ABSTRACT
We're getting 'concept' opera by the truck-load these days, which to me is a bit like putting a crew-cut on Michaelangelo's David (Dolora Zajick* 1994: 15).
Introduction
Rosenthal's description of the past 250 years of operatic history as successively the Reign of the Singer (until the end of the nineteenth century), Dictatorship of the Conductor which ended during the last war (Mahler in Vienna, Toscanini in Milan, Krauss in Munich, Beecham at Covent Garden 'made sure producers and designers did not ride roughshod over composers. They were also the artistic directors of their theatres, where are today's?') and the Age of the Producer unfortunately still with us' (Rosenthal 1979: 528), was devoid of material contextualisation or explanation. Fifteen years on and artistic directors are audit-haunted managers whilst producers (now with movement specialists, choreographers and designers), have their power yet further enhanced: we have 'conceptitis' (Pleasants 1989), 'interventionist', 'postmodernist', 'radical', 'deconstructionist’, 'produceritis', 'Pountneyfication', 'Aldenorrhoea' (Jonas et al. 1992: 16), we speak of Chereau's Ring,i Sellars' Flute, Alden's Macbeth, Visconti's Don Carlos, Zeffirelli's Traviata. Opera has been transformed by 'a surge of theatricalisin' (Inglis 1993: 35) and, as these epithets imply, a surge of tensions and conflicts from all sides of the stage and proscenium. These disputes, often deeply acrimonious and frequently superficially reduced to conservative
versus radical (Jonas et al. 1992), are disputes over the sanctity of works, rights of control over them and to the transmission of knowledge and interpretations of them to audiences and other members of the laity. Defence of the 'pure', 'original' work as written, directed and performed, is frequently used to signal an attack on producers who impose their radical 'idee' employed as attempts to make works meaningful to modern audiences, to liberate them from culinary practice and museum dust. For such defendants the stance is reverential and traditional according to the musicological dierarchy outlines in Chapter 1, whereas the perspective of 'radical' producers is not reverential but referential to extra-musicological discliplines: literature, cultural studies, philosophy, political ideologies of various kinds, Marxist, 'post-modernist' and so on. Both sides claim the greater understanding of the 'truth' of the 'original', the former through an emphasis on meticulous 'authenticity', the latter through their claimed ability to release the 'spirit', 'essence' or some such hidden behind 'auratic' convention, age and familiarity.
