La Cieca (not pictured) cannot say she entirely agrees with the statement (after the jump) made by Mary Zimmerman in an interview today with the New York Times, but she (La Cieca, that is) is most interested in hearing your reaction to said statement about (more or less) “what’s wrong with opera audiences?” 

The main difference between directing theater and directing opera is the opera audience and its knowledge of the text. That knowledge goes back to childhood, and it’s an oral knowledge, often from recordings, accompanied by an imagined virtual perfection, or that virtual perfection is a production they saw as children. And that’s wed to the music in the heart and mind. There’s a longing for how we first experienced it or how we experienced it virtually by listening to it — disembodied and therefore divine — and any materialization of it is, by definition, incorrect, at first.

Photo: Ken Howard