Janos Gereben wrote:
>This week, while writing the story of James Conlon's appointment to
>Ravinia, I came across my interview with him in Cincinnati last year.
>
>The point he made then is just beginning to sink in only now: if the
>headline, the lead and most of the review for the upcoming SFO "Damnation
>of Faust" deal with the Produktion, and the rest of with the music, then
>we too are responsible for promoting and perpetuating the shock-schlock
>distraction from the music... *regardless* of praising or condemning
>this tired old "modern" approach to opera.
But, as I have finally been given to understand, Opera is a composite
art of which the music is an important, but not the only important
component. This may be hard to realize when we're considering operas
like *Don Giovanni*, *Otello*, *Tristan*, and perhaps, IMO, ten to twenty
others, which would probably include Berlioz's *Damnation of Faust*.
But so many other operas, like *Don Quichotte*, *Le Cid*, *I Puritani*,
*Luisa Fernanda*, *Samson et Dalila*, *Fedora*, *Sly*, *Romeo et Juliette*,
*Dona Francisquita*, *La Rondine*, *The Dangerous Liaisons*, *Il Guarany*,
*El Gato Montes*, just to take a sampling of some of the operas presented
by the Washington Opera from 1995 through 2001, are so barren musically,
consisting essentially of at most a handful of pretty arias and/or
ensembles separated my musical fluff, that, were it not for extra-musical
attributes like the sets, the costumes and the drama itself, the works
would scarcely have an artistic raison d'etre.
Walter Meyer
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