The Sea and the Stars and the Wastes of the Desert

ROGER PARKER The Sea and the Stars and the Wastes of the Desert Those who wish to abolish death (whether by physical or metaphysical means) - at what stage of life do they want it to be halted? At the age of twenty? At thirty-five, in our prime? To be thirty-five for two years sounds attractive enough, certainly. But for three years? A little dult surely. For five years ridiculous . For ten - tragic. The film is so absorbing that we want this bit to go on and on ... You mean, you want the projector stopped, to watch a single motionless frame? No, no, no, but ... Perhaps you'd like the whole sequence made up as an endless band, and projected indefinitely? Not that, either. The sea and the stars and the wastes of the desert go on forever, and will not die. But the sea and the stars and the wastes of the desert are dead already. Michael Frayn, Constructions Imagine the following. You are fortunate enough to be able to attend performances of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera in London, Milan, and then New York. The performances are all different - different casts, conductors, orchestras, staging teams - but you of course have expectations of both difference and sameness. You will expect the singers, despite their individual quirks, to sing a more or less identical musical text. True, a high note here or there m'ay be interpolated to display what used to be called the 'money notes'; and more often than one might think - there may be a discreet transposition to ease the depredations of age or nerves at exposed moments; but these are matters of small detail. You will also expect an identical literary text, although again there may be a wider variation than you might expect for such a classic of the repertoire. Some performances may choose, with scant evidence from the original sources, to substitute aspects of an original Swedishsetting, thus replacing an occasional place or character name;' and there is one notorious line in the first scene (the Giudice describes Ulrica as 1 Verdi originally set his opera in Sweden, and was constrained at a fairly early stage of composition to transfer the setting to Boston. Efforts to restore the Swedish 'original' will always remain half-hearted and tokenist, however, if only because the 'Bostonian' names were clearly in place as Verdi was composing and are frequently mentioned in the sung text. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 4, FALl 1998 AUTHENTICITY IN STAGING VERDI'S OPERAS 751 'dell'immondo sangue de' negri') which is often censored, at least in New York. And you will trust that the conductor and orchestral musicians have identical parts before them. Yet conductors routinely adjust details of orchestration and dynamics to suit the theatrical space and thus aid audibility. But what of the staging of these three productions? Your expectations of sameness in that department will, if you are at all a seasoned campaigner, be of the most modest imaginable; and a good job too. In London there is no scenery except a naked light bulb (which swings incessantly), a crooked doll's chair, and an equally crooked bed suspended halfway up a bare walt from which the soprano precariously sings her main aria. In Milan there is a hugely costly recreation of eighteenth-century Stockholm, with real horses pulling real carriages, stately ships passing in the brilliantly lit background. And in New York the staging is what die-hards proudly call 'traditional,' which means that it looks about the same as it would have when the people bankrolling the production were young enough to enjoy newness: a kind of mid-century pastiche or - more accurately - a midcentury frozen in aspic.:l. But now imagine a different world, one in which - through some unimaginable warp in our present civilization - the staging world is as relatively fixed as the musical or literary one. In just the same way as there is a libretto and a rnusical score, there is now a 'book' that tells us how to stage Un baUD in maschera: what the sets and costumes should look like, who stands where, even what gestures they are...