previously
La Cieca thanks a particularly loyal member of the cher public for pointing out the most recent bit of hard-hitting arts coverage in the Wall Street Journal, as copied and pasted by that hardest of all arts hitters, Terry Teachout. La Cieca says “copied and pasted” because in this piece Teachout manages to blather on for over 800 words without introducing a shred of new reporting or even a sliver of fresh observation.
For those of you who have not been paying any attention at all to what’s been happening at the New York City Opera since, oh, around the time the last woolly mammoth died out in these parts, La Cieca takes the liberty of emulating the Teachout’s reporting technique and pasting here a few choice snippets:
New York’s second-biggest opera company is closing up shop — temporarily. Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater, home of the New York City Opera, will be undergoing major renovations throughout City Opera’s 2008-09 season. The company had originally planned to present a series of concert opera performances in various locations around the city, then decided to trim costs by cutting back. . . .
. . .the repertoire will consist of six 20th-century operas. No Handel, no Mozart, no Puccini — just [list of operas]. All of these works are widely admired, but none has ever been mistaken for a box-office draw.
Gérard Mortier . . . has said that New York needs “a new vision in opera,” and his first season definitely fills the bill. . . .
. . . the State Theater [was] built with dance, not opera, in mind. Among other things, the house was designed in such a way as to deaden the sound of dancing feet — the opposite of what should happen in an opera house, where the goal is to make the singers on stage more audible, not less. . . .
In Europe [Mortier] has long been identified with ultratrendy, government-subsidized updates of familiar operas, most notoriously a “Fledermaus” in which Johann Strauss’s lovable characters snorted cocaine and got beaten up by Nazis. . .
. . the Metropolitan Opera, City Opera’s neighbor at Lincoln Center, has changed its once-stodgy theatrical ways. Under Joe Volpe, the Met offered a steady diet of blandly staged warhorses spiced up with an occasional dash of Eurotrash. But Peter Gelb, his successor, is bringing in stage-savvy directors like John Doyle and Bartlett Sher. . .
. . . . Mr. Mortier may be remembered as the man who turned out the lights at the New York City Opera — for keeps.
As La Cieca’s tipster comments, “How resourceful of him to publish a piece that summarizes the previous 267 articles already written on the subject without a single new insight. So very saving of labor.”
I’ve been reading Teachout in the WSJ for years and I’ve never seen anything approached far right wing political comments. I do recall Frank Rich writing theatre reviews in the Times, however, that just couldn’t stop with the the far left wing comments.
Do you object to that as well? Or is the right wing you object to?
As for Sanford … that’s the kind of thinking that will close the company. Get your head out of the sand, dickwad.
If I know 30 or 40 people who won’t come …. how many more are there? As they say, for every 1 letter to the editor they assume there are 10-20 more who feel the same way.
And pissing off the people like me who have been most loyal to the company, donating, buying multiple subscriptions, and coming a great distance to hear opera there is not far-sighted.
Yep, that’s the way to run an organization … piss off your most loyal supporters.
I think saying that John Doyle has a clue of stage savvy is a new insight, though not one any rational critic would admit to under a byline.
Sweeney and Company were both pretty terrific.
They may not have been opera productions, but they were on stage.
I saw Company — it was ANTI-stage, made the thing into a song cycle. That was reasonable for Company (just omit the dances, which they did) — but it was precisely the wrong thing to do with Peter Grimes which IS a drama, though not when Doyle staged it. So, far as I can tell, he doesn’t know how to maneuver a stage piece on a stage. And certainly shouldn’t be invited back to the Met’s.
As far as the Met is concerned, I can’t say, as I didn’t see Grimes. I did see the Company, and I can’t agree that it was anti-stage. The show IS something of a song cycle- there’s no real narrative- but there was dramatic and theatrical invention to burn in that production. I was expecting to HATE the actor/musician thing, a much odder idea in Company than in Sweeney, but I thought it was handled with a deal of wit and understanding; the tuba as the ‘modern art’ in Bobby’s apartment, for example, and- magically- the fact that Bobby suddenly made for the piano for the intro to ‘Being Alive’. In many ways I found it more dramatically than musically impressive.
Ah well, if we all had the same opinions there’d be no point talking, eh?
Let’s see. This “Mark” person takes Alex Ross (ALEX ROSS!) to task as someone “living in a bubble somewhere” and then repeatedly rebuts anything she doesn’t like with accounts of what her friends think — which gains force from being precisely what she herself thinks. (This last device has most recently been used to questionable effect in the Clinton campaign’s constant use of: “people all over this country come up to me and say …”)
She resents the NYCO for trying more specifically to serve the city it was first invented to serve, with less of the pretense of being a second-rate international house that has been creeping over its identity in recent years.
It is perhaps charitable to pass lightly over her revelation of herself as having a Fox-like paranoia that only the right wing gets the hostile critical examination that persecutes poor Mr. Teachout here as she punctuates her genial observations by addressing one of the cher public of La Cieca (LA CIECA!) as “dickwad” for not falling in line with her opinions (and to be fair, those of her many friends — all munificent benefactors of the NYCO who, at her command, no doubt, will now divert the streams of their bounty in protest against the régime of someone called Mortier who has not the benefit of their profound insight and experience.
Oh, fuck it. Why go on?
high c’s pirate, et al: my “anti-art” complaint derives from Teachout’s choice of production details (from Fledermaus) that in context seem intended to depict Mortier as a spoiled radical chic parasite. That Fledermaus is not really representative of Mortier’s sensibility as an impresario except in the broader sense that he sometimes provokes the audience in order to get their attention. The reason I think the remark is anti-art is that it riducules the idea that art should or even can be political. The underlying idea here is that opera (and all art) is entertainment, a luxurious diversion — a frill, in other words. It is in the interest of materialists to marginalize art because accepting the idea that art is transcendent directly contradicts their belief that financial success is the prime goal of human endeavor.
Brava, La Ciaca!