Mr Webbers comments are clearly well thought through and based on genuine
understanding of the medium.  Most of us approach opera through the music
but stand alone music it never was meant to be - why not then write a
symphony or song cycle?  Opera, by definition, is music-theatre.

This is why Wagner created Gesammstkunstwerk.  In his time, he was a
revolutionary, appalled by the maudlin stagings and meaningless concepts
of his time, which in his mind degraded the intellectual and spiritual
power of music.  He believed that his operas were an expression of
Universal Truths, in other words, concepts.  He believed that all elements,
staging, music, sets, singing should work in unison to reinforce the
music and bring out every possible level of meaning as possible.  Had
he lived to the age of film, he would have embraced that, too.  Had
Wagner lived to see the age of film, he'd have been fascinated at the
potential for breaking past literal representation, I suspect.  The old
cliche that Bach didn't know piano does not apply, because Wagner wrote
assuming the ideas were primary.  He built Bayreuth not just to have a
venue but so his musical ideas could be expanded in their own universe,
a total concept if ever there was one.  It was Cosima who turned it into
a museum of frozen rigidity.

And look who embraced that rigidity - Adolf Hitler, who wanted to turn
back modernity, Jews and "Jewish" music, gays, socialism, non literal
art, etc.  in other words, many of the elements that make things fun.
He and the Bayreuth of his time wanted to preserve one single vision
of some mythical past where things were safe, predictable - none of this
Entartete Kunst business!  Dictatorships, by and large, have always found
innovation subversive, because by its essence, creativity is individualist
and doesn't conform.  Had Bayreuth continued to wallow in that approach
to art, it would have been toppled like so many other grand dreams of
that regime.  Fortunately, Wieland Wagner was a revolutionary in his
turn.  He saw like few others did, Hitler from personal experience, and
understood at first hand how art can be manipulated to suit an agenda.
He went back to the soul of Wagner, removing the detritus of convention,
creating a evaluation and reinterpretation for new times.  So blame him
for Chereau and concept opera and so on, but without him, Wagner and his
music might have been suffocated by motheaten association with the past.
Wieland recreated the idea that opera represents universal ideas, which
cannot be shaped by conventional boundaries like costumes or mechanical
dragons on stage.  All that light and transparency in the Chereau must
have been blinding to eyes conditioned to what went before.

When performers approach a piece of music, symphonic, chamber or whatever,
they should be thinking about what it means.  It's not the job to
articulate verbally, but normally those who have something to say musically
are the ones who bring something interesting to their performance.  It
is never "just the notes".  So why should that same creativity be denied
to the other partners in the performance of opera?  A conductor who just
plays without bothering about hat's happening on stage is abrogating his
responsibility just as much as a director who doesn't know the music.
Obviously, in the real world it doesn't always happen but when it does,
it's special.  Fundamentally, however, music and stage are two distinct
disciplines.  Composers were musicians above all, often they used the
most incompetent librettists in the faith that they knew what they were
doing, which is a laugh, but they were musicians not theatre people.
Many libretti are written at a level that demeans the music.  So why do
we have to follow what was not the word of the composer?  An intelligent
staging that brings out the meaning in the music, and in its ideas, may
well be a better representation of what a composer may have felt than
some tawdry staging based slavishly on the libretto.  Many composers
were sanguine about the difference bewteen what they did and what happened
on stage.  Alban Berg, for example, was excited by what others might
achieve from his music - he wanted performers of the future to understand
the whys, the hows being up to them.

We cannot assume that any staging set in its time is any more authentic
than another.  Handel and Mozart productions were mounted in the costumes
of the time, ie the modern dress of the era.  No one had any illusions
that The Abduction from the Seraglio was about Islamic custom.

To take an example from a later period, Puccini's Orient is completely
fictitious and indeed quite offensive if you know the "real" settings.
Audiences of the past had no delusions of authenticity, they knew that
what they were watching was artifice, not reality.  They hadn't been
conditioned by TV.  For them opera was a bit like circus entertainment,
the spectacle being the thrill, not necessarily the artistic content.
Hence the love of elephants and over the top effects, hammy acting,
strident costumes.  People came for the arias and the melodrama, the big
numbers that gave their favourite diva a chance to do her thing, often
standing in front of the stage for the fans, repeating the aria twice
for applause, adding embellishments and frills that weren't in the score.
It was the singers and fans who led, not the composer.  Before boybands,
pop stars and football, opera served a purpose beyond music.  Let's face
it, opera was for the canaille as much as for the literati, and its roots
still show.

Regietheater stems from a need to get back to the underlying imagery
in the music and to express what was symbolic in it.  Its roots are the
Expressionism of the 1920's, an era in which theatre arts blossomed as
much as music did.  Expressionism means, loosely, that meaning can be
conveyed other than through the literal and that art should spark off a
process in the viewer, who cannot remain passive.  Artists used abstraction
to express inner situations - the vivid colourings (for the time) of
writhing horses in the Blaue Reiter, the angular, distorted backdrops
in movies like Dr Caligari.  Much could be conveyed implicitly without
having to be spelled out in capital letters.  Hence the origins of
Regietheater in the underground, both in the Weimar, and later in the
postwar DDR.  Things could be said relevant to the times by focussing
on the underlying values in opera.  The much maligned trenchcoat has
serious and painful origins in that it was a code representing the secret
police, or faceless authority, or the brutality of the "system".  A sort
of Jungian archetype, like the Pierrot of an earlier era.  Some may
titter, but images like that don't happen everyday.

The conflict between "modern" and "conventional" opera has been going
on for decades and will probably continue forever, as long as there are
creative types, however mistaken, and those who prefer what they think
they know.  Egocentrism is not a monopoly of directors.  Wagner did not
write Beckmesser for nothing - Beckmesser being the voice of formula
music, a critic who hated the new!  Like the best music, the debate is
universal.  To my amazement, it's even generated intelligent debate on
Opera-l, in addition to the usual kneejerk superficiality.  Cheap shots
against modernity really aren't the whole picture.  What really matters
is understanding the issues from a deeper and less facetious perspective.
It's not as simple as switching from a froth of foaming taffeta to a
trenchcoat.  It has to be understood from within.

Anne Ozorio <[log in to unmask]>