Janos Gereben <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>Further, I acknowledge the fundamental goodness of hard-working Mr.
>Webber in his extensive attempts to correct my erroneous ways. Tough
>love is still love, and we need more of that in this otherwise best of
>all possible worlds.

I'm duly touched by the tribute as much as the recantation.  I'd like
to believe that Janos will keep his heart as well as his eyes open to
those "modern" productions that he patronises henceforward.  I hope we
will read many positive reports from him in the future, free from the
taint of that parochialism which bedevils the work of so many other
reviewers.

I'm not saying every opera production succeeds.  Very far from it!
Yet theatre, which includes opera - unfortunately I agree for those
self-styled purists who don't like the way it uses music for its own
ends - is by its nature a here-and-now art, responsive to what's going
on around us.

Partly at least, it's in the business of reflecting and influencing our
thoughts and feelings about that world, changing our perspective on the
material it presents.  Nobody on either side of the footlights simply
wants to repeat an old experience.  Otherwise, why bother to do it?
Why bother to go?

As Janos now understands, the Aspic Museum is not an option.  And when
theatre works ....  goodness, how it works!

Moving away from Janos's new German director friends, I received a report
yesterday, for example, about the first production of the new season at
Madrid's Teatro de la Zarzuela.  Chapi's three-act masterpiece "La bruja"
is one of the cornerstones of the Spanish operatic-zarzuela repertoire
(some of you may know the marvellous recording with Alfredo Kraus and
Teresa Berganza), and the name of "modernist" director Luis Olmos on the
handbills had led many people to expect what the old Janos might have
called "the worst".

In the event the radical and in many ways iconoclastic staging received
a standing ovation and was cheered to the rafters.  Once again, an old
repertory warhorse has been given new and vibrant life through the pooled
imagination of the modern Madrid company, and everyone is the richer for
it.  It's a tightrope act, but when it works, it really works.  Those
who sigh for the return of the safety net - jaded insiders as much as
the Buffs - would have us remove the thrill as well as the danger.  No
way!

Christopher Webber,  Blackheath, London,  UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm
"THE ZARZUELA COMPANION" (Scarecrow Press)