While I prepare my next article, I thought I would add two quotes about Regietrash.
That bastion of journalistic integrity, The UK Guardian (is my sarcasm showing?), wrote about ‘Regietheater’ about a year ago in this article by Andrew Haydon:
When we go to see a new play in Britain - even most of the time we go to see an old play or a classic - we expect that we are going to see the play "as written". Say this to a mainland European critic and you get a pitying look, often followed by an explanation of why that is a terrible approach to making theatre. Europe has a long tradition of "Regietheater" - there isn't even a word for it in English, but it roughly translates as "director's theatre".
The authority and vision of a director in this tradition is so total that the director is considered to have failed if they have not firmly put their stamp on a text. This is no mere matter of understanding the characters' motivations and getting the actors to be convincing: it can run from spectacular set pieces through to eviscerating the script in order to present their vision of the play. This sort of artistry requires a whole different level of critical engagement, and of course, at that point, wanting to know what the play was like before the director interpreted it becomes a wholly understandable impulse.
I want to know when did defacing a work of art become the definition of ‘art’ itself? The ‘artistry’ that Haydon is referring to is the antithesis of art. A dear actress/director friend of mine who was trained by Vittorio Gassman is always truly appalled by current European theatre traditions, and wholeheartedly agrees that the joke has gone on long enough already and that the adults should get a turn at playing instead.
Interestingly enough it was the New York Times back in 1996 that posted an article about “The Pestilence That Is Regietheater” by Paul Moor. I find the alusion to the director’s possible ‘retarded psychological development’ a very accurate impression of what I usually undergo whenever treated to a rare heaping pile of “Director’s Theater.”
What Germans call "Regie-Oper" — opera dominated by staging — has become epidemic in Germany. Hans Neuenfels's new production of Verdi's dear old classic "Il Trovatore" exemplifies this pestilence.
Regie-Oper takes some hapless staple and renders it ostensibly more relevant today by horsing around with its nonmusical aspects. For example, Harry Kupfer's production of Gluck's "Orpheus and Euridice" at Berlin's Komische Oper depicts the tragic hero of Greek mythology as a lovelorn drifter in T-shirt, jeans and sneakers with a guitar slung over his shoulder.
Since 1981, the Deutsche Oper Berlin has had at its helm Götz Friedrich, one of the world's finest stage directors. Friedrich lays remarkably few operatic eggs, but he has himself horsed around with some works, to distressing effect — for example, wrenching Strauss's "Rosenkavalier" out of Empress Maria Ther-esa's Vienna into the period of its 1912 composition.
Friedrich also engages other imaginative directors with whose styles his own has little in common. For such courage he deserves commendation, but he has much to answer for when guests foist upon audiences such an affliction as this "Trovatore."
Visually and dramatically, outrage succeeds carefully premeditated outrage. If you enjoy egregiously immature brattishness, you'll love this production. Forget about realism, or any semblance of it.
Leonora sings of the mysterious troubadour of the title, and down drops a gigantic photograph of a scruffy Latin youth, nude except for a tattoo on each folded arm, genitalia concealed by crossed pieces of black tape. An intervention by Professor Friedrich?
One can scarcely imagine Neuenfels shrinking from nudity, particularly after briefly interpolating three topless extras who serve no purpose except to display half a dozen breasts.
As Leonora continues her aria, a hooded executioner type holds up before that photograph's pubic area first the body of a guitar, then a human skull.
Dramatic subtlety? Forget it.
The evening's first part closes with breechclouted Jesus, thorn-crown a-twinkle with Christmas-tree lights, rising from a tilted cross long enough to place a ring on Leonora's finger, among nuns in pleated skirts in every color of the rainbow. Jesus picks the cardinal as his partner to lead the wedding dance.
Weird becomes ever weirder. The second part opens in the neon-lighted Bar of the Immaculate Conception. At the end, in a Nazi concentration camp, Manrico manifests facial lesions: AIDS.
Musically, this otherwise execrable production has much to offer. Paolo Olmi, on the podium, drew convincing italianità from the orchestra, but the Toscaninian pace he strove for caused occasional audible distress among his sluggish principals. One, Amanda Halgrimson as Leonora, at times contemptuously shut her eyes tightly and arrogated to herself the conductor's responsibility for setting the tempo, but otherwise she turned in a superior performance.
Violeta Urmana, as Azucena, almost stole the evening with a portrayal of vocal and dramatic brilliance. In Kristjan Johannsson, Luciano Pavarotti has an obvious idolator, and the Mediterranean sunshine suffusing his voice belied his Icelandic origins. As Luna, Paolo Coni solidly rounded off a stellar quartet of principals, and Karl Kamper's chorus sang magnificently.
Long before the end, one envisions Neuenfels as the victim of retarded psychological development, a bright but petulant adolescent testing his elders not only with nose-thumbing but also whoopee cushions and the occasional hotfoot. Had Salvatore Cammarano and Giuseppe Verdi, who created this operatic gem, happened to attend this premiere, one could easily imagine one of them knocking Hans Neuenfels down and the other kicking him, along with his equally culpable designer, Reinhard von der Thannen.
As singers, what is our best weapon to combat this sort of inanity? Dare we use our clout to stop this in its tracks, or are we too swallowed up by the idea that we have to be fluffy, smiling little Pomeranians ready to perform tricks at anyone’s command?
Otherwise we might end up with more things like these: Nemorino, Telephone Repairman (Una Furtiva Lagrima whilst climbing a utility pole? WHY?)
