Virginia Woolf’s contrast, between the centrality of women as represented in fiction and their virtual absence from the roster of those who have created fictional representations, may readily yet incompletely be adapted for the history of opera. It is easy enough to insert operatic heroines into Woolf’s sardonic parade of martyrs, dominatrices and self-sufficient charmers: ‘Certainly, if we consider it, Violetta must have had a way about her; Carmen, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Susanna, one might conclude, was an attractive girl.’ And, as in the history of literature, women have been all but absent from the operatic activities that received scholarly attention before the late 1980s: few traces remain of women composing, staging, theo-rizing about or paying for opera. Yet at the same time it would be absurd to describe women as ‘all but absent from [opera's] history’, when women – not only as dying heroines but as living divas – have been so central to this art’s fascination for audiences, patrons, enthusiasts and critics.

It might seem curious to the average modern music lover that opera, that most elite of genres, came to be seen as music’s pre-eminent contributor to nationalism. This apparent contradiction derives, however, from two common misconceptions: on the one hand, that nationalism was essentially an expression of popular (nineteenth-century) revolt; on the other, that opera’s associations with the aristocracy should debar it from relevance to more general political concerns. Such misconceptions might seem appropriate for an ideology such as nationalism, which has always covered the traces of its invention by rewriting history in its own image, but opera too is defined by its continual reinvention of itself.

Indeed, as both opera and nationalism are at heart concerned with origins and with representing themselves as originary – both defining themselves as ‘always already’, whether in theoretical or dramatic terms – their interaction can be symbiotic. The anxiety perpetually expressed in operatic criticism and theory about ‘naturalness’ (generic, vocal, aesthetic) is thus neatly complemented by nationalist ideology, the prime hegemonic strategy of which has been similarly to self-authenticate as inherent and instinctive. It is only in the latter part of the twentieth century that nationalism has been subject to stringent scrutiny as an ideology, its essentialist claims unpicked as historically contingent on (variously) incipient capitalism, industrialization, mass communication and the decline of religion. Scholars such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm and Liah Greenfield have seen nationalism as an invention of the modern period (from c.1800 onwards), and have offered trenchant critiques of the ideology’s essentialist mystification. Nonetheless, with nation states remaining powerful political and cultural forces (despite the effects of globalization) and the right to national self-determination still invoked in pursuit of new political entities, the idea of the nation continues to be a significant social paradigm – and continues to be the principal way we parcel up history, whether operatic or otherwise.

Opera is a form of theatre, but the degree to which theatre participates in opera is an issue over which battles, many of them surprisingly vituperative, continue to be fought. In fact, over the last several decades, as the stage director has laid claim to being an artist with a creative presence equal to that of the composer and librettist, the intensity of the dispute has increased. The director has been seen as the saviour of an art form in danger of extinction; according to Jean-Pierre Ponnelle: ‘for now [the director's] duty is really to keep the entire repertory alive so it doesn’t just exist in a museum’. On the other hand, directors have been accused of wantonly damaging the operas they direct; for example, a distinguished scholar of Handel writes of modern productions: ‘Whether the producers’ [stage directors’] antics have stemmed from ignorance, cynicism or the lust to explore a hyperactive ego…the result has been the same. The work of art is defaced by graffiti. The servant is exalted above the master.’ While all of us can think of directors whose work has interfered with our enjoyment of the opera, the final sentence indicates more than a passing dislike for some individual’s work; it implies that theatre is only admissible in opera when it is subservient to the demands of the music and the libretto.

This chapter will take issue with this assumption. In accepting that opera is a genre of theatre, it will identify those conventions and practices that have been central in the production of opera and it will consider too the documents that enable us to understand them and ask whether they might provide some guidance as to how opera should be performed today. It will also account for the rise of the modern stage director and question whether his or her work ‘defaces’ opera, and suggest ways in which we might decide this issue for ourselves.

Richard Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio (1942), reflects on an issue that has preoccupied opera since its birth in the Italian courts of the late Renaissance. Which is more important, it asks, the words or the music? Is it ‘prima la musica, dopo le parole’ (first the music, then the words) or ‘prima le parole, dopo la musica’ (first the words, then the music)? Capriccio suggests that the answer lies in a genuine symbiosis that privileges neither, implying, with a wink, that the opera itself is a demonstration of that symbiosis. Things haven’t always been so harmonious. To its critics opera always seemed to lack the economy of means so treasured, at various historical moments, in verbal, musical and theatrical arts, while its apparently haphazard and bloated combinations suggested a forced marriage. Opera hasn’t even fared well in relation to other suspect hybrids like theatre. The term ‘theatrical’ has often encompassed negative associations with falsehood, superficiality and emotive excess, not least for the modernists, who, as Martin Puchner has shown, derided theatricality as a trope for everything that modern art disavows. Yet the victimized finds its own victim: in many theatrical circles musical forms of theatre, including opera, stand for something debased in relation to what is still referred to as ‘legitimate theatre’. Is it that too much is given away to music? Does music need to be kept in check to avoid swamping theatre’s heterogeneous mix of literary, gestural and visual components in a flood of homogenizing sound? Isn’t the opera house really a concert hall with scenery?

This is certainly one strand of the historical critique of opera, which is saturated with arguments for the reform of operatic practice in the name of drama and poetry, as though curbing the genre’s instinctive tendency to indulge music. Measured against the possibility of rediscovering a lost unity between poetry and music in Hellenic theatre – a conviction shared by so many of the theorists and practitioners of opera, from the Florentine Camerata through the eighteenth-century philosophers to Wagner – opera was always haunted by an ancient ghost and found wanting by comparison.

Flying machines

In the opening scene of Peter Sellars’s production of John Adams’s Nixon in China the audience derives special delight from a simply achieved scenic effect. After an opening chorus celebrating the successes of the Chinese Revolution – ‘the people are the heroes now’ – a two-dimensional painted replica of the front half of an aeroplane (The Spirit of ’76) is ‘flown’ into the stage. A three-dimensional and thus functional stepladder is wheeled into place so that when the figures of Richard and Patricia Nixon open the ‘door’ in the ‘plane’, they can step out of the simulated flying machine and into the solid real world of the playing space, pausing, of course, on the steps, to allow photographs to be taken and applause to be offered. This was a moment that gave this spectator particular pleasure at a performance of a revival of the production at English National Opera in 2006, nearly twenty years after its premiere at the opening of a new opera house in Houston, in October 1987. It would appear that this pleasure was also felt at the premiere, however, as the Los Angeles Times notes in its review of the opening night:

I want to start by trying to account for the particular, theatrical pleasure of this moment, as a way of opening out into a wider discussion of the technologies of opera production in the theatre. The theatrical technology at work in Sellars’s production is both an instance of and a comic reference to the stage technologies around which opera, as a public theatrical event, originally took shape. When opera emerged from the courts and into the public theatres of Venice in the 1630s it did so as a spectacular entertainment, in which the effects which could be achieved by means of stage technologies were as significant a part of the production as music or singing.