Spanish inquisition
Given the current lively discussion of Peter Konwitschny's regie of Don Carlos, La Cieca thought the cher public might like to see (and to debate) the "Celestial Voice" scene from this production.
UPDATE: Since the discussion has now broadened to involve the context of this scene, La Cieca has substituted a player with a selection of scenes from this production.
UPDATE: Since the discussion has now broadened to involve the context of this scene, La Cieca has substituted a player with a selection of scenes from this production.
POSTED at
2:31 PM
88 Comments:
Ridiculous
Ooooh, the inquisition brought a PowerPoint presentation! Or were those vacation slides?
Anyhow, it wasn't as bad as it looked. It makes sense in a bored, decadent, "Isn't it terribly modern to be so cool and Postmodern" kind of way.
My eyes are as good as rolled back in my head, and not in a good Blanche Devereaux way (or even Linda Blair's).
It makes no sense whatsoever. None. Absolutely none.
That's Vargas, isn't it?
When you're laughing at an auto-da-fé, you better be watching Candide and not Don Carlos.
I don't always hate directorial (is that a word?) commentary but but but I think Don Carlo is a specific historical drama. Even though dramatic license has been taken, to me it only makes sense within its historical context. I do not mean to be unkind, but this clip reduces the grandeur of what I think (in my meager brain) Verdi and his librettist must have imagined. I love opera because in addition to everything else, they have taught me improtant lessons in history. I would not have learned those lessons had I grown up wioth productions like this. To make the heavenly voice visible and especially in that manner is a commentary that I don't associate with the music. Having said that, I still think that even with those ugly glasses, Bo Skovhus is Yummmy with a capital Y.
Could La Cieca get former Celestial Voices Martina Arroyo and Lucine Amara to comment on this clip? I'd love to know what they think of it.
Did they do the Fontainebleu scene? How was the Grand Inquisitor presented - a modern day Archbishop or a televangelist, perhaps? What about the final scene in the Escurial with the rescuing monk, ghost, whatever?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- when the program notes for the director's concept take longer to explain than the plot synopsis, the show is in trouble.
TDG: It's rather pointless to ask Ms. Amara to comment on the dramatic aspects of a production. As she has so often said, she was never a thespian.
and neither is her 65 year old adopted daughter who lives happily with her in their tiny upper west apartment
upper west side apartment that is
What's there to comment on? The staging made no sense at all in the context of the libretto. None - not even with a few mushrooms and a complete suspension of belief. Updating a simple love story, revenge drama or fantasy can make sense when removed from it's intended setting, but I agree that Don Carlo(s) is too rooted in historical events (however distorted by Schiller and the librettist) and should be presented as such if it's to work.
....And the Celestial Voice (or was it Evita? Madonna? Marilyn? Renee Zellweger in a scene from the movie version Chicago - It's Roxie!?). Not so celestial. There were sopranos in my high school choir who sang rings around whoever this was.
aside from the Marilyn Monroe spin off, hideous and very badly sung.
The Phillp is atrocious. an the rest, well. This is not Don Carlo, this is Dumb Carlo.
Please - no more complaints about Alagna. At least you can hear every word he sings. This grotesque mishmash could be in Serbo Croat. There is no excuse nowadays for such sloppy diction (or for sloppy "concept" of course)
dear la cieca
I know miss amara has said that se is not a thesbian, but maybe it would be more appropriate to ask her if she is a lesbian
Josephine, your brain is not meager, and haven't we already had this discussion? Don't make me come over there... Yes, that is Vargas. Remember when he was the hot young tenor at the Met. I seem to recall a rather wonderful Cenerentola with him and Bartoli (back when i could tolerate her). How can a voice be celestial when she's on stage in a gown I wore about 30 years ago (back when I was a young, not very pretty drag queen)? I like spome of the "modern" productions I've seem, such as the Bilbao "Tales of Hoffmann", though I didn't like a lot of the singing. But I don't really like gratuitous updates, because then it seems to be mpore about the director/designers and less about the opera itself.
Shoo shoo fontana has evidently had an irony by-pass
Is Bo the one with the blonde ponytail? He is yummy. After I wrote my last post, I looked up Vargas in the Met's archives. I was shocked to discover that he's still singing there, because so many other tenors seem to be getting all of the attention. I always liked his voice. And I'm so glad that someone mentioned Lucine Amara. I go back far enough with opera that I remember when she was still singing at the Met. I thought her voice was quite lovely, and I vividly recall adoring her Verdi Requiem, with Eugene Ormandy.
From this clip I see no dramatic frisson at all. No impact, no anything. Except I wish the dinner parties I've been had such a glorious soundtrack; all I ever hear played anymore is Bocelli in the background.
Who's who here? Phillip is just another man bellowing in a crowd of tuxed men; what's the big deal? I always thought this problematic scene (as Shocked German described it) is disturbing enough on its own without having to highlight the artificiality of it or its inherent strageness. Why gild this warped lily with a poorly sung Marilyn manque? Quel est le point?
What I wonder is, aren't Central European audiences sick of seeing Marilyn and security guards and wheelchairs and mirrored sunglasses and all the other detritus of these no longer cutting edge productions which are all about the name-dropping (Adorno to Zizek) in the directors' program essays? I know there is a kind of snobbishness about people who feel they are on the inside intellectually hailing this stuff as brilliant and important, but it just *isn't*. I mean, I have seen a few wonderful reimagined and updated stagings, but so many of these directors are trafficking in worn-out symbols that can have no visceral theatrical power at this point.
Marilyn- yawn. Surely only Wayne Koestenbaum and these Dessau refugees could care less at this point.
I usually avoid commenting on Regie but -- Recently, the price of butter rose rather sharply in Germany so the good Germans stopped buying for a while, and yesterday I saw a sign "billiger". If there were more sound-minded people among opera goers, they would know what to do: stop going for a while, stop commenting for a while. Just ignore. There are only two things that the Konwitschnys of this world want: a lot of money and a lot of scandal. Take these away from them and they will hopefully disappear.
I suppose (grudgingly) that it worked in a somewhat heavy-handed way - but I found the projections of images from the Warsaw ghetto somewhat superflous - I MIGHT JUST HAVE GOT THE POINT WITHOUT THAT!!!!It's about oppression, yes??!!!!
My other problem is - this does refer to a specific auto-da-fe that took place in 16th century Spain, which is - er - where and when autos-da-fe took place. I don't in principle have a problem with setting SCHILLER'S PLAY in the 20th century, during the Spanish Civil War, because the issues - about the power of Church and State - are very similar. But it doesn't work for the opera, really.....Franco had concentration camps, but not autos-da-fe, although the Catholic Church was hand-in-glove with him.
Is it OK if I forward this discussion to the DON CARLOS Yahoo group?
Furthermore, just want to say to Josephine....Skovhus is nowhere near as gorgeous as Hampson in the Chatelet production! And that was a MUCH BETTER production, too!
I am sooo bored by Kowitschni´s Oberlehrer attitude. We don´t need all that hyper-significant symbolism to get the point of "Don Carlo", thank you.
I might be able to overlook the dubious production if the singing were better....
Okay, there seems to be unanimous contempt for this production (at least this scene) on this board. However, I remember to come out of the opera house deeply moved and excited after I had seen it in its first run in Hamburg (with an entirely different cast, better suited to the smaller financial possibilities of the Hamburg State Opera: Danielle Halbwachs as Elisabeth was vocally the highlight of the performance).
As the disregard for this production has probably nothing to do with the fact that the clip is not that well filmed (I have the impression the producers of the DVD were quite undecided what they actually wanted to show and what not), I will therefore try to make one last attempt at defending Konwitschny and his way of producing operas.
I have explained the intentions behind this staging on the Regierätsel page, therefore I would like to say some more general things about the value of (GOOD) Regietheater. Without further ado, here comes my little attempt to develop the line of thought that makes so many Central Europeans (believe me, I am not alone, Konwitschny was five times in a row producer of the year in Germany) fall for this kind of productions:
Cum grano salis:
1) Opera is in a way the ultimate form of art by combining music (score), text (libretto), and visual elements (production) in one.
2) Theoretically, all these elements of an opera are of equal importance. At least, there is no reason, why the production is necessarily subordinate to the libretto.
3) Empirically, music has shown to be the dominant element in determining the long-term success of an opera, not the quality of the libretto or the productions. In fact, one is often inclined to say that most operas that are still played today, survived despite their libretti, not because of them (La Forza del Destino or I Puritani, anyone?).
4) Most libretti are really, really bad and have almost no artistic value at all. This is particularly true for the libretti used by two of the most loved composers: Wagner and Verdi.
5) As an aside: I agree with most mainstream thinkers on opera that there are only very few libretti that actually have an artistic value: the Da Ponte libretti for Mozart, some Romani libretti for Rossini (particularly L'Italiana), the Boito libretti for Verdi (Otello, Falstaff) and the Hoffmansthal operas from Strauss plus Salome).
6) It is well documented that composers usually only looked at the potential for dramatic scenes when judging a libretto. They did not care much for consistency, historical accuracy, etc.. This even pertains to the Don Carlos. While Schiller did extensive studies on the civil war in the Netherlands, his portrait of Don Carlos has been repeatedly shown to be inaccurate to say the least. However, the Verdi opera is not even true to the play and even more inaccurate, because it tells a love story and not the political story of the fight for freedom in the Netherlands.
7) The setting of the opera (location, time) was typically chosen in order to satisfy some censor or fashion. However, most important operas were intended to comment on the actual situation of society at the time when they were composed. Examples are abundant: the Figaro operas play in Sevilla, but were supposed to critizise the circumstances in France, Nabucoo plays in Babylon, but was supposed to convey a political message about Italy’s future, the Meistersinger play in medieval Nürnberg, but were clearly intended to criticize current musical practice in Europe in the 19th century, etc. etc. One of the best examples for the arbitrariness of the historical context is obviously Un Ballo in Maschera. Is it Renato or Gustavo? Boston or Stockholm? Is it Casablanca? Does it matter?
8) In sum, many composers (particularly Verdi and Donizetti) could not have cared less about the setting of the opera. Therefore, why should we? Operas are about people caught in archetypical situations in human life, regardless of the setting. This is what a production should reflect in the first place.
9) Against this background the highest maxim of any producer should be: Be true to the music, and to the story the music is telling.
10) As an aside: Sometimes, it is necessary to completely ignore the libretto. If Hans Sachs sings his song of German superiority, how can this be performed today, without thinking of everything that this way of thinking has brought upon the world? To add some fuel to all the anti-Regie sentiment here: In his Meistersinger production (completely typewriter-free, by the way) in Hamburg, Konwitschny had the singers have an onstage discussion about this right in the last act.
11) In the end, art IS experience. Therefore, another maxim should be: Be theatric and move people. Give the composer the possibility to speak to an audience accustomed to the freedoms and comforts of the 21st century.
12) This does not automatically call for productions Konwitschny style. In fact, it certainly allows for numerous different directorial interpretations of the same opera. But it does make productions Konwitschny style an artistic possibility with a lot of merit. And it does minimize the obligation to stick exactly to the libretto.
P.S.: There are very many trashy productions over here, too. I’d say one out of four Regie attempts succeeds. No doubt about it. But honestly, the Puritani production from the Met makes me cringe, too, because it reeks of boredom from the first scene onwards. It just does not try at all to actually show, why this kind of opera should be performed in an opera house and not in a concert hall.
I see the chain of argument that leads to the conclusions here, but I don't agree with a lot of it. First of all, in contemporary scholarship (disclaimer: I'm a graduate student, so I keep track of these things), people are looking at libretti a lot more carefully than they used to, rather than carrying out the wholesale "Well, we assume a default position of 'trash', and then we glorify these few exceptions: da Ponte, Boito, Hofmannsthal" position of the past. So I'd quibble with a lot of the reasoning leading up to:
8) In sum, many composers (particularly Verdi and Donizetti) could not have cared less about the setting of the opera.
Having read a work like Divas and Scholars, I can't agree with that as the sweeping statement that it is: Verdi fought against the censors to get his vision on the stage, for example, Traviata as a *contemporary* opera instead of being played in powdered wigs as a story of the past century.
2) Theoretically, all these elements of an opera are of equal importance. At least, there is no reason, why the production is necessarily subordinate to the libretto.
The problem is, the libretto is still THERE, and we do tend to start getting queasy at the prospect of directly editing it, in our modern times, something that has changed since the 19th century. A wise friend of mine (wink wink) once commented about how with supertitles, the text is right up there for the audience to see, so you do have to deal with it. And audiences are attentive to disjunction that makes them scratch their heads and say "What?" It takes a lot of thought and skill to pull off a staging directly contrary/dismissive of the text that's not simply confusing. Or I guess some directors go for flat-out provocation, but that has a lot of dramatic problems.
If Hans Sachs sings his song of German superiority, how can this be performed today, without thinking of everything that this way of thinking has brought upon the world?
I guess so, if you've stripped the opera out of its historical setting which provides a particular (bitter) context to that speech, you're going to tend to read it that way--but that's the problem with decontextualizing something in the first place. It reminds me of the problems that 19th century thinkers ran into with some of the less savory aspects of Greek tragedies, aspects that are very understandable IF you put the plays into their cultural contexts and don't try to make them into timeless statements of universals.
From a purely theatrical standpoint, I was more annoyed than anything else when Don Ottavio stopped singing so he could read us a letter of Mozart's, during Konwitschny's Komische Oper Don Giovanni. I suppose you can argue that's one way to enliven audience discussion, but I don't particularly like being preached at that overtly.
(This is a bit of a devil's advocate post; I do see many of the good sides, as well.)
Bravo, Straussmonster!
The assumption that libretti are trash and that they meant nothing to the composers must be one that German directors and Dramaturgs have access to, and not the rest of us. How ludicrous. Take a look at Verdi's letters to his librettists.
To me the absolute worst part of Regie stagings- something that NEVER should be done-- is having added bits of text, like Ottavio reading a Mozart letter. That is just inexcusable, incredibly unmusical and pompous. It's bad enough that the programs are so ludicrously stuffed with pretention. But at least there the team's thinking is fair game for audience consideration. Pushing it onto the stage verbally is a travesty.
This kind of high-toned sloganeering is as bad
as 18th century performers adding arias by different composers at will.
No one wants decorative garbage like the Met PURITANI, which was poor when new. That does not mean that having legal tracts from workers' collectives supporting Cromwell or the director's favorite lines from TRAINSPOTTING read by a character representing The Godfather-- since Bellini was Sicilian-- would improve it.
I'd like to know what was Konwitschny's unifying concept (if there was unity at all) for this production.
Why is Posa's role minimized as a pizza delivery man; what was the Ueber meaning of Eboli's dream?
How did he handle the ending of the opera, which is problematic even in a standard production?
What was Phillip's character supposed to be here, what was the Inquisitor, how was their relationship portrayed?
I have seen some updatings that work and I have seen some fall flat; I'd like to understand the broader context of how that clip fits into the entire opera as Konwitschny portrayed it. That clip did not convince me of anything new, but I do realize that I am seeing it out of its context.
I thoroughly enjoy discussions like this, though I feel at this point like we should all be getting college credit.
And if we're going to let auteurs do whatever they want to opera, we wind up with an Orfeo by the Marx Brothers.... I mean, the Alagnas.
OK guys, way off topic, but I need help.
Remember that lady that had a program on NYC access channel that sang opera?
I am trying to remember her name and I am having a hell of a time. I know there were videos of her in youtube, but I have not been able to come up wityh anything that will yield a result.
Help please
Found her! Mari Lyn. Damn that was hard, and it shouldn't have been.
There is a review of the DVD for this production on Amazon.com. What I learned:
Eboli is stabbed in the back by an unknown assailant during the Act IV prison scene. (why does Peter K feel this is necessary?)
In Eboli's dream, she is married to Carlos and they invite Phillip and Elisabetta to dinner; the chicken is burnt and so they order out for pizza - hence Posa the Pizza Man. (what is the point of this?)
Apparently Eboli is present during Phillip's soliloquy, and the following interchange with the Inquisitor. (why? wouldn't it weaken the private confrontation between the two men?)
The costuming is supposedly mostly 16th century, with the exception of Eboli's dream and the auto da fe. (what is the point of switching back and forth like that?)
I don't get it. As if Don Carlo needs extra bits like this to be provocative... sounds more distracting than illuminating.
It wouldn't be a problem for K. to become the best director for 55 years in a row (unless he overdoes his drugs beforehand) because those who decide on it are the same cronies who provide him with all that public money and keep inviting him, boos and protests notwithstanding.
But what sort of "coherence" and "historical precision" do K. and his kind bring to the works, if I may ask?
I remember the hideous Munich Elektra where Wernicke had Klytemnaestra slain in a mantle that was an exact replica of the theatre's curtain. Quite transparently, it was opera itself that the loonie dreamed of assassinating. Good that he was taken relatively early, so that he must not suffer working and we don't have to suffer from his work either.
Same thing with K. He drags the shabby, idiotic idea that good is equal to evil from Parsifal through Freischütz to whatever he is staging at the moment, for lack of anything else to say. His driving force is an enormous hate for the civilization that produced the operas, for everything that their authors believed in, for any humanist message inside.
And even if the work should not be a paragon of wisdom or humanism, even if you cannot agree with the Meistersinger ideologically, do you need a director to stage the work or to interrupt it and prove it all wrong? As an audience, do you feel like a mindless idiot who cannot decide what to accept and what to reject unless old K. is out there to educate you?
Well, I don't, so I stay at home with my CDs, and I don't come near the opera until I die, or until opera goes belly up, or until it gets rid of Regie.
What I get out of it (just the heavenly voice part):
Phillip and his cocaine-drenched, cynical court have gathered to watch historical snuff films to the accompaniment of a karaoke singer.
Or let me put it this way, if that were exactly what a regiemeister _wanted_ to convey, how would s/he go about it any differently than Peter Konwitschny has?
Opera is in a way the ultimate form of art by combining music (score), text (libretto), and visual elements (production) in one.
The modern musical is for you.
Disagree. The addition of the VOICE changes everything. The composer searches for a great libretto that will lend itself to cadances using the human voice. The music is the essential piece. The voice immediately after. Plot is great but the music makes it an opera. otherwise, they could do theater. The voice and it's magic is what makes it a potential transcendant experience.
2) Theoretically, all these elements of an opera are of equal importance. At least, there is no reason, why the production is necessarily subordinate to the libretto.
However, without voice it has no revelance.
4) Most libretti are really, really bad and have almost no artistic value at all. This is particularly true for the libretti used by two of the most loved composers: Wagner and Verdi.
Just not interesting enough for a shocked german.
8) In sum, many composers (particularly Verdi and Donizetti) could not have cared less about the setting of the opera. Therefore, why should we? Operas are about people caught in archetypical situations in human life, regardless of the setting. This is what a production should reflect in the first place.
They absolutely cared fiercely for the setting fo the opera. That is the rot these egoists who bastardize opera content themselves to think. Verdi always fought for his vision of the piece against the idiots of his day.
9) Against this background the highest maxim of any producer should be: Be true to the music, and to the story the music is telling.
But above all, respect the damn composer. AND his libretto.
11) In the end, art IS experience. Therefore, another maxim should be: Be theatric and move people. Give the composer the possibility to speak to an audience accustomed to the freedoms and comforts of the 21st century.
To touch or change a thing, you must create it/. Do it with respect in the intentions of the master who wrote it. People will be moved.
P.S.: There are very many trashy productions over here, too. I’d say one out of four Regie attempts succeeds. No doubt about it. But honestly, the Puritani production from the Met makes me cringe, too, because it reeks of boredom from the first scene onwards. It just does not try at all to actually show, why this kind of opera should be performed in an opera house and not in a concert hall.
not enough skin for you? NO red dress? No urinals?
No uber concept suffocating the piece?
God deliver opera from this current group of no mads who can't get work doing anything else. so they shyte all over masterpieces which have survived intact just to be available for some floating
ego who thinks he got it right.
Well, I don't, so I stay at home with my CDs, and I don't come near the opera until I die...
In a way, this attitude exactly harmonizes with the idea that opera production must be radical. Today It is possible to simulate a "traditional" experience at home on CD or DVD -- or, for that matter, to experience it firsthand at an opera house easily accessible through modern transportation. So what, then, is the point of doing an opera "straight" if that presentation adds no intellectual value?
I would further suggest that the work of a nontraditional stage director (like that of a radically mediating conductor or singer) demonstrates a greater faith in the work than that of the artist who believes that for each opera there is only one ideal means of presentation. It seems to me that Konwitschny is not saying "mine if the only way of looking at this work" but rather "there is more in this work than has been perceived before; I want to try to bring this additional information to light."
This attitude I think is really necessary when presenting long-familiar works to an experienced audience: the public must be challenged to rethink their relationship to the text.
This is not to say that any particular attempt at recontextualizing is successful; this YouTube scene looks messy and tentative, for example, and the "concert singer" effect so overplayed as to lose any sense of irony.
Sorry to be late to the topic here, but I saw this production a year and a half ago in Vienna with a slightly different cast and I actually liked it a great deal. I didn't agree with or really understand all of it, but thought for the most part it was smart and interesting. First, I think "Eboli's Dream" wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and Posa's role in it was just to show how Eboli doesn't consider him or his concerns important at this point (since he's basically the moral center of the opera this tells you a lot about her).
This video clip leaves out the procession at the beginning of the auto-da-fe scene, which is staged through the lobby of the opera house during intermission with a TV red carpet announcer (and probably most of you would find this part a lot more objectionable than the clip here). Up to this point the opera had been mostly staged in period dress, at this scene everyone was suddenly in contemporary costume.
I think Konwitschny's point was to dramatize the public's complicity in a public execution--suddenly the whole chorus was dressed like the opera-goers--and include us, the audience, as the guilty ones in the oppression of Flanders, which is compared to WWII and I think particularly Austria's role (one of the pictures is of the bombed-out Staatsoper, I believe this production premiered during the 50th anniversary of the reopening of the house).
I can see why people wouldn't like it, but it's pretty much exactly what Regietheater aims to do-- dramatize the opera in a contemporary way and make the audience involved and uncomfortable. I think it's worthy of being taken seriously, not just dismissed as sensational silliness.
Shocked German is absolutely right about how risky Regietheater is, and I wish that more directors could edit themselves and that more productions were successful. But I think this production is mostly a success in a way totally different from that of a traditional production, and if you measure it in the same ways as a Zeffirelli, well, of course you aren't going to like it.
As for the Celestial Voice, um, well, I'm not so sure there.
OK, I hesitated for a while now – and can’t resist any more:
Thanks for your comment, shocked german, I wholeheartedly agree!
This Don Carlos is, in my opinion, one of Konwitschny’s less convincing productions. Act I doesn’t work too well, there are some problems with the autodafé and the finale, and in one or the other respect I thought he failed, on a high and thought-provoking level, but failed. Still I prefer his interpretation to most other Don Carlo(s) I’ve seen so far.
Why does not anybody here and now blame Verdi for garbling Schiller’s play? Frankly, the director who distorts Verdi’s opera as much as Verdi and his librettists did with Schiller’s play, has yet to be born. Did they do justice to Schiller’s play? No! But they used Schiller’s text to translate a message which might be more true to parts of Schiller’s ideas than he himself ever was aware of (while neglecting other - not less important - parts of the drama) – and this is exactly what a director should do. “Any performance of an opera is the translation of an original which never existed” – a director’s work is not a nice and handy accessory to an opera, it’s part of the package not less important than Verdi’s share. If one want to have Verdi pure, one has to stick to concert performances or – better - read the score.
I regret that particularly Konwitschny, who has probably the best knowledge of music and score of any director on stage today (and it’s not only his father’s heritage: the man is driven by music and his search for its inner truth, more than some of the conductors he’s working with), is seen as a kind of amateurish provocateur.
Let me try to answer two of the questions above:
Eboli’s dream is ballet music added for Paris, taking place during a masked ball. Elisabeth asks Eboli to swap masks and disappears, the princess is dreaming of a shared future with Carlos, just before they will meet in the garden: Bourgeois household, kind of 50's atmosphere, Eboli pregnant, Carlos coming home from work, parents-in-law coming over for dinner, the teddy bear for the yet unborn grand-child - simple, but easy to imagine that it‘s exactly what one or the other princess in love might dream of. Konwitschny makes that happen in a box, disconnected to the rest of the performance, delivering a kind of slapstick, but he thus refers to Verdi’s strong dislike to add this ballet to his opera, which is arguable more true to his ideas than installing a tableau à la grand' opera. More than that: Even though the scene caused quite a tumult and loud distortions during both performances I’ve attended (Vienna), Nadja Michael managed here to add a part of girlish naivety and desire to Eboli’s character, which made the disillusion in the garden scene come as even more of a shock. That an important figure in one’s life – as Posa is in Eboli’s – has a cameo appearance in one’s dreams in whatever silly disguise is not at all that strange, is it? The pizza guy saves the situation, when the turkey is burnt – Freud wouldn’t have difficulties to explain why Eboli wants to rely on Posa as deus-in-machina in her dreams!
The fact that the princess is sleeping in the king’s bed during his monologue was in my opinion one of Konwitschny‘s most brilliant ideas: It adds a sort of ambiguity to the scene, slightly shifting the kings code of moral to a more hypocritical attitude towards his queen, but even more, making them both, Eboli and Philipp, looking so terribly lonesome as one can imagine. The fact that she has to hide when the Inquisitor arrives – how could his powerful position be better illustrated than by the fact that he has not to wait and can cause such an embarrassing situation for the king? How utterly helpless seems Eboli when she tries to pull away her dress on the floor under his white stick to get dressed! And what a fine sense of how stage works proofs K. when he makes the inquisitor’s blindness visibly through another person who’s presence he might suspect, but can’t verify! (Though not only Eboli isn‘t quite sure of that!) How fine it works that she thus immediately knows about the acute threat for Carlos. And that she can’t escape before the queen rushes in, hiding behind a door and witnessing Elisabeth‘s pain and breakdown, made both more plausible: Eboli’s sudden appearance for the following quartett and her change of heart! That the very fact – Eboli being the king’s mistress – which causes later the queen‘s irreconcilable attitude is not just mentioned in dialog but was visible for us all – I can hardly think of a more elegant way to make the audience „feel” the drama. Blame my limited command of English if I wasn't able to explain that.:-)
moritz
I can see both sides in this argument. I don't necessarily want to see Traviata staged exactly the same way, in the same costumes and sets, until I die. By the same token, as various people have pointed out, not ev ery update will be be valid or interesting.
However, while i'm glad to have Micaela's insights as someone who saw the production, here's my quibble with superimposing modern politics onto opera. As a Jew, I understand full the implications of people watching and doing nothing while others are oppressed, murdered, and excuted. I understand it as a gay man also. but that's not really what i want to go to Opera for. I love opera because it's an escape from reality, not a reflection of it. When I want reality, I go to documentaries like the terrific War Dance, or I turn on any number of cable channels. When I tune in to opera, I want to be entertained. I want wonderful singers singing glorious music gloriously. If I haed to choose between singing and acting, I'd rather my singers could sing. If I had to choose between looks or singing, I'd rather they could sing.
I liked what Micaela said about wishing directors would self edit themselves. I watched Julie Taymor's Zauberflote with my jaw agape, because it's as if every thought, every design idea had come out all at once.
Intellectualised nonsense, aristic incoherence, and above all political tendentiousness. These are the principal components of "rubbish" on the opertic stage.
Rubbish - we know it when we see it. As US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said (of obscenity): "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."
We know when something is rubbish, and just as surely (as Potter Stewart did of obscenity) we know when is NOT rubbish - when it is a genuine attempt to bring to life the values of a musical work (however much philistines might insist that it is rubbish.)
The comments above about libretti being worthless trash is (a) factually incorrect and almost completely ignorant; (b) crude and reductionist - ignoring historical and artistic evidence of the role of libretti in innumerable aspects of operatic creation, performance and (evolving) understanding.
Moreover, it is generally not so much the libretti but composers' musical intentions that rubbish productions ignore or deliberately ignore. (Mozart would appear to have attracted the most abuse).
leonora: please feel free to forward this discussion to your Yahoo group -- we invite those members to join in!
From the latest edition of "opera Now" reviewing productions at Hannover, PETER GRIMES:
The set made no visual references to to the sea, Aldeburgh, fishing boats, fish, pints of ale, a pub, or storms - instead we saw a mixture of packing cases of various sizes... A life-size Grimes doll crucified upside down was lifted into the flies by a giant hook. The walls of Grimes's hut (which was in fact a huge open crate) were decorated with children's crayon drawings... At the end Grimes was not lost in the fog, but captured and dressed up by the sadistic citizens in drag, knickers, lipstick, red wig, light blue shoes and tinsel party hat - then stuck there holding a sparkler in each hand, arms stretched wide... Encouraged by Balstrode to go and sink himself and his boat, Grimes got into a packing case and slowly descended through a stage trap...
Bob Bowles masturbated furiously at the prospect of sex with Mr Sedley (a trouser-wearing lesbian); the Boar was not a pub but a brothel; the offstage service took place on-stage so everybody witnessed the row between Ellen and Grimes and Grimes's violent seizing of the apprentice. The final scene of life going on as ususal on the Aldeburgh shore was omitted. The single interval was taken just before the passacaglia and march to Grimes's hut. The composer's intention and the sweep of the music are both absoluetly patent.
Rubbish. Of course it is. What has it got to do with operatic production? Presumably the director lacks the technical comptenece and artistic talent to write his own opera, so he just takes over someone else's. Had I been unlucky enought to go to this production I would have sought to get my money back.
I have to say, Charlie B., that basing your arguments on Opera Now instead of the actual experience of seeing the opera is really no different from making your final decision on a novel by reading the Cliff Notes instead of the book.
What I gather from that critique was that the reviewer either wouldn't or couldn't understand what was happening onstage. So he composed a laundry list of shocking images to convey the idea that the whole production was nothing but filth. That's a very cheap and tired way of avoiding the responsibility of actually confronting the ideas presented.
Note that I don't say this GRIMES production was good or bad, valid or tripe, entertaining or dull. I just say that this review communicates nothing more than "they didn't give me what I wanted to see," and that is at best a limited and not very useful sort of critique.
I think one of the reasons we traditionalists have become so cynical about Regietheater is that, at least in some places, it seems to be becoming the norm rather than the exception. It's my impression that companies in Europe might actually come under attack for presenting konzept-free stagings of operas.
Back in the 90's, I believe in connection with her last Brünnhildes at the Met, Gwyneth Jones was interviewed by Opera News, and she said she was glad that her daughter, who was in New York with her, would finally get to see a Ring set in traditional, mythic times. Because ALL the other Ring productions in the world were modern-dress! I found that absolutely astonishing. I'm all for experimenting with new ideas for producing opera, but when radical reinterpretation becomes orthodoxy, opera is in trouble.
Whoops, I should have said that I don't see the Cliff's Notes as a correct analogy. I am not seeking to understand or analyse "Peter Grimes" without seeing the work (the equivalent of using the Notes instead of reading and thinking about, say, "Hamlet"). I already know "Grimes" well from a number of sources. What I am taking at face value is a report of what a particular production was like, something we are obliged to do (and all the time on this website).
I did not assume the review was "objective" or that the reviewer had not presented some of his own views (possibly in a cheap fashion). All I was concerned about was whether it was possible, if the things he stated were true, for it to have been possible to see in such a production of "Grimes" the essential dramatic values that were the structure into which Britten bound his music. I judged that, whatever else might have been possible (and which the reviewer omitted to consider) you could not. Most particularly, that you could not through this presentation discover the musical world, and thereby musical-emotional values of the work. For someone not already familiar with the work, it would represent a meaningless farrago in relation to Britten's work (no matter how wonderful it was as something else.)
I'm glad Straussmonster et al. have called Shocked German on his disregard of libretti. Metastasio's were regarded as major poetry in their day; Verdi (once he got away from that madman Solera) seldom wrote an opera that was not already a successful theater piece (Aida, which has the least convincing characters in late Verdi, is one notable exception), and Wagner's, though problematic and verbally eccentric, introduced a whole new way of looking at legend, of interpreting it combined with the usages of classic theater, that gave birth to the disciplines of anthropology and psychiatry, among others, and completely transformed the cultural landscape of several eras. As Straussmonster points out, we cannot have opera without the libretto, and therefore the disjunct between the words being sung and what the director is doing (ignoring them half the time) is bound to interfere with the enjoyment of anyone who takes the form seriously.
But I think the comments of the Germans on this thread are significant in revealing to us in the benighted U.S. what is going on there, the inability to create new art of great beauty, quality or relevance that leads too many people to a frustrated feeling that the old and classic must be lowered in order to level the field. (Americans never did create great operas or churches, but we have movies and rock n roll.)
I do enjoy having the opportunity to go back and forth between reinterpretation (especially when done intriguingly, as here) and tradition -- which I gather cannot be done any longer in the major musical centers of Europe, because traditional is so generally condemned. Also there is no excuse for the Bieto productions where the singing is not valued at all, and great chunks of the music are omitted as irrelevant to the director's vision. That does not belong in an opera house; it belongs in the director's own theater; let him get his own grants and hire his own singers; he should not be allowed to torture real ones.
However P.S.
It's perfectly true that Verdi's interpretation of Schiller is a travesty if it is a theatrical staging of the play -- but it was never intended to be anything of the kind. To use the piece for a music drama required as much distortion as Shakespeare's pays required -- the demands of the opera house in Verdi's time overruled the coherence of Schiller's plot. (Neither play nor opera has very much to do with history.) The Fontainebleau, ballet and auto-da-fe scenes -- and the Ghost as a character, but also the chorus -- had and have no place in staging the play, but Verdi's musical portraits of the characters require their musical appearances in these scenes. Perhaps the Germans feel justified in trashing Verdi because they think he trashed their beloved Schiller. (There aren't many German operas based on Germany's classic writers; only the French and Italians -- and Tchaikowsky in Maid of Orleans -- were willing to be so sacrilegious.)
Well, I'm out of it and feeling better. No opera tickets, no DVDs, no broadcasts (whatever made you think I would watch these, La Cieca?), no Bieito, no K., no little black dresses for Ariadne, nothing with Regie on it whatsoever, and, of course, no comments, because I cannot comment anything I have not seen or ever wanted to see. Just good old plain CDs and good old memories!
La Cieca, thank you sooo much for posting those updated clips.
Now that I have seen those, I can't say I hated it. It kept my attention, to be sure. But it seems awfully heavy-handed and preachy. We get it: political oppression and religious dogma, Bad. Freedom of expression and liberation from tyranny, Good. But Verdi already did that for us.
Couldn't Peter K get that across without resorting to gimmickry, jumping costumes and settings across the centuries, inventing character's dreams and adding assassinations (Eboli)? Seems to me Verdi already makes the point successfully while maintaining a consistent whole, and Peter K's additions are just unnecessary, confusing distractions.
I will add that if I had been in attendance, what *would* have annoyed me absolutely would have been that business with the ushers shoving political pamphlets in my face during the "Sire, sire!" chorus. There is no excuse for directing my attention away from the music. If Peter K thought it so imperative that I have that piece of paper thrust at me, that could have been done during the intermission.
Anonymous:
First, please have the courtesy to choose a nickname so we know whom we're talking to.
Second, I don't follow your reasoning that "Quite transparently, it was opera itself that the loonie dreamed of assassinating."
or
"He drags the shabby, idiotic idea that good is equal to evil from Parsifal through Freischütz to whatever he is staging at the moment, for lack of anything else to say. His driving force is an enormous hate for the civilization that produced the operas, for everything that their authors believed in, for any humanist message inside."
This sort of mind-reading comes perilously close to the sort of criticism that insists that "obviously" Wagner intended the RING and MEISTERSINGER as explicitly anti-Semitic works.
Lydia L:
Also there is no excuse for the Bieto productions where the singing is not valued at all, and great chunks of the music are omitted as irrelevant to the director's vision.
I'm going to ask for some examples here. I certainly have not heard of the omission of "great chunks" in Bieito productions, and who says "the singing is not valued at all?"
I originally posted two replies to La Cieca, the first of which I saw displayed, but which has now disappeared. Is there any way it could have accidentally got deleted? (not that I can even remember much about it, and certainly not that it was worth anything - I just wondered).
Charlie B:
The reply beginning "Whoops, I should have said that I don't see the Cliff's Notes as a correct analogy" is here; I haven't seen another. Blogger is sometimes a little erratic about displaying comments, so it may well turn up by tomorrow.
I'm sure my comment is zingng about the blogosphere somewhere. It really doesn't matter because my ultimate view is that La Cieca is so knowledgeable and so charming that it is impossible that she should not always be right! Indeed it caused me no little pain to think that something I had written had prompted La Cieca to comment in correction! (and btw thank you for the wonderful "Macbeth-Mandalay" podcast - is this perhaps a secret hint that we will be hearing Dame Ethyl Smythe's "The Wreckers" - was soon? I'm just not sure if it was one of Shirley V's operas.)
Thank you Charlie B for your kind words. No "Wreckers" at the moment (La Cieca tries to avoid operas where the villains are Methodists) but your doyenne and two special guest actresses are recording a couple of scenes from Shakespeare's "Macbeth" as intermission features in the next acts of the Verrett podcasts.
"In Eboli's dream, she is married to Carlos and they invite Phillip and Elisabetta to dinner; the chicken is burnt and so they order out for pizza - hence Posa the Pizza Man. (what is the point of this?)"
The point, if there is one, is to use the ballet music....but there was a ballet specifically choreographed for the first performance, surely someone could have coreographed something - ANYTHING - better than "Eboli's dream". I mean, why would Princess Eboli have a dream of suburban domesticity?
"Apparently Eboli is present during Phillip's soliloquy, and the following interchange with the Inquisitor. (why? wouldn't it weaken the private confrontation between the two men?)"
of course!! The POINT of Philip's soliloquy is that he is ALONE, he isn't supposed to be telling his mistress that his wife doesn't love him, ferchrissake!!
And she is present during the Inquisitor scene because the old blind man has trodden on her cloak as he comes in...pathetic!
Well, good morning one and all. If anyone is going to Starbucks, could you please pick me up a grande latte? thanks. Last night, speaking of obscure Verdi operas with bad libretti, Gallery HD here on Cablevision broadcast "Oberto", with Ildar Abdrazakov, Carlo Ventre, Evelyn Herlitzius, Marianne Cornetti, Nuria Lorenzo, and directed by Ignacio Garcia, from BBC Opus Arte. I've I've only listened to the ACt I finale so far, but the physical production is gorgeous and very traditional.
As for the podcasts, I always look forward to the banter between you and Milton.
one spectacle deserves another. i was entranced by what i saw, but this is not why i go to the opera. the quotidian gets left at the door along with the homeless, the refugees, the downcast. having opera dropped uncomfortably in my lap is beyond the pale. but let's face it folks- an italian opera sung in french about a spanish king just opens itself to riduculus interpretation. though i truly feel that this production has a well thought out integrity about it. again, i prefer a certain distance between myself and the drama where there can be room for projecting, dreaming and fantasizing. can we view this as the ultimate outcome of opera as drama instead of vocal art?
It's not an Italian opera being sung in French. It's a French opera being sung in French. It may have been written by Verdi, but he set it to a French libretto by two very French authors, Joseph Méry and Camille Du Locle.
What, are the courtiers holding the Holy Toilet Paper at second 13 or 14 of the clip?
Figures.
leonora-gatta: On the other hand, if Phillipe's aria is understood as an inner monologue, why couldn't he be thinking these thoughts just as logically while in bed with his mistress as alone in his chamber? To my mind the presence Eboli as the King's sex partner (intimate only in the physical sense) only emphasizes his spiritual loneliness.
Eboli's presence during the Inquisitor scene does not immediately sound like it would work, I admit. But I have certainly been surprised before by seemingly illogical bits of business that paid off handsomely when seen in context.
What get me is that this kind of innovation (the presence of Eboli in the King's bedchamber) sends everyone into a tizzy, when nobody lifts an eyebrow at a production of Cavalleria rusticana which begins with Santuzza stalking Turiddu and Lola during the Siciliana. This interpolated business makes a bare-faced liar out of Santuzza:
TURIDDU: Ah! mi hai spiato?
SANTUZZA: No, te lo giuro.
A noi l'ha raccontato
Compar Alfio
Il marito, poco fa.
So what bothers people seems not to be infidelity to the text but rather novelty per se -- particularly when they only hear about these changes in traditional staging rather than actually seeing them in context.
well... I for one was riveted by the clips. Thanks for posting them.
This has been a fascinating thread. I've sometimes worried that there has been a mothball tendency among some of the posters on here- Violetta should only ever stand centre stage wearing a big white meringue, and raise her champagne glass in her right hand on the first 'Gioir,' that kind of thing.
Equally, there are times when a false opposition seems to be made, that there is a binary choice to be made between dramatically unlikely or unconvincing people with magnificent voices, or skinnny pretty ones who can't sing, and never the twain shall meet. So it's refreshing to see so much passion applied to such divergent opinions.
I'm not convinced by the idea, however, that the Bieltos and the Konwitschnys are motivated solely by scandal and column inches. Most of the controversialists of opera strike me as serious-minded individuals, far likely to be prone to feelings of intellectual superiority than merely to chase headlines. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't- that bizarre Marxist Fledermaus with Mireille Delunsch springs to mind- but I would argue that most theatre and opera professionals do have a respect for the work and the art form as a starting point.
And surely a great work of art is strong enough to stand a little reinterpretation? As TS Eliot said, 'If you find it in my work, it's there'
All of which is not to say that there's no place for the traditional in opera stagings. Has anyone ever seen a Rosenkavelier trio without Sophie stage left, the Marschallin stage right, and Oktavian in a nice big follow spot in the centre? And would anyone want to?
Jonathan Miller (Dr Sir Jonathan Miller, I mean) wrote a very interesting book a while back, "Subsequent Performances", on the very subject of what he calls the afterlife of an opera, or a play. Here is an excerpt of an interview he gave to the ISPA :
"I look at some of my own younger colleagues, all these sort of Richard Jones-like figures, Peter Sellars and so forth, and you realize that there is a routine deconstruction. As long as the work can be made enigmatically unintelligible on the stage, you've scored. It's unfair. I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings. They're arbitrary. Sellars, who's a clever director, doesn't deconstruct; he does what I call theatrical transportation. Every single thing is just simply dropped in a truck and driven 200 miles, 200 years up the freeway and dumped in the art class Thursday afternoon. "It's in Malibu; it must be good."
The interview URL is http://www.ispa.org/ideas/miller.html
it is mostly about his exhibition "Jonathan Miller on Reflection", but it does make cogent remarks which seem to me very pertinent to this post.
Armerjacquino
I've seen Konwitschny's Rosenkavalier in which the Marschallin and Octavian are lesbian lovers and the "trio" takes place in a shop window in which the Marschallin, Octavian, Sophie and three mannequins are modelling near-identical furcoats and sporting peroxide wigs. No-one moved until curtain down. This is also the production in which Octavian shoots Faninal's black servant in the head instead of wounding Baron Ochs and the Marschallin gives birth on stage in the levee to the Singing tenor, who is wearing baby clothes. I'd love micaëla to explain all that.
Regina, If I understand your description correctly, that means that Octavian essentially becomes Victor/Victoria. In other words, a woman playing a man playing a woman. Or do they dispense altogether with OCtavian being a man? And what is the Marschallin doing on a levee? Has she suddenly become Manon Lescaut? And she gives birth to a tenor? WHAT THE F...!
OK, bear with me: I come to the party late and lacking your erudition. This discussion reminds me very strongly of what goes on in the world of Shakespeare performance. If there is sometimes ghastly stuff onstage (still don't get a Hamlet I saw in the 90's where Hamlet kept peeing on the stage), the bottom line is it IS still on stage, live and communicating directly with the audience. Yay for survival. Having said that, though, I take my daughter to the opera whenever I can, and it is such a nightmare trying to figure out which productions, not which operas, to see. She refers to the Norma here at SFO as the "popsicle stick opera," which I'm not sure will serve her well in appreciation of it as music. You pays yer money and you takes yer chances.
Sanford - let me clarify. In Konwitschny's production is played as a woman - occasionally cross-dressing as a man (in Act II) - and the Marschallin's levée has her sitting on her bed, she opens her legs and out comes the tenor dressed as a baby to sing Di rigori armato il seno! I am not joking. In the trio, all three singers are dressed as almost identical mannequins.
"I take my daughter to the opera whenever I can, and it is such a nightmare trying to figure out which productions, not which operas, to see."
Amen. I have the same dilemma taking different friends with me to the opera, and then trying to explain what I thi