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  • Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky
  • Ruth V. Gross
David J. Levin . Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky. U of Chicago P: Chicago, 2007. 254 pp. US$ 35 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0-226-477522-6.

A night at the opera these days, especially in European houses, is not merely an amusing diversion. With the advance of what has come to be known as "Regieopera," even operas once considered "light-hearted romps" are now staged in ways that often force the audience to deal with interpretations that are, at best, provocative and, at worst, wrongheaded. David J. Levin, in his intelligent and challenging book, analyzes and describes some of the developments in opera productions of the last fifty years and boldly argues that for the survival of opera in the future, unsettling stagings are essential.

Levin starts from the premise — one contrary to the norm — that opera in performance is itself an "unsettled" art form. By the very fact that when produced, it is a work on stage that touches on a number of different and competing modes of expression and artistic systems, opera is unruly. When opera performances have been the subjects of study, up until now, the questions raised have been mostly of a historical nature, for example: has the production observed performance practices? or what were the social conditions under which the operas were written or first performed? Only a handful of musicologists before Levin have concerned themselves with questions about how the nature of performance might change the understanding of the opera text itself, and these few have simply asked the question rather than providing a real exegesis on the subject. Levin's book begins a new field of inquiry: mapping the intersection of contemporary developments in opera production and contemporary critical concerns in opera studies.

Levin, who for many years worked as a dramaturge at opera houses in Germany and the United States, provides the reader with examples of staged productions that, for the most part, radically reexamine and reconceptualize the underlying operatic texts in such a way that, in the best cases, they uncover new explanations of the works. This is the kind of "unsettling" experience Levin wishes for opera goers. Unlike many opera critics, Levin believes that radical and innovative readings of canonical operas, like the ones he discusses in chapters 2-5 of his book, are a promising development and bode well for the future of operatic art.

The chapters of his book, as the subtitle suggests, deal with each of four important and familiar operas in the standard repertoire by four different major composers — Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Mozart's and Lorenzo Da Ponte's Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Verdi's Don Carlos; the last chapter [End Page 388] deals with a seldom performed opera by a lesser-known composer, Alexander von Zemlinsky's Der König Kandaules. Levin has chosen the specific productions he discusses on the basis of their being widely available on DVDs, so that the reader can also become a spectator of these performances and be unsettled by them firsthand.

Because Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is my favourite opera, I was particularly curious about what Levin had to say about this work. Because what we might call "controversial" or more figurative stagings of this opera are not available on the commercial DVD market, Levin decided to compare the way each of two conventional and literal productions staged part of act III, the scene in which Wagner conceptualized a scene of performance — Beckmesser's delivery of the Meisterlied composed by Walther von Stolzing but drafted in Hans Sachs's hand. Levin's interest is in how this scene is then conceptualized in the two conventional productions. One of the directors has staged the scene to reveal the motivation for a gesture that Wagner himself had not explained in his text, and this touch is evidence for Levin that, even within conventionality, there can be streaks of wit and innovation that illuminate and explain what may previously have been invisible or overlooked. On a small scale, this is...

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