(3) “A staging faithful to the libretto? Stupid frontal stage singing!”

Much has been written about the historical backgrounds of the Regietheater in opera, also in Opera Gazet. We can deal with historical explanations exhaustively as much as we like, but in the meantime we are stuck with it: the drifting Regietrash constantly flows through the sewers of European opera houses, the handkerchief with eau-de-cologne can no longer compete with it.

The Regietheater is an evil and malignant phenomenon that has been able to take hold without encountering any significant opposition. People will look in vain for intellectual justification. Regietrash is an expression of a so-called “modern sense of life”, a cherished gem in the cultural baggage of Today’s People; if you don’t surrender to it, you belong to a fossil generation that polishes its 78 rpm records every week and with melancholy look at the signed photo of Magda Olivero hanging on the wall.

There is no well-drafted story with reasons why a libretto does not need to be respected. One gets no further than nonsensical one-liners. The fallacies with which Johnny Modern tries to justify the Entführung aus dem Serail placed in a brothel have long been known.  There is a kind of top-50. We have listed 10 of them. Here is the third one.

“A staging faithful to the libretto? Stupid frontal stage singing!”

The set is a large building of grey concrete on a rotating stage. The set could basically be used for countless operas, but here we are supposed to see Aida: Bavarian State Opera 2009. This production by German director Christoph Nel, who is known to involve his wife, a psychologist, in his productions, made Barbara Frittoli flee from the premiere. She was replaced by the young and talented Kristin Lewis.