Modernizing old operas and ballets

[Pamela Moberg]

Well, to cut a long story short I am just back from an audition. Didnt get the job, by the way.

The local opera house of Gothenburg is going to stage Gounod's Faust - an opera director from Frankfurt am Main has been specially invited to do it the same way here as in Frankfurt. They wanted extras, youngsters and then some older people.

That's where I come in.

Director made a bit of a speech and explained that he wanted Faust in a kind of fifties setting, (1950 that is). Opening scene should take place in an asylum for old demented people, old guys in white beards should be sitting about in wheel chairs and old ladies should be feeding them breakfast. At this point I for no reason at all started thinking about "One flew over the cucko's nest" and I wasnt far off. That was exactly how it was meant to be.

A lot of OAP guys with white beards were hired together with some elderly fat women with grey hair. I am not fat and I dont have grey hair - so exit

I think Gounod's music is very beautiful, but it is hardly suited to a fifties setting. It really beats me why directors think that modernizing operas and ballets by putting them in an entirely different epoch from the original will work. If they want a new and younger audience they will fail - in my opinion the younger generation thinks that the fifties was a rather silly era.

Must admit that I am rather disappointed and I will not go and see the performance either, might do better by buying a decent DVD.

What is other BalletAlerters opinion of modernizing operas? Maybe I am just old-fashioned, but has anybody seen any work where modernizing has been an advantage?

[richard53dog]

What is other BalletAlerters opinion of modernizing operas? Maybe I am just old-fashioned, but has anybody seen any work where modernizing has been an advantage?

Pamela, the directors always say they are trying to get the audiences to look at the piece in a new way.

But it's really a can of worms, there are really some Regies that are truly trying to make the singers and the audience see something new. Other directors throw any old thing on the stage for shock value. After all there is no such thing as bad publicity (case in point: recent NYCB R+J).

I'm sort of on a middle path with this. I'm willing to go along with the Regie if they sincerely try to breathe new life in an old piece. In many, many cases I'm not oppossed to updating or even Konzepts. My rule of thumb is that I don't want the music or the libretto betrayed in a major way (minor discrepancies don't bother me) and I MUST be knocked over by the performance. I HAS to really grab me and take me with it.

Another potential problem is that singers are chosen for how they look rather than how capable they are with the music.

Ballet has similar issues but there are so many versions of a really popular piece that there is some leaway. Again I get angry if I think the director is just out for shock value with no substance behind it.

[Anthony_NYC]

After sitting through many such productions, I realize that the ones I object to tend to fall into three groups:

1. Productions that presume that we in the audience are too dull to understand the piece unless the director explains it all for us. The Met's current production of "Jenufa" has a huge boulder in the middle of the stage to represent moral oppression. It's about as subtle as, well, a huge boulder in the middle of the stage.
   
2. Productions that take a condescending attitute towards the opera or its characters. The Met's recent production of "La Juive," an opera well worth returning to the repertoire, was ruined by the director's sneering tone of "Oh, look at these horrid little Christians. We're better than THEM, aren't we?"
   
3. The worst sin of all--productions that are unmusical. This can include ones that are just plain ugly, when the music is not, like the recently replaced Met production of "Faust," almost comically hideous to look at.
   

I think Peter Sellars is one of the most successful of the updaters. He is always musical, and he has a knack for getting terrific performances from the singers. Also, the Appia-inspired ones, where less is more and the music is paramount, can be very effective.

Most of the time, though, I have to admit I find these productions just tiresome. Charm is one of the most important elements in any score by Gounod, but I think a lot of director's equate charm with frivolity, so they have to change things to make it (and therefore them) look profound and intellectually challenging.

New York's major ballet companies don't seem to be as interested in these kind of productions as European companies.

[Helene]

In general, I find most updatings a snooze, and I'm allergic to Eurotrash and its Ameritrash counterpart, but I did love Frank Corsaro's Spanish Civil War Carmen for NYCO. My only complaint about it was in the last act, when Carmen and Escamillo sat at a raised table, and the stage went dark except for the lights on them during their duet. The Carmen/Escamillo duet is an uncharacteristically sacharine piece of music, and I always think of it as a Hollywood moment, like when movie stars put on a show at brunch and pose for People Magazine. I would have had a bunch of photographers flashing away during it, since it always seems to me that the two are posing in public.

[dirac]

What is other BalletAlerters opinion of modernizing operas? Maybe I am just old-fashioned, but has anybody seen any work where modernizing has been an advantage?

Pamela, the directors always say they are trying to get the audiences to look at the piece in a new way.

But it's really a can of worms, there are really some Regies that are truly trying to make the singers and the audience see something new. Other directors throw any old thing on the stage for shock value. After all there is no such thing as bad publicity (case in point: recent NYCB R+J).

I'm sort of on a middle path with this. I'm willing to go along with the Regie if they sincerely try to breathe new life in an old piece. In many, many cases I'm not oppossed to updating or even Konzepts. My rule of thumb is that I don't want the music or the libretto betrayed in a major way (minor discrepancies don't bother me) and I MUST be knocked over by the performance. It HAS to really grab me and take me with it.

Another potential problem is that singers are chosen for how they look rather than how capable they are with the music.

Ballet has similar issues but there are so many versions of a really popular piece that there is some leaway. Again I get angry if I think the director is just out for shock value with no substance behind it.

I'm with you, richard53dog. I don’t like a hackneyed traditional version any better than a misguided updated production and I’m willing to go along with a director who is making a sincere effort to show us a different aspect of an old work. I do fear, however, that some are motivated more by the desire to Put Their Stamp on a piece – you see this a lot in Shakespeare productions, too – than to shed new light. As to discerning the difference, I can only say with the late Justice Potter Stewart that “I know it when I see it.”

Thanks, Pamela, for raising the topic, one of our hardy perennials.

[Helene]

Pamela, the directors always say they are trying to get the audiences to look at the piece in a new way.

The way my mind works is if I can figure out what they're doing, I can evaluate and analyze, which does make me think hard about what I think the piece means. For example, there may be an analogy being presented on stage. If I just think, "not a 100% fit and dismiss it," I don't get anything out of it. If I think that there's some overlap, I might see a part through a different light and learn something from it. If I think the director has turned the piece into meaning something diametrically opposite, at least I know what I think about it, even if I feel that the performers's time has been wasted. If the director bores me into not thinking at all or is incomprehensible, then I can take Balanchine's advice and close my eyes and listen to the concert.

Two other pieces I've liked are the reconstructions of the seemingly indestructible Carmen by Brook and Turandot by Berio. Neither is the original piece, but I did re-think them by having the piece in a different chronological order and with different accompaniment.

In general, though, regardless of what the director does onstage, the music generally goes unpunished. Unlike ballet, where the performers can be physically harmed by pounding rehearsals of the choreography, and the physical text is destroyed, in opera, by closing one's eyes, one hears live, hopefully unamplified, voices, singing an original score (if not the text), something that is missed by saying "I'll pass." On the whole, I tend to think "no harm, no foul."

[Pamela Moberg]

Thank you all for your thoughtful replies - especially I loved Dirac's "hardy perennials".

Yes, but why do these perennials pop up so frequently? (My perennials in the garden all seem to be struggling like mad).

Could it be that directors have a terrible burden of responsibility, it is not cheap to mount a large production and tics must be sold. In the olden days the public was lured to performances by means of very weird spectacles like tooth pulling, bearded ladies, dwarfs leaping through burning hoops and other oddities. Maybe it is the same feeling today, audiences might not attend if it is something they are vaguely familiar with - everything must have a new twist.

BTW, I have already nicknamed this new production Faust and the Atrics - ( a bit of a play with Gerry and the Atrics).

The reasoning about a new twist seems to hold true, except in one aspect. When it comes to a love story everything all of a sudden becomes Romeo and Juliet. West Side Story was called that, a recent play at the municipal drama theater here was depicted as the star crossed lovers of Mostar. Actually based on a true story, a young boy and girl were shot at the bridge of Mostar, one was orthodox Christian and the other muslim. That went on during Shakespeare's time and it still goes on and such tragic cases will always occur. It will be interesting to see what they will make of Faust's love for Margarethe here - and what they will make of her character. And what are the intentions for the "merry-making at the Kermesse"?

Rock and roll started in the fifties, will they jive to Gounod? The mind boggles, better stop before I get nightmares

[Mel Johnson]

One of the best re-readings of a great opera I remember is Sellars' staging of Rigoletto. Placing the characters as "made men" in the Mob was brilliant. Hardly anything needed to change from the Renaissance! (OK, Tommyguns, but you know what I mean!)

[bart]

It really beats me why directors think that modernizing operas and ballets by putting them in an entirely different epoch from the original will work.

I agree with Helene on this. Some of these concepts work, and even enhance our entry into the work. Others don't work.

Here's an example of something that apparently "works," from the Met's recent production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, with choreography by Mark Morris. Alex Ross, reviewing this in The New Yorker, writes:

The action unfolds in front of simple, severe, handsome sets ...: steeply raked amphitheatre seating for the chorus of the dead; an enormous fire-escape-style metal staircase for Orpheus' desscent to the underworld; a gauzy gray cavern for the lovers' climactic scene in the "tortuous labyrinth." These monumental spaces are alternately chilled and warmed by James Ingall's emotionally precise lighting and humanized by Isaac Mizrahi's vivid costumes: roughly contemporary garb for the principals and the dancers (Orpheus looks a bit like Johnny Cash, with a guitar slung behind him), multi-period garb for the chorus. When you notice a tall, think bass wearing a top hat and sporting a beard, you realize that all hundred singers have been made to resemble famous people of the past, from Cleopatra to Henry VIII and on to Lincoln, Gandhi , and Jackie O. The concept risks cuteness but achieves pathos: celebrities are apparently doomed to spend eternity in a V.I.P. area designed by Richard Serra.

Setting works in an anachronistic past -- Jonathan Miller's American-diner setting for Cosi; Dance Theater of Harlem's wonderful Creole Giselle, Mark Morris's cartoon-50's setting for his version of Nutcrcker, the 1920s for just about everything "comic" and light, 30's fascism for works featuring political oppression, post-World War II for the nostalgic, etc. -- can be refreshing or trite.

And then there are those productions in which the action takes place in a a time-less "time" -- a kind of No Exit dream world consisting of caverns or warehouses or open skies in which the performers wander among sculptural or architectural symbols, wearing clothing from a variety of periods (including the ubiquitous long dark leather military coat -- so slimming for Siegfrieds and Tristans who haven't kept their figures).

[dirac]

Some of these concepts work, and even enhance our entry into the work. Others don't work.

I think we've reached a consensus on that.

[zerbinetta]

Mel: was this a recent Sellars "Rigoletto" production? The one I remember quite well was a Jonathan Miller production by the English National Opera, which came to the MetOpera in 1984. It was set in Little Italy & the Court were Wiseguys.

It worked wonderfully.

[Mel Johnson]

I do beg everyone's pardon, and indeed, it was the Miller production I recalled. I must have confounded it with the Sellars Marriage of Figaro, which I saw at about the same time, but it's not set among the "there's no such thing as the Mafia! "

[bart]

Some of these concepts work, and even enhance our entry into the work. Others don't work.

I think we've reached a consensus on that.

You're right! The difficulty comes in determining which updatings work and which do not -- something that seems to continue to generate some controversy.

So far, we all seem to be mentioning opera more than ballet. Have you seen any ballet "updatings" that have worked for you? Or not?

[Helene]

DTH's "Creole Giselle" is my favorite of all alternative settings.

[Mashinka]

Some of these concepts work, and even enhance our entry into the work. Others don't work.

Yesterday I went to a performance that I think illustrates the fine line between what works and what doesn’t. It was a setting of Bach’s St Matthew Passion by the Glyndebourne Opera set in a school building in the aftermath of a massacre. The concept was that the families of the victims have gathered inside the school in remembrance as a group of artists perform the passion for them, selecting several of the mourners to take part in the performance.

Personally I think the approach worked – but only just and perhaps my view was swayed more by some fabulous singing and playing than by the actual staging: Mark Padmore as the evangelist was superb.

I’m including a review of this work from The Independent because sitting at the side I consequently missed some of the production details that the reviewer describes. My view was of the onstage audience of mourners (the chorus) and I was unable to see very much of the principal artists whose stage area was in the left front corner.

http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/review...icle2745638.ece

By the way, I notice this review appears to be anonymous and ends with a mention of the Holland Park production of Lakme, reviewed together with Glyndebourne presumably because both are summer events, but having also been present at the opening night of Lakme, I find the critic’s preference for an artist singing a bit part over the singer in the title role rather ludicrous.

My friend and I debated the merits of the staging for much of the long drive home and agreed that a staging as a traditional passion play would have been preferable. Of course Bach famously never wrote an opera, but some of his ‘secular cantatas’ are rather like mini operas and I’d love it if someone were able to stage his Hercules or Phoebus & Pan. The St Matthew Passion is one of the most glorious pieces ever written but I feel it sits uncomfortably on an opera house stage.

[bart]

Mashinka, the St. Matthew Passion sounds moving, and actually something of an improvement over seeing a chorus standing on risers on a stage.

I'm still wondering about ballet, however. I know there are examples of this kind of production in the ballet world. Just a month ago I saw the Ballet de Monte Carlo's version of La belle au bois dormant ("La Belle"), which changes the old scenario -- and even the score (Act III comes from Tchaikovsky's schmaltzy Fantasy Overture from Romeo and Juliet) -- on a number of levels. The worlds of Princess and Prince are completely at odds with each other, in terms of visuals and movement. La Belle first appears walking on point down a ramp, contained in a transparent bubble. Carabosse is an incarnation of the Princess's mother. At the end, the lover's depart by squeezing through a hole in the set. And everything was supported by voluminous essays expaining what it all means and what you are supposed to be feeling.

The Paris audience -- most of whom, I'm sure, were quite familiar with the original ballet -- seemed to love it.

As for myself, I was completely fascinated (sometimes actdually mesmerized) by what was unravelling on stage -- which is quite different from being moved by it or finding it beautiful.

[dirac]

My friend and I debated the merits of the staging for much of the long drive home and agreed that a staging as a traditional passion play would have been preferable. Of course Bach famously never wrote an opera, but some of his ‘secular cantatas’ are rather like mini operas and I’d love it if someone were able to stage his Hercules or Phoebus & Pan. The St Matthew Passion is one of the most glorious pieces ever written but I feel it sits uncomfortably on an opera house stage.

Thank you for the review, Mashinka. It sounds as if it was an experiment worth trying.

My knowledge of the Passion comes only from recordings but I agree that an opera house stage does not sound like the ideal setting.

[Mel Johnson]

Mashinka, the St. Matthew Passion sounds moving, and actually something of an improvement over seeing a chorus standing on risers on a stage.

I'm still wondering about ballet, however. I know there are examples of this kind of production in the ballet world. Just a month ago I saw the Ballet de Monte Carlo's version of La belle au bois dormant ("La Belle"), which changes the old scenario -- and even the score (Act III comes from Tchaikovsky's schmaltzy Fantasy Overture from Romeo and Juliet) -- on a number of levels. The worlds of Princess and Prince are completely at odds with each other, in terms of visuals and movement. La Belle first appears walking on point down a ramp, contained in a transparent bubble. Carabosse is an incarnation of the Prince's mother. At the end, the lover's depart by squeezing through a hole in the set. And everything was supported by voluminous essays expaining what it all means and what you are supposed to be feeling.

The Paris audience -- most of whom, I'm sure, were quite familiar with the original ballet -- seemed to love it.

As for myself, I was completely fascinated (sometimes actdually mesmerized) by what was unravelling on stage -- which is quite different from being moved by it or finding it beautiful.

Sounds like somebody at Monte Carlo had been frightened in infancy by Petit's "Paradise Lost".

[bart]

Sounds like somebody at Monte Carlo had been frightened in infancy by Petit's "Paradise Lost".

Mel, don't tell me you saw that too. The Royal toured it to the US in the 60s, no? Nureyev and Fonteyn were the big attractions as Adam and Eve -- and Fonteyn's energy and risk-taking were the big suprise for me. I do remember Nureyev emerging semi-naked from a big egg.

Come to think of it, Petit's egg/incubator imagery IS a bit reminiscent of the part of La Belle at the time Aurora is born, where all the court ladies have their own personal versions of the transparent bubble attached to their bellies.

Giselle also has been modernized. I haven't seen either of these, but Boris Eifman's "Red Giselle," and Mats Ek's "Giselle" come to mind. Both end up with the heroine in an insane asylum.

[Mel Johnson]

And when you mentioned exiting through a hole, I could just see Nureyev diving through the lips in the drop behind him.

Didn't Gorsky do a Giselle in the 1920s that looked like Act II was held in a psychiatric hospital?

And the lead post on this thread, portraying the opening scenes of Faust in a nursing home calls to mind Amadeus.

Reminds me of one of my favorite verses from Ecclesiastes: "There is no new thing under the sun."

[bart]

Reminds me of one of my favorite verses from Ecclesiastes: "There is no new thing under the sun."

Does Ecclesiastes say anything about artistic "borrowing"? Sounds like Jean-Cristophe Maillot (the choreographer) may have been running a few Petit tapes in his head.

Has anyone seen one of the versions of Giselle set in psychiatric hospital?

It's sounds fascinating. The original version demands from the audience a kind of belief -- or at least a willing suspension of disbelief -- in a spiritual world and an afterllife. The hospital setting objectifies the story. These things really do happen in the world, and we all know it. And they have been used for many 20th century works, playing on themes of fragile, helpless victims -- abusive power figures -- a world isolated (indeed, locked away) from the rest of us -- drug phantasmagoria - etc.

I wonder: do the ward attendents stand in straight lines and do anything like the choreography given to the willis? To they wear tulle? And what about Frau Doktor Myrthe? Is she a character from the original ballet -- or more like Caraabosse or Death in the Green Table?

[Mel Johnson]

Well, wise old King Sol put in there:

A time to get,

A time to lose.

A time to give away,

A time to keep.