October 06, 2006: There's More to Opera than the Music!

For the better part of this decade the San Francisco press seems to have enjoyed invoking the term "Eurotrash" when writing about productions at the San Francisco Opera. For the most part this seems to have indicated a reactionary trend based on the precept that the staging should not get in the way of the music, particularly the performances of the singers that the public has paid good money to hear. Now Philip Gossett has written a 675-page book (Divas and Scholars) about the practice of producing opera in the first half of the nineteenth century; and Charles Rosen has reviewed the book for The New York Review. Given his background (as both scholar and performer), one can understand Rosen's inclination to place music above all; but I came away from his review feeling he might be the small boy with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Gossett seems to have tried to capture what the work practices were in the period he studied; but, since he provided more than enough musical grist for Rosen's mill, Rosen could evade any of the issues Gossett raises about the actual people who composed (and designed) and performed (and directed).

All this relates to Eurotrash, because that word seems to have become the catch-all for describing controversial stagings of opera (probably even when the director is not European, as is the case with Peter Sellars). Gossett offers a sensible comment about how Verdi might have reacted to such practices:

Verdi's reaction to any such controversy would have been to look at the box-office receipts. We could do worse.

Indeed, but Rosen is not content to leave well enough alone:

I do not think that Verdi would have found good receipts sufficient compensation for the 2001 production of Un Ballo in Maschera in Barcelona that featured the conspirators sitting on toilets and the introduction of an irrelevant homosexual rape.

To address the second point first, if the rape victim was Oscar, then I would need to know more before making a judgment call on its relevance, since there seem to be many who adhere to the idea that Oscar was sort of a Ganymede to Gustav's Jupiter. So, if we really want to portray the conspirators as bad guys (rather than, say, political dissidents), then it makes sense to give them some nasty things to do. This takes us to the first point: If they are going to do nasty things, you may as well give them some nasty settings, such as toilets. In semiotic language what we are seeing are some staging decisions that are connotative, and Rosen's reaction seems to be that we opera lovers can live on denotation alone. My own feeling is that, if a stage director knows how to use connotation effectively, more power to him!

Rosen then decides to depart from the track of Gossett's book in order to riff on da capo arias in Handel, probably because there has been an abundance of imaginative and outrageous ways to stage an extended piece of music that may or may not distract from the technical virtuosity of the singer. Since nothing matters but the music to Rosen, he is indignant that

you cannot make a "da capo" aria tell a story. Because of its formal structure, you can only impose a story on it by actions or gestures which are completely extraneous to the music: the return of the A section can be more intense, but that is not a narrative device but an emotional and lyrical one, and it requires no action or gesture but only great singing.

Again, this misses the point, because Rosen wishes to examine the aria in isolation from its context. Once we take context into account, we recognize that the aria is embedded in a narrative structure. One might say that it's function is to reflect on "where things stand" in that structure (and the text being sung is usually pretty explicit about that). Repeating the A section returns the audience from the reflection to the narrative. I would have thought that Rosen knew enough narrative theory to see this point, but he seems to have been wearing his musical blinders when he wrote his review.

This takes us to my final example, equally narrow in its scope:

A staging should arise from the music.

If an aria is a reflection on "where things stand" at a particular moment in the progress of the narrative, then a good staging can reflect on the entire narrative. In so doing it can also provide the audience with a specific point of view. Consider the Ballo example: Are the conspirators malicious thugs; or are they "freedom fighters?" Remember, the assassination of Gustav was so controversial that the libretto had to be reworked to change the setting to Colonial Boston. As a result of that revision, the leading conspirators were renamed "Sam" and "Tom." When that version is done in the United States, we have a tendency to associate those names with Adams and Paine and may not be that grieved when the colonial governor (AKA Gustav III) is assassinated. None of this ever gets translated into musical terms; but, in spite of Rosen's puritan stance, any staging that did not take problems of point-of-view into account would be lacking (or at least reduced to a concert performance by the soloists with some superfluous activity).