Zeffirelli Joins The Fray: "Bravo Maazel, Enough With This Horror". And Then Proceeds To Slam, Well, Everybody.

It was just a matter of time, really.

Yesterday Opera Chic wondered, "What Would Frengo Do?". And in today's Corriere della Sera (today it's online for subscribers only, in 24 hours it will be available from their archives) in another big interview -- a whole page -- Franco Zeffirelli praises Lorin Maazel's full-on attack against "trashy", "provocative" opera directors and the Salzburg Festival.

Zeffirelli calls Maazel's rant "a manifesto" and slams "laughable operas in Salzburg", "the handful of bums who run Europe's opera houses", savaging productions "that are ridiculous but don't even make you laugh", saying that "it's gettingworse and worse".

Zeffirelli's sh^tlist is long: and it even includes Opera Chic's beloved Graham Vick, one of Zeffirelli's favorite targets (the old Tuscan maestro doesn't seem to have taken lightly the fact that Arena di Verona a few years ago asked Vick to update Traviata instead of going with Zeffirelli's own decades-old staging).

Anyway here's the list of Zeffirelli's opera enemies as per today's interview:

"Guth and his junkie Don Giovanni"

Vick's Traviata: "Violetta as Princess Di... what would Verdi say?"

Martin Kusej's Don Giovanni and Willy Decker's Traviata, both in Salzburg: "what a joke"

Stephen Barlow's Tosca: "laugahble... obscene"

"Wilson's Aida fiasco"

"Carsen's ghoulish Tannhauser"

"Henning Brockhaus's Macbeth, Eurotrash"

Now, we like Frengo because he is a man of great culture, a maestro who still works hard and his love for the opera is real and his commitment to what he perceives to be the composer's and libretto writer's intent is sincere, and his Bohème still awes us and yes, he does get Tosca and yes, he did work with everybody in an era of truly legendary singers and conductors. He's right that some "iconoclastic" directors don't really have much sense of drama, they're not really people of the theater to begin with, and really want to simply épater by rewriting stuff written by giants like Da Ponte and Piave and even Herr Wagner, and that's just not right. He's correct that some new directors are indeed charlatans. They key word here, though, is "some".

His mistake -- nevermind that his ferocity toward strikes the people guilty of updating the operas Zeffirelli sees as being "his", and hence leading many of Zeffirelli's stagings into retirement, so yes, some of his rage is indeed personal, and this is a factor, it's like a big name writer seeing many of his novels go out of print forever, this is the sad nature of the theater business though, he should know this -- his mistake is that he refuses to accept the fact that opera is for the living, not for the dead, and that some of his "enemies" are indeed men of the theater who understand drama and work hard -- as hard as Zeffirelli -- at trying to do a good job.

People like Vick, Carsen, McVicar, many others -- you can like their work or not, you can have problems with some of their choices, but they are simply not charlatans, and they're not in bad faith -- they correctly refuse to do the same old thing, over and over, and sometimes updating an opera by setting it in a different era actually illuminates it; sometimes it cheapens it. No one hits the nail on the head 100% of the time, nobody, not even Zeffirelli's idol, Luchino Visconti, giant that he was. But this is an entirely different topic.

To slam everyone who ever strayed away from Franco's own way of doing things -- as if Callas were still here to get mad about it: she's not, her records and videos are, thankfully, but she's not here anymore -- means that we should essentially retire the business of staging operas, keeping Zeffirelli's and Visconti's and a few others work in a big refrigerated hangar, use them all the time and then take them back to the icebox until next time. It's simply not possible, maestro. It's boring. OC is as appalled as Zeffirelli's at some of the more egregious excesses -- indeed fisting and mutilation probably don't belong to the Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Zeffirelli didn't mention Bieito in the interview probably because his blood pressure would jump up too much and his doctors have forbidden him to) and we could do happily without people goint to the toilet on Don Giovanni's stage -- but even people like Bieito (just check out his Rake's Progress) have something good and interesting and, hey, illuminating to bring to this most volatile of arts. 

Maazel and Zeffirelli are smart enough to understand the difference between an incompetent charlatan (there are many out there, even working in big venues, yes, it's true) and the many directors who are trying to do good work in a different manner.

Just the other night, Opera Chic felt like basking in the glory of Pavarotti's and Battle's singing -- she watched their Elisir DVD. As wondrous as the singing is, the visuals are just static, and dusty, and lame. Singers nailed to the floor look like singing mannequins, and a cartoonish 1950s idea of old Italy is simply useless as old cardboard -- and it's quite devoid of dramatic truth.

Re: period instruments, Dinu Lipatti once wrote that

Therefore the wish to restore to music its earlier framework means the same as wanting to dress an adult in adolescent attire. This act might have some charm if one proposes a historical reconstruction, otherwise it is of no interest to those other than lovers of dead leaves and old drivel.

Dead leaves and old drivel sometimes appear in a director's work as well.

Our main man Graham Vick once said that, to him, Eurotrash is Zeffirelli.

As much as we feel for Franco and happy as we often are to speak up and defend Maazel, if their battle ends up defending stuff like that Elisir, sometimes we feel like we know what Graham's talking about. 

Comments

[Andrew Powell]

Good grief, OC, that Elisir s*cks!

[Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin]

Thank you for posting on these articles and topics OperaChic, and certainly for your very astute contributions to the discussion. If I might take the liberty to expound on some issues, especially as one who works frequently with young singers, I would say that it's very difficult for us as a modern audience to be too adamant one way or the other...the industry is such that singers must be able to accomplish virtually anything on stage--least of all singing well! Singing has turned into an Olympic sport nowadays and many of your previous postings have helped exemplify this fact.

I admit that I have a personal preference to traditional, yet beautiful and visually stimulating productions. Often it can be extremely difficult, not just for an audience member, but even for a performer to completely grasp every and any esoteric and perhaps avant-garde conception presented in a given production, traditional or non. There are always going to be directors that lose people for going to far over the line as there are those who won't even approach it!

I prefer to take the attitude that, even if one doesn't agree with a particular staging or ideological concept of a production, if a director is clear in communicating his ideas to a singer who is able to then process that information, rework it internally and then successfully communicates it to his colleagues and audience, there can be so much gleaned from that process and experience and it can only be for the betterment of art.

That being said, I do agree that there are plenty of vulgarities and unintelligable demonstrations that filter onto the operatic stage from time to time (a Don Giovanni urinating or receiving fell4tio on stage, for example, or a Carmen set in a be-cubicled office space where Carmen spends most of the time using a photocopier with her back to the audience to keep the focus on Jose because the director wanted the opera to be more like the original) that really do have an averse affect, not only on the audience, but on the institutions where they are presented and the majority of weight falls on, you guessed it, the singers. It has, seemingly more unfortunate than not, become an industry wrought with an obsession of introducing realism (like Reality TV) to a theatrical medium...I guess what I'm trying to say is that my understanding has always been that opera (the libretti, the music, the fashions, the period-glamour) is an art form that necessitates the use of imagination and fantasy from all who participate, whatever their capacity.

I must say that I'm a bit at odds with the citation from Lipatti with regards to the sense that opera has already been a 'mature' art form for centuries...if anything, it is now in old age. Putting on a traditional (or a chronologically and culturally respectable--with regards to the original place and setting of the piece) is not treating the work as if an infant. To treat La sonnambula in a method that attempts to alter the innate identity conceived by Bellini and Romani--the cultural and societal foundations of the plot and characters as well as the audience they were writing for--is, in my view, inadmissable. To clarify further, I mean to suggest that Bellini (along with Donizetti, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, etc.) wrote opera within their own time and cultures...times when television and movies did not exist. In our world, we chide librettists like Romani for having written "illogical" or "unrealistic" scenarios...incohesive plots, sometimes unimaginative characters, and verbose poetry that modern audiences are virtually unable to relate to. But, to me, these are unchangable virtues of opera--operas written during periods of time when attending a performance was a matter of society and really meant being out ALL night, written for audiences who would have been familiar with the subject matter and who only knew how to use their imaginations as 'realistic media' did not yet exist.

Does that mean that modern directors and operagoers should ignore our contemporary cultural elements and force ourselves to revert to antique philosophies of entertainment? Perhaps only as much as we should dismiss Verdi's Otello for not being an exact translation (I recall once debating with a Shakespearian scholar who felt that listing to Verdi's opera was an insult to the Bard as the plot was not perfectly insync and that Verdi removed an entire act) or Madama Butterfly because, really, what strong modern woman would today allow herself to share a similar predicament, or Cosi fan tutte because it's preposturous that such a thing could ever happen in less than 24 hours in a modern society!!

I agree that there are many instances of where a truly creative director manages to transplant an opera from it's predetermined suit, but I believe it is only truly successful when there is reverance for the composer and his time, the characters and their time--it would be nonsensical to present a Carmen outside of Spain or a Tosca outside of Rome (could you imagine? "E avanti a lui tremava tutta Wichita!" However, I agree that efforts must be made to bring an opera to life for a modern audience. With the supremacy of televised media and now, with the elaborations of computer graphics, modern audiences seem to have forgotten how to utilize their imaginations when it comes to opera. I don't think it's a matter of "dress[ing] an adult in adolescent attire" as it is about finding a way to conceptually transcend history and culture in a way that is at one time both respectful and honoring of the past and accessible and competent to the present and future. Certainly no easy task, but ultimately I believe this is primarily what Maazel and Zeffirelli were attacking--a prevalent attitude amongst many directors and the theatres/festivals who employ them to portray operas in "new & improved" fashion rather than bring new visions to pre-existing material. The challenge and reward should be to use the tools supplied by composer, librettist, and history and find new perspectives that is cohesive with the precedented intentions. I think it has less to do with "thinking outside the box" and is more about "expanding and rearranging the box." At least, this seems to be the stance that Maazel, Zeffirelli, and many of the older generations of singers and operatic illuminati take.

Should singers be forced to perform acrobatics and prostrate themselves across a stage in inummerable contortions or deal with pressures of phsyical exposure, perhaps morphing their bodies (unhealthy in some cases like Voigt) for the sake of sewn fabric and contemporary aesthetic or confronting and combatting inexperienced ideals (as per many new operagoers taking issue with countertenors and trouser-roles--they cannot employ their imaginations in some cases to accept an effeminate sound from a man, either in body or in character) at the sacrifice of beautiful singing, musical integrity, theatrical prowess, and self-preservation for the sake of directors (many of whom have never worked in live theatre previously or no nothing about opera) who seek to take apart what already stands and build up anew so that the 'rennovated' production hints nothing at what has stood tried, true and strong for centuries? It is comparable to one destroying the Colosseum in favor of a new astrodome! For me, therein lies the rub. It is about attitude, the rebelliousness and lust for reconception more than it is about scandal or (un)imaginativeness or creativeness. It seems to be an overlying attitude: the desire to break free from any and all restrictions of either libretto, score, or historical identity, thusly and frequently undoing and tearing apart the very fabric of this greatest and most noble of art.

I apologize for taking so much space to declare so little, but as forementioned, I do not often contribute to blog commentary less I should have something of deliberate importance to contribute. I hope that I have been clear and concise in my points and would equally honor and respect depatures from my own views as I would those that are shared.

With warmest regards and continued success,

Chev. C. A. Dupin

[Chris]

We don't need "singers nailed to the floor" for sure, NOR do we need singers jumping about like wild animals doing calesthenics while vocalizing, like Damrau recently in Rigoletto. A happy medium is what we need but don't always get. And we don't need Juan Diego pawing women's breasts to tell us that he is playing the role of a lecher. There are better ways to emphasize that. (I have to add that the scene where he gets on top of her in bed is simply silly since it doesn't go anywhere, he never strips, and he never "does" her either; he comes off as a tease who can't go through with the act, so why bother?).

[coccodrillo]

Someone should tell the dude to mellow out. It's summer, go have a gelati or something.

[infant 18]

Sorry, oc, i agree with Zeffirelli and Maazel. Too much junk flying around being passed off as "genius"!!!!

[La Cieca]

Or, to put it succinctly, "coot alert!"

[furst]

Exactly right OC. Precisely the sort of nuanced, sophisticated, skilled yet deadly wielding of the rapier I solicited in my comment to the prior post. Brava!!!

BTW, the Guth Don was significantly worse than Kusej and both are notably atrocious. It should be said that the Kusej (seen 5 times) was musically compelling in the way the Guth was most emphatically not.

[sb]

OC, thank you for analysing and evaluating this unbelievably stupid matter. I wonder how many more years I have to wait to see your lines in newspapers like the "NY Times".

Carry on!

[Dogbrook]

We can't know what a 'happy medium' is unless we see the extremes. And we can yearn for very different productions of Boheme on different nights of the week. Operabase knows about 55 future productions of Boheme - how dull for them all to be set in a garrett.

Thanks for the stimulation OC.
x.

[James Sosa]

One man's celling is another man's floor, (Paul Simon). This is exactly what the doctor ordered for the promotion and existence of opera as an art form. Times they are a changing, Dancing and acting have progressed over the years, fat ladys still sing but slim down versions can belt it out as good and not bad looking!

I can't wait for all the rebuttals, this is entertainment, a WWF wrestling card, life's Ugly Betty, I love it. You say Opera's dead??