Newsday, July 2005

If you want to be different, be warned: Even in New York, opera traditions die hard.

Opera's "age of the director" is upon us, or so The New York Times declared last month. This writer begs to differ. While the pronouncement might stand in Berlin or Barcelona, it seems a tad premature for New York. True, New York City Opera, the Met and smaller troupes all mount their share of riveting shows. By and large, though, local audiences resist even mildly innovative stagecraft, branding productions that stray from nostalgic rectitude with that ultimate term of revulsion: "Eurotrash."

One example is Robert Wilson's 1998 staging of Wagner's Lohengrin, which the Met will revive next season. I was thunderstruck by Wilson's stylized vision, with its dreamlike motions and glowing columns of light, a thing of Rothko-like beauty at one with Wagner's music. But its premiere met with the ugliest reception I have witnessed in a theater. For weeks afterwards, Internet opera mavens accused Wilson of all possible abominations, aesthetic and otherwise.

Whence the outrage? Wilson's work had been known for decades. Indeed, shrewder detractors dismissed his Lohengrin as "warmed-over Wieland," referring to the abstract, midcentury productions by Wagner's grandson Wieland, whose vogue was long past. Still, Wilson's staging departed radically from the musty, naturalistic Wagnerian style that holds sway at the Met—naturalism, by the way, being a problematic notion in opera, which traffics in artifice and myth.

For all that New York is a center of cutting-edge art, its opera lovers seem innocent of the fact that the intentional fallacy was debunked long ago. "Give us the opera as the composer intended," they whine. But nobody knows what long-dead creators had in mind. Even with the benefit of documentary evidence (explanatory notes, eyewitness accounts), no one has ever been bound by the chimera of authorial intention.

Times change. Do theatergoers clamor for boys to portray Juliet and Cleopatra, as Shakespeare expected? The original production books for several Verdi operas still exist. Verdi expert Julian Budden offers withering appraisals of their composer-approved stage business: "worthy of the Folies Bergère," "remarkably crude."

Vergil and Dante, Titian and Manet: Great artists have always revised their forbears' works, mindful that history's course demands fresh interrogations of the past. Opponents of newfangled stagecraft cite a difference between "interpretation" and "creation," arguing that directors have no right to impose their vision on others' art. But the Met's period-dress staging of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, which plays this pseudo-pastoral as farce, is no less an imposition than Wilson's Lohengrin. The latter stirs howls of protest, the former not a whimper.

Old Heraclitus said it best: "You cannot step twice into the same river." Aida or Hamlet can never be for today's spectators what they were at their premieres. But innovative stagings can compel us to look more deeply at old favorites and experience opera as drama, not simply sound. This may go against the grain, given our species' laziness and our culture's traditional exaltation of sublime, incorporeal music over down-and-dirty theater. One scholar evoked an age-old "antitheatrical prejudice"—the belief that theater, built on transformation and illusion, is an intrinsically wicked craft, unleashing all that is "devious, intricate and disorderly" in humankind.

And yet, for all that opera's "age of the director" still seems far off in these parts, there is one context in which it is dawning for opera lovers everywhere. Studio recordings are becoming a thing of the past, with most new opera recordings released on DVD, which documents both the musical and the theatrical dimensions of the form.

Decca has issued the Mozart/da Ponte operas in updated productions by Peter Sellars first seen at SUNY Purchase in the late 1980s. TDK has released a 1999 Don Giovanni by Roberto de Simone, an apparently "traditional" staging driven by the historical transmutations to which purists object.

De Simone uses costume changes and shifting styles of gesture to evoke the cultural soup from which Don Giovanni emerged, and the new meanings the famous character acquired after the opera's 1787 premiere. He first appears as the primordial burlador, or "trickster," with his servant Leporello as a commedia dell'arte clown. Giovanni's further guises include a French Revolution libertine and Aristide Bruant (the legendary cabaret artist depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec).

The results are both fascinating and frustrating. De Simone's meta-narrative becomes the story, with the blizzard of cultural signals obscuring the human drama of Giovanni and his pursuers. The cast features eminently charismatic singer-actors—Carlos Álvarez, Anna Caterina Antonacci, Ildebrando d'Arcangelo—whose portrayals never quite gel as the action shifts from Seville to Paris, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. While I admired the director's erudition, I found myself longing to see this gifted company set free in, say, Marthe Keller's uncluttered Met staging of Mozart's opera.

High concept as it is, de Simone's Don Giovanni provoked nothing of the scandal of Sellars' Mozart trilogy. Sellars' settings put purists' noses out of joint: Trump Tower for the class-conscious Marriage of Figaro, a seaside greasy spoon for Così fan tutte, Harlem for Don Giovanni. Beneath the anachronistic trappings, though, lies much in harmony with Mozart's deepest spiritual concerns.

In da Ponte's libretto, Don Giovanni is a cavalier who breaches all tenets of chivalry and piety. In Sellars' vision, Giovanni is a dealer of drugs, which fuel his joyless exploits and help explain his hold on others. The violated Donna Anna is an addict bound to Giovanni by her need for smack—and revenge. (Aristocratic codes of honor were dodgy from a Christian perspective, which taught that a thirst for vengeance could be as evil as the offense that occasioned it.) The troubled humanity of Mozart's characters shines through vividly, with Lorraine Hunt (in her pre-Lieberson days) as a febrile, wrenching Donna Elvira.

To my mind, Sellars' apt and forceful metaphors make this ancien régime saga speak powerfully to today's sensibilities. That said, his take on Mozart's dramma giocoso is implacably grim, and updated stage business can turn into clichés just as easily as old-fashioned fare. As one London critic complained of a recent Don Giovanni by bad-boy director Calixto Bieito, "There are only so many times you can watch a character… shoot some heroin and stimulate his crotch, and remain interested."

In the end, Umberto Eco's definition of works of art comes to mind: "machines for generating interpretations." Perhaps a variety of interpretations is not a desecration of opera, but a testimony to its grand and inexhaustible richness. Sit back and revel in the newness: The wondrous machines churn on.