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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2008
In a recent issue of this journal, David J. Levin proposed an approach to evaluating the work of directors and producers of opera. The idea that one might be able to theorise the difference between good and bad stagings is appealing, not least because many of us would like to feel able to raise the standard of debate on this subject. Most public discussions of opera productions (or at least of those productions that generate public discussion) can be predicted in advance, more or less verbatim; the persistence of the arguments used on all sides is in itself enough to suggest that little progress is being made. On the other hand, it is not easy to see how academic debate contributes. Theatre is where operas enter public discourse. Performance might seem like a decisive act of interpretation – choices have to be made about how to present the given work – but, paradoxically, it also marks the point at which opera escapes the attentions of the academy in favour of a constituency which is (presumably) less grounded in theory and less committed to consciously interpretative acts. With understandable reservations, Levin suggests the use of commercially available videos to analyse details of a staging, but details of this sort are not likely to contribute significantly to a theatre audience's experience of how a production works and what it has to say. Videotape permits us the mastery of freeze-frame enquiry, and at the same time confines us within the flattened perspective chosen at each moment by the camera's eye. Both its advantages and its drawbacks are incommensurate with theatre, where (especially in opera, with its simultaneous but distinct modes) the stream of information is diverse and continuous, and our eye moves in relative freedom, never capturing the totality of the stage. One might draw an analogous distinction between academic criticism, which works by isolating certain elements of the ‘text’ or its contexts and subjecting them to intense scrutiny, and the more holistic act of sitting in the opera-house watching a ‘work’ unfold. The pause button creates a sequence of discrete images submitted to the critic's intellectual play. In the theatre, a staging is more likely to achieve its effects through what we might call its ‘feel’, its general character and stance. When Peter Sellars set Così fan tutte in a diner, the air of incongruous modernity – conveyed through costume, set, the characters' ways of behaving–must have determined the audience's sense of his interpretation far more powerfully than (for example) the fact that he had Ferrando and Gugliemo sing ‘Secondate, aurette amiche’ in their own characters rather than their assumed ones.
1 Levin, David J., ‘Reading a Staging/Staging a Reading’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 9 (1997), 47–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Ibid., 60.
3 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Music and Discourse, trans. Abbate, Carolyn (Princeton, 1990), 28.Google Scholar
4 My general aim is to discuss the nature of interpretation in the theatre, not to discuss the meaning of particular productions; however, I have tried to draw my few examples from well-known stagings, or those discussed in available books on Wagner production. Dates given for productions refer to the year of their first appearance. The most useful reference work on the subject is Oswald Bauer, Georg, Richard Wagner. The Stage Designs and Productions (New York, 1983).Google Scholar For a more critical study, limited to Bayreuth, see Spotts, Frederic, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven, 1994).Google Scholar
5 One critic writes that ‘If it might be going too far to hold Wagner responsible for the arts of stage production and design as we understand them today, he nevertheless played a central role at their birth’; Carnegy, Patrick, ‘Designing Wagner’, in Millington, Barry and Spencer, Stewart, eds., Wagner in Performance (New Haven, 1992), 48.Google Scholar See also Mike Ashman, ‘Producing Wagner’, also in Wagner in Performance, esp. 29–31. For a full study, see srocke, Martina, Richard Wagner also Regisseur (Munich, 1988).Google Scholar
6 Levin, (see n. 1), 49–51.Google Scholar
7 Levin, , 51.Google Scholar
8 Tanner, Michael, Wagner (London, 1996), 16.Google Scholar
9 Levin, (see n. 1), 49.Google Scholar
10 Levin, , 60.Google Scholar
11 Nattiez, (seen. 3), 15–16.Google Scholar
12 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, ‘ “Fidelity” to Wagner’, in Wagner in Performance (see n. 5), 77.Google Scholar
13 Levin (see n. 1), 69. The argument is made in more detail in Levin, David J., ‘Reading Beckmesser Reading’, New German Critique, 69 (1996), 127–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 Levin, (see n. 1), 51.Google Scholar
15 Levin reveals the private standards which inform his assessments of stage practice a number of times, perhaps most tellingly when he describes a conservative critic's attack on Peter Sellars's productions of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas as part of a ‘vehement’ reaction to innovative interpretations (Levin, 56n25). The piece he cites is certainly hostile, but it is hard to see the case as a straightforward battle between the reactionaries and the progressives when we find Sellars's choreographic inventions described as being ‘worth diamonds’: ‘Of itself it would justify seeing the opera, buying the videocassette’. Littlejohn, David, The Ultimate Art Essays Around and About Opera (Berkeley, 1992), 152. Levin's motivated misreading suggests that too much energy has been invested in the historical categories.Google Scholar
16 Nattiez, (see n. 3), 70. The phrase ‘total musical fact’ is derived from the work of the sociologist Marcel Mauss.Google Scholar
17 Adorno, Theodor, In Search of Wagner, trans. Livingston, Rodney (London, 1991), 45.Google Scholar
18 Nattiez, (see n. 12), 85.Google Scholar
19 Performance is the dimension distinguishing this point from familiar arguments about the relative priority of score and libretto in interpreting opera. One argument against opera's textuality says that ‘Opera … is in its essence [what ‘essence’?] not a textual but a musical phenomenon’, a view contentious at best. Robinson, Paul, ‘A Deconstructive Postscript: Reading Libretti and Misreading Opera’, in Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger, eds., Reading Opera (Princeton, 1988), 330. My argument is not about which of opera's modes is legible and interpretable, but whether reading is what happens in the theatre.Google Scholar
20 DiGaetani, John, ed., Penetrating Wagner's Ring: An Anthology (Rutherford, NJ, 1978), 384, 380.Google Scholar
21 Ibid., 436.
22 Ibid., 394.
23 Boulez, Pierre, Chéreau, Patrice, Peduzzi, Richard and Schmidt, Jacques, Histoire d'un ‘Ring’ (Paris, 1980), 76 (my translation). Natriez cites this as one of those ‘manifest errors of interpretation against which even the most explicit producer can do nothing’; Nattiez (see n. 12), 85.Google Scholar
24 In this sense, Chéreau's Ring was an unusually text-like staging, which may explain why it proved so engrossing when broadcast on television in the 1980s, and works so well on video. Nattiez has devoted a full-length book to the centenary Ring, though (in support of my argument here) it is important that the book is not so much a ‘reading’ of Boulez's, Chéreau's and Peduzzi's work as a discussion of the production's own approach to reading the tetralogy. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Tétralogies (Paris, 1983).Google Scholar
25 Fay, Stephen, The Ring. Anatomy of an Opera (London, 1984), 37.Google Scholar
26 For a stimulating exploration of this imaginative environment, see Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995), 75–134.Google Scholar
27 Being free of this knowledge is a kind of prelapsarian innocence. Those of us who encountered Chéreau's Ring on television at a relatively early age could never have imagined what all the fuss was about. The production of an opera one first encounters often seems simply to be that opera, so that the second production comes as a shock.
28 Shaw, George Bernard, The Perfect Wagnerite (London, 1898);Google ScholarDonington, Robert, Wagner's ‘Ring’ and its Symbols (London, 1963).Google Scholar
29 See the opening section of Wagner's 1851 essay ‘A Communication to My Friends’. Wagner, Richard, Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. Ellis, Williams Ashton, 8 vols. (London, 1892–1899), I, 269–73.Google Scholar
30 Foucault, Michel, ‘Nineteenth-Century Imaginations’, Semiotext(e) 4 (1982), 189.Google Scholar
