# Critical Piece on Regietheater



## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

Hello everyone:

In the August issue of _Opera News_ magazine last year there was an article by senior editor Louise Guinther titled 'Lost Horizons' which elicited many negative responses.

Her piece begins with this excerpt:

_For many of us who came to love opera before Regietheater took hold, current notions of effective dramaturgy boggle the mind. When did the directors and impresarios decide that an opera was a random collection of notes, independent of its dramatic and visual elements - a mere musical shell, to be filled up with and bent out of shape by whatever modern hang-ups seem most likely to catch the public off guard? When did wild controversy, booing and academic apologias in the press replace straightforward storytelling as signs of theatrical prowess? When did "making people think" become the top priority in an art form once clearly intended to make them feel? And why the rush to "reinvigorate" something that is so palpably alive already? (In fact, the recognition that great works do not need wholesale reinvention in order to endure is precisely what I have always understood "classic" to mean.)_

The whole piece can be read here:

http://www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2011/8/Departments/Coda__Lost_Horizons.html

And here is one of those negative comments:

_1. Guinther's editorial is pathetic. It is an expose of her own ignorance, full of clichés, spurious assumptions, and brimming with crude oversimplifications that miss reality by a mile. She comes up with no kind of convincing defence for her stance, it's just a load of moaning about something she doesn't really understand. Her examples are pretty sparse. She has no concept of what 'conservative' means; she mistakes it with her lazy reactionary stance. It's not untypical for an American opera goer, though, who is more likely to treat this European art-form as an ornate accessoire of culture, a museum's piece, rather than living (and developing culture). I suppose it's interesting that Opera News is presenting the views of a spoiled 14 year old in their pages, even if it's a middle-aged woman who's writing them. _

Blogger AC Douglas quickly came to Ms. Guinther's defense with this entry:

_Guinther's article contains a key thought we don't recall ever articulating explicitly before; viz., that opera is an art form intended principally to make audiences feel, not think. That, in fact, is what opera - is what music - is all about. Prior to our modern age, there's not a composer of opera (or of music generally, for that matter) who ever lived who thought otherwise. Whence, then, this perverse, noxious, and ***-backwards impulse to make opera audiences think first, feel after? _

http://www.soundsandfury.com/soundsandfury/2011/07/a-matter-of-priority.html

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While I agree completely with Ms. Guinther and Mr. Douglas on this issue I don't really have a horse in this race because I regard most opera as pure music without any regard to the drama or words at all. For me the theatrical and visual dimensions are always an afterthought.

Anyway I would appreciate your thoughts (however brief) on Guinther's editorial.

Xavier


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## Moira (Apr 1, 2012)

Xavier said:


> While I agree completely with Ms. Guinther and Mr. Douglas on this issue I don't really have a horse in this race because I regard most opera as pure music without any regard to the drama or words at all. For me the theatrical and visual dimensions are always an afterthought.
> 
> Anyway I would appreciate your thoughts (however brief) on Guinther's editorial.
> 
> Xavier


I'm with those who want opera to be primarily a theatrical experience. I would sacrifice (some) musical excellence in the quest to present the opera theatrically. When I say "(some) musical excellence" I do not mean wrong notes, poor technique, and horrible singing, but rather that if the most suitable opera singer for the role vocally is, like me 54 and fat, while an acceptable voice on a 26 year old sex siren is available to sing the role (say of Carmen), then I choose the 26 year old. And then I'll just leave it to the teenagers to wonder what she sees in a fat tenor who gets twisted in his cape.


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

I recently attended a discussion by one of my favourite directors, Pierre Audi.

he said something along the lines of, you are presented with the drama and the staging and these must be interpreted, but not the music. The visual aspects of opera can make you think, while the music makes you feel. 

To me, this is why opera is so much more powerful than absolute music. 

Taruskin, in his history of 19th century music quotes some interesting bits from other musicologists ;

"... I must first experience the desire that the leading tone move up, before I can recognise the representation of an imaginary ascending line when it so moves.
... In a brief formula, visual media are the instruments of knowing the object of desire, but not the desire itself, tonal music is the instrument of knowing the desire but not it's object. " - Karol Berger 

Opera obviously does both of these things. Therefore I believe that the direction can be a wholly 'thinking' affair if needs be. The music will do the feeling if it's good enough. 

'


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I could not access the full article you gave, in terms of not being a subscriber to that online mag.

Anyhow, I think _regietheater_ or not, the director has to in some way put across the composer's vision. I don't know whether it's necessarily a separation of emotional and intellectual as that quote from the article you gave discusses, but more in terms of telling the story in a way that somehow supports it and adds to it in some way.

I don't mind productions that are more experimental, but what they do has to be in some way relevant and sensitive to the opera involved. For example, in the early 2000's we had a director here called Barry Kosky, who did a number of opera productions. One was taking _Wozzeck _up to date, the captain was turned into a modern day policeman, wearing the clothing of an Australian cop. In a production by him of _Nabucco_ (or some Verdi opera, if my memory is correct), there was a scene where imitation male genitalia where all over the stage. Both where controversial, but I think what he did with _Wozzeck_ was okay or within reason, but what he did with _Nabucco _was ridiculous. I really don't know what he was doing with that scene, and there where other aspects to that production that where simply bizarre (I saw it on TV, but funnily enough despite the gimmicks, it didn't make much of a lasting impression on me).

So it's about balance. You can push things but only so far. Of course this is subjective.

& btw, opera is my least liked genre in classical. As far as I'm concerned they can do what they want with it. I really don't care a great deal. Most of the times, I don't see it, I just listen to it anyway. I make up the images in my mind, as with (say) a novel.


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## Moira (Apr 1, 2012)

I find that changing the historical setting can be problematic. We had a director who set Rigoletto in a fifties Muslim African setting. Fezzes were obviously going cheap when he went to buy costumes. 

This makes the religious context of Gilda "sneaking off" to the church a bit ridiculous for women don't attend mosque and there is no way a Muslim girl can engage in flirtations in the mosque.

I can overlook problems like the one stated above if there is a valid reason for resetting something into a contemporary or other historical setting. Tosca works well with current police costuming and contemporary dress for police brutality and abuse of power is always an issue in any age and any society. But Nabucco with phallic symbols? Nah! Doesn't work for me.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

^^YOu remind me that _La Boheme_, the most popular opera here it seems (staged every second year, or just about, it seems) has been through quite a few permutations. I remember one of them set in the 1950's, with Elvis type hairdos and leather jackets. I think it worked quite well, judging from seeing it on TV. I agree about _Tosca_, I've seen one like that a while back. Again, it all boils down to doing it in a way that's sensitive, and basically the director applying some type of measured approach which is faithful to the composer's vision. The production is not an end in itself, its a means to an end of telling the story.

Problem is, it seems to me that they are trying to deliberately do things that are 'out there' to get publicity. _Any publicity is good publicity, _the saying goes. Especially true for an archaic artform like opera. Stage musicals overtook it ages ago as a living artform of combining theatre and music. So they feel they have to do something with opera, spice it up visually, to make it relevant and appealing to various segments of the audience. I think basically that's not necessarily going to work. I don't know if it is working, is it putting bums on seats? I mean, if people want to go to opera for whatever reason - the music, the social aspect, the glamour, or all of these things - then won't they simply go to opera? Does it need to have these gimmicks to get people to go? I don't know, I'm just asking people here.


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## MAuer (Feb 6, 2011)

We've lived with Regie-Theater productions now for so long that they've almost become as cliched as the traditional productions they replaced. And it now seems to be the fashion to set an opera in any time period except the one in which the action is supposed to take place.


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## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

Sid



Sid James said:


> I could not access the full article you gave, in terms of not being a subscriber to that online mag.


Here is the full piece:

*Coda: Lost Horizons*
Opera News, August 2011
by Louise Guinther

For many of us who came to love opera before Regietheater took hold, current notions of effective dramaturgy boggle the mind. When did the directors and impresarios decide that an opera was a random collection of notes, independent of its dramatic and visual elements - a mere musical shell, to be filled up with and bent out of shape by whatever modern hang-ups seem most likely to catch the public off guard? When did wild controversy, booing and academic apologias in the press replace straightforward storytelling as signs of theatrical prowess? When did "making people think" become the top priority in an art form once clearly intended to make them feel? And why the rush to "reinvigorate" something that is so palpably alive already? (In fact, the recognition that great works do not need wholesale reinvention in order to endure is precisely what I have always understood "classic" to mean.)

My first three operas at the Met were Don Giovanni, La Traviata and Madama Butterfly, in beautiful, traditional stagings by, respectively, Herbert Graf, Alfred Lunt and Yoshio Aoyama - all utterly literal yet utterly distinctive. Those great men of the theater were not above committing themselves to carrying out the creators' intentions. They understood that no two artistic visions are ever the same, even when two artists are aiming for the same goal. At all three, though I was only a child, I was swept into another world by the music and, aided by a stage picture that accurately reflected that world, understood everything I needed to understand. The period details were not a distraction, as some modern directors try to claim; they were a gateway into another era whose very different-ness made the universality of the story clear: if those people in those clothes all those years ago felt just what I was feeling now as I watched them, then clearly there really were certain great truths to the human condition that nothing would ever alter.

Nowadays, the game has changed. Sometimes I feel like a C student in a roomful of Rhodes scholars. "Am I the only person in the theater who doesn't get it?" I think to myself, as the applause resounds to the rafters while I squelch my own instinct to leap to my feet and boo at the top of my lungs. Is it merely my own prejudice that keeps me from responding to these high-concept stagings with anything but revulsion? Can it be that in my mid-forties I've lost the ability to adapt to something wonderful and new?

Yet a voice inside me still rebels. After all these years of "consuming" opera, shouldn't my tastes and my aesthetic preferences still count for something? The art form I adore seems to have been given into the hands of apologists who don't love or believe in it as I do - whose whole approach is to subvert and to mock. In the scramble for new audiences, the old ones are being insulted and trampled into the dust.

Faced with a Fanciulla del West that relocates Minnie from her quaint Polka Saloon to a modern leather bar, could anyone undergo the sincere cathartic emotions the final scene is meant to elicit with Minnie tripping to the rescue down a neon staircase as the MGM lion opens its jaws behind her? A Munich Fledermaus rife with gunshots, suicides and a final-scene descent to hell, however intellectually stimulating, cannot be said to support or enhance Strauss's divinely frivolous score. In the current iconoclastic climate, even Hans Sachs - my all-time favorite opera character, with his matchless blend of wisdom, humanity, humor and self-sacrifice - is not sacrosanct; at Bayreuth, Wagner's own great-granddaughter, Katharina Wagner, transformed him into an ice-cold "Führer" figure, a sell-out who uses his cigarette to immolate the "lesser masters." Just reading about it made me feel I was hearing a dear friend unfairly and publicly maligned.

I confess to having enjoyed myself immensely at certain anti-traditional productions in recent years: who could deny getting a belly-laugh out of watching Scarpia grope the Madonna in the middle of the Te Deum in front of a whole army of clergy and choirboys? But my enjoyment generally springs less from emotional engagement or psychological enlightenment than from a sort of morbid cerebral delight in poking holes in the director's wrongheaded conceit. If I can't be carried away by the deep connection I once experienced from these characters and their music, I can at least take some pleasure in identifying every place where the whole idea has become derailed.

A lot of the time, though, I walk out of the opera house feeling sad - not only for what I've lost but for what the next generation will never know. Perhaps the rewards today's audiences reap from these labyrinthine approaches to opera are as great as my innocent face-value absorption. Perhaps they are even greater, since Regietheater involves a good deal more investment on the viewer's part in terms of the brainpower required just to keep up with the story. But even so, the rewards are not the same as the ones that drew me back season after season, and I hate to think that in the future, when traditional productions are entirely obsolete, operagoers will no longer be able to connect with the art form's glorious history in a visceral way, as I did. There is a palpable sense of loss for me in the thought that the only way we are now willing to reflect on the past is through a fun-house mirror that wildly distorts whatever it is focused on.

As opera hurtles headlong into a future hardly recognizable to many of its fans, I'm not sure whether I've stayed on past my stop or missed the bus altogether. Perhaps if I remain in my seat, I'll arrive at some new place that will bring its own kind of fulfillment. But one thing is increasingly clear: in the world of opera, I can never go home again.

****************

I imagine it was this line that really annoyed a lot of opera bloggers:

_"The art form I adore seems to have been given into the hands of apologists who don't love or believe in it as I do"_


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

^^Thanks for that, Xavier. I think, with reference to the over-intellectualising and post modern wankery that the writer more than hints at, we may now be going through a similar period in opera as late 19th century. Things where becoming kind of dry and academic, posed and artificial. Then along came things like Bizet's _Carmen_, also verismo, and esp. after WW1 things like Brecht-Weill, Berg's _Wozzeck_ and so on, injecting reality and down to earth quality in music.

Maybe we're similarly at a crossroads. But I think as a whole opera has been supplanted by stage musicals, to be honest. Opera tunes are now no longer whistled in the streets, as Verdi's operas where. They are not a defining thing as in the nationalist era of late 19th century. They are no longer part of social commentary or current politics as Brecht-Weill. They're kind of an appendage to society, not integral to it, to the discourses of society (getting a bit academic here myself). Opera as in terms of its musical content is not controversial, more likely what happens on stage (eg. nudity, sex scenes, which have been done now for a while) or the production being as ridiculous as described in the article. It's not the substance of opera that's making headlines, if any.

So these kinds of regie-theater ploys and games are like trying to sell a dead horse. I don't know if it's working. I asked before, is it putting more bums on seats? Is it drawing people to go to opera live? Or buy it on dvd, etc.? Or is it driving people away. Is _any publicity good publicity_? I don't know, I'm just asking this to people here who have more experience with these things.


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

It seems a certain type of person is attracted to being a stage director: the type of person who should *not* be a stage director.

The blame ultimately lies with whoever decided to hold the Nuremberg trials in Nuremberg, which led to Bayreuth productions of _Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg_ to *not* be set in Nürnberg. And from there directors got the idea to **** around with the setting and staging.


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## quack (Oct 13, 2011)

I think whoever decided to hold the Nuremberg rallies there a few years earlier might shoulder as much blame.


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## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

Sid James said:


> So these kinds of regie-theater ploys and games are like trying to sell a dead horse. I don't know if it's working. I asked before, is it putting more bums on seats? Is it drawing people to go to opera live? Or buy it on dvd, etc.? Or is it driving people away. Is _any publicity good publicity_?


I wonder about these questions all the time and I haven't a clue. All I can say is that the theatre has always had its cranks and nutcases but unfortunately economics (always a problem in the arts) has taken a strangle hold and the nut cases have risen to management level.


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## guythegreg (Jun 15, 2012)

I feel kind of sorry for the columnist - it's clear from what she writes that the people around her get it, even if she doesn't. Of course she feels left out.

I've seen traditional stagings that didn't move me when modern ones did, and modern stagings that didn't move me when traditional stagings did. I wonder a lot what makes it all work - I'm sure that if you could bottle it you could sell it for a bundle.


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## MAuer (Feb 6, 2011)

I think a modern staging can work if the director honestly cares about the opera itself, respects the composer's intent, and wants to use its story and characters to explore the human condition.
Modern stagings usually don't work when it's all about the director -- his/her assorted neuroses, political views, etc. -- and plot and characters are distorted to conform to the director's "concept."


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