Re-Visioning Opera

styles in production RE.VISIONING OPERA Daniel Quinn In the 1950s Peter Brook was directing opera at The Met, Maria Callas was transforming the accepted notions of dramatic acting in opera, and Wieland Wagner was reshaping and redefining a neo-Bayreuth staging of the works of Richard Wagner. In the 1960s Peter Brook founded a Theatre Of Cruelty, following the publication and ever expanding impact and dissemination of Antonin Artaud 's manifesto "The Theatre and Its Double." Maria Callas retired from the opera stage leaving behind an interest and respect for the previously dismissed and neglected operas of the Bel Canto period. Wieland died in 1966, after creating a different interpretive style in his grandfather's work. Peter Brook published The Empty Space. Artaud became internationally known, emerging as the pivotal influence In the founding of experimental companies and radical theatrical productions, including Joseph Chaikin, Patrice Chereau, Jerzy Grotowski, Jorge Lavelli, and Luca Ronconi. In 1970 Italian composer Luciano Berio collaborated with members of Chaikin's Open Theatre company in the realization of his stagework Opera at the Sante Fe Opera in New Mexico. Incorporating The Open Theatre production of Terminal, Berio tried to forge a new kind of musical and performance language for the opera stage. Risks were being taken, and the naturalistic conventions of standard operatic performance were being thrown into question. The turmoil of the period created an awareness of a society beyond the walls of the opera house, that the opera house could no longer afford to ignore if it wanted to survive. Enter the work of the visionary 87 director, of people like Chereau, Lavelli, and Ronconi and the ongoing and unmistakeable revolution of the opera form. Amidst this revolutionary background stand out the enlightened leadership of Claudio Abbado at Milan's Teatro Alla Scala, Rolf Liebermann at The Paris Opera, and the musicologist and historian Andrew Porter. In an Introduction to the recording of Verdi's I Lombardi, for Instance, Porter speaks of "the diverse techniques by which a theatrical experience may effectively be constructed... after the teachings of Artaud." In an ongoing storm of misguided and shrill critical attacks leveled against opera staging Porter speaks with a sensibility that is almost unknown in the field of music criticism. Cliched and unending critical attacks on theatrical innovation on the opera stage reveal an ignorance of the transformational impact of Artaud on the modern theatre. It even more clearly reveals the gulf between musical and dramatic criticism that only a few like Porter seems to have bridged. A host of talented directors have provided solutions on the practical level. FAUST Rolf Liebermann's regime at The Paris Opera has included several productions by Patrice Chereau, Jorge Lavelli, Peter Stein, and Giorgio Strehler. In 1976, the Opera brought their Jorge Lavelli production of Gounod's Faust and the Giorgio Strehler production of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro to America. The Faust was staged in the era of its nineteenth-century composition within a Crystal Palace design by Max Bignens. This particular concept released the work from its sixteenth-century setting and supposed "realism" to a more imagistic placement as a mirror in glass and iron of its own time. It was attacked by the press in seemingly formula music criticism as a "distortion" of the composer's intention. The sense of wonder and 88 theatrical magic that Lavelli and Bignens invoked was dismissed In customary and oblivious fashion. More to the point, the 1978-79 season at La Scala-a season that illustrates a whole new direction in opera staging-was notable for two other productions directed by Lavelli and designed by his ongoing collaborator, Max Bignens. These were Puccini's Madama Butterfly, and the two one act operas of Ravel, L'Heure Espagnole and L'Enfant et les Sortileges. The new directional sensibility and spirit of innovation was equally present in Luca Ronconi's direction of Verdi's Don Carlo, Luciano Damiani's production of Rossini's Mose, Giorgio Strehler's staging of Verdi's Macbeth, and for different kinds of reasons, the European premiere of Krystoff Penderecki's 1978 work Paradise Lost (produced in collaboration with the Chicago Lyric Opera). The presence of the...