Christopher Webber responds to me:

>Leaving aside for a minute the value judgement about modern opera staging,
>it's an interesting point as to why the musical side of opera has become
>ever more sacrosanct the greater the directorial deviation from the
>libretto.

Indeed. But why?

>>However, I for one absolutely disagree with the policy of staging operas
>>differently than demanded in the score.  ...
>
>Now hang on.  The music generally is left untouched, as we'd agree.
>Even where one person (e.g.  Judith Weir) is responsible for both, it is
>the librettist not the composer who is considered fair game for 'auteur'
>vision or conceptual staging.  Here, surely, is a clue to the resolution
>of the paradox - though it suggests another, one intimately connected with
>the time-honoured 'words versus music' debate.

I don't quite understand this.  No matter whether Mozart or da Ponte is the
author of the opera, I believe that we should stick to the text.  My above
statement wasn't limited on music.

>In the 21st century opera house, music is considered the most important
>component.

As above, why?

>Yet paradoxically, what continues to draw audiences to these tired, old
>museum pieces is the fresh angle provided by the "modern" staging [...]

Perhaps the "old" staging would also provide a fresh angle, just as old
instruments have brought a new angle to music thought as worn-out?

>Here is the new paradox - the music is fossilised, the staging provides
>the impetus.  For theatre is a living art form.

This is interesting.  I understand that you draw a line between (music-)
theatre and concert.  Theatre is a living form, whereas the concert is a
"dead" form, unless it programmes "new" music.  If you mean that "living
art" is the art that is created today, music either always or never is
living.  The process of composition is - except for improvisations -
always in the past when we hear music, but the performance always is new,
created in the very moment we hear it.

>We simply cannot reproduce the old conventions of a bygone age - if you
>tried to stage "Don Giovanni" with the fidelity to Da Ponte's directions
>demanded by Mr Templiner you would have something which would be a mixture
>of the risible and the incomprehensible to modern theatrical and aesthetic
>tastes.

But doesn't that apply to the music too? Isn't what you're saying the
point of the people who dislike(d) old instruments in music? Of course
it is impossible to create exactly the world of Mozart/da Ponte's time.
But I didn't demand that.  I want that the score is obeyed.  Why is it
not possible to let the Magic Flute (I don't have the score of a da Ponte
opera here) begin ina "rocky area" and let Tamino wear "Japanese hunting
clothes"? That does not mean the stage would have to be lit by candles.

Jan