parterre box

63 comments

• Matthew Westphal says:

  @ #44 – Regie doesn’t have to be the willful distortion of a pre-1920 opera. It’s the willful distortion of any opera.

  Take Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin. The first production the piece ever got that wasn’t the Sellars staging of the premiere (in which the composer was involved) put the main character into (quasi-)modern dress and made him a recluse who lived amid heaps of books.

  People I respect say that that production worked. (There’s a good review here at http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=15099). But it definitely counts as Regie.

  on April 1, 2009 at 11:51 AM
• Olivia says:

  Giulio Cesare in Egitto. Except this Caesar is all in the mind, y’know?

  on April 1, 2009 at 3:38 PM
• di-donc says:

  Responding to both Curvy and Matthew:

  Regie is short for Regieoper (yes I’m sure you know that) therefore it’s to be define by intelligent Menschen like us as “Opera in which the Regisseur has run Amok”.

  I agree it doesn’t have to be a pre-1920 work. But a staging of Le Grand Macabre, done Grandly and Macabrely, does not qualify.

  Your description of the subversion of the Saariaho work counts, though, in my humble opinion.

  So, to sum up, kids:

  Fledermaus with coke-sniffing spandex-wearing sex addicts = Regie

  Mamelles de Tiresias with transvestites and floating balloon boobs = a night at grandma’s house.

  on April 5, 2009 at 8:29 PM