Julian Allen <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>What's theatrical about having a woman with a shopping bag walking across
>the stage.  If Prokoviev doesnt indicate it why have it? The central thing
>in opera is the music.  Why do directors have to foist their irritating
>concepts on everybody.

If a woman walks across a stage carrying a shopping bag, she is walking
across a *stage*, which makes it theatrical by definition.  It may not be
drama, but it is theatre.

What if the composer asks for one thing in the score, and the librettist
another? Mr Allen doesn't mention that august personage, of course.  But
it does happen - even where the two (as in "War and Peace", and "Midsummer
Marriage") are one and the same person!  Then, Da Ponte asks for a whole
series of cardboard-cutout settings in his "Don Giovanni" which are so
impossibly antiquated that even Mr Allen, I suspect, would plead for a
little modern re-interpretation.  We do things like descents into Hell
so much more prettily these days.

Mr Allen goes on to confuse "concept" with imagery.  I don't think Tim
Albery had a "concept" in mind with this "War and Peace", by which we mean
an over-ruling design and production vision.  I have been fighting this
"concept" approach for years, and am just as deeply suspicious of it as Mr
Allen.

What Albery did have was a good idea of how to use striking imagery to
illuminate individual moments.  If Mr Allen don't respond to a particular
image, or fails to see the point of it, that is his loss; but he should
not confuse image with concept, which is more far reaching.

The nature of the central "thing" in opera has been argued over for
centuries, since the form began; so Mr Allen's simple statement, though
refreshingly clear, hardly does away with the continuing need for debate.
It would be a total nonsense, for instance, applied to the masterly, late
operas of Carl Orff such as "Prometheus".

Mr Allen might try listening for once, not just to the *music*, but to
the *words* of Strauss's "Capriccio" for some further stimulation on this
interesting point!  The great appeal of opera is precisely that the various
aspects of it appeal to different people in differing degree.

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