# A Sincere Question for the Regie Cheerleaders



## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

I have a sincere question for all of the fans, acolytes and cheerleaders of Regietheater and other forms of 'progressive' opera direction today.

All of them claim that.... _"intelligent and creative stagings are vital to keep a repertoire of centuries-old works alive and relevant"_

Vital?

Wait. What?

Do they seriously believe that if the director were to take a backseat to the music, vocalists and conductor that this will encourage potential opera lovers to turn away from the art form?


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## guythegreg (Jun 15, 2012)

Xavier said:


> "intelligent and creative stagings are vital to keep a repertoire of centuries-old works alive and relevant"


Well, I wouldn't call myself a Regie Cheerleader, but I'll take a crack at it. Understand, I'm made pretty uncomfortable by sex or torture on stage, and I'm not advocating that at all.

But if all I have to defend is the statement I've quoted, then yeah, I would say intelligent and creative stagings are vital etc etc. Operagoers get tired of the same old thing. They want something new. As wonderful as many of Zeffirelli's productions have been for the Met, some of them are getting to feel a little tired to people who subscribe year in and year out.

Please don't think that's my opinion of Zeffirelli's La Boheme, which I love to death. If you haven't seen it - OMG. It's something. Completely traditional.

But I didn't enjoy Traviata until I saw Willy Decker's production. Oval stage, big *** clock dominating the stage at all times, cross dressing bullfighters, the whole shmear. In fact, I saw Willy Decker's production, and didn't enjoy that very much - although I liked it better than what it replaced - until Natalie Dessay did it. So to me, new productions can be very effective in improving access to a work. Why anyone would want to deny that, I can't imagine.


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

Xavier said:


> I have a sincere question for all of the fans, acolytes and cheerleaders of Regietheater and other forms of 'progressive' opera direction today.
> 
> All of them claim that.... _"intelligent and creative stagings are vital to keep a repertoire of centuries-old works alive and relevant"_


I completely agree that "intelligent and creative stagings are vital to keep a repertoire of centuries-old works alive and relevant" (though I am not _quite _sure why they have to be relevant). The point is that many productions are _not _intelligent, and their creativity is at the service of the director not the composer, the music or the musicians. _That _is the problem with Regietheater as I see it.


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

Indeed, Regietheater does not necessarily mean that the music and musical performance are relegated to a second rank. This is the important distinction, and there are many so-called 'regie' productions which are musically 'authentic' and excellent,but where only the stage decor and action have been changed to provide a different or new context to the drama. In my opinion, a good production of such a nature can often open up fantastic new places in the work, whether they may be more abstractly. psychological or updated to a modern social situation.

When operas are written they, like all forms of art, have a temporal/social context. If hundreds of years later this same context is used, it will no longer have the same meaning to audiences.


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## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

Greg, Jeremy, Emiel:

Ok but how do you respond to those who say the following:

_"There is absolutely no need to 'update' because operas are so palpably alive already. These great works do not need wholesale reinvention in order to endure and this is precisely what I have always understood 'classic' to mean"_


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

I'm not opposed to stagings which change the time of the action of an opera to the present or set it 
in a different location from the original per se. What ARE objectionable are stagings which are merely
outrageous and raunchy for the sake of sheer perversity and are full of completely arbitrary staging ideas and gratuitious sex and violence . 
For example, two Met productions, of Fidelio and Verdi's Macbeth in recent years, took some liberties but did
no damage to the operas . Fidelio was set in a Latin American banana republic , and Macbeth took place in 
the present era in a non-specific location .
But productions such as the infamous Calixto Bieto Abduction from the Seraglio set in a brothel with all manner 
of sickening goings on are appalling . Who needs them ?
Some of these Eurotrash productions are just plain werid, such as the recent Bayreuth Tannhauser set in the future in a waste recycling plant ! or the one back in the 80s in Chicago which set the action in Las Vegas
with Tannhauser as a singing televangelist who is disgraced by going to a Vegas brothel and then flies to Rome to seek absolution from the pope !


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

Xavier said:


> Greg, Jeremy, Emiel:
> 
> Ok but how do you respond to those who say the following:
> 
> _"There is absolutely no need to 'update' because operas are so palpably alive already. These great works do not need wholesale reinvention in order to endure and this is precisely what I have always understood 'classic' to mean"_


There is some verbal sleight of hand going on here. There are profound differences between an opera

(a) as it exists on the page, 
(b) as it is remembered and understood by each listener (perhaps from attending stagings, listening to audio and video recordings as well as, ahem, studying the score),
(c) as it performed as a production.

Operas are 'alive' in the sense of (a) and (b) (though the way it is alive in (b) must vary from person to person and is, essentially, unknowable). But for a production to be 'alive' the work has to be reimagined, reinvented each time. Te aliveness in (a) and (b) does not automatically lead to the aliveness in the sense (c).

The problem is compounded by the fact that composers do not always think through the staging clearly, and usually the stage directions are either imprecise and incomplete or they are hopelessly unrealisable. From the libretto of Götterdämmerung: "[Brunnhilde] has mounted the horse, and leaps with a single bound into the blazing pyre. The flames immediately blaze up so that they fill the whole space in front of the hall... At the same time the Rhine overflows its banks in a mighty flood which pours over the fire... When the gods are entirely hidden by the flames, the curtain falls" (Andrew Porter translation).

Whether imprecise or unrealisable, the directions force the director to invent something, or do something other than the composer requires. But the production only becomes alive if the director's choices in these situations are convincing, compelling, congruent and authentic. Operas (and they are not all "great works") do have to be reinvented for performance precisely so that they can become alive in the experiences of audiences.


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## guythegreg (Jun 15, 2012)

I think it's been covered pretty well. I did say in my original response that operagoers, frequent subscribers, get bored with the old production and want something new - and although they aren't the only people you have to listen to, you do have to take their needs into account with all the other stakeholders.

I'd like to add that the culture changes, we change, and as we change, our perception of the opera as the composer laid it down changes. Part of my difficulty with, for example, Abduction from the Seraglio, is its (to me) weirdly ancient cast of sex roles. A cultural change has taken place, since the opera was written, and I (and I suspect, quite a few others) find those kinds of sex and gender relationships kind of offensive. This actually seems to me to REQUIRE re-interpretation. How lucky we are that operas can be re-interpreted and re-staged! Poems that no one reads anymore cannot be recast for new generations. Art cannot be redrawn. But opera can be re-imagined, and we all win as a result.


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