Voices of Opera: Performance, Production, Interpretation

MIKE DOHERTY AND ERIKA REIMAN Voices of Opera: Performance, Production, Interpretation SUMMARY OF PROCEEDINGS Opera's recent resurgence as a popular theatrical form may be attributed in part to its multivocality. The voices of opera are not simply the physical voices of the singers, but the productive collisions of ideas among composer ,librettist, singer, conductor, director, impresario, critic, and, not least, the general public. The struggle to make opera palatable to the widest possible audience produces a parallel struggle to preserve its artistic integrity. In recent years, these multiple collisions have created an operatic milieu whose excitement and ideological richness have attracted a wider audience than perhaps ever before. A crucial thread in the midst of all this activity has been the search for authenticity in operatic performance and production. Many of those who produce opera have instigated historical study in order to approximate the original historical experience of opera, particularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At other times these historical investigations influence specific production in a less dogmatic way, as jumping-off points for avowedly modern, but 'historically flavoured/ operatic productions. The first day of the two-day 'Voices of Opera' symposium was unified by explorations of the idea of operatic authenticity. Roger Parker, in opening the conference, prescribed neither slavish adherence to tradition nor radical deviation from it. Rather, he raised the question of authenticity in the staging of Verdi's operas, and why staging has received so much less historical attention than purely musical aspects of these works. Are nineteenth-century performing traditions part of, or external to, the basic text of an opera? The livrets de mise en scene or disposizioni sceniche that survive from the premiere performances of Verdi's operas suggest that a nineteenth-century Verdi performance was like nothing we are likely to witness today. Particularly startling was Parker's evocation of opera choruses moving in lockstep with the music and using identical hand gestures , like a troupe of synchronized swimmers. The livrets also suggest more subtle revaluations in light of censorship, relative importance of nonsinging characters, and visual interpretations of musical repetition. In the discussion period following his presentation, Parker suggested strongly that consideration of contemporary performance traditions might combat the current 'ossification' of Verdi's oeuvre in the repertory, and that UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 4, FALL 1998 VOICES OF OPERA 745 decreasing levels of government support might make such consideration a necessity. A similar topic was treated by Anna Migliarisi, who examined Il Corago, a seventeenth-century Italian treatise on operatic direction. Herself a talented director, Mgliarisi explored the roles, self-images, and public perceptions of the early baroque director in Italy. The treatise in her discussion situates itself at the very birth of the director's art as we commonly construct it. While effectively introducing these rustorical issues to her audience for the first time, she also raised important, often neglected, questions about modern direction. What is the appropriate training for a director, and what indeed constituteshis/herjob description? In lightofthe recent prominence of directors such as Peter Sellars, Harry Kupfer, and Atom Egoyan in the production of opera, we would do well to consider the history of their profession. The difficulties inherent in reconciling the contemporary with the archaic corne to the fore in Hans Pfitzner's Palestrina, which was the subject ofStephen McClatchie's paper. As McClatchie explained, the controversial Pfitzner felt the threat of futurism and aimed in his composing to overcome what he saw as 'cultural decadence,' as evinced by atonality, Americanism, and the 'Jewish international influence.' McClatchie examined the character of Palestrina as a thinly disguised image of Pfitzner himself, or at least as an image of Pfitzner as the composer liked to think of himself - 'the final word on Romanticism.' According to McClatchie, Pfitzner's style of selfaggrandizement rendered him ultimately impotent as a visionary. McClatchie's reading of the opera centred around Palestrina's moment of inspiration, which is evoked as an instance of quotation rather than creation, as Pfitzner's score embodies portions of Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli. For McClatchie, Pfitzner's association ofhimself with Palestrina as an individualist was undermined by the use of quotation...