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,
I would say though you slant in favor of Regieoper, I do believe you to be non-partisan and take each on a case-by-case basis. I try to do the same, though I perhaps slant toward the “traditional”
Quanto Painy Fakor: Loved those Boheme clips. Clearly I need to visitg operachic more often.
The question of whether a director should love opera had me thinking of the way that biographers approach historical subjects who might be significant but who are pretty unsavory. It seems to me that a biographer, even if writing about a person who is detestable, should a) love the form and craft of biography in general; and b) even if he can’t stand the individual personally, he must still be able to say why said person was significant or dominant on the historical stage.
muede – yes, to say the very least. but I think it goes further than that. I appreciate the idea that Gelb presents, which is to bring directors from theater, film, broadway into the opera house in order to learn a new theatrical point of view/ method of working/ etc. But we seem to be offering ALL new productions these days to people who do not have any sentimentality for these operas at all. I think that a director who at least knows the traditions of opera is better equipped to deal with the problems inherent in the piece than someone who has no vested interest in the operatic art form.
Your biographer metaphor is problematic, too, because a person can be important and inflluential without being savory or good.
I personally resent Bondy coming to the Met and saying “well, tosca is half crap, so let’s be agitators and give them a hyper-realistic version IN ORDER to show them that it’s at least half crap”. That’s not what we hired him to do. (The royal we, of course!)
What does “sentimentality for these operas” mean?
I suppose I mean having grown up listening to them, or having come to them at some point passionately.
In other words, the opposite of “Q: Hey Luc, ever conducted an opera? A; How much is it going to pay?”
Or Robert Spano being asked to conduct The Ring “because he hates Wagner” (Speight Jenkins)
er, directed…
William Friedkin has received good reviews for his productions at L.A. Opera, and most people still think of him as primarily a film director first. Woody Allen also got good notices for his first production last year. I don’t know that directors need to have a sentimentality about any particulars operas but rather an respectful interest in the opera form and the possibilities of opera. A director could be well-matched even if he or she hasn’t heard or seen the opera before the invitation to direct. But then I think they should (meaning, I would HOPE they would) develop a respect for the work.
And by respect, I don’t mean slavish adherence to tradition. More a lack of “that’s crap” crossing their minds.
Ah, I see, “sentimentality” is a variant on the old traditional “straw man” theme.
Some opera queens are good opera directors, others are not. La Cieca has been around plenty of queens who sucked opera from their mother’s teat, but whose idea of directing consists of sitting in the back of the theater chain-smoking and sighing, “Oh, dahling, if only you could have seen Zinka in this paht.”
Same with non-opera queens. Some good, some lousy. The proof of the fucking, as La Cieca has said before, is in the pudding.
Note also: if there is a bigger opera queen in the world than Speight Jenkins, it must be a tranny who uses the partitur of Fedora as a vagina. And yet, dear old Speight goes and hires somebody who hates Wagner. Those queens, who know what they’ll do?
“respect for traditions” never crossed my lips.
i agree with our hostess cupcake. a certain opera queen (may I use that term inoffensively if I am not one?) from yesteryear in cincinnati comes to mind…