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.
cute loge reference!
@ 59
I heard Guèze sing Romeó in a concert performance at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and he was quite spectacular. He has a lovely voice that sounds especially good in his native tongue…
@59 & 72 — I saw Guèze at Operalia a couple of years ago, and he was superb in Gounod (Polyeucte) and Halévy (La Juive — far too heavy for him, but still thrilling). He came second, but got the audience prize. The first prizewinner among the men was David Lomeli, not in the same class, but — by coincidence in a competition founded by Domingo — a young Mexican on the young singers’ programme in Los Angeles …
I just saw David Lomeli in Gianni Schicci, as Rinuccio. He was good, if at times overwhelmed by the orchestra. I suspect he’ll get stronger with maturity. His acting was slight, mostly stood around looking good in his white pants. But he’s young and still in the opera training program at SFO. I’m sure he’ll develop in all areas. I’ve no doubt he will.
The problem for me is that Bondy’s alterations did not make the characters more human, just more preposterous. Their story no longer made sense. Is this an improvement? I’d say not. That his production was also hideous to look at and will be difficult (impossible?) for other sopranos to inhabit does not underline its utility to the Met.
(For the rest, http://www.operatoday.com/content/2009/10/tosca_at_the_me.php )
I’m going with Alex Ross’s recommendation: The Met should ask a director if s/he likes opera, and if s/he likes this opera, and if the answer is No, should move further down the Rolodex. And Mr. Bondy plainly does not like Tosca or (I’d argue) understand it. Sentimentality (I hope) has nothing to do with it. Sentiment, possibly.
(I wasn’t crazy about that Hercules, supra, either.)
Harding conducted the Chéreau Cosi in Aix with the Mahler CHamber Orchestra (with which he has a long-standing relationship). When the production moved to Paris, it was with the Opéra orchestra and he complained it was not up to his exalted standards and resigned. Then he thought better of it and said he would after all agree to conduct despite the quality of the orchestra, and then the orchestra threatened to go on strike if he was reinstated, so Mortier had to find another conductor. That’s what I heard from someone who works at the Opéra, anyway. I saw it in Aix – it was a disappointing production and very moderately sung (apart from Elina Garanca’s Dorabella).
#75 Hans Lick: Thanks for the link to John Yohalem’s brilliant, incisive, (dare I say “penetrating”?) analysis of the Luc Bondy Tosca in Opera Today. Any aspiring opera critic should read this as a model of how to do it. I admire in particular his point that here Puccini has fashioned a finely-tuned mechanism both musically and dramatically – (yes, Mr. Bondy, Puccini didn’t just write tunes, he was a consummate dramatist too) and that you mess with that mechanism at your peril. One peripheral question, though, Hans: why did you float this piece on your blog without attribution, as if it were yours?
@77 Valzacchi:
Thanks much for the kind comments!
and
HL:JY as LaC:JJ
but
zitto, zitto, piano, piano, nessun conosce!
I’m going with Alex Ross’s recommendation [etc. etc.]
I yield to no one in my admiration of Alex Ross, which is second only to my admiration of the Yohalem. But this statement borders on being parochial nonsense.
No, I don’t think you have to love the material you’re working with so long as you are engaged by it. Those are two very different things. In fact, the problem with love is that it tends to gloss over flaws and so can’t be sufficiently critical. The director who blindly loves opera and just adores Tosca warts and all may well be content with doing the same old same old, because, after all, it’s Tosca, and who am I to tamper with my beloved Tosca‘s perfection? So long as the soprano ends up groveling on the floor at some point during “Vissi d’arte,” the audience is going to roar, so why bother?
Very often people who collaborate the most successfully are those whose relationship is adversarial, in a friendly, collegial way, perhaps, but taut with the tension drawn between very different viewpoints. So why can’t we imagine a similarly adversarial relationship between director and material?
Our JJ directed Tosca once and found it a very problematic work, much more difficult to do in an honest way than, say, Traviata or Butterfly, and in no league of comparison with Don Giovanni or some of the bel canto works, which practically stage themselves. Now, that’s just JJ, but he’s probably in the minority here of having at least attempted to solve some of the problems of this (yes) problematic work, so, well, maybe he has some glimmer of the problems facing a Luc Bondy who is trying (not, admittedly, in many ways, successfully) to make interesting theater out of an uneven text.
But to say, “well, first, we must weed out anyone who’s not an opera queen, and then X out the names of anyone without Tosca fanboy credentials” — that, I think, is the reason opera is in such a sorry state here in the US (and, yes, a lot of other places too). Art that’s strictly by fans, for fans may be swathed in all sorts of sincerity, but that doesn’t prevent it from coming off like quaint kitsch to the non-initiate.
Another view from La C’s former publication, Gay City News:
http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2009/10/02/gay_city_news/arts/music/doc4ac633bebae46171263476.txt