Comment_Dir_Gone_Wild - Page: 1 of 1

By Carie J. Delmar
OperaOnline.us

Achim Freyer is considered to be a great director and designer. I would call him a proponent of “Regietheater,” or “director’s theater.” He takes artistic liberties and disregards the intentions of composers by imposing his own stage vision upon his singers, musicians and audiences – all for the sake of art.

Historically, Wieland Wagner, the grandson of Richard Wagner, was probably the first to start the movement in Bayreuth after World War II by presenting his grandfather’s operas on minimalistic sets, utilizing the grand orchestrations to create epic stagings with visual symbolism. Other visionary directors have followed his lead and apply every imaginable concept to not only Wagner's operas but to the works of Mozart, Verdi and Puccini as well. Examples include turning Simon Boccanegra

into a Mafia don, placing “Le Nozze di Figaro” in a Park Avenue apartment, turning Don Giovanni and Leporello into gay lovers, and having King Idomeneo take the severed heads of the Buddha, Muhammad and Jesus Christ out of a bag. The movement, also known as “Eurotrash,” has been going strong in Germany, especially in Berlin. There have been Freudian and Jungian “Rings,” and a Marxist “Ring” with the Rhinemaidens as whores. Long Beach Opera produced an adapted, cut version that had a duration of just two nights, and there is an American “Ring” underway in Washington, DC and San Francisco. But all of these productions don’t totally jolt our sensibilities because the characters seem real and interact.

I think that what makes “Regietheater” so controversial today is that opera no longer is about the voices and the music – it has become a director’s medium where the singers become no more than pawns on a chessboard. The directors substantiate their actions with symbolic interpretations, but they totally disregard the composers’ intents and stage directions. Add to this avant-garde and surrealistic visions, and you have “Theatre of the Absurd” opera. I am not opposed to “Regietheater” as a category if it works. But when opera becomes “Theatre of the Absurd,” it doesn’t.

Achim Freyer says in a program note that he has created “timelessness” in his production of Los Angeles Opera’s “Ring,” which was “Wagner’s dictum.” Well, I question him. What I saw in “Das Rheingold” was strange Nibelungs with gigantic paper-mâché masks, gods with white pasty makeup and multiple hands, bald multi-breasted goddesses carrying molds of their bodies in front of them, a prostitute with grapefruit-sized breasts and cherry nipples (which I found offensive), giants who weren’t giants but carried magnifying glasses, gargantuan hands dripping blood, a miniature airplane en route to Valhalla, and more. So is this timelessness? It represents a vision that could never have occurred in the ancient Nordic mythological world that Wagner described. It isn’t a past, present or future vision. It’s a cheap surrealistic, satirical vision. It is anti-Wagnerian and doesn’t work.

Now had Freyer decided to create this vision for the premiere of a new modern opera, it just might have attracted me. I like seeing crazy visions in the name of art. I also am a sucker for magical creatures and puppetry. Even in his “Ring” production, two grandiose giants would have knocked me off my feet. And I also love a great special-effects show – the kind that might have ensued had George Lucas’s team been involved. So although I basically like the traditional, I’m also up for anything modern. But I will never go along with the obscure or bizarre. Anything that mocks a composer’s work, turns singers into pawns so that their singing becomes secondary, insults the intelligence of the operagoer, or moves the audience into the gutter (ie. the prostitute making love to Alberich) – those elements simply don’t work. The defining question for me is: “Does what the director did, fit?” If it doesn’t, then the show doesn’t work.

There are two kinds of great directors. Achim Freyer is a creative artist, possibly a genius, but his productions are all about him. Then there is the director like Peter Kazaras who recently directed the young artists at UCLA and who is also directing productions for Seattle Opera. His is a silent presence. The audience doesn’t even know that he’s there; but, oh, he leaves his mark. His place in the scheme of things is much more humble than Freyer’s. He uses his creativity to enhance the talents of his singer-actors so that they coordinate with the conductor and musicians and shine. His results are just as magical and far more appealing.

Now “that” is opera.

I concur, only more so. Here's what we wrote when reviewing Peter Sellars' "Giulio Caesar."

Peter Sellars is fast becoming the American version of Europe’s notoriously self-absorbed Calixto Bieitro, of whom it can be said, he is a director who never fails to bring out the worst in humanity, degradation and abstraction on stage. And he often does this to the utter humiliation and sufferance of the singers who are called upon to perform in his productions. “As Londoners know all too well,” wrote Eduardo Benarroch, “ in Musical Opinion last year, “his name alone brings out the worst from the national press and his two ENO productions, Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera" and "Don Giovanni," apparently served to bring down their capable General Director, Nicholas Payne.” Too bad Payne hadn’t reined in Bieitro earlier or replaced him altogether, thus saving both the productions and his own job.

What is sad is that major labels and opera companies don’t have any supervision around the set to halt this nuttiness early and say: “not with our money, you don’t.” As we have noted in previous editions of OperaOnline.us artistic expression and free speech are not just the property of directors and composers, but are also the property of the company footing the bill – even more so. The director is using anothers' forum, not his own. It is contributors and ticket holders that pay the freight here, not Sellars.

We suppose it would be unrealistic to suggest major labels and companies pull the plug on these productions, but it is something that must be said. These productions will not prove a money-maker. Word of mouth will kill most of this stuff as viewers cringe at its offensive silliness and wonder why they ever attended. Singers could boycott Sellars; AGMA could demand a “respectability clause” in all contracts that prohibits the gratuitous or humiliating use of singers in roles they are called upon to sing. We suppose a lot could happen. The truth is, however, nothing will happen so long as self-absorbed elite rule and major companies yield any responsibility to the public in the process.

The ticket buying public can speak, as well. It's called staying away.

It’s time to cast Mezzos’ in gender appropriate roles; it’s also time for conductors to accept the fact that castrati are no longer in fashion, and that the era that produced castrati is long gone.

Contemporary audiences do not accept women singing and acting as men, even if the die-hard opera audience thinks it is sacrilegious to suggest otherwise.

Try selling this gender-bending concept to an auditorium of young people who you are trying to get excited about opera and what you will get are sneers, giggles and curious glances. "Opera is weird," is what you might hear afterward. To that, we might add, job well done, if killing opera among the young is what you are setting out to do.

The latest resurrection of a trouser performance that is simply out of touch with reality is the casting of the fabulous soprano Anna Netrebko (Giulieta) and gorgeous mezzo Elina Granaâa (Romeo) in Bellini’s “I Capuleti e I Montecchi” in a new recording of Romeo & Juliette from Deutsche Grammophon . It’s difficult enough justifying the gender bending on stage, it’s impossible to figure out what is going on when a recording label casts the same on a CD where figuring out who is singing what role is extra difficult, even if ther performers make great music together.

This site has repeatedly urged major companies and conductors to break with tradition, come to terms with the age they live in and stop casting women in men’s roles because it has been done in the past. So composers couldn’t find any great castrati to sing their new operas and they cast mezzos in their place. It was a mistake then; it is even a bigger mistake today and wholly unbelievable when done on live stage.

Sadly, opera companies think this suggestion is outrageous and they continue to cast trouser roles in fits of what can only be viewed as confused and stubborn intellectual elitism with a touch of arrogance – or cowardice. It’s hard to say which is in play. The score says “mezzo” so I cast a “mezzo.” Well, keep in mind in most instances, the score called for “castrati,” and “mezzo” was the next best thing.

The next best thing today, as we see it, is that conductors search for the next great tenor or baritone. Yes, roles can be transposed, as they should be. It can be done. See our review of Anna Netrebko, "Souvenirs," CD.