Bruce Alan Wilson wrote:

Let me get this straight: An imaginatively-staged, well-performed
presentation of a not-as-often-as-it-should-be performed opera.  The
audience loved it.  This is, somehow, a Bad Thing.  Am I missing
something?

Dave Lampson responded:

>>>[The music? How dare someone care about that!  Of course, the music
>>>should never be allowed to interfere with the special effects.  -Dave]

I rejoined:

>>I find Dave's editorial snipe unjustified.

Dave replies:

>Hey, right back at ya.  Read again.  I answered a question - I didn't
>snipe.

Yikes!  An editorial thunderbolt!  Peeping out from under my rock, I
mumble that Dave's comment didn't - and still doesn't - read to me like
an editorial answer, even to a question Mr Wilson did not ask.  And who
was talking about "special effects"? Nobody.

The answer, if there is one, to Mr Wilson's rhetorical question is simply,
"No."

>Janacek's music - like it or not - is great music and as such
>deserves some respect.

I know that Dave, along with many others on the List, has limited time for
opera and maintains a fundamentalist perspective on it.  This was not the
case with Janacek, who loved it, warts and all.  Like it or not ...  giving
his music the "respect" it "deserves" means staging it - no matter how
imperfectly - in a theatre.  Period.

>It is not simply accompaniment to an extra-musical spectacle.  You
>apparently saw, and loved, the performance Janos saw.  Please tell us why.

Homer sometimes nods.  If Dave - perish the thought!  - were to re-read my
original posting he would find that I clearly state at the top that I had
not seen the production in question, and indeed took great care to say that
I was sure Mr Gereben was quite right to find this particular show ghastly.
I find many of the opera shows I see equally reprehensible, though perhaps
for different reasons.

No, it was the attitudes that lay behind Mr Gereben's particular gripes (as
manifest in many previous postings, and as shared by a lot of opera buffs
and people who don't really care about opera) that I was moved to address.
In particular, like Mr Wilson, I found his negative comments on the
enthusiasm of the audience hard to take.

>I confess: I don't have a lot of interest in the topic myself.  But I care
>about the state of classical music and have read enough to know that while
>there are many who are heartened by the current success of opera - drawing
>in the crowds in some instances - there are many who are also concerned it
>is being achieved at a price.

Why "concerned"? Musical theatre is big enough to take care of itself,
thank you.  I scent, once again, some suspicion of "the crowds" and ask
Dave to consider carefully whether that lies at the root of his problem
with the art form.  When we are "concerned" because nobody is going to
Beethoven concerts, is it consistent to be equally "concerned" because
people are going in their droves to "Turandot" and "Nixon in China"?

>I don't even know how to respond to the bizarre concept that there are
>only two uses for music: social indulgence at the theater or passive
>study.

I didn't think my statement - that Janacek wrote his operas for the
theatre, not for the study or home listening - could be open to such
controversy.  Certainly, to describe musical theatre going as "social
indulgence" will not do.

For me, and for many others, the theatre is not a "social indulgence"
but a temple of the arts.  That is, all the arts, including but not
exclusively, music.  Like many temples, the opera house has to balance the
claims of historical precedent (the written scores and words) and modern
tastes (changing theatrical style).

The idea that opera productions betray the musical content of these great
theatre works is curious, given that more (too much??) attention is paid
to scrupulously authentic and accurate delivery of that content than ever
before in musical history.

For example, we no longer sanction wholesale cuts in Wagner, Mozart or
Janacek in the theatre.  Even the D'Oyly Carte, when I directed for them a
few years back, was insistent on using Sullivan's original instrumentation
(even down to cornets instead of trumpets) with an attention to the musical
minutiae which would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago.

I note that Mr Gereben - sensible man - has not so far bothered to reply to
my extremely specific critiques (with contrary examples) of certain of his
observations on three London and Berlin productions.  I did not think his
Olympian detachment needed Jove's thunderbolts for protection!

Christopher Webber,  Blackheath, London,  UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm
"ZARZUELA!"