sein wir wieder coot
That bloggeress La Cieca likes to think of as “like a young me,” OperaChic, is currently and brilliantly following up on the controversy sparked by Lorin Maazel’s grumpy condemnation of those darn newfangled stage directors who won’t get out of his yard. Consarn it. Joining Maazel in tying an onion to his belt is the doyen of operatic media whores, Franco Zeffirelli. And now the young ‘uns are answering back, more in sorrow than in anger
they should shoot the young uns….
One of my clients told me not to have a “titty-attack” last week. WHen I asked what that meant, he explained that it’s the same as spazzing out. Apparently, it’s the same as getting angry about a nude Desdemona hung out like laundry with her ass in the air, while enjoying the tits at the Folie Bergere. (not that he’s wrong, by the way)
I’ve been using ‘titty attack” since 1999 at the ripe old age of 14. It’s still one of my favorite sayings. Some of us young uns agree w/ the old coot. There’s only so much “shock” one wants to see at the Opera.
Franco *does* get on these high horses… He designed quite a good framework to show off my brilliant work in FALSTAFF at the Garden and the Met. But time passes, as those of us still in the forefront of the profession realize.
Great graphic, La Cieca, one of my favorite Simpsons moments. I think we should have an opera equivalent to Godwin’s Law: when A.C. Douglas posts in a thread, it’s dead. I’ll just cut-n-paste what I wrote over at OC:
I will say that the most powerful moment I’ve ever had in an opera house was during a Peter Sellars Pelleas here in Los Angeles, with OC’s mang E-PS conducting. The production ran during the height of the OJ Simpson trial insanity and was set in a Malibu beach house. Golaud: huge black man Willard White. Melisande: small white, blonde woman Monica Groop.
In Act IV, Golaud meets and beats Melisande after Yniold tells him that he’s seen P & M together. So, onstage there’s a tall black man terrorizing a small white woman in a town that was in the middle of a trial that had horrible racial over-and-undertones and it was….STUNNING. The crowd was blown away after that scene ended, you could see everyone around you deflating because they’d been so gripped.
So, if Beito wants to have men taking a pewp on stage, BFD, regie like the Sellars can work and to lump everyone together is kind of childish.
Back in my day, we had to make do with one trap door and some dry ice. And we liked it!
Zefirelli should leave the stage with grace, as should his prodcutions.They’ve had their time. Not all the young ones are there to provoke us with filth, but some of them do (I do not like the horrible Bieito productions, but mcVicar, Carsen and such try to keep opera alive, not turn it into a museum. Frengo, wake up! we are not in the 19th century anymore!
Something is wrong when one can go to the opera, watch say the first act and correctly predict who directed the bloody thing? It does not matter whether it is Mozart, Verdi or whatever. All the identifiable mental bar-codes of some hung up politico ‘brain fuck’, are there to see. You then, get hold of a information sheet or a programme, and find their name up there in lights. Regie directors have one boring habit: ‘they must ALWAYS FIND SOMETHING OBSCURE no one else could ever wildly imagine (’Hallucinate about’-is a better word) in the opera. They usually have their recognisable obsessions , in full view. Source inspiration :
‘wanking themselves silly while on funny substances or reacting to surge releases of perculiar self -produced chemical reacttions in their individual brains. In turn, no matter how well they have been parrot fashion formally educated- they suffer from a form of ‘mental dyslexy’ about the human condition. They are glorified, stunted mental runts who feel the kid like need to be a talked about show-off or skite. If one had such an adult acquintance, they probably would be given the swift ’short shift’ out of your life. Yet we see ‘operatic monkey gazers’ mimic and exclaim of their work……”Gee that was really ’something’, don’t you think?”.
Best compromise : Get Mel Brooks to pretend to be old Pop Simpson and do his own form of regie opera for the Met or Saltzburg. That would cover all grounds and be unforgettable and somewhat unpredictable. Perhaps some naked storm trooper boys as Valyries for a start, taking their dead heroes home to Valhalla for a few little heavenly ‘rewards’! The gods asking Loge to produce some heat ready during the magic steam muisc/ Manon Lescaut dying of thirst and hunger- not finding the Louisiana desert road stop for a Starbucks coffee and a hamburger / Dialogue of the Carmellites set in a sliced bread factory / Don Giovanni set at Disneyland – after he has ravished all forms of cartoon creatures ‘he still has Minnie Mouse (Zerlina)… on the agenda’ / Salome as the kiss of the deadly spiderwoman with cynanide lips before Herod orders her ‘pinned’ as a insect specimen / Electra as Lizzy Borden at the local state agricultural show – a champion frustrated contestant axe wood chopper / Makopoulos Case as a case of crook – batch botox and bad face lifts / Kata Kabanove as being the unfaithful wife of a coach at a swimming carnival / Der Rosenkavalier as the comings and goings in some well serviced public wash room, ran by the Marsallian’s expert staff. Octavian , Act 2 – of course offers Sophie the ‘rose’- a can of rose bathroom deoderant.
Just some of the untapped amazing ideas in the backs of some regie clown they have not thought of- no doubt, just yet! Sellers and Co. , where are you??? I am waiting for my own close up shot like Ms Desmond too!’
This is one of the reasons I am rejoicing that this is Maazel’s last season as Music Director of the NY Philharmonic…”old coot” is much too much of a compliment….deadly dull is much more like it….
My favorite quote?…when Maazel feels he has to ‘protect’ the “pure heart” of Violetta….lol!!
Sounds like a man after my own heart, and I don’t give a damn what anyone else says.
Henry Holland, I wasn’t there, but from your description of the black-on-white beating, it sounds arresting, to be sure, but also cheap and opportunistic.
And what does it have to with the opera in question?
I’ve never sat through a live regie performance so I must reserve judgement, but opera the traditional way does not seem broken to me. I’m not eager to jar it lose from its foundations. (I still blame Bjork for all this regie business, that Icelandic cod mafia must be a rough bunch of hombres)
Loose, that is.
And what does it have to with the opera in question?
I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that we Parterre Boxians were stuck in a cold, damp school house on the prairie in 1908 with a bitter old alcoholic schoolmarm who would beat us within an inch of our lives with her pointing stick if we deviated even a little from the lesson plan. I will note, however, that you don’t chastise Harry, who *twice* deviated from said lesson plan.
In other words, Alto, I was pointing out that not all regie theatre is crap by using an example where I thought it worked. Apparently, for some people, ALL regie stuff is crap, full stop. The idea that it has its moment is an idea that still seems to be controversial around these here parts.
It should be pointed out that Sellars’ production of Pelleas was first performed at Netherlands Opera in 1993, i.e., before the Simpson/Goldman murders took place. The Los Angeles revival must have been scheduled more than a year in advance. So the “parallels” between this production and the O.J. Simpson case, though obviously striking, were surely accidental.
Since Pelleas is a setting of a deliberately unrealistic symbolist text, there is no question of violating historical period as there might be with (say) a strictly modern-dress version of Don Carlos. La Cieca believes it could be further argued that, since Pelleas was intended as a sort of anti-opera, it is the duty of those presenting the work continually to make it challenging and disturbing for the audience. (Whether Mr. Sellars’ concept works ideally, La Cieca cannot say, since she never saw it, but she would tend to agree that the show needs something to help put it over. Ever since Mary Garden quit the stage, directors have had their work cut out for them.)
Just got back from Pesaro where we saw two very different styles of production.
Maometto II was Michael Hempe at his most traditional: realistic sets, fairly authentic period costumes, some striking tableau and effective if static staging. Perhaps the Anna fell to her knees a bit too often but it all worked within the context of the opera.
L’equivoco stravagante was updated, played for some crude laughs and included a rather gratuitous blow job scene which if Gasbarri had thought about, he omitted in the stage directions. Again – save for the bj which really should be kept for the dressing room or the administrator’s office – more often than not it too worked in the context of this piece of Rossinian juvenialia.
However none of the staging would have matter if the performances had not been well sung or as in the case of two singers extremely well-sung.
Graham Vick’s reply to the Old Devils was more eloquent than most of what’s gone up here. As several posters say, why lump them all together? Bieito is childish and doesn’t care about the music; Carsen, Richard Jones, Pelly and several others (Sellars only on a good day) certainly do.
Willym: “Perhaps the Anna fell to her knees a bit too often …. L’equivoco stravagante … included a rather gratuitous blow job scene”
It sounds to me like the two directors were working the same concept!
Scaramuccio is right although McVicar, Jones and Carsen have “off” days too.
No director is perfect. For example, look at Carsen. On one hand you have his striking met ONEGIN, on the other his ridiculous “American” Candide, which I found not only stupid but insulting. To be clear, I don’t find his two-fisted attack on American life insulting, but rather his pushing and shoving CANDIDE into something it isn’t. He deleated all the satire for upfront mockery, he tore the plot (what there is) to shreds and he turned one of the most beautiful and uplifting endings in musical theater history into a sardonic commentary of pollution. I hated it, even with one of my all-time favorite tenors, William Burden, in the lead. But that being said…I do love his Onegin.
Agreed, Regina: McVicar is very erratic, and sometimes there’s nothing going on for stretches (viz his Tosca, Rigoletto, etc). But I can forgive him all that for the genius of his Rosenkavalier and Agrippina. Carsen’s Rosenkav from Salzburg I hated to begin with, but have come to respect the interaction he gets from the singers (the end, though, with the mass death of the Austrian army, has to be a stinker). I loved certain things about the Candide, but I wonder if the piece is workable; I haven’t seen a production that convinced me it could, though folk say the London National Theatre show kept it lively throughout. Here one felt that forty minutes could have been sliced away without anyone really noticing or caring.
So the “parallels†between this production and the O.J. Simpson case, though obviously striking, were surely accidental
Yes, I know it wasn’t the prima for that production –I’m sure the bit where LAPD officers beat the crap out of some homeless people that happened outside the Malibu beach house was unique to Los Angeles– and yes, singers are booked months/years/decades in advance, but it was one of those things where it all worked out and happened at the right place and right time, which was my point.
I remember going up to San Francisco a few years after the Sellars/OJ convergance for Pelleas with…wait for it…Willard White and Flicka. Not the same jolt, by any stretch, but still a wonderful performance with a young Simon Keenlyside an almost ideal Pelleas and typically gauzy production.
I love Debussy’s opera, I think it’s a blazing masterpiece, but I can understand why some find it such a trial. At the Tower Records in West Hollywood, when it was still open, they sold a little book called Opera Plots Made Easy and the one for Pelleas was a gem of concision: “Nothing happens and Melisande dies”.
Richard Jones summed it up as the usual operatic triangle: ‘two men, half-brothers, fall in love with the same woman, with disastrous results’.
Stanislas Nordey’s production, which I saw at Covent Garden, was panned, but many of us found it spellbinding: the auditorium becomes the forces of nature, so that the singers all addressed us downstage. Helps with co-ordination between pit and singers, especially in a larger house than this intimate piece should normally be seen in (Glyndebourne is the ideal size).
Mary Garden has quit the stage? Why didn’t anyone tell me?
I’m amused to see your Google ad for the risible Maazel 1984 on DVD. Where would that have been without the hard work of a (perhaps less than radical) Robert Lepage (not to mention the thankless dedication of the singers)? Even then, I never want to have to sit through a work more derivative and empty even than anything by Lloyd Webber (and less fun).
Would Maazel make Lepage an honourable exception to his ludicrous blanket dismissal? Or would he rather have had Great Franco’s view of Orwell, I wonder?
Maazel is, himself, a rather eccentric music maker — sometimes it works, often it does not, and never does his opera (and my god! he’s writing another one), work.
SOOOoooooo…..why don’g you regiequeens show him more respect? I thought you liked the off-beat
I happen to think he is quite right about regie-kookdirectors. Fuck ‘em.
Beito & Co. are twisted jerks, and all shame on the Germans, Swiss and Spanish (the main offenders), whose federal coffers fund this dreck. The regie-craze is an insult to all serious directors and musicians and singers involved in opera – yes, even the celebrated Americans, Il due Aldini; the lot of them should be turned out of the temple.
It’s basically a kind of political matter, and fads come and go — and in the end, of course, money rules. So I think we know where this is ultimately headed. To regie-lovers I say, Grow Up! For the rest of us I say, Be Strong. Never never give into them! In the end we will prevail!
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