Jan Templiner responds to my question:

>>I wonder why this business of 'original settings' is becoming such a
>>sticking point for Jan?
>
>Because text fidelity is one of the most crucial things for a musician.

Oh dear. As it's New Year I'll roll my stone up the hill just one more
time: in the imperfect world of the opera theatre, the musician's is not
the only set of priorities, because other people's priorities are involved.
In the theatre, fidelity to the musical and verbal text is usually
respected, but fidelity to the letter of the stage instructions (which
are rarely if ever spoken or sung out loud) rightly comes a poor second
to fidelity to their spirit.

No heavy-handed mockery of real or invented 'modern' productions (especially
of pieces which have the temerity to have been written less than fifty
years ago), no repeated cries of "why?", have the power to alter the
fact that if we want Opera as Drama - which not all of us do - then we
must also take on board Opera as Theatre.

Jan has the option to imagine his perfect production listening to the
music in his own front room; good luck to him. But if he wants the full,
live, communal experience of opera, he must compromise with his fellow
human beings. He must get hold of the idea that everyone's vision is
going to be different, and that someone has to make decisions about what
the audience sees. That person is the director, who has to facilitate
and co-ordinate the technical, stage and design teams as well as the
musicians. No amount of wishing these other people out of existence can
remove them from the scene, and in any case most of us want them there.

Of Nicholas Maw's cuts to "Sophie's Choice":

>But what's the point of leaving it in the score when their not practical
>to perform?  Whatfor is a reference needed when it doesn't matter?

Who has said it doesn't matter? It may become practical in another era,
and the composer's original conception (as with Wagner's for "Parsifal")
is surely worth preserving as a beacon light.

Of Handel's "Tamerlano":

>>A production of mine even set in it 19th c.  revolutionary Cuba, without
>>violence either to Handel's drama or his music; at all events, fox furs
>>and yashmaks were not a practical option for us!
>
>Oh no, you didn't violate the music of the "drama" (what is that?) just
>only violated the text.

I didn't alter a word of the text. Indeed, I was concerned enough for
textual fidelity to spend time collating the printed score with the
original libretto in the British Library. The indignant epithet is
telling: "violation" implies the rending by impious, ignorant, unclean
hands of a sacred tome - which is exactly how the fundamentalist
music-firsters view the mucky business of creating real-life performing
editions from musical scores. As Jan suggests, they have a difficulty
with the whole, impure notion of "drama per musica".

Luckily, on that particular (not very revolutionary) occasion I was
blessed with an audience which did not need to do anything so literal
as suspend its disbelief and 'pretend' it was in Dark Age Eurasia. As
theatre audiences do, it took the positive point of the geographical
translation on board quickly and easily, and got on with being drawn
into the human drama.

Of Wagner's "Lohengrin":
>Oh.  I understand.  Of course he set in in a concentration camp located
>on Mars in 2254.  How could I have forgotten that. My deepest apologies.

We can agree that a concentration camp on Mars in 2254 would most likely
not serve too well for "Lohengrin" just now, as audiences don't have any
strong shared image or feeling about the world in 250 years time, or
about how Martians might look.

What we have to do, is think hard about Wagner's text with its dead
theatrical conventions, and find a contemporary stage context with as
strong a resonance, social, political and personal, for our audience as
he provided for his.

Given that the rights and wrongs of German unification are pretty much
a settled matter these days, a pretty pre-Raphaelite painted backdrop
of a Brabant Bog is about as far away from our communal imagination as
Jan's little green men are from his. With respect, it has equally little
utility for those of us interested in living in the 21st, rather than
the 19th or 23rd century.

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