Lotfi Mansouri: An Operatic Journey

Prologue: Staging My Own Funeral

• Prologue • Staging My Own Funeral Clamori e canti di battaglia, addio! Della gloria d’Otello è questo il fin! arrigo boito libretto to Verdi’s Otello Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! . . . Farewell. Othello’s occupation’s gone! william shakespeare Othello I t was one of those events that really trigger mixed feelings. On the one hand, a gala evening at the San Francisco Opera is always a thrilling occasion for me, a reencounter with a number of talented friends from the profession, past and present, as well as the dignitaries who come to pay honor. While the planning of such an event is always a challenging exercise in logistics, the end result is invariably a stellar evening which everybody enjoys, and it generally commemorates a major event in an operatic career, such as Plácido Domingo’s thirtieth anniversary of association with the company or Marilyn Horne’s fortieth. The Farewell Gala on September 8, 2000, however, would be a bittersweet one for me, because it marked my retirement from the San Francisco Opera, arguably the second most important opera company in the Western Hemisphere, after New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It would bring down the curtain on an association of nearly forty years, fourteen of which I spent as general director while continuing to mount stage productions. I had been the only company head in the United States to serve this double function in a major house, although it often happens at theaters in Europe and Canada. Knowing the event would be an evening 2 } p r o l o g u e of heart-wrenching farewells, I was beginning to feel as if I were staging something akin to my own obsequies. To make matters more complicated , I was haunted by the premonition that I might be turning over the company to an uncertain future. Uncertain? From the beginning of my career, starting with student productions as both singer and stage director in California, ranging to master classes in Bayreuth and Berlin and positions at European and American opera houses, it had always gone without saying that the function of operatic production was to illuminate the meanings and values of the musical and verbal text, to search for and externalize hidden significance and subtexts, and, using intuition and a full armory of acquired skills, to bring the true meaning of each opera as close to the awareness of the audience as possible—in short, to read between the lines, without neglecting to read the lines. Now this approach was being challenged by a new wind sweeping in from Europe, Central Europe in particular, and given a wide variety of appellations, ranging from the rhapsodic to the vituperative . This new movement saw the actual work solely as a point of departure , to be enhanced—or obfuscated, depending on your outlook—by the subjective agenda of the stage director, and those approaches could take some fairly bizarre turns. To complicate matters, the kind of production my colleagues and I had always regarded as self-explanatory was now being ridiculed as old-fashioned or lightweight and—under the worst of circumstances—decried, with sociopolitical overtones, as “pandering to the rich.” One of the cradles of this new school of thought was the Opera in Frankfurt, Germany, spearheaded by the general director of that house, conductor Michael Gielen, assisted by a native Californian named Pamela Rosenberg, whom I knew fairly well, having served with her on the jury of some vocal competitions in Europe. Meanwhile, she had moved up the ranks of various European theaters to a position as codirector of the Württemberg State Opera in Stuttgart, where she had been tapped as my successor at the San Francisco Opera. Whatever anyone’s point of view might be about the function of staging, this succession would certainly represent a watershed in the history of operatic production in North America, and I frankly had my doubts. For the time being, however, there was a gala to be planned and some wonderful accolades from high places to enjoy, including a Certificate of Commendation from the U.S. Senate issued by California’s senior sena- Staging My Own Funeral { 3 tor, Dianne Feinstein, a former mayor of San Francisco, and a letter of congratulations from President Bill Clinton. The Gala itself would be attended by celebrities and feature a grand parade of stars. It was meant to be my formal farewell...