for andante.com, December 2001
Pity the poor director!
Is she not damned to shoulder the blame for so many problems of opera that precede her arrival — and dwarf her?
How can one quarrel with the director without protesting the repertory paradigm, which demands that the opera house be both a hushed museum of masterpieces and a go-go new theater — on the same evening, in the same house, frequently with the same work?
Mustn’t we address the brittle and dogmatic modernist musical theories regnant from the 1920s through the 1960s, theories which swayed too many composers to believe that addressing the public and progressive thought were mutually divergent paths, thus leaving talented and restless directors without their proper métier — good new work?
And what about the seductive 1980s literary theories of deconstruction, which encouraged gullible Yale graduates to squint quizzically at the very idea of authorship of a text — further emboldening directors (as well as critics) to fill with smoke and mirrors the authorial vacuum made inevitable by Adorno and fashionable by Saussure?
There’s more. How do we get the attention of millennial mass culture, in which sophisticated new technologies have so irresistibly colonized the global imagination that any music requiring vibrato now sounds hopelessly retro? What’s our emergency-response to the implosion of primary and secondary music education, from the ruins of which generations of young people emerge thinking that music means only Destiny’s Child or Britney Spears — and early music is the Beatles?
Above all, what do we Americans do with ourselves? How does a wealthy, still-young republic, one that has always prided itself on its blue-jeans populism — our presidents don’t commission Gloriana for their inaugurations, they reunite Fleetwood Mac — how do the artists and audiences of such a republic ever feel authentic telling their own stories in what still seems like artistic drag, the templates and technologies codified by a Europe of long ago?
And we’re complaining about directors?
Well, no, actually — at least not personally. In my brief and merry life in American opera I’ve enjoyed ardent and intelligent collaboration with almost every man or woman who has directed Little Women. I’ve also directed my own work — more on that later. Nonetheless, we can pose some intelligent challenges to the director’s role.
Isn’t it time, for example, to entertain the notion that the best way for opera to face today’s world is not to impale Violetta Valéry with a dirty syringe and dump her on the Lower East Side or in Brixton — all while Verdi’s 19th-century orchestra flails away — but to commission a new Camille from, say, Kaija Saariaho? (Can Camille Paglia be lured into writing her first libretto?)
Commissioning that new piece then frees a director to stage La traviata as written: in the 18th century (or, arguably, in the 19th, as Verdi had planned to set it in his own time but was forbidden by censors to do so). In other words, isn’t it time for artists and opera companies to intelligently distinguish between their creative and their curatorial responsibilities?
Isn’t it time, as well, to challenge directors to define their art as something more than revisionist set design? Placing Don Giovanni in 1920s Newport may excite the costumer, the program annotator, and the overworked freelance writer looking for a hook on which to hang his preview piece for the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section. But dressing Leporello in Beau Brummels rather than breeches isn’t the same as deeply understanding how characters are expressed in music and text, guiding a cast to realize those characters, and designing stage pictures and patterns that arise from, not merely frame, those characters’ interplay. This is a more thankless job in opera than in the spoken theater, because the opera composer is really the director. He’s made so many non-negotiable choices about the pacing, interpretation, and emotional temperature of any given scene that there’s less room for a director to make the decisions that really color the performance of a play. This, however, is not Mozart’s problem. Want more interpretive room? Direct plays: they’re more flexible documents. Plan to direct opera? First admit that the score (at least from the 18th century onward) has done much of your work.
Yet the issues are more complex, both for old work and for new. At important premières (world, country, international capitals) it is ethically obligatory — no less — to present as transparent a reading of the new piece as possible. No audience can distinguish between a brand-new piece and a directorial slant. But what of a work overexposed to the point of cliché? In an ideal world, as Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times once noted, there would be enough conservatories and small companies (or large, publicly funded companies) to present the standard repertory in clear and, literally, conservative readings. A large public, regularly visiting these opera museums, would develop an informed understanding of the standard repertoire. They’d be naturally curious, then, to visit the contemporary companies, both for those new works the museums don’t exist to mount and for new visions of those warhorses with which they’re familiar. But most American cities are hard-pressed to support even one company, and that company must perforce angle itself as both the community’s basic resource and as the exciting contemporary alternative to itself. (In the U.S., only New York City Opera currently enjoys the privilege of authentic alternative status: its recent World War I-era Bohème eludes charges of irresponsibility because just next door stands the Met, whose Zeffirelli production is just what a first exposure to that score should be.)
Things get even trickier when you address unusual repertoire. Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia hasn’t been heard in New York City for decades. A recent production at Glimmerglass Opera made this piece — the music of which I long admired, the whole of which I thought preachy and psychologically opaque — a deeply intelligent and heartbreaking evening. But the director worked this magic by repositioning an ancient Roman story as the bedtime reading of an unhappy couple in dreary post-war London, and by making characters interact whom the authors strictly forbade to do so. What are the criteria by which we criticize this choice? The Rape of Lucretia isn’t a repertory piece. But it’s not, at 54, quite new either. I believe this director’s psychological insights could have ignited this performance even if he had kept the piece in period. But perhaps he needed, in some intuitive or semi-conscious way, those gaslights and bad handbags to invigorate a perhaps-unjustly-neglected opera. Do you throw out the inspiration with the incorrect sets?
Stephen Sondheim wrote music for a quintet of Lieder singers in A Little Night Music; and, unusually for this conscientiously theatrical composer, made no attempt to determine where they’d fit in the play. “I need them musically. You figure it out,” he told a baffled Harold Prince, the director. Prince, at the 1972 premiere, made them socialite observers; In the 1994 production I led in Washington D.C., I used them as everything from set pieces (cars, fountains, statues, a dining table, and, once, a locomotive) to ghosts working benevolently to guide the characters to their appropriate erotic conclusions. “Figure it out,” the writer commanded, and we did. Here are productions, I suggest, that make the case for legitimate revisionist direction. But are they exceptions that prove the rule?
More questions like this and I’ll exceed my word-limit.
In any event, I retain a perverse gratitude not for our most brilliant directors, but for our most wrongheaded ones. Their undoubtedly well-meant misuses of authorial power have made unmissable the urgent need for actual new authors — composers and librettists — to resume leadership of the operatic discourse. The directorial mind and the compositional mind are actually quite similar: one journalist described, accurately, my method of composing Little Women as “directing the piece first, then writing it afterwards.” What if, though, you believe as a director that the truth of the piece is somewhat different from what’s written — and you’ve written it? I’ll give a full report on that last question after this summer: I’m set to direct my first Little Women in August of 2004.