Peter Sellars --- Extended

Over the life of this blog I have been trying to figure out the director Peter Sellars, and after all these years I want to try to do a full essay on him.  It turns out there are two of him:  Peter Sellars the opera director and Peter Sellars the librettist.  He has directed other things not opera, but this discussion will limit itself to Peter Sellars in the classical music world.  He is America's foremost representative of the Regietheater movement.

To briefly review, the principles of Regietheater involve:

• moving the action to another time period, including costumes which usually look modern
• more sex than strictly necessary
• creating an interpretation that emphasizes modern day issues.

Peter Sellars the Regisseur of other people's operas

I am attempting to reconstruct my own experience of his work and find this hard going for the operas staged before the beginning of this blog.  I now believe that my experience of his stagings began with the 1987 PBS presentation of John Adams' Nixon in China with Alice Goodman as the librettist.  I especially enjoyed the comic Henry Kissinger.  Who knew Nixon was funny?  I liked Madame Mao's aria, the play within a play and the portrayal of Pat Nixon.  I enjoyed its proximity to real life.  The time frame is not changed because it's already modern.   (film)

It might be important to remember that as an undergraduate he did a puppet version of The Ring.

My next experience with the work of Peter Sellars the opera director probably dated from his 1990 filming of the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy which played on PBS.  In the Sellars' Don Giovanni we are among the American urban lower class in the 60s.  People shoot drugs and sniff cocaine.  You may and probably should view this here, here, and here.  I should probably watch it again myself for Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Donna Elvira if nothing else.  Leporello and the Don are played by twin brothers.  At the time it was very shocking and caused an enormous stink.  But isn't that the problem with Don Giovanni?  That it just isn't shocking enough.  The other two operas in the trilogy were not nearly this shocking.  

So I did.  You should too.  Lorraine is fabulous, but what else could she be?  The filming is a bit heavy on the close ups but otherwise completely brilliant.  When these guys act like they will kill one another, you believe them.  Every scene rings true.  How often does that happen?  There is a lot of kissing and snuggling but no fake sex.  The hero strips down to his briefs a couple of times.  At the end, after the Don has descended to hell, it appears that the sun has begun to rise.  This is actually more timely today than when it was originally done.  (film)

I attended a performance of Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer, libretto by Alice Goodman at San Francisco Opera in 1992, shortly after its premier.  When the opera was withdrawn from the HD season in 2014 for political reasons, I discussed it in the blog.  It was trying to be even handed about a terrorist attack, which I found difficult.  One side are terrorists, the other tourists.  What's even about that?  The direction by Sellars was not remarkable. (live)

L'Amour de Loin ("Love from afar,") (2000) Music by Kaija Saariaho, seen later in 2005 on a DVD from Finland, was also directed by Sellars with a kind of mysterious simplicity.  I simply wanted to see and hear this work.  A shallow pond of water representing the Mediterranean Sea covered the stage, and on each side was a winding metal staircase.  On the left staircase was Dawn Upshaw in France, and on the right was Gerald Finley in Lebanon.  A messenger in a boat brings their communications back and forth.  I found everything about this fascinating, including the music and the fabulous singing stars.  The story comes from the mythical past, but everything here seems modern.  It was a deep and wonderful experience.  (film)

In 2011 the Metropolitan Opera revived Adams' Nixon in China and kept the original director, Peter Sellars, making his Met debut.  This new Met version ended with enhancements bordering on pornography.  I didn't see the point.  The Met also used some of the same singers who were then older.  I still prefer the Houston version.  (HD)

My next encounter with Sellars wearing only his director hat was Vivaldi's Griselda at Santa Fe.  I also attended his lecture here and agreed with him that Griselda is a terrible opera.  The most notable thing here was that the always smiling Isabel Leonard never smiled once.  They look rather like people from the 60s.  I don't know if this opera could be saved.  How about staging it like Platée with a man in the title character?  (live)

After all these years of hearing about but always missing it, I came upon Peter Sellars direction of  Bach's Saint Matthew Passion from Berlin.  A religious work became a ritual, an aspect of religion that cannot be disparaged, at least not by me.  I was deeply moved by this enhancement to a long loved work.  The wonderful musical performance also helped.  A glimmer of light began to appear. (film)

Then in 2017 came Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito from Salzburg.  This story about ancient Rome became a modern racial encounter.  The encounter was emphasized through the use of cast members who belonged to the suggested races.  Sellars added some other music (which he also did in Griselda) from a mass by Mozart to enhance the sad parts.  I found this entire production profoundly beautiful.  Two home runs in a row.  How was I to explain this?  It made me think that he is actually capable of the truly profound and should work harder.  As usual, the costumes are modern.  I saw as never before that this was an opera about forgiveness and reconciliation.  It may possibly be Mozart's greatest opera.  (film)

I followed my curiosity over to an easily available film of Handel's Theodora from Glyndebourne in 1996.  Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Dawn Upshaw are also in this.  It turned out to be a much earlier example of his true gift:  the portrayal of large, significant issues.  This is an oratorio with a story rather than an opera, and consists of a lot of very beautiful music suitably staged in modern settings.  I recommend it.  (film)

Can I write about stagings I have not seen?  After his wildly popular, at least in Europe, Mozart-da Ponte trilogy, he staged Saint François d'Assise by Olivier Messiaen at Salzburg in 1992.  There's a film about this but not of it.  He says,  "Anything that finally matters doesn't appear in the plot synopsis.  So this history of staging the plot synopsis is one of the things that has made opera so intellectually inert and dull and expressively limited.  And opera becomes incredibly expressive just as soon as you forget about the story and try and stage the music."  I would go with a statement that said:  what does this opera express?  Stage that.

Don Giovanni expresses exploitative sexuality; Nixon is just people out of their context; Klinghoffer expresses that terrorists are people, too; L'Amour is about love conquering all; Griselda is about men treating women badly, or maybe it's just about singing; Matthew Passion is about the life and death of Jesus; Clemenza is about forgiveness; Theodora is about the life and death of a Christian; Saint François is basically the same with vastly more complex music.  Clearly the staging works best where the message is clearest.  You may feel free to hate my simplified summaries.

This vision statement I quoted above may explain everything.  I think if you are staging an existing opera, you need to focus on enhancing its musical expression within the delineated characters.  But generally when you are composing an opera, the libretto is usually slightly ahead of the music.  There must be a vision of the opera before the composer can write it.  That's my idea anyway.

Score card:

Great things:  Mozart La Clemenza di Tito, Handel Theodora, Bach Matthew Passion, Iolanta / Perséphone
Hits:  Saariaho L'Amour de Loin, Mozart Don Giovanni, Nixon (1st)
So so: Mozart Figaro, Giulio Cesare
Misses:Vivaldi Griselda, Adams The Death of Klinghoffer, Nixon (2nd)

This is an excellent record for any director.  I will add to this list where I can.  Next is Giulio Cesare.  Clearly he follows the first rule of Regietheater:  everyone will wear post WWII clothing.  Stuff you can buy in a department store or thrift store.  They will look like people you know.  This is key.

There is one thing that he does that I can think of no one else who does.  Claus Guth took all the spoken dialog out of Fidelio and replaced it with groans and sound effects, but he left the music alone.  We are living in the era of reconstructing old scores to accurately represent their eras and original condition.  Doctor Gossett called this a critical edition.  Peter Sellars consistently changes the score, sometimes adding from somewhere else, sometimes cutting sections, in order to reflect his vision.  Academicians will object to this, especially the adding part.

Peter Sellars the Librettist and regisseur of his own operas

Which brings us to the other Peter Sellars, the librettist.  After the stink that surrounded The Death of Klinghoffer, Alice Goodman abandoned her career as an opera librettist, or it abandoned her.  Her libretto for Nixon in China was very successful, but no one was willing to forgive Klinghoffer.  She began working on Doctor Atomic with Adams, but withdrew after a while.  Adams was used to working with Peter Sellars by then, and he took over the task of librettist.

As a librettist, it is not possible to add or subtract from the score or the original theatrical concept because one is the person creating it.  One may do what one wishes.

The John Adams/Peter Sellars operas are El Nino (2000), Doctor Atomic (2005), and Girls of the Golden West (2017).

I began blogging about his direction with the premier of John Adams' Doctor Atomic at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 where Sellars wore both librettist and director hats.  Some of the work was done by Alice Goodman, but she bailed somewhere around mid way.  Perhaps around the beginning of Act II.  Added to this trio of collaborators was the boss Pamela Rosenberg who thought of it as a Faust play.  I think it is this mish mash of influences that muddies the plot here.

Other people's ideas about Faust seem to be different from my own.  It's true that Faust was an intellectual, a scientist, but his soul was clearly not threatened by this fact.  It was threatened by the fact that in old age he began to regret wasting his life with serious efforts instead of having fun.  The devil immediately pops in to offer other activities that might attract his attention.  In short:  science is the good path, seducing women and debauchery is the path to hell.  Please, Faust, take one of these and love it.  Wearing lab coats is irrelevant.  But this is a side issue.  Apparently Rosenberg did not win the argument.

For me the production was a bomb hanging in the air, a bomb which looked nothing like the photos of the bombs that were dropped on Japan.  Contrary to my comments, the bomb used in the production looked just like the experimental version of the bomb that was exploded in New Mexico.  I ranted, "I attended Peter Sellars' lecture before Doctor Atomic where he enthusiastically raved over what a great opera it is and what a great production he had invented. I don't care if the opera sells when you're talking about it. I don't care if part of it came from John Donne. I only care if it plays while I'm watching it. Do the characters matter? Does the drama draw me in?  Or is it all BS?"  I got carried away.   (live)

In the first half people came out and spoke to the air.  The first part of the opera was OK if somewhat static, but the entire second half was empty.  We waited and waited, and there wasn’t even an explosion at the end.  This was supposed to represent time moving slower and faster, but remember I am the person who never reads the program before.  If that's what it means, show me.

My next encounter was with a film of another John Adams work:  El Nino (2000), also with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Dawn Upshaw, which I reviewed in 2006.  I couldn't stand how the film switched constantly from filming the performers and showing still pictures of other people.  I rejected it for its film direction, but it is also a work where Peter Sellars wears both librettist and director hats.  I really wanted to see this but could not stand looking at it.  A live performance would probably have been easier to deal with.  Even a split screen would have been better.  I offer no opinion of the work itself. (film)

Doctor Atomic was significantly changed when it played at the Metropolitan Opera in 2008.  This version was directed by Penny Woodcock.  The empty act II was filled out with action.  So here Sellars wore only the librettist hat.  I am still unclear about the meaning of this opera.  What does it mean that a man reads John Donne who searches for God while simultaneously developing the largest bomb ever seen on earth, a bomb destined to kill thousands in Japan.  This is the story I wanted to see and did not.  I wanted to see the conflict of good and evil.

This season I saw in San Francisco Girls of the Golden West .  The text is yet again assembled around a structure provided by letters of Louise Clappe with the pen name Dame Shirley.  There are many other sources.  I was again missing a sense of clear narrative, though this doesn't seem to have been fatal.  Dame Shirley is telling stories about her experiences during the gold rush, which is a kind of narrative.

If there are other operas by John Adams on librettos by Peter Sellars, I have not seen or reviewed them.  I didn't get the impression from anything I have read or heard about these works that Peter Sellars actually wrote any of the words sung from the stage.  I believe he only selects and assembles them.  So if you get the impression that no one is speaking to anyone else, it's because the words came from something written down by people not named Peter Sellars and never attempts to simulate conversation.  Glass successfully writes operas in Sanskrit and ancient Egyptian and still does not make you feel lost without a sense of narrative.

What does this opera express?  Then include structures and text that accomplish that.

You may also have noticed that the narrative never quite gels.  An Oratorio like Messiah can be assembled, but no staging is implied.  Assembling a text in English, generally the language of the audience, made up of literary texts never intended to represent conversation or action is a problem.  No amount of moving people around is going to make up for the fact that the words were never intended to be theater.  For me this requires that the action be absolutely clear.

Clearly Mr. Sellars' operas haven't given me the sense of genius that his work on other people's operas have.
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An Observation about Norma

I have seen Norma a number of times in several productions from very conservative to WWII style.  There is one thing I have never seen.  Norma is a priestess who during the opera conducts two different religious ceremonies.  What usually changes when one transitions from normal life to a religious ceremony and back again?  One usually appears first in street clothes, followed by vestments, followed again by street clothes.  Have I ever seen Norma appear in what would appear to be a ceremonial garment of any kind?  No.  This is why the actions always feel wrong.  We need more than you telling us she is a priestess.  We need to see it, too.

Top 10 Regie Productions 👍🏻

I put back the term Eurotrash in my top ten post.  In my mind Regie Theater and Eurotrash are not synonyms.  All Eurotrash is Regie but not all Regie is Eurotrash.  Some of it is actually good.  The word regie just means direction or staging.  The director is the regisseur.

Regie Theater is a more definable term than Eurotrash.  It refers to productions, primarily from Europe but not always, which move the time to something like the present day.  Other traits are imposing a story on the opera which is different from the actual story of the opera; adding sexual activity; assigning symbolic meanings to objects and actions.  Eurotrash is in the eye of the beholder.

It is an argument to have whether or not it is possible to have a modern opera with a Regietheater production.  You can't move it to the present because it already is there.  If you add a lot of fake sex, that might qualify.

As a result of this argument, I have added a new label--Regie--and added it to the Filters section.  It's best if labels are kept short.  This label has been applied to over 100 reviewed productions on this blog.  If you are interested in this subject at all, select the label to see what I think is Regie theater.

In attempting to distinguish between regie and Eurotrash my argument was that the top 10 regie productions would be a completely different list, so here it is.  These are my personal favorites in the extreme production area based entirely on how much I enjoyed them. You will have to choose your own.  I notice, now that I have selected, that this list is quite varied and comes from all parts of the operatic world. 

Number 10 is Monteverdi's L'Orfeo from London by the Early Opera Company.  

Though extremely abstract, I felt that the plot in this production by Michael Boyd and Tom Piper was expressed very effectively.  Its cause was augmented by the great beauty of the musical performance.

What makes it regie?  The use of ordinary modern clothing is the primary basis for the regie classification.  There is no attempt to suggest a period.  The plot is only slightly modified.

The story of Orfeo is the story of the power of music.  Nothing stands in the way of this powerful musical performance.

Blogging

My post about Eurotrash was removed from an online site.  They don't allow the term.  You are required to call everything regietheater.  I realize that there are people that call everything that moves the time period Eurotrash, but that was not my intention.  I was trying to single out 10 productions for being really bad.

Virtually everything in opera today is regietheater, but it would be a mistake to think that I disliked all of them.  I loved and adored Partenope which is pure regie.

We agreed that I could call it "Bottom 10 regie productions."

My Top Ten Eurotrash Productions

You will be pleased to know that my top ten Eurotrash productions all come from Europe.  This is only suitable.  Each of our examples will have a named production designer, also something that happens more often in Europe.  Eurotrash is a derogatory term, so these are the worst examples of the broader category called Regietheater.

I suppose a definition is in order.  Regietheater or director theater is characterized by staged actions that do not represent the planned actions of the original work.  Sometimes there is no relationship at all between the words and the actions.

X

In general it will be a countdown, but I find that I must begin with the most famous of all regie productions, Katharina Wagner's production of her great-grandfather's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg for Bayreuth.  It dates from early in my blogging career, but I watched it only four years ago.  Meistersinger is about a Meistersinger guild in Nürnberg in the time of the Renaissance.  The hero, Hans Sachs, was the famous master, and the others strove to come up to his standard.


Katharina Wagner has moved the opera to modern times with our over-inflated celebrity status.  Do I understand Meistersinger better now?  Absolutely not.  Do I understand why the street scene is replaced by green representations of composers?  No.  What do the composers have to do with the plot?  The Meistersingers are from the middle class while the winner of the song contest, Walther Stolzing, is a prince who just wants the girl and does not see the reason he needs the singers' guild.  In the original version of the opera Hans Sachs talks him into it, but here Walther does not become a Meistersinger and instead runs off to become a rock star, taking Eva with him.   This production holds a position in this list because it is so famous.

Could you buy the costumes in a department store?  Pretty much.

Do you understand the plot any better?  Without reading from the designer's notes, the green composers seem meaningless.  Since one of them is clearly Verdi, they can't represent die heilige deutsche Kunst (holy German art).  The Meistersingers all appear to be artists instead of singers.

Staging opera in the 21st century.

Once upon a time a stage set consisted of painted flat surfaces which could be raised and lowered easily for set changes.  I know at Santa Fe they don't have a space above the stage where the set pieces would usually go, so they slide them on and off at the sides like a deck of cards.  This is smooth and easy, and does not require an army of stage hands.  Who wouldn't fit on the stage at Santa Fe anyway.  There's also a big elevator at the back.

Larger companies like the Met, the ROH and the Bayerische Staatsoper look down their noses at painted flats.  They will occasionally use sets where the objects stay the same but are made to seem varied and interesting through the use of projections.  Lately the projections have started to become movies.

The current rage throughout the opera world is for a whole opera to be presented in a single set.

A set made up of two rows of boxes where the various scenes move from box to box was seen in Peter Grimes from the Met in 2008.  Another similar production was seen in Don Giovanni also from the Met.  This achieves the goal of a single set but makes each scene small and unimpressive.  It looks great in the movie theater but cramped in the house.

Cav/Pag from the Salzburg Easter Festival both was and wasn't done as two rows of boxes.  The bits of stage were framed into boxes, but on the stage things seemed to change and often extend across two or more boxes.  It was both confusing and interesting.  The way this was done seemed legitimately creative, and not just a cop out.

The single set as a giant staircase is another common theme.  We saw this in Arabella from the Bayerische Staatsoper and again in Un Ballo in Maschera from the same company.  Ballo was far more confusing than Arabella.  The visual unity did not match the story of the masked ball.  The libretto says we are in a palace, a cave, a deserted field, and finally back to a palace again.  A giant staircase doesn't communicate this at all.  It communicated that perhaps the prince was hallucinating.

My favorite of all the single set productions has been Don Giovanni in a hotel lobby from Salzburg, seen at top.  Usually the sets for this opera are difficult to follow because each small scene is supposed to represent a different location.  The hotel lobby staging was genius.  All these things might well happen in a hotel, where weddings are celebrated, meetings are held, tourists arrive and leave, bedrooms for dalliance are easily found, strangers encounter one another, etc. 

We want more than just money saving single set productions.  We still want the production to explain the action, to intensify the emotions through thoughtful design.  And yes, I know this is a difficult task. I'm starting to feel that all too often the production designer simply doesn't want to spend time discovering the opera and skips to a simple solution.

Blogging

My background was in both music and theater.  I have never felt the desire to choose between them.  My first great operatic love was the Marschalin of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf who was fully an actress and a musician.

I feel very strongly that opera is becoming a theatrical medium.  This is validated for me by this wonderful week in opera.

First Anna Netrebko invigorates a bizarre production of Macbeth by sheer force of will.  No one acts with such overwhelming energy, both in her voice and in her body.  Perhaps it is she who defines this new theatricality.  This opera is moved in time. 

Then on Wednesday comes the astounding Handel comedy Partenope which is not merely moved to the 1920s but is also transformed into an homage to the great art period of Paris.  The strongest influencing artist would seem to be the photographer Man Ray, someone we see not nearly enough of.  I understand that the giant photo mural in the last act is by Man Ray, though I could not find a copy of it on line. 

And now today is a new production of Le Nozze di Figaro where the producer is first and foremost a great theatrical director.  It is also moved to the twentieth century with Spanish style mixed with modernism.  For the first time I see Susannah in what to our eyes is a wedding dress.  At last a real wedding.  When she changes costumes with Susannah, the countess wears the wedding dress and reveals herself to her husband by raising her veil.

It is only suitable that Isabel Leonard, the most real of all Cherubino actresses, would grace this production.  Richard Eyre also brought us last season's Werther and the great Carmen with Elīna Garanča and Alagna.

Opera is becoming a theatrical genre.  It is all very well to complain about the productions where everything is moved to modern times, but these are the people who produce opera today.  If not them, then who?

The opera for this week is the opera of the future.

P.S.  I am biased toward acting, something seen only occasionally in the past.  Scenery and costumes are less interesting to me.

Peter Gelb Part II

I always intended to write a Peter Gelb Part II after my Peter Gelb Part I.  Missing from the previous essay was a dollar figure attached to each production.  The main problem with any of these productions I discussed is how much they cost.  The infamous Ring is the high end at $19.6 million.  Gelb seems to think spending money on productions is a good thing.  It is significant to note that new productions are usually separately funded from the general budget.

What exactly is the problem with Peter Gelb?  I think this can be briefly summarized:  he imagines himself to be saving the opera genre and not managing the Metropolitan Opera.   He seems to correlate spending money on productions with saving opera, a significant logical mistake.

His actual job is to manage the Metropolitan Opera which basically consists of putting on operas people will enjoy, hiring singers to sing them while keeping the budget in balance.  I think a sensible opera board would fire him asap.  He would be vastly more successful if he stuck strictly to his real job.

And now we hear this.  Here is an article that suggests that what we are now witnessing is simple union busting.  I like it that the author cites a couple of illegal things going on.  Labor law in the US is strict.  If he's right, let's hope that shortly after the lock out will come the law suit. The goal of union busting is to get rid of the unions, not merely to reduce their pay.

I have already suggested that there will be no 2014-15 Met season.  And I so wanted to see Anna Netrebko sing Lady Macbeth.

It has been suggested that we lend them David Gockley, a man who actually knows how to manage an opera company.

I remind myself at this point of my recent Friday night visit to the San Francisco Opera where lots of young people were seen.  Are we sure opera really needs saving?

P.S.  The extension of the lockout deadline gives me at least a little hope.

Modern Stagings

Watching streamed opera from Europe generally results in viewings of modern European style stagings, what we here in America like to call Eurotrash.  This always makes me think back to my days at the Ulmer Theater.  I like to think we were in at the beginning.

We had Busby Berkeley in John Dew's Der Vogelhändler.

We had psychoanalysis and shadow figures haunting the stage in Peter Mussbach's Figaros Hochzeit.  He may possibly be a psychoanalyst. 



And we had black on black productions by Giancarlo del Monaco, including Pique Dame.  Giancarlo was told to come up with some colors or find another job.  He found another job.  His Met production of La Fanciulla del West started out in Ulm.

I like to feel that there is nothing new in current European productions.  I'm only guessing that these are the right pictures.  They were all much younger then, and so was I.

Alex Ross

I read Alex Ross on the staging of The Tempest and Un Ballo in Maschera, and he had some interesting points.

I was interested in the idea that the productions last year looked better in the simulcast than they did in house.  A film of an opera is often very different from the impression it makes in house.  For one thing, directors often put things on the side of the stage that are not visible in the film.  In the Munich Lohengrin the hero sleeps off camera for an extended period, visible to the in house audience but not to the film.  Filming focuses on the important details and often ignores the bigger picture.

I don't know which of last season's productions he is referring to.  I liked Flute and Enchanted Island on the screen.  I have seen Ernani, Satyagraha and Walkure both on the screen and in the house and thought they worked about equally well in both places.  Walkure is just pictures in a foreshortened space both on the screen and in the house.

If I have 9 windows arranged in three rows, such as is the case in Don Giovanni, on the screen I will see each window one at a time in close-up with occasional wide shots of the full set.  In the house I will see all 9 windows all the time.  Perhaps in the house one prefers that the sets are in motion.

Ross talks about claustrophobia when the sets are close in and shorten the depth of the stage, such as in the Lepage Ring and Ballo.  Singers tend to love this because they can feel their voices reflecting out into the audience instead of disappearing into the flies.  The illusion for the Ring worked better on the screen because you could not see the pictures projected on the actors' faces which were obvious in the house.

I thought that the production for The Tempest made for some interesting pictures but did nothing to clarify the plot.

I was fascinated by the picture that accompanied Ross' article in the New Yorker.  It showed Zajick as Ulrica in an aqua blue dress such as a relatively lower-class woman might wear while Blythe in our version was dressed in upper-middle-class black.  She also pulled different things out of her purse.  Hmm.  Perhaps the other version makes more sense.  After all, she is reading the fortunes for sailors on leave, and not just upper-class women like Amelia.

His complaints about Dmitri are the same for anything he does.  Renée Fleming in Onegin brought him out of himself, but this is a rare event.  He is a sharp contrast to Marcello.

I liked the flamboyance of the production for Ballo, the subdued palate combined with the outrageous Oscar, the sophisticated Ulrica with her skull, the king's disguises where he always still looked like Marcello Alvarez, the radical changes of mood from scene to scene.  In fact I felt these mood changes clarified the plot as never before.  This is what matters most to me in a production.

Perhaps I should go back to reading Alex Ross.

Peter Gelb, Part I

To evaluate Peter Gelb in relationship to his new productions it is necessary for me to select operas to evaluate. I will evaluate new productions from 2007-2012, ignoring everything from the first 2006-07 season for which he is not responsible.

I will ignore those I did not see: The Nose, From the House of the Dead, and Attila, though I have seen the production of From the House of the Dead on DVD. This leaves 29 new productions. I am counting the four operas of The Ring as a single production.

Gelb has imported some famous productions from other houses. Both his Laurent Pelly productions were already famous-- La Fille du Régiment, 2008 [1], was already a DVD from Paris, and Manon, 2012 [2], was almost as famous from the Royal Opera. Pelly is a well established opera producer. As a side note, I must mention that Pelly was the designer of two Santa Fe Opera productions that I have seen: La Traviata and Platée, both rather odd. Traviata is boxes, Platée is bleachers and pond scum. Only Natalie Dessay would have been able to jump around on all those boxes.

Richard Jones' Hänsel und Gretel, 2007 [3], was from Pamela Rosenberg's San Francisco Opera. For me it was rather more notorious than famous, but in New York they seemed to love it.

David McVicar's Il Trovatore, 2008 [4], and Nicolas Joël's La Rondine, 2009 [5], were both seen previously in San Francisco and liked. La Rondine in particular is in a fascinating period style.

Willy Decker's La Traviata, 2010 [6], from Salzburg is famous around the world for Anna Netrebko's portrayal. Decker also produced Die Tote Stadt for San Francisco.

When Gelb decided to do Nixon in China at the Met in 2010 [7], he just borrowed Peter Sellars' original production from Houston. Why mess with success? I have seen a lot of Sellars by now, including Griselda in Santa Fe. Some I like, some I don't. He is famous because of his productions of Mozart-Da Ponte in modern dress, all three of which ran on American television. Don Giovanni as a drug addict comes to mind.

Of this group of 7 operas only La Traviata and Hänsel und Gretel can be considered Eurotrash. Fille is unique--modern and made for the talents of Natalie Dessay. I can't work up a sense of revulsion for any of them. I missed the food fight from the San Francisco production of Hänsel und Gretel, but can't actually complain. It can't surely be any of these productions that are supposed to be ruining the Met?

This still leaves 22 productions. I will begin with some less controversial productions. I hope you agree.

Stephen Wadsworth's first Met production was Rodelinda which I was very impressed with. Then in 2007 came the reasonably conservative Iphigénie en Tauride [8], and in 2010 Boris Godunov [9]. They all seem like normal opera productions to me. Iphigénie tried very hard to invoke an ancient Greek atmosphere and almost worked. I was good with Boris. It stayed out of the way of some pretty fabulous singing.

Phelim McDermott has opera experience at the ENO. Satyagraha, 2007 [10], was suitably abstract, and The Enchanted Island, 2011 [11], was like a traditional production from the long ago past. He is capable of bringing fun to the opera. Surely no one minds these.

David McVicar is very experienced all over the opera world. I already mentioned Il Trovatore, 2008 [4], but he has also done Anna Bolena, 2011 [12]. Both of these productions were very conservative, almost old fashioned.

Richard Eyre produced the amazing Carmen, 2009 [13]. If you didn't like this, what's the matter with you?

People from the west end theater in London include Adrian Noble who produced Macbeth, 2008 [14], John Doyle who produced Peter Grimes, 2008 [15], Nicholas Hytner who produced Don Carlo, 2010 [16], and Michael Grandage who produced Don Giovanni, 2011 [17]. I was hooked on Don Carlo from the opening scene. How could you ask for more? I liked Peter Grimes at first, but have reconsidered. For me every production of Don Giovanni I've ever seen has been ghastly, so this one was somewhat less ghastly than the others. Every tiny bit of plot is somewhere else, and this constantly shifting scene is very hard to stage. I thought the transitions between scenes were reasonably smooth. Macbeth was very ugly and sometimes absurd, very much Eurotrash, but I seem to have liked it anyway. Or maybe it was just Maria Guleghina I liked. So that's a score of one definite hit, two maybe near misses, and one pure Eurotrash for the London west end.

Penny Woolcock, a British film director with a prior relationship with John Adams, produced Doctor Atomic, 2008 [18], and I thought it was a huge improvement over our version in San Francisco by Peter Sellars. The flaws that were left have to be blamed on the composer.

John Cox's Thais, 2008 [19], was his fourth production for the Met. I thought the production was pleasantly amusing, especially the virgin enthroned scene.

In researching this article who should show up but Cecilia Bartoli's darlings Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier as the producers of Hamlet, 2009 [20]. Who knew? There was absolutely nothing shocking about this. It was even maybe a bit boring. They are the producers for Clari and Giulio Cesare.

We have only 9 operas left and have still not hit anything completely shocking. Or are you more easily shocked than I am?

All three of Mary Zimmerman's Met productions are considered at least a bit controversial. Her background is American theater off Broadway. For me the original touches found in her Lucia di Lammermoor, 2007 [21], were effective and touching. This is the only production to be repeated in the simulcasts so far, once with Anna Netrebko and once with Natalie Dessay. I loved the fairy tale aspects of Armida, 2009 [22]. It didn't bother me that the tone wasn't dark and threatening. I parted from Mary Zimmerman only for La Sonnambula, 2008 [23]. The show within a show idea completely didn't work for me. When are we hearing the character and when the actor? When is Juan Diego himself and when is he the hero of the opera? This is a very simple plot made emotionally confusing for no reason. I give her two out of three.

Des McAnuff is an American theater director. I suppose his Faust, 2011, [24] from the ENO should be included in the list of imported productions, but I'd never heard of it before. It appeared to have a premise, namely that these people were somehow involved in the labs at Los Alamos. Thus the double-breasted suits, I suppose. I didn't mind looking at it, but it meant nothing to me.

When the various critics are blasting Gelb, they usually condemn bringing in theater directors with no operatic experience, but one of the most despised productions was Luc Bondy's Tosca, 2009 [25]. He has produced a lot of operas in Europe, including La Scala. This is pure Eurotrash. Madonna with boob hanging out. Dark, grim and depressing sets with nothing in the way of decoration. Ugly staging with almost depraved action.  I don't see why it's necessary to goose up Tosca with "interesting" details. Isn't it already interesting enough? Would anyone have cared if the singing had been better?

A producer who seems to actually fit the criticisms is Bartlett Sher who works across the patio at Lincoln Center Theater. His opera productions for Gelb are Les Contes d'Hoffmann, 2009 [26] and Le Comte Ory, 2010 [27]. There is much sound and fury here, especially directed at Ory, but I'm not sure why. Different people like different things.  I think the problem is that Ory is just not that funny.

We have saved the most controversial for last, of course. Robert Lepage is best known for his work with Cirque du Soliel in Canada. His productions for the Met have been La Damnation de Faust, 2008 [28] and The Ring of the Nibelungen, 2010-2012 [29]. I don't remember anyone complaining about his Faust. This work is not an opera and is, therefore, notoriously difficult to stage. Berlioz composed only the interesting parts, so it jumps around a lot. Lepage dealt with the difficulties smoothly and created a pleasant drama. There were projections in this, too.

I suspect that there is a tendency to trash Gelb strictly for the fact that he bought the pig in a poke that is the Lepage Ring. Much of the difficulty with this production, in my opinion, is that Lepage has vastly more experience with acrobats than he has with opera singers. This is all much more plausible when it isn't Bryn, Debbie and Stephanie who are actually doing it. To all potential producers of Wagner:  your actors will be middle-aged and over-weight. Get over it. Watching the film about the making of The Ring made me much more aware of the fact that there are a lot of acrobats on the stage. We would need for them all to be acrobats before this would really work. The projections were kind of cool, though.

My feeling is that Peter Gelb is much more in contact with and indeed in tune with the present day world of opera than are the people who are criticizing him. If you don't like the opera of today, I suspect you are stuck.

Opera News Censored

Today's big opera news is about Opera News.  Peter Gelb does not want them giving his productions negative reviews, so now they will not review the Metropolitan Opera.  Since most of the magazine is about the Metropolitan Opera, I assume this refers only to the section in the back where operas around the world are reviewed.

This story is in the New York Times.  The only possible conclusion is that Peter Gelb has a very thin skin.  I regard his regime as very bold and daring, bordering on iconoclastic.  His biggest success is something I am very grateful for--the establishment of the network of HD simulcasts into movie theaters.  It's very nice to sit in a movie theater and watch opera, especially when you know it is happening right then.  For the first few years there were a lot of technical glitches.  If you don't think about it, you don't notice that there are no more of these.  Sometimes my local theater turns the volume down too low, or up too high, or forgets to turn up the lights during intermission, but these things are out of the control of New York.

Up until Peter Gelb began his tenure the Metropolitan Opera was one of the (if not the) most conservative opera houses in the world.  Zefferelli, who favors elaborate naturalistic productions, was king.  Gelb daringly contracts people from outside the world of opera to create productions  The much maligned Eurotrash movement, it should be noted, is not doing this.  The to our eyes completely outrageous, modernistic productions seen everywhere in Europe are created by opera producers.  My favorite is still the fashion show Manon Lescaut at the Wienerstaatsoper.  It's all about couture.

He wants to have his cake and eat it too.  He wants the cake of iconoclastic productions, but he eschews the eating up of hostile critics.  Did he really think this wouldn't happen?  I recommend that he adopt the musician's motto:  when in doubt, fake it.  He's definitely not faking it very well.

Wagner's Dream

The film Wagner's Dream is really more Lepage's Dream.  Or maybe Peter Gelb's Dream.

At the beginning it is a toy that they are playing with.  They are used to playing with acrobats and their toys and designing toys for them, and so how different can an opera be?  The toy of a Rhine maiden cracks her head into the machinery, and no one seems to care.

The problem immediately becomes apparent, at least to me:  they are used to working with people who are young and athletic.  Their stand-ins all fall into this category.  They are unclear on the concept of opera.  When I see middle-aged, somewhat overweight stand-ins, I will understand that they are imagining Wagnerian singers playing these roles.

The Ring is an imaginary landscape.  What other opera takes place primarily outside?  It is an imaginary landscape of rivers, mountains, forests, caves and glens.  The characters are heroes and immortal gods.  In my imagination this would work best as a cartoon.  There will always be a disconnect between the imaginary landscape and the reality of a production of The Ring.  Lepage has tried to bridge this disconnect with his machinery, and it is fun to watch them all try.

And O they try so hard.  So much work.  I always enjoy watching other people work.  For me it is very enjoyable to watch opera in production.  I do miss it so.  The best seat in the house for an opera is in the wings.  It never looks like there is much space in the wings at the Met.

Dwayne Croft is the only one of the real singers that seems to be having any fun with this new concept.  He laughs as he jumps from one piece of the set to another.  The rest frown and look terrified.  Eric Owens is openly hostile.  If they are doing something daring and don't look terrified, it's probably the stand-ins.  Acrobats cross the rainbow bridge.

I'm trying to make this clear:  What is probably the farthest thing from an acrobat?  Quick.  This is a no-brainer.  The farthest thing from an acrobat is a Wagnerian.  No offense, guys.  50 is the right age for a Wagnerian.  25 is the right age for an acrobat.  I assure you, none of these people work out on the flying trapeze with Natalie Dessay.

And for me that is the problem with Lepage's Ring.  They never manage to stop looking terrified.  It ruins the tension in the scenes.  The emotion of the scene is replaced with terror.  Jay Hunter Morris is the best at faking it.
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Blogging

Disclaimer:  I never read what the director says is supposed to be going on in the production.  I like it to unfold while I am watching and listening.  I want to allow for the possibility of surprise.  I assume that whatever I am seeing is what is intended for me to see.  If I have to read things to understand the production, something is wrong.  The purpose of the production is to explain the opera to me. I consider it the director's responsibility to communicate to me what the production means by putting the meaning in the production.

Now that it's over, I have read a lot of commentary about what was supposed to be going on in Faust.  Perhaps they were confused and I was not because they read the director's explanation.

I want to know what in the visual elements of this production would have led one to believe this was another Doctor Atomic, and that he sold his soul, not for a young woman as seems so obvious, but for the atomic bomb?  I read that that's what this production was supposed to mean.  I do not read what besides the fact that they all wore lab coats would have meant that?  I insist that if you can't see it, easily and clearly see it, it isn't there.

I don't memorize leitmotivs or tone rows either.

Staging Concept

I haven't done one of these in years. When I first started blogging I would invent imaginary stagings. My favorite was always Don Giovanni as Austin Powers. So why is Don Giovanni never done as a comedy?

Today I have a new one: Cosi fan Tutte as Cheers. Coach is Don Alfonso and Carla is Despina. One couple is Sam and Diane and the other couple is Frasier and Lilith.  The whole thing would take place in the Cheers bar in Boston.  We will ignore any problems with who appeared in which season.  Could we imagine Diane and Lilith as sisters?  This seems a minor difficulty.  After much puzzling, I think Lilith has to be the serious Fiordiligi, while Diane is the more frivolous Dorabella.

If you are too young to remember Cheers, it's got to be in rerun somewhere.

Blogging

Just a thought:  the only thing I can think of that would save Vivaldi's Griselda would be if the role of Griselda were sung by a man and played as comedy--maybe not the broad comedy of Platée, but something a bit gentler.  She should be performed as buffo, maybe even by a buffo bass.  Then we would love her and accept her, and it wouldn't matter that all her music is ugly.  Just a thought.

Advice to Set Designers

I haven't really given any advice for a while but here goes.

When designing a set for an opera, do not design it as a giant staircase. A few productions come to mind.

• Old production of Die Frau ohne Schatten at San Francisco.

• The First Emperor at the Metropolitan Opera.

• Nabucco also from the Met.

When you are designing a set for an opera, please write out in large letters and hang it up somewhere obvious: THESE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BE SINGING. No matter what their conditioning program, climbing up and down gigantic staircases is going to make them out of breath. We would prefer that they were not out of breath.

Placido Domingo in The First Emperor had the good sense not to even try it. He did his final scene near the bottom.

Monty Python

Someone has sent me an email saying that the Macbeth production from the Met reminded him of Monty Python.

"You mentioned the Met's Macbeth production and its modern sets and costumes. I saw the PBS telecast, and thought it worked on its own terms.
But one thing struck me as unintentionally funny(or was it?). The witches reminded me of those deliciously wacky Monty Python sketches in which the fellows dressed as dowdy middle aged women and acted very silly. It wasn't scary; I couldn't keep myself from laughing."

I would like to suggest that the appropriate Monty Python opera would be Peter Grimes. All the female parts would be done in drag. Peter would be Eric Idle. There would need to be silly walks.

My favorite Monty Python is the one where a dessert turns into a tennis star, and at the end into a Scotsman. They called it a blancmange, (pronounced /bləˈmɒnʒ/). I recall in those pre-internet days doing extensive research to figure out what the hell they were talking about, what this amorphous blob holding a tennis racket could possibly be, I myself never having heard of a blancmange. I began to laugh and could not control myself for the entire half hour. You had to be there.

Regietheater

La Cieca was doing his usual funny pictures from weird opera productions here when fromthepit hissed:

"It is of course Gerald Barry’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, from the original ENO production. I dare to reveal the answer even though to do so is against the rules, because La Cieca herself broke the rules by presenting these photos as an example of Regietheater. Presumably that term refers to a radical reinterpretation of the composer’s conception by a director. This production, a direct collaboration between composer and director on a world premiere, by definition cannot be Regietheater. An illustration of the excesses of the European stage, perhaps, or a radical reinterpretation of Fassbinder’s film, maybe, but Regietheater, no."

This refers to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), the great German movie director. This reminds me of a person in my past who forced me to watch all fourteen episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz which was available at Captain Video. If you don't know what that is, please stop reading here. Die Ehe der Maria Braun was one of his more popular movies. I'm having an attack of nostalgia.

I would like to suggest that Herr Fassbinder is the godfather of the entire Regietheater phenomenon. His spirit pervades modern Germany even now, 25 years after his death. I must rent Petra.

Regie

I have been playing the Regie game with La Cieca lately, and I must say it is a lot of fun. I guessed Die Fledermaus a week or so ago, and was disappointed that it was so easy. It looked exactly as it should to me. In this production both Alfred and Rosalinde are in their dressing gowns, implying a lot more fooling around than is generally the case. It looked like fun to me.

I have a harder time understanding Eugene Onegin in the old west.

One doesn't oneself live in Germany and doesn't see the need. Both the UK and the US have very lively theater traditions that have nothing to do with opera or government subsidies. In the old days one of the directors at the Ulmer Theater was doing Busby Berkeley and another did exclusively black on black, so this whole German thing is nothing new to me.

It has to have to do with money. In our culture someone spends the money and takes the risk to produce a new work and put it on in a Broadway theater. Twisting old pieces in government subsidized productions is simply not necessary. The Germans should give capitalist theater a try. Start a Broadway style tradition in Berlin now that you have a real capital.

I've heard of a piece about King Ludwig II that is put on in the Bavarian Alps every summer, so there is at least some original theater in Germany.

I like the game. Try it yourself. Search on Regie and it will show you all the old ones he has posted and people's guesses. Yes, I know--everyone already knows about this.