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?

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).

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”.

It sounds to me like the two directors were working the same concept!

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.

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.)

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.

And what does it have to with the opera in question?

My favorite quote?…when Maazel feels he has to ‘protect’ the “pure heart” of Violetta….lol!!

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.