European males talk among themselves
La Cieca sat in on the “Cognitive Theater” discussion tonight at the New York Public Library, and the main impression she came away with is that Patrice Chéreau is a very quiet, soft-spoken man who happens to be a genius. (She was expecting something more fiery, but like many of the great divas, it seems this stage director saves his “flame” for the work.)
Luc Bondy came off as a serious artist who either has run out of particularly interesting things to say in his work or else (maybe more likely) not a good fit for directing Tosca. Neither he nor Chéreau are in any sense opera queens, which is maybe more off-putting to other people than it is to me.
Bondy did say that he thought (and he seemed to be weighing his words carefully here) that Tosca is a “wonderful and awful” opera with some “completely stupid” moments: a “good, thrilling” piece but a “trivial” story. The weak moments of the opera can be glossed over, like bad food with a rich sauce, which Bondy said was, as he understood it, Zeffirelli’s approach. (The takeaway snipe of the evening was in reference to the Zef: “He should remember Puccini wrote this opera, not Zeffirelli.”)
He wanted, he said, to try for a “human” approach, to make the action more believable. This is the source of Tosca’s finding the knife early, for example: Bondy feels that as written the melodrama is too “convenient.” He added that he did not realize that in New York Tosca was like the Bible.
A lot of back and forth about booing, and Chéreau was rather gallant here in recalling the Bayreuth Ring, though it’s scary to think that this was now 33 years ago! (Scary to me, I mean. He seemed all right with it.) Nobody wants to make a scandal, they all assured us, what they try to do is to tell the story. Bondy did say that the audience reaction was not particulary important because by the time the audience sees the production, his work is completely done. He added a funny analysis of why booing sounds so loud even when only a few people do it: the “r” in “bravo” interrupts the sound, whereas the “oo” in boo projects very well.
Bartlett Sher was a little more PC and, in the American style, very verbal about his concept for Les Contes d’Hoffmann. His point of departure is Offenbach’s outsider status as a Jew; he sees Hoffmann’s successive romances as attempts at assimilating into mainstream society. The production for the Met will have something of a 1920s feel because of a connection to Kafka that I didn’t quite get.
Again, Chéreau didn’t have any real “aha!” moments, but he sounded like he was very in touch with From the House of the Dead, how when he first looked at the work he expected a lot of “despair” but was surprised by how “full of hope and life” the work is. He took on directing it because Pierre Boulez asked him to collaborate on the conductor’s last operatic production. (Gelb says he invited Boulez to the Met but he declined.) Chéreau did emphasize that the Met production was not a revival in the conventional sense but rather a reworking of similar ideas, stimulated in particular by the different abilities and qualities of the New York cast, specifically Peter Mattei.
The interlocutor, Paul Holdengräber, got things off to a bit of a grating start for me when he drawled, “As de La Rochefoucauld once said…” and he could have spared us the anecdote about how his father was a claquer in Vienna. But mostly he asked the expected questions about missions and stuff.
Few revelations were forthcoming from Peter Gelb: he wants to build new audiences but not alienate old audiences, he does not believe in scandal for scandal’s sake, success of a production is measure in terms of audience interest over the course of a number of seasons. Some boilerplate about the success of the HD telecasts. The Met standard is the best voices in the world, the finest orchestra, heard in their full glory.
The questions from the audience ran the usual gamut from the incomprehensible to the asinine, but there was at least one good, straightforward query as to the future of the iconic Zeffirelli Bohème. Gelb answered, “There is no production at the Met that will not eventually be redone.”
Please see also the observations of squirrel and rommie. And Daniel Wakin was there too.
Cieca we were in the same space…
thank you la cieca, sorry for rambling about this on your site before you got a chance to weigh in, but I’m flattered that we saw some things similarly!
cieca,
These guys are, to say the very least, “not opera queens”. I don’t care if people are queens or not, but do you not share my frustration that opera is constantly being entrusted to people who do not love opera?
In Bondy’s case, I felt he more or less showed his cards here, implying that he was at least ambivalent about Tosca’s merit as a piece, perhaps feeling somewhat derogatory toward it.
And more specifically, who are the opera directors who “love opera” (and please don’t say Zeffirelli) and why aren’t they working at the Met?
No problem, La Cieca obviously has a longer commute than you youngsters! Probably the most striking element here is how great a disconnect is between a director’s vision and his ability to verbalize it.
The rommie question was about the only sensible one, and it elicited what felt like the least guarded answer of the night from Gelb. Well played!
Edited to pick up on squirrel’s further question. I wouldn’t say that any of these guys “doesn’t love” opera, just that it’s not the narrowly focused kind of love that opera specialists have. I think you can say, “What attracts me to opera is its expressive power as theater” without having to specify that it’s a whole quantum leap of greatness different from other forms of performance, spoken theater and film.
What did seem apparent was that Tosca was not really Bondy’s cup of tea. Should it have occurred to Gelb or someone else at the Met that he might not be a good fit for the material?
the most striking element here is how great a disconnect is between a director’s vision and his ability to verbalize it.
Yes, couldn’t agree more!! This is what I was mumbling to myself on the helicopter ride home to bay ridge!
(What was the “Rommie’s question”, sorry?)
La Nostra Signora Mercedes Bass looked extra IN YOUR FACE TONIGHT in her very very very red dress with sequin-encrusted black jacket. (can you encrust sequins into a jacket?)
She did not laugh at anything the audience was laughing at.
Squirrel, the boheme question.
You were the guy who asked the Boheme question?
Mercedes Bass was there?
I need to catch up on my.. something.
La Bass was pretty hard to miss. She arrived lateish (just before the talk started) and extremely dressy, let’s just say, for the public library. She left just before the end of the talk: dinner plans?
Leave it to me to miss the thing that is hard to miss. I do everything the hard way!
Being trapped, as I am, in my own mind, I can’t help but flash on Mrs. Parker’s “The Little Hours,” when I see a La Rochefoucauld tag. “It’s only a question of minutes before I’m going to be pretty darned good and sick of La Rochefoucauld, once and for all. La Rochefoucauld this and La Rochefoucauld that.”