BALANCING ACTS
BY THE EDITOR
As February drew to a close, the Deutsche Oper Berlin gave the final performance of its very old production of La Gioconda. Unveiled in 1974—that’s half a century ago—the staging featured designs based on scenery from the premiere of Ponchielli’s most popular opera (in 1876, almost 150 years ago). At one of the final performances, as Act 2 was about to begin an audience member got up and addressed fellow spectators, saying that as someone who’d been attending the Deutsche Oper for 50 years he felt it was a scandal that such a theatrical phenomenon was being retired—and that the house should rather be cancelling modern Regie productions such as the recent Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Cue enthusiastic applause. Our 1974 Gioconda reviewer had noted, ‘Utterly sympathetic to the atmosphere of the bizarre story, these sets lend support to certain [aspects of the opera] that would otherwise jar against today’s popular attitudes.’ But fast forward, and only last month the DVD of that above-mentioned Meistersinger also received a warm welcome in our pages, when it was rated Disc of the Month. Who’s right? Well, all I can say is that it’s sometimes surprising—in the Regie capital—how many old-fashioned, not to say moth-eaten, productions remain in the repertoire of the Deutsche Oper. That’s something the incoming Intendant Aviel Cahn (known to audiences in Flanders and Geneva as a committed Regie man) is likely to address. The chasm between narrative and conceptual traditions of theatre—sometimes characterized with slight oversimplification as the contrast between British and German tastes in opera—still gives rise to tension everywhere, it seems. What, then, represents an ideal balance? It obviously differs from city to city and tradition to tradition, but balance is possible and frequently comes down, in the first place, to the taste of an artistic director—not all that many have that gift for administration and artistic collaboration which produces consistently stimulating work, but happily there are shining examples of opera companies around the world taking their audiences on an adventure. Second, it helps to have a decent amount of money in the coffers, since well-funded opera houses can be artistically secure (money also implying the resources needed for the sort of workshops able to keep old productions looking fresh). Successful houses seem to find a way of giving their conservative, bank-rolling public some artistically acceptable productions while still putting on more challenging work. There are plenty of such examples in Germany—if not in Bayreuth, where Wagner’s ‘Kinder, schafft neues’ is taken as a signal for blind experiment—and in the UK we certainly see companies using solid traditional productions to keep the tills ringing while doing less popular work. Even the most adventurous opera fans would probably admit that some representational productions might be helpful to newcomers to opera: while a couple of generations of Londoners were content to equate Rigoletto with the New York mafia, what about those Parisians seeing La Bohème for the first time, set on the moon? Was that unhelpful or did they love it?
A complementary question: what about repertoire itself? Balance also means looking beyond the standard operas to embrace obscure pieces from the Baroque to the 21st century, and it’s telling that the Met is now consciously programming new works. Everywhere, it’s a balancing act. We’d love to hear about your ideal opera houses.
Opera, April 2024
437
