http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/2010/07/peter_gelb_talks_some_more.html

or: http://bit.ly/dx30FN

The second statement has never been corroborated. The first is more of a judgment call, but La Cieca has to say this: there are plenty of people who do a very good job at something for which they have no particular passion, and there are plenty of opera queens who couldn’t run an opera company for a day. There are plenty of opera performers, for example, who love to sing and love the excitement of performance, but they don’t care all that much for opera in the abstract, e.g., they don’t attend other singers’ performances for any but professional or social reasons. So the point is, one can have a passion for the job if not necessarily for the thing the job creates.

Again, all this is if the “Peter Gelb doesn’t like opera” meme is true, for which, again, I haven’t heard a convincing argument. (“He’s trying to destroy opera by hiring Mary Zimmerman” is a tempting argument, but to me it smacks of the early 1950s notion that the Reds were going to conquer us by turning American youth homosexual via comic books.)

As a lady, I apparently have no imperative to take complete or perhaps any responsibility for my actions. WHEEEE!!!

Joking aside, despite everything that I had heard and read about the work, I went in optimstically, not expecting something great, but hoping to find some potential. I was hoping to see a kernel of something that might show future promise (after all, who gets their first opera right?). And I’m usually not one for hyperbole but it was complete shit. It was like some child’s idea of what opera is with cliches of cliches being paraded on the stage.

In the middle of the second act, the title character puts on the recording from her last performance. Here, the tenor walks on and the two of them recreate the grand duet from that performance.

The two characters proceed to sing about their “passionate love” amid the “splendour” of their surrounding and importantly repeat the word “sadness”. In fact “sadness” is the final word of the duet, accompanied by an almost heroic orchestra flourish. First off, characters don’t refer to their love as “passionate”; that’s for the audience to decide. As I watched the scene, I came to horrible realisation that this is really Wainright’s idea of what opera is.

Aside from the parade of endless cliches, there was the puzzling vocal writing. The vocal lines were the same whether the character was asking for a cup of coffee (literally) or making a painful confession.

I was prepared for it to be derivative. It wasn’t a surprise that the music sounded like bad imitations of only the lush parts of Manon Lescaut and Adriana Lecouvreur (and a bunch 50s Hollywood melodramas).

What I wasn’t prepared for was Wainright’s idea of what opera is. He calls it a “love song” to the artform. Hate mail was more like it.

This, I realize, is neither here nor there on the question of the man’s affection or otherwise for opera, but that question is not on the same level as ridiculous inventions like the Renée example. One does hear, however, that a authoritative tell-all book is almost finished that purports to deal with the subject via chapter and verse. (I have nothing at all to do with that work, by the way — he said defensively.)

Now, be fair. La Cieca did her best to warn you.

La Cieca has a bit of experience with the negative meme thing (i.e., “Renee Fleming wouldn’t give parterre an interview [etc.]“) and, honestly, her experience is that it’s rather tilting with windmills to address this kind of stuff because it’s not based on anything real anyway; it’s just a way of verbalizing some kind of irrational prejudice, the sort of non-thinking that’s never going to respond to logic or proof anyway.

Having to say no to new commissions that did not work out so well is one of the tough decisions a company has to make. I think the even harder part is conveying to the media that you’ve cancelled a new commission. I think the Met did a very good job of making the Wainright cancellation appear to be about the French language and the fact that Wainright didn’t want to wait until 13-14 (or whenever it was) to see the work performed.

First you have to have an Alpha Male, an entrepreneur, an organizational wizard, very macro-managerial. Second, you must have a visionary, an idealist, micro-managerial, with a complete grasp of what opera is, must be, can be, and should be. Third is the artist who stands outside classification but is most involved with communicating emotionally and intellectually with the audience/consumer. From what I have observed, Gelb is superb as Number One, but a complete failure as Number Two. Levine was superb as Number Three, but was loathe to involve himself as Number Two. This fellow Holander is being brought in to fill the Number Two slot but there is a real problem on the horizon.

Number Ones have no respect for what they perceive as the wishy-washy, nit-picky Number Twos they are endemically unable to see that anyone has value except themselves. Number Threes feel that nobody understands artists and that Number Twos are just in the way; they are endemically incapable of taking authority except within their own (artistic) bailiwick. The ideal Number Two is a grimy little sweathog who must never, under any circumstances be put on public display. No Board Member would ever consider giving authority to such a creature. So I would say that unless some real effort is made on everyone’s part that more than one personality type is needed, we are more than likely going to witness a blood bath of epic proportions.

The bigger question is about where the buck stops, and, yes, I think the point of being a general manager is that you can both delegate authority and yet accept final responsibility. That is, to manage without micromanaging.

9.1.1.3 “what management is supposed to be managing so management’s criticism of a production is implicitly self-criticism”

Haven’t we discussed before that management should let directors create work and not be so involved (Joe Volpe) to the extent that it could be responsible for work enough that it would be “self-criticism”?

The other point is that in general artists don’t have much direct control over the production or musical direction, whereas those elements are exactly what management is supposed to be managing. So management’s criticism of a production is implicitly self-criticism.

There are two schools of thought about defending a production that the GM honestly sees as a failure: he can take the director’s part or he can be silent. (Well, three schools: Volpe used to openly badmouth directors’ work in meetings with the Met patrons group; he never took questions from the press.) I can see two reasons for taking the director’s part: a) the altruistic, i.e., he really believes in the director’s work and thinks it was misunderstood or unfairly judged, and b) the practical, i.e., the director has another production or two to go on her current contract, and there is nothing to be gained by turning audiences and critics against the future product.