Rear view
“The Met at this point is not a place where even a talented opera director can make good, strong work, let alone a place where a director inexperienced with the genre — as so many of Mr. Gelb’s favored artists are — can be guided toward an understanding of it.” Gadfly-at-large Zachary Woolfe takes “A Look Back at Peter Gelb’s Met.” [New York Observer]
I think that this thread is a great museum piece of its own. It’s a damn good depiction of the state of opera in 2010 and the thoughts that many informed and experienced commentators have at this time for its future. Thank, LC for instigating the whole exercise.
But I still contend that houses whose bread-and-butter is revivals of the standard box-office hits need productions which can be revived without much ado and minimal rehearsal.
And I contend that such productions are no longer possible, because we’re dealing with old works of which the theatrical language is no longer self-evident common practice. That doesn’t necessarily mean trenchcoats with everything. But it does mean that in order to get in contact with a past theatrical language a lot more preliminary work is in order with each production–especially when you have singers coming in from all over the globe from all manner of backgrounds.
Frankly, I think that repertory opera as we’ve known it this past century & a half is impossible. (And that may be Woolfe’s ultimate point as well.)
I an ideal world, you’re right. English National Opera is attempting a program which puts new productions at the core of its repertoire, with a measure of success. But a good proportion of these have to be co-productions, not all of which can be premiered in London – next season’s Radamisto is the Alden staging from Santa Fe, and there will be a Lehnhoff Elektra premiering this summer in Salzburg and a Bieto Fidelio which Munich is opening in December in future ENO seasons. In all three cases, the original director will stage the ENO version with different casts. But even ENO has to revive some of these productions. The advantage is that if you put on ten new productions and four flop, you’re still in credit. If Covent Garden with five or six new productions has four flops, it’s not so good and because its productions tend to be more expensive, they stick around like the Zambello Don Giovanni and Carmen. At least there is little chance of her Tcherevichki remaining long in the rep. Certainly ENO’s new upcoming season is considerably more exciting than Covent Gardens. New York City Opera could take a leaf out of ENO’s book and offer itself as a distinctive alternative to the Met.
I don’t mind cutting edge, but half-naked girls (Hoffmann & Tosca) performing simulated sex acts is not cutting edge. A lot of what is billed as cutting edge is just epater les bourgeoises. But shock for shock’s sake is a failure.
Directors ought to try harder to understand the story they’re supposed to tell. As old-hat as some opera plots appear to be at first glance, they usually contain strong elements of typical human behavior, and those are timeless.
When a new concept for a production does not impress, the newness is not usually the issue; the concept itself is at fault. That wretched Sonnambula did not work because it was set in Manhattan, a place of limitless opportunities, yet the story is about an isolated group of people who intrigue, gossip, and give each other no privacy. Put that same theater troupe idea into a small town setting where they’re all holed up in the only motel, desperate for diversion and messing with each other constantly, and it could work just fine.
I want brilliance from the opera. Sometimes that brilliance should be a million cut crystals in classic chandeliers, and sometimes it could be a nearly empty stage.
I’m going to have to see Hoffman again because I don’t remember the simulated sex, although I do remember the half-naked supers (“turn, turn, KICK, turn”).
CruzSF: I think the simulated sex was in Tosca. I must say, if it can be worked into the story, I’m all for naked sex! Whoopee!
I will have to disagree with Indiana Loiterer III. ILIII seems young and willing to dismiss anything older than 2009 as old hat, not worth understanding. I, myself, find that period pieces of any age are interesting, informative and just plain fun to see and learn about. Not everyone is a history buff, I know, but being dismissive of history or historical context is not an attribute of which I’d be especially proud. Nerva Nelli will be at me again for being pompous, I know but there you are.
The problem was the sex was only HALF-naked.
I read Indiana’s comment differently. It’s not that the older theatrical styles are “not worth understanding,” but rather that these styles are now alien to most of the audience. At one time “grand manner” operatic acting was similar to what one might see in stage productions of the classics or even in certain period films. In the last three or four decades, though, that big stylized acting has mostly disappeared, with the only vestige left in a few gifted opera singers.
The problem is that these “gifted” singers are not available for every production and for every role. That means that a director is going to be necessary if only to get the rest of the company up to speed on how to act Italian opera, and I have to tell you that the lurch-and-stumble school is not easily taught. The stereotypical postures have to be informed with strong emotion and great intellectual conviction in order to transcend camp.
I think a lot of directors and singers feel like if they are going to spend all that time and energy in rehearsal, they would rather do something they find more interesting and creative than echoing what is after all an obsolescent acting style.
Who ever said the simulated sex acts and half-naked girls were intended to be “shock for shock’s sake”?
I agree. There is no shock value in nudity showing off a bare bum or two. After all everybody has a bum of their own, haven’t they?
Well, Harry, i wasn’t sure. I turned this way and that, but I couldn’t see it, so I took off all my clothes and stood in front of a full-length mirror. But that didn’t quite satisfy my curiosity, so I got a hand mirror, bent over and held the mirror between my knees. I was standing that way when the Orkin man came in. “Just checking for bugs, ma’am,” he said. “Me too,” I answered,” and we let it go at that.
Thank you for the comic relief after all this insufferable talk of Regie.
Peter, Honey, what I saw between my legs IS Regie!
Betsy, tell him I said hi.
I use Terminex myself!
Didn’t realize Betsy was into Regie Hamm.
LC: Do you mean to tell I can’t have “A Bird in a Gilded cage,” “After the Ball” or Lillian Russell’s “Come Down Ma Evenin’ Star” in all their turn of the century glory? Oh the Horror!
While my last comment was just in fun, it has, when I think about it, there is an underlying grain of truth that I’d like to mention.
That is this: In 1949, I saw a spoof of the florid turn of the century style, complete with a short “Melerdramer” with Snidely Whiplash and Jack Dalton rescuing Pearl Pureheart. (“Curses on you, Jack Dalton, foiled again.”) The genera had fallen into ridicule in about forty years. I saw my first opera about ten years later (1959ish.) It was Forza, with Farrell, Tucker and Merrill. If that production was revived today along with its cast, (that will take some digging) I think it could be produced today and be quite acceptable.
I may have misinterpreted ILIII, and the performance style he advocates. I’m not sure how far back you have to go to find the kind of extravagant “grand manner” that would be generally objectionable, although LC herself says four decades. Perhaps quite a bit futher. How about our beloved Olivero? She was the darling of verismo composer Francesco Cilea. That will get us back a bit further, since her return to the stage was in 1941 and she was still singing at the MET twenty or more years later.
I certainly hope that I was wrong about what ILIII wants and LC is right. I do not want or advocate the return of the silent movie style of acting nor its operatic counterpart but I am concerned when people start in with dismissing anything having to do with anything before their own era and demanding everything be updated to the post valley girl chic.
I still remember Tucker bounding onstage in a built-up blond wig and high-heeled shoes back when I was a budding opera lover of valley girl age, and I thought he was just absurd, as off-putting as any modern Regie you’d care to mention. Pure camp even then. But Farrell was a whole different story. It wasn’t the “grand manner” gestures themselves, but how they were filled, that made the performance exciting. It was really hard to fill them properly even then, and as LC says, it’s even harder now.
Well, you were wrong; I don’t advocate a particular performance style, let alone an all-purpose Hollywood-style naturalism. If anything, I’d love to see a serious revival of theatrical grand manners analogous to the early-music movement revival of past performance practices. The problem is that you need a lot more work and time to achieve such a revival than current opera repertory conditions provide. It’s not even that the grand manner is alien to the audience; it’s that it’s alien to the performers, and if it’s alien to the performers, then how can they carry it off to the audience?
I’m glad to have been straightened out. When you’re wrong, you’re wrong and it’s always best to find it out and stop making an ass of yourself.
Now, lets all go out and enjoy a great production of an opera we love or come to love because of it.
Gelb ain’t using his gelt wisely. He promotes the hell out of dog productions, such as Armida, Thais, and, reportedly, Tosca, and if he gets blowback, it’s because he’s focused too much on marketing and not enough on fundamental quality control.
The Schenk Ring was 16 hours of crap. But the two acts of Armida I saw were also crap, amateurish and dull. The first production I saw at The Met, Faust, in 1965, also stunk and like others who post here, I’ve seen my share of bad productions at the house. But opera companies no longer have money to throw down a rathole (or privvy hole, to maintain metaphors). And quality, rather than quantity and hype, is what’s needed at The Met.
Reading all these comments make me anticipate what Calixto Bieito could do with a work like Die Gezeichneten.
I am going to use my first $50mil to donate to the Met on the condition they hire Beito for new productions of Boheme, Butterfly and Figaro.
Looking back, Gelb’s MET has certainly been a mix of good and bad. Among the highlights was the absolutely gorgeous Carsen Onegin (sung beautifully by Fleming – who knew?), but we also had to suffer through that dreadful Bondy Tosca (I didn’t hate it as much as others, but it’s certainly not something I’ll ever want to see again). On the top of my personal list of disappointments, however, was the Sher Hoffmann, perhaps because I feel such a personal attachment to this work. I don’t think I can lay the blame at Gelb’s feet, I tend to put the blame on a rather inexperienced director who was obviously in over his head (Sher) and the stubborn nature of a maestro (Levine) who still insists on ignoring important scholarship and the most recent Hoffmann discoveries. The fact that Sher’s Giulietta act is such a disaster is in part because Levine insists on continuing to use the dramatically lame Choudens edition, the combined work of many people, rather than Offenbach and Barbier’s original dramaturgy and music (which we now have). Sher, who has since been vilified in various internet blogs and websites, apparently ignorant of the background of this work in the first place (as his comments in Opera News and during the HD transmission proved), refused to stand on his own two feet and even review his options. Instead, Sher only praised Levine’s musical decisions in the press in an effort to ingratiate himself at the MET. If those celebrated people would just forget about their own egos and take the time to consider and really understand what the authors originally composed (and despite what you may think or believe, Offenbach definitely DID finalize the Giulietta act), then the production could have been, in my opinion, much more of an artistic and dramatic success.