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.

It is easier all around.  The producers will get lots more attention
from vacuous simulated sex on stage than from real love-making to the
music.  For the writer, the visuals write themselves; describing a music
performance is hard work.

Pogo, indeed.

   `No Wagner please, We Are German-Americans'
   Janos Gereben - www.sfcv.org [May 2002]

   CINCINNATI - A journalist asking James Conlon about the unending
   blight of Eurotrash in opera will have a Pogo moment: "We have
   met the enemy and he is us."

   Allowing the obvious, that directors can make a name for themselves
   faster and easier with a non-standard production (regardless of
   how the work is being served, if at all), Conlon points at the
   questioner and says, not unkindly, "et tu, Brute."

   "It's easier to write about the staging of an opera than about
   the music," he says.  "So you have six-seven paragraphs about
   what the audience sees, and then maybe something about the music."
   It's understandable, he allows, because describing music in words
   is hard.  Writing about the action the more bizarre, the better
   doesn't pose the same obstacles as saying that this phrase was
   like that, the harmonic progression was interpreted in a novel
   way, and so on.

   In no way does Conlon blame the messenger for the bad news, but
   he is pointing out something I never thought of how even opposition
   to regietheater can turn into significant publicity for something
   you wouldn't want to promote in any way.

   Conlon, a veritable Mr. Opera in Europe, is leaving as the head
   of the Cologne Opera after 13 years and serving two more years
   in Paris, which will take him to a record nine years at the helm
   of one of the world's most "difficult" houses.

   In the middle of significant changes in his career relief from
   decades of administrative duties and the opportunity to move
   back to New York with his family, especially for the sake of his
   daughters aged 5 and 13 the one small point of stability is his
   job here, as music director of the May Festival for 23 years.

   Among his predecessors in the 128-year-old line of the Western
   hemisphere's oldest choral festival: Eugene Isaye, Eugene Goossens,
   Fritz Busch, Josef Krips, Max Rudolf, Julius Rudel, Leonard
   Bernstein and James Levine.

   Succeeding Levine had an unexpected drawback for Conlon who was
   eager to fill the festival's two weeks with opera, especially
   Wagner.  He was greeted in one of the country's most German-influenced
   cities with a double plea from festival officials: Please no
   opera, especially no Wagner.  The reason?  Levine, besides playing
   Scott Joplin rags, marinated the city in Wagner, including a
   still-talked-about uncut "Parsifal," which set the record for
   the longest concert in festival history...

   [cut]

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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