So you're going to see your first Fliegende Holländer, and you prepare. You prepare by reading your opera guide, or your Grove, or Newman's Wagner Nights, or what have you; and you learn that this is a 19th-century ghost story about a sailor doomed to roam the seas forever and the captain's daughter who seeks to redeem him. Then you go to the opera house and watch a story about contemporary lowlifes in a run-down bar in a modern port.
What the hell is going on here? And why should anybody like it?
To many opera-lovers, Regietheater, "director's theater" — the kind of interpretive, even radical staging often derisively termed "Eurotrash" — is at best bewildering, at worst downright offensive. You arrive at the theater expecting one thing, and you get something completely different, and the connection isn't always immediately apparent. When I first moved to Europe in the mid-80s, opera-besotted, I dealt with the phenomenon largely by ignoring it: I was there for the singing, period. This led to an incident in Munich when a friend, on my recommendation, took her visiting parents to Nabucco. "You didn't mention," she said dryly the next day, "the giant penis hanging over the stage." So help me, I hadn't noticed. Julia Varady was singing Abigaille; who cared what it looked like?
However, while I arrived in Germany a theatrical conservative, my decade-plus of residence there witnessed pretty much a total conversion in terms of my willingness to consider, and sometimes champion, the crazy things directors do to opera.
It was a gradual process, fostered by countless nights of opera and a handful of dynamite, memorable stagings that wouldn't have been possible in a more traditionally-minded climate. One seminal experience was a 1993 Wozzeck in Frankfurt, staged by Peter Mussbach (now Intendant at Berlin's Staatsoper unter den Linden), which I attended as a green young critic for Opera News. Rather than naturalistic sets, the stage was occupied by geometric forms in bright colors, dominated by the red shape of Wozzeck's house, facile and windowless as a Monopoly hotel. In this setting, the action became a grisly cartoon, with the Captain padded like the Michelin man playing off the beanpole Doctor: a reductio ad absurdum of the world in which Wozzeck can no longer fit. The singers seemed inspired, and Sylvain Cambreling conducted wonderfully. It was one of the most gripping live performances I had ever seen. I remember wondering, in the middle, "Does the audience realize how good this is?" They did. The ovations were unending — a verismo reception for an atonal opera.
This and other experiences helped change my understanding of what opera can be. The basic premise of Regietheater is that opera is a living art; that it can have a theatrical immediacy and contemporary relevance; and that it doesn't have to be preserved in the same, unchanging state in order to maintain its validity.
After all, any staging, traditional or modern, is a reinterpretation. In Galina Vishnevskaya's autobiography, the soprano recalls how she adored Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin on record, only to be utterly disgusted when she first saw it onstage, with tired costumes and an aging Tatiana worlds away from the eager young heroine she'd imagined. And this wasn't even a modern, "Eurotrash" production. For any opera-lover in the age of recording, seeing a work onstage is like watching a filmed version of a favorite book (which is one reason many people react so violently to an unexpected approach — the more beloved the book, the more we resist changes to it). And yet every director putting an opera onstage, whatever her approach, has to make a whole slew of interpretive decisions: what does the Countess's boudoir look like? Where is her bed, her closet? Who is the Countess: strong, weak, angry, sad?
These decisions are the first and most important step in the art of drama. Actors learn from the start that, even when you're simply reading aloud, you have to establish what significance and meaning the words have for you. In opera, the music provides an additional layer of subtext, but it doesn't replace the need to make those decisions. Yet often, especially in so-called "traditional" productions, you see performers just going through the motions, singing the notes while repeating stock gestural clichés. (Jonathan Miller once told me that in every Bohème he'd ever directed, all the Rodolfos initially grabbed all the Mimís in exactly the same way; his job, he said, was "to clean the hard drive.")
Making dramatic decisions doesn't mean you have to create a radical conceptual staging. These decisions are also evident in the best traditional productions — take Visconti's Traviata, Strehler's Boccanegra, or early Zeffirelli. The only basic rule — and this applies in a sense to any work of creative art — is that in establishing a world, you have to abide by its laws. A director has to be sensitive to invisible but essential truths of creative logic, constructing a world that holds together both on its own terms and — most importantly — in accordance with the music. If he or she can achieve this, and help the singers bring it across, I'm happy to go along, whether it's a traditional production or a modern one.
Of course, everyone has his or her own sense of what those rules are, and of what a given work will bear. For me, the idea of making Simon Boccanegra into a Mafia don (Matthias Langhoff, Frankfurt, 1993) was a flop; it didn't at all accord with the musical characterization. But I was completely drawn in when Peter Sellars moved Le nozze di Figaro into a Park Avenue penthouse; although I thought the same director's mostly brilliant Don Giovanni fell apart at the end, because the supernatural elements of the opera's conclusion dissipated the gritty force of the ghetto world of drugs and violence he'd constructed for the rest of the opera.
One problem with trying to write about innovative stage direction is that simply reducing the director's concept to a bare outline is not a good way to convey what he or she is trying to do. In fact, it's the best way to make it sound ridiculous, and thus a favorite weapon of "Eurotrash" haters. Example: Don Giovanni and Leporello are gay lovers. That sounds ludicrous, shocking, absurd. To understand how it can work, you'd have to see Deborah Warner's Don Giovanni from Glyndebourne on DVD — with an open mind. This is one of the most sensitive, nuanced performances I've ever seen. Every character understands why he or she is saying every word. Because of this precision and care — it must have been phenomenally rehearsed — Warner is able to convince me of all kinds of things I hadn't thought of before. In this reading, Don Giovanni's bravado with women is merely a front for his true inclinations; and Leporello (pleading, "Lasciam le donne!") is a complex, feeling figure. When he turns to Donna Elvira and says imploringly, "You know how it was!", he's saying that they've both had the same experience of being seduced and emotionally abandoned, by the same man. On paper, it may raise eyebrows; but theater is not about paper. Watching it, hearing it, I find that Warner has hit a vein of poignant truth, creating a vivid take on the characters and enriching my experience of the opera. Is it the only way to do Giovanni? Of course not. Is there "a" way to do Hamlet?
These creative reinterpretations don't always work. Like any contemporary art, there's a lot of dross and a lot of unsuccessful experimentation — always a byproduct in the creation of something new. There's also a lot of bad direction out there. I am certainly no defender of mediocrity, of the directors who do violence to a piece in the name of concept, or have no understanding of the music.
But I have trouble understanding the violence of people's fear — especially in this country — of unfamiliar approaches to well-known works. Sometimes, the emotion with which people confront so-called "radical" stagings seems to border on hysteria; and I find myself starting to sympathize with the desire to shake up such a complacent audience. After all, many of these works that purists now so ardently defend were once themselves seen as avant-garde, shocking and politically controversial: think of Wagner's operas; think of Verdi and his wrangles with the censors; think of the resistance to verismo opera, with conservatives wondering why anyone would want to put that kind of filth on the opera stage. The strengths of some of those works originally derived from their innovation. Why shouldn't opera continue to challenge its audiences in the same way it once did — and the same way you see in the other arts?
Sometimes I squirm when taking friends of my own 30-something generation — intelligent, artistic people — to the opera and seeing their reactions to traditional, 19th-century sets, or to performers mugging for laughs that wouldn't raise a chuckle in another venue (for some reason the convention of opera makes audiences willing to laugh at things that elsewhere would seem the hoariest of clichés). Seen through their eyes, this form I love seems less art than artifice. I'd argue that a radical modern staging has more potential to reach these friends — people who go to contemporary art shows, who follow trends of contemporary literature; people who are smart enough to determine for themselves what they find refreshingly provocative and what, merely shocking — and give them a way to connect more directly with opera's inner, elemental truths, like its music. (And it seems to me that the audience demographic in Germany tends to skew younger than the Met's.)
This was one rationale behind Katharina Wagner's contemporary staging of Fliegende Holländer in Würzburg this season, with which Richard Wagner's great-granddaughter sent shock waves all over Germany. Again, a one-line description doesn't do justice to the concept, and the many details that backed it up. No, there weren't any sailing ships here, and there wasn't even any redemption; the Dutchman is beaten to death by xenophobic skinheads. But sitting in the theater, you saw that, yes, Senta could easily be the misfit in high school who dresses funny and obsessively listens to strange music on her Walkman. Ms. Wagner, 24, found a way to have the opera make sense in the terms of her generation. The inner logic she created for the piece held water; and it was closely linked to the music. Nearly all the German critics, like me, arrived prepared for disaster (Ms. Wagner had never staged an opera before), and nearly all of them — with the exception of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and a couple of other smaller papers — found, as did I, that it was valid.
The point is that in all the performing arts — dance, orchestral music, opera — there's more than one way to tell a story. It's an impoverished society that's reduced to telling the same stories over and over in the same way — and the term for that is not art, but dogma. I've sat through a lot of dogs as I developed my tolerance for, and finally support of, "director's theater." But it's my own naïve belief that opera is good enough to take it; that opera is good enough not to need special protection; that opera is, in fact, good enough to be treated as art.
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