Updating opera

At opening nights of Puccini's "Tosca" at the Metropolitan Opera and Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, audiences booed the directors and designers responsible for non-traditional productions.

The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins scolds the dissatisfied London patrons for being "boorish, callow and just plain rude" . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2009/oct/01/opera-classicalmusicandopera

"Updating has gotten a bad rap," writes The New York Times' Anthony Tommasini. "Shifting a story to another era can easily seem a glib and arbitrary maneuver. But done with imagination, an updated production can take today’s audiences to the core of a familiar work." He compares Luc Bondy's undecorous but "essentially traditional" staging of "Tosca" at the Met with Achim Freyer's "unabashedly avant-garde approach" to Wagner's "Ring" cycle at the Los Angeles Opera:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/arts/music/04tomm.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=music

Under the headline "Fiasco," The New Yorker's Alex Ross writes that the Bondy production "suck[s] the life out of 'Tosca' " in "an uneven, muddled, weirdly dull production that interferes fatally with the working of Puccini’s perfect contraption." Ross avoids (for now) lengthy rumination on Regieoper ("director's opera"), but observes that a new vision of a familiar work "needs to be good" . . .

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2009/10/05/091005crmu_music_ross?currentPage=1

Tommasini approaches, but doesn't quite get to, a key point about updating operas. "Tosca" is set in a particular place and time (Rome, 1800); its text refers to that environment, and its stage directions reflect period manners and behaviors. Puccini packs all kinds of cultural cues into his score. Update a show like this, and you're rewriting it – but only partly, since even the most avant-garde directors don't (yet) routinely splice historical references out of texts or doctor the scores.

Other music dramas are mythic fantasies, set in unspecific or theatrically malleable times and places. Tommasini cites the "Ring" cycle, the grandest example of this genre. Mozart's "Magic Flute" is another familiar fantasy. Operas set in such distant history that there's no real picture of the setting in the vernacular memory – I'm thinking here of Greek drama and other ancient storytelling – also can be manipulated successfully in chronology, costuming and the like. Baroque depictions of myth and legend respond especially well to modern, even abstract-expressionist, stagings.

There's an old actors' aphorism: "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." Reverse that and you've got good guidance for opera directors and designers.

Tragedy is tougher to update than comedy. Perhaps it's because tragic gestures and mourning rituals are so rooted in specific cultures and eras. It's comparatively easy to juggle times and places in comedy, especially a domestic comedy such as "Cosi fan tutte" or "The Elixir of Love." Comedic expression is pretty universal, physical comedy even more so – slapstick has been with us always. We have no trouble envisioning Bugs Bunny as Figaro and Elmer Fudd as Doctor Bartolo in "The Rabbit of Seville."

Opera combines many arts and crafts, but the dominant one is music. (How many "innovative" directors could say that and mean it? Show of hands, please.)

When a master composer addresses a specific theatrical style – when Verdi takes on 19th-century Italian melodrama – no staging intervention will change the piece into something else. Directors and designers can either work with what they've got, or against it. Wagner invites more creative direction and stagecraft; so do Mozart, Handel, Monteverdi, Richard Strauss (but not, please, "Rosenkavalier"). Before envisioning, let alone re-envisioning, an opera, listen to it.