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<\/a>In response to my two-day-old blog<\/a><\/strong> about the Met\u2019s \u201cworst ever\u201d Carmen<\/em>, a prominent European artists\u2019 manager wrote (in an email): \u201cIf you would have been forced \u2013 as I was from professional duty \u2013 to attend productions as Tosca<\/em> at the Aix-en-Provence Festival (staged Christoph Honor\u00e9) or Les Troyens<\/em> at the Bayerische Staatsoper (staged by the same Christoph Honore) or Aida<\/em>, again at the Bayerische Staatsoper (staged by Damiano Michieletto), you would understand that opera as we knew it, and as we used to love it, is a dead artistic form. It was poisoned little by little by stage directors who did not like opera and used it for their own purposes. We just have to acknowledge this fact and keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The conductor Paul Polivnick wrote (on facebook): \u201cWe don’t take the Mona Lisa and put her in a psychiatrist’s office so she can have her enigmatic smile analyzed.\u201d Another conductor wrote (via email): \u201cBoth this article and your recent articles on [Klaus] Makela brought out what is so wrong in today\u2019s opera and music world. . . . I have spent decades conducting in Germany and experienced the gamut from wonderful stagings in the [Walter] Felsenstein tradition to the most horrible Regietheater in which the stagings are total perversion and distortions.\u201d (The sentiment of helplessness \u2013 from conductors<\/em> — seems notable to me.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conrad L. Osborne, whose opera blog is mandatory reading, most recently observes<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cOf all the productions I have written about over the seven years of this series, to say nothing of (I scour the memory bank in vain) those of several earlier decades, this [Carmen<\/em>] has come the closest to complete separation of eye and ear: its stage world cannot conceivably have generated this music, and Bizet\u2019s music cannot have evoked this stage world. And it is unrelievedly ugly to look at. With Carmen<\/em>, the Met has hit what we must hope is rock bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What next? Do we really need to haplessly \u201cacknowledge . . . and keep going\u201d? What am I to make of the many thousands of readers I have suddenly and uncharacteristically acquired via my recent blogs about the startling resignation<\/a><\/strong> of Esa-Pekka Salonen in San Francisco, and the implausible appointment<\/strong><\/a> of Klaus Makela in Chicago, and the troubles afflicting<\/strong><\/a> the Boston Symphony? Rubber-necking? Or might there be a groundswell of discontent out of which something constructive could emerge?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s an analogy to the degeneration of Regietheater that cripples opera today:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Europe experienced a couple of seismic upheavals during the first half of the twentieth century. The \u201csweetness and light\u201d of the arts, especially the Germanic arts, seemed discredited. For this and other reasons, a drastic reorientation seemed required. In music, Arnold Schoenberg came up with a new method of composition \u2013 with 12-tone rows \u2013 that he believed would rescue German music from obsolescence. I know a thing or two about 12-tone composition, having studied it religiously at Swarthmore under a true believer: Claudio Spies. And I became a true believer, too. No longer. It was a wrong turn. And the wrongest turn came in the US, where the historic conditions that produced serial music did not exist. I could name a few 12-tone compositions that deserve to endure \u2013 Berg\u2019s Violin Concerto is certainly one, Schoenberg\u2019s Ode to Napoleon<\/a><\/em><\/strong> (which I have frequently presented in concert to overwhelming effect) is another. But I cannot think of a single American 12-tone piece of lasting consequence. (Can you?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so it is with Regietheater. It was a European product. It never made sense to import it lock, stock, and barrel to the New World. And it remains less embedded in the US \u2013 and potentially more possible to ameliorate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What direction to take? First of all, it seems to me: stagings of opera, whatever else they may be, should be musically literate. I mean: stage directors of opera should be able to read music. They should be able to offer guidance to singers \u2013 how to inflect a word or phrase. Just as theater directors do. And ideally they should also work in concert with the conductor at hand. Currently, these conditions seem to me infrequently met at the Met.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I think back to the 1977 Bayreuth productions I have so often described<\/a><\/strong>, one manifest aspect is that G\u00f6tz Friedrich and Harry Kupfer were stage directors profoundly conversant with the operas \u2013 Tannh\u00e4user<\/em> and The Flying Dutchman<\/em> \u2013 at hand. As for Patrice Chereau\u2019s Ring<\/em> \u2013 he shifted the musical and dramatic aesthetic toward modernism. The stage pictures of Richard Peduzzi and the conducting of Pierre Boulez followed suit \u2013 the result was an integrated whole. When Chereau\u2019s Siegfried was indisposed, he acted the role himself (with a singer offstage). He had absorbed and memorized every detail, every gesture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Commensurately: the director of an opera should make a close study of the work at hand. Self-evidently, this cannot be assumed. With its high tech projections and mobile metallic slabs, the Robert Lepage Ring<\/em>, at the Met, furnished a notorious example. Reviewing Lepage’s Siegfried<\/em> for the Times Literary Supplement<\/em> in 2019, I reported<\/a>:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLepage\u2019s virtual-reality special effects include running water, floating leaves, slimy worms, scampering rodents, and a Forest Bird that sits in Siegfried\u2019s lap. The production works best where it is least intrusive: act one. In act two, the shallow playing space vitiates the expansiveness of Wagner\u2019s forest; the dragon, if impressively large and animated, is neither frightening nor poignant. In act three, the magic fire frames Siegfried\u2019s entire scene with Br\u0215nnhilde. Wagner asks that it disappear after Siegfried penetrates the flames for a reason: the mountaintop he attains trembles with a preternatural stillness, a preamble to apocalyptic events. This is but one example of Lepage\u2019s failure to listen. Directing his singers in this final scene \u2014 the most psychologically complex duet in all opera \u2014 he is clueless. [That is: Siegfried and Brunnhilde simply stand and sing.]\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n No less than the Lepage Ring<\/em>, Carrie Cracknell\u2019s Met Carmen<\/em> fails every criterion at hand. She not only cancels Bizet\u2019s score. Her \u201cfeminist\u201d take \u2013 with Carmen a victim of sexist societal norms \u2013 is a banal misreading. What\u2019s Carmen<\/em> about? Here<\/a><\/strong> again is Conrad L. Osborne:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDramatically, it introduces an agonizing twist on the [generic operatic] narrative: the couple\u2019s bond holds the seed of its own destruction, and tragedy ensues not when one or both partners die in the struggle against antagonist forces, but when one partner kills the other. Musically, it brings an unprecedented depth and darkness to a tone that is predominantly one of brilliant, crowd-pleasing entertainment, and once past the dashed expectations of its first audience, has found no contradiction there. And there is one more layer. While the history of opera is studded with works derived from mythical sources and which take place either in a mythical world or else one wherein mythical figures and disputes govern and\/or intrude into the \u201creal\u201d one (opera began that way, after all), there are only a few wherein a central character assumes a legendary status that itself verges on the mythical, and wherein mythical law, subliminally but quite clearly, guides the \u2018real world\u2019 action.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A crucial detail, derived from the Prosper Merimee novella Bizet adapted: Don Jose is himself a renegade outsider. In fact, he\u2019s killed a man and is well capable of doing so again. The mythic tragedy that Jose and Carmen enact, and which Bizet adapts, cannot be reduced to a lesson in victimization without shrinking the characters and miniaturizing their story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is the tone of today\u2019s Metropolitan Opera? I fear that it\u2019s summarized by the success of Kevin Puts\u2019s The Hours<\/em>. The new Met audience, insofar as it can be glimpsed, seems enraptured by this operatic adaptation of the Michael Cunningham novel and its cinematic sequel (with Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Understanding Toscanini<\/a><\/em><\/strong> (1987), I wrote: \u201cIn his landmark 1960 essay \u2018Masscult and Midcult,\u2019 Dwight Macdonald, stigmatizing both, wrote of midcult that it has \u2018the essential qualities of masscult [but] decently covers them with a cultural figleaf,\u2019 and that it \u2018pretends to respect the standards of high culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.\u2019 . . . Midcult\u2019s ambiguity, Macdonald argued, makes it the most insidious cultural stratum: ostensibly raising mass culture, it corrupts \u2013 packages and petrifies \u2013 high culture. It \u2018threatens to absorb both its parents. It may become stabilized as the norm of our culture.\u2019 . . To ponder the health of contemporary operatic and symphonic culture is to ponder the diverse ramifications of a vast, democratized audience headquartered here in the United States.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n To suggest that The Hours<\/em> exemplifies midcult may sound gratuitous. It may sound supercilious. This is not a makeshift effort, like Terrence Blanchard\u2019s Champion<\/em> and The Fire Shut Up in My<\/em> Bones<\/em>. It is an opera skilled and clever in many ways. Greg Pierce\u2019s libretto is ingenious. The vocal writing sings, and so does the orchestra. But aspirations outstrip means. Puts\u2019s idiom is fundamentally saccharine. It craves fulfillment in clich\u00e9. Does a sung enactment of a three-woman drama pondering Woolf\u2019s Mrs<\/em>. Dalloway<\/em> have to end with a vocal trio remembering Der Rosenkavalier<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Invoking Virginia Woolf is false. However unwittingly, it\u2019s opportunistic. The art of Virginia Woolf is nothing like the artifice of Kevin Puts. Read Mrs. Dalloway<\/em>. Its pronounced musicality \u2013 the lyric free verse of its language \u2013 is original. The narrative, though seamlessly bound, bristles with unlikely insights into character and behavior. And Woolf is heedlessly, ruthlessly unsentimental. She abhors clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is mine an extreme reading of a popular new work? Am I ricocheting off the wall? I recognize my own response in the reviews of Alex Ross in The New Yorker<\/em><\/a><\/strong> and Oussama Zahr in the New York Times<\/em><\/a><\/strong>. Self-evidently, they both tried hard to like The Hours <\/em>more than they could. So did I.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is The Hours<\/em> what we want today\u2019s Met to be? Could it be something else? Among the peak frustrations of recent seasons was a new Lohengrin<\/em> directed by Francois Girard: another dark, dystopic re-imagining of an opera flooded with air and light. It was nevertheless possible to enjoy Piotr Beczala, in the title role, as an \u201cin spite of\u201d accomplishment. Wagner\u2019s poetic ending — the reappearance of the swan \u2013 proved magically indestructible; the audience came to life. Thomas Mann somewhere describes Lohengrin<\/em> as \u201cblue\u201d \u2013 a memorable evocation. Black it is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thirty years ago, I encountered a Lohengrin<\/em> in Seattle directed by Stephen Wadsworth. Ben Heppner sang Lohengrin. The swan, for once, was wholly life-like. Its reappearance at the close consummated a moment purely Wagnerian. To paraphrase my viral <\/em>Tannh\u00e4user<\/em> blog<\/a>: <\/strong>as with the cataclysmic climax of the Venusberg orgy in the Met\u2019s Schenk\/Schneider-Siemssen Tannh\u00e4user<\/em> (its sudden transformation to a green valley and piping Shepherd Boy), a credulous rendering, abetted by Wagner\u2019s musical imagination, proved as breathtaking today as in times past. <\/p>\n\n\n