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Overview
Believing in Opera describes in detail the seminal opera productions of the last fifty years, starting with Peter Brook in London after the war, and continuing with the work of such directors and producers as Patrice Chéreau in Bayreuth, Peter Sellars and David Alden in America, Ruth Berghaus in Frankfurt, and such British directors as Richard Jones, Graham Vick, Peter Hall, and David Pountney. Through his descriptions of these works, Sutcliffe states that theatrical opera has been enormously influenced by the editing style, imagery, and metaphor commonplace in the cinema and pop videos. The evolution of the performing arts depends upon revitalization and defamiliarization, he asserts. The issue is no longer naturalism, but the liberation of the audience's imagination powered by the music.
Sutcliffe, an opera critic for many years, argues that opera is theater plus music of the highest expressive quality, and as a result he has often sided with unconventional and novel theatrical interpretations. He believes that there is more to opera than meets the ear, and his aim is to further the process of understanding and interpretation of these important opera productions. No other book has attempted this kind of monumental survey.
Originally published in 1997.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691600604 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #356 |
| Pages: | 482 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Believing in Opera
By Tom Sutcliffe
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1996 Tom SutcliffeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-01563-7
CHAPTER 1
Believing in opera
In theatre and in opera we can and should apply moral standards, but there is no rulebook defining the right approach to performance and interpretation. Opera is not a sport. The purpose of performing opera is to bring the work to life, to make its meaning tell, to help the audience believe in the truth and vitality of its message. Every serious attempt to perform an opera adds to the richness and depth of that process.
Aficionados of the interpretative and performing arts know that what happens in front of their eyes and before their ears matters profoundly – because of what it means. That process of mattering is the reception into the mind by a member of the audience of the sense intended or perceived, not invariably the same thing. When we in the audience are engaged and pleased, we feel that our experience is mattering. The performance rings true for us, and that truth has implications which resonate. This is the crux of modern controversies about theatrical and operatic interpretation and the obligation to composer or playwright. We may associate works we know with all sorts of elements. We may think that the music of The Ring 'is locked in time in the middle of the last century: it has a gravitas, a dignity, a spaciousness that does not accord with paper-bags, pistols, syringes, Mexican Waves and so forth', as the broadcaster John Amis wrote in his column in the Tablet. We may believe like the composer and critic Robin Holloway that the music of Wagner's dramas requires the flowing woollen and skin costumes German chieftains wore a thousand years ago. But those are our associations, connected with our knowledge of the gothic revival or of the deeper past or of grand opera in the time of Queen Victoria; they are not inherent in the works themselves, articulating stories to stir emotions and provoke mirth and grief.
I have never found satisfaction in a performance from knowing that it is being done as it should be, from seeing decorum observed – as if theatre were like the splendid courtly rituals of the Sun King at Versailles. It is true that the codification of a performing art such as classical ballet, where great skill and physical presence and preparation count for so much, can lead enthusiasts to devote their attention to the mere fact of the satisfying of outward forms, the accomplishment of the appearance. Equally, the technology of mechanical reproduction which has become so sophisticated at the end of the 20th century encourages a fetishistic devotion to the superficial actuality, not the idea it exists to serve.
I remember that when I was a child and playing with my friends we used to say, 'It's all right; it's only make-believe.' But it wasn't all right, because what was most frightening was not what happened, but what we thought it meant – what it ended up meaning in that so much richer, more potent world inside our heads. I used to frighten myself in all sorts of ways, imagining what might be, what probably was if only I knew. When I started going to the theatre, around the age of four (because the theatre was just a street away), I found the world of the ballet completely fascinating – not because of the rules of movement that governed what happened on stage, but because of the unspoken sentiments and passions, the defiance of the everyday, that it represented. Perhaps the verbal repartee of boulevard entertainment would have been too adult. But ballet suited the young and innocent imagination perfectly. There was no need to translate what was implied, to put in other terms the distant imaginative horizons revealed to me in these works – so wonderfully alternative to life, bicycles, shopping, ration points, the cleaning lady Mrs Fosbrook, Goofy our chow, the stony Southsea beach, the old lady next door who taught me to play patience. Going to theatre was like going abroad, whether it was ballet with Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, or Song of Norway, or Carmen, or Ivor Novello's Perchance to Dream. Nobody ever had to explain to me about reality and imagination, about the relationship between what was happening in front of me on the stage and what I was lapping up inside my head and storing for future nourishment. In many ways the live theatre was much more fulfilling than the cinema, because the realization was less oppressive, less constraining. The cinema did it all for one. In the theatre it was up to me. I can remember the shock of discovering that not everybody regarded the theatre – and what happened on stage – as important. I think it was my father who later maintained the concept, 'It doesn't matter; it's only a play' – in the same way that fiction, borrowed from the library, didn't matter because it was only a story.
But the point of the theatre is, after all, what happens in the minds of the audience, what they/we believe. The purpose of the performers is to make believe, and the believing that goes with operatic performances is affected by a wider array of elements than in the case of any other art-form. In an ideal operatic performance, the singers will be able to realize their vocal lines with a wealth of colour and technical vocal facility, and will be singing in the language they share with the audience to which the listeners can immediately and subtly react. The context of the story will be indicated in various ways by the setting and the clothes that the characters and chorus are wearing. The music will profitably distort how time affects the tale. In opera the music – when it is running – cannot be stopped, but how it flows is crucial to how we react to it.
Music as it so irresistibly floods over us results in firm emotional conviction. And the flow of the music into our minds and memories has all sorts of subliminal surreptitious flickerings. It is precisely when time is – in a sense – thus suspended by our own digestion that the work in our imagination as audience may be at its most fruitful. The purpose Of performance is, after all, invariably what happens inside the minds of the individuals experiencing and receiving the performance. Many things in opera can astonish one: the sound of a voice on a particular note, a glance, the lighting on stage, a passage of orchestral music so familiar but suddenly so infinitely beautiful. This book is not a compendium of all those delightful lost moments. But it is focused – with determination and sufficient clarity – on the issue of theatrical interpretation, the vital context of everything else in the experience which qualifies and fertilizes the whole meaning. It is the circumstantial theatricality of an operatic performance that governs the business of believing what it is all about. The process of believing is very complicated in opera. One may be profoundly influenced and affected by the music. Opera is prima facie music. But what one believes and how one is led to believe it is a consequence of the staging, with its physical images and designs, its sense of a period or none, its manipulation of time. Believing precedes feeling, and believing (or the suspension of disbelief, the acceptance of convenient conventions – such as that plump Pavarotti is in fact a young peasant, with romantic dreams, named Nemorino) is the purpose of everything that is done. Believing is the basis of effective interpretation.
There is a tendency to get stuck on the surface of the performing arts, to assume that what you see or hear is what you get. But, as with all creativity, what is interesting is not what is obvious, but what the obvious leads to, ambiguous subtleties approximating to what we feel to be truth. If, as a Redemptorist Father reassuringly reminded me, certainty is the enemy of faith, then beyond doubt the point of theatre and opera is starting hares – not catching them. In this book I attempt to provide a monument to those theatrical realizations of operas that made me think, that took me further on my journey with the work, that perhaps sometimes made me accept as worth attention an opera I had previously written off as uninteresting. Books about opera generally talk about the story and the music as if that just about adds it all up. But I have come to see – over the last 35 years – that, as with the Christian creeds, so with music and story in opera, the statement is not the end but the beginning of understanding.
There is a clear difference in dynamic between the most elevated and sophisticated forms of musical and spoken theatre. Opera has a non-linear, non-argumentative, non-logical character – which is intensely demanding if audiences· give it proper attention. The combination of music and text is innately suggestive, like lateral thinking. Textual understanding is not the priority. Reading and understanding text unmodulated in performance by the nuances of vocal and musical qualification (as happens increasingly in opera-houses because of surtitles) may detract from and obscure other aspects of the imaginative stimuli being offered the opera audience to edit and assimilate.
Audiences always love surtitles, because being able to read what is being sung (which may be hard to make out even when you understand the language of the singing) makes us feel gratifyingly in control. We live in a strongly verbal culture, and understanding the verbal side of opera can make us smugly confident we know what's going on. Yet, while enabling an audience to follow a cold text closely, surtitles often hinder spectators from observing and responding to the detailed acting, the reactions by other characters to the singer in full flood, the meaning of movement – the whole context. Singing words audibly is never easy, and it is not good for the future health of opera if surtitles make performance in translation less viable. New and young singers need to learn to communicate musically in their home tongue. In their apprenticeship they need to experience what it actually feels like to achieve direct poetic and dramatic communication with the audience using a shared primary language. There is a huge difference between singing your own language and being understood, and singing another language and not being understood – or being partially understood. Young singers need to grow into truthful actors rather than just reproduce the effects of acting. If you are talking to somebody you usually look at them to understand what they mean, but nowadays opera audiences can spend much of their time reading surtitles above the performance – eyes buried in printed text. That is not theatre.
A lot of meaning in a performance is conveyed obliquely through the attitude of characters to each other and to what they are themselves singing (their musical and textual material). Is Leporello proud of what his Catalogue aria is outlining about his master's seductions in Don Giovanni, or amused, or shocked? Is it a friendly warning to Elvira, or an aggression against all women not far from rape? A performer might convey a whole range of ideas, and Elvira's reaction will build her characterization in turn. But to follow such details requires the audience to attend continuously to faces and movements, stage pictures and atmosphere. In effect, surtitles encourage audiences to refer back to and draw on their generalized memory of the work they are hearing (more than they are seeing) rather than respond to the specific performance of the moment.
Some may question if that matters. It is true that one of the good things about listening to opera on record or on radio is the bonus of hearing the finest casts singing in the original language with a direct translation of what they sing available to hand: just as Handel's Italian operas in 18th-century London were followed exactly in an auditorium well-lit throughout the performance, if one were not too busy quizzing one's neighbours. The concept of surtitles in the opera-house is not unprecedented, and it is better for an audience to understand some of the language they are hearing than none. But it is dispiriting, when one visits Paris (the capital of operatic snobbery as manifested in a commitment to 'original language' that has coincided with and helped cause the disappearance of the tradition of native French opera) to hear, for example, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin sung in unstylish, impersonal, internationalized Russian by a cast containing not a single native Russian speaker. You do not have to understand Russian to recognize the detailed nuances of, say, Sergei Leiferkus's superb delivery of the text through his singing – and to know when that kind of artistry is not happening.
Opera is and always will be two things, and can be approached with equal validity from either end. It is music harnessed to dramatic purpose, music in which the composer becomes a playwright – with the assistance, usually, of a librettist (or poet, as Verdi would say). The music is the means whereby the drama is realized, and, though listeners following opera in terms of just music and words are missing out on theatre, there is no denying that what they are enjoying is opera. They experience opera rather as one may read a play on the page, peopling the stage in their mind's eye with more or less detail according to their own imaginative fire.
Equally, and this is my major concern here, opera is theatre plus music of the highest expressive quality, without which one would not perceive the insides of the characters or sometimes their situation. Every great operatic composer has felt himself to be the servant of theatre, and most (by no means just Wagner) have seen themselves as servants with vital revolutionary programmes of theatrical improvement to put into effect. Dissatisfied with the operatic theatre they inherited, they have wanted to create something more powerful and real, better able to convey their compelling metaphysical burden. Handel's detailed stage directions reveal how important theatrical realization was to him, and the same can equally be said of Gluck, or Berg. Opera composers are propagandists, in a sense, whose propaganda is so persuasive because their music of genius performs as a surreptitious and subversive theatrical fifth column.
The mixed or dirty (that is, impure) musico-theatrical character of the operatic art is, incidentally, what makes it resistant to television. It is almost impossible to present staged opera truthfully on television, for much that is vital in the actual theatrical experience gets omitted. The television director's editing suppresses a great deal in terms of lighting, atmosphere, incident and reaction that the audience in an opera-house is accustomed to absorb effortlessly or subliminally. This gesamt character may also suggest that modern opera production style is not just a temporary fad, is in fact more fundamental than merely a question of style or aesthetic – which may be legitimate matters of personal taste. Because it is not linear like spoken drama, opera readily suggests a surrealistic kind of collage on stage. Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos is a prophetic work. Its staging invites cinematic sleight of hand.
As we approach the 21st century, we cannot disinvent the cinema. Opera is an art-form very like cinema where we find often heroic narratives with varieties of information edited together for particular conclusions. What in poetry would be figures of speech, rhythm and rhyme, in the cinema (and in opera) have all sorts of visual and musical equivalents. Narrative and context are explored through a variety of atmospheric and verbal means.
Cinema audiences find it easy to understand what is being expressed and communicated by so many non-verbal means with a jumble of images carefully balanced by editing. To a large extent the narrative process in film is defined through a sequence of reaction shots: one face after another keeps us close to the idea of events interpreted from different points of view. Presenting opera on stage also frequently demands and receives a kind of collage of different physical and visual elements, as well as the theatrical equivalent of montage. In live opera we the audience have to do the editing ourselves as we go along – though the skilled stage director sets up channels (especially at crucial passages) that should irresistibly command attention.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Believing in Opera by Tom Sutcliffe. Copyright © 1996 Tom Sutcliffe. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsForeword
1 Believing in opera
2 Peter Brook and theatrical opera
3 Theory of interpretation
4 A repertoire of classics
5 The design matrix
6 Patrice Chereau: revolutionary classicism
7 Ruth Berghaus: Marx, feminism and the absurd
8 David Alden: expressionist shock
9 Peter Sellars: Americanizing everything
10 Richard Jones: burlesque profundities
11 Graham Vick: neo-realism and emotion
12 Albery, Pimlott, Cairns: British expressionism
13 A line of renewal: from Hall to Pountney
14 Brian McMaster's eclectic imports
15 Frankfurt and after: from Neuenfels to Decker
16 21st-century opera: going for a song
Appendix: Buhnenreform (Theatre Reform)
Postscript
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Any study of this field must proceed from both knowledge and insight. Tom Sutcliffe possesses both. We come away from this book with a much clearer understanding not only of the directors themselves but, more importantly, of the ethos of this attempt to venture beyond the literalism of opera stagings. In an environment where productions of opera will increasingly depart, often radically, from the 'norm'—as I believe will occur in the next decade—it is imperative to be able to understand the bases for these rethinkings. This book is of major importance to the field of opera today."—Patrick Smith, editor-in-chief of Opera News, and author of The Tenth Muse"Tom Sutcliffe's new book Believing in Opera is an important explanation of how opera theatrically ticks and why it should. It is hugely entertaining for fans, professionals, and all those interested in the way opera production has developed since the War. Whether you love opera as theatre or would rather have concerts in costume, this book is for you and it clearly explains what directors actually do and why."—Peter Jonas, Intendant of the Bavarian State Opera"Believing in Opera, as the title implies, is an affirmation of faith in an art form which some authorities have pronounced to be dead or dying; faith in the music, faith in the artists who perform it, and faith in the process of interpretation which brings the operatic repertoire on to the stage and makes it emotionally and intellectually alive for the audience. Tom Sutcliffe draws on thirty years of regular experience of European opera to illustrate his passionate belief that the theatrical vitality and imagination brought to the opera house by talented and adventurous producers and designers are indispensable elements in the appreciation of opera at the end of the twentieth century. This book is a vigorous defense of opera stagings which challenge and enrich our understanding of the masterpieces of the repertoire. Tom Sutcliffe defines the crucial role of live theatre in our modern society."—Hugues Gall, Director of the Paris Opera