoffmann. Funny thing is, I like that Tcherniakov Macbeth.


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

I think there should be clauses in contracts where singers can say "I will sing in this unless it is staged by [insert blacklisted directors]". Of course, this might only work for big names and even then they might be considered "difficult". But somehow the director isn't difficult if s/he antagonises the singers... it's amazing productions even get staged considering how many egos are involved.


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