What a sad mentality…

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It has been almost 15 years since Heather Mac Donald, political commentator, essayist, lawyer, and author, published her article “The Abduction of Opera” in the City Journal. Her article, which adequately wipes the floor with Regietheater and explains the murky antecedents of the abject phenomenon, is as relevant, if not more relevant, than ever, 15 years later. It has one disadvantage, however: it is too long, and for many that is a reason not to read it. Since opera in the Netherlands has been bon ton among cultural parvenus, roughly since the opening of the Dutch opera house “Het Muziektheater” in the 1980s, the ever-growing blind acceptance of directorial trash has been inversely proportional to the staggering decline of the most basic knowledge of opera. We like to play eavesdropper on the conversations of the white wine-sipping audience in the foyer during intervals of performances. Without lapsing into anecdotal casuistry, our observation is that there is more “opera savvy” in the audience at an amateur performance than at a Traviata pastiche at Amsterdam’s Muziektheater, where Regietrash is a guiding artistic principle.

Why do the Emperor’s Clothes enjoy a relentless, quicksand-based admiration? Where are the roots of the misconception that a director is as important as the composer and librettist, if not more important?

Regietheater in Europe is one of the most depressing artistic developments of our time.

Although singers, orchestra members, and conductors have serious reservations, they too depend on government subsidies and the dubious interactions between subsidizer and the postmodern cultural elite that holds up their hands.

The so-called “updating” (read: taking out of context) of operas is a serious form of barbarism. The New York critic Alex Ross rightly observed that there is a serious intellectual laziness underlying the idea “that the past must be problematized, and that older works must be ‘rescued’ from their ideological presuppositions.”

For the origins of Regietheater, like the origins of a range of social problems, we must go back to the 1960s. Not only was the stage and concert practice under attack by a band of Marxist intellectuals, students, and artists, but opera also had to be liberated from “bourgeois values.” Gérard Mortier led a group of student provocateurs in the late 1960s who loudly disrupted opera productions they considered “too traditional.” In the opera house, works from the past had to be twisted so they mirrored our so much more interesting selves.

Michael Gielen, the Frankfurt proponent of Regietheater, declared that what Haendel wanted in his operas was irrelevant; more important was “what interests us … what we want.”

The aforementioned Gérard Mortier once stated that when updating operas, he tries “to transform a work from a certain era so that it conveys something fresh in our time.” Complete idiocy, of course. Nothing is less “fresh” than the tiresome iconography of refrigerators, Cadillacs, wheelchairs, and Kalashnikovs. What is really new about an opera by Mozart is that it comes from a world that no longer exists. And it is the music in particular that expresses that difference. When directors tear operas out of their historical context, they close a precious window on the past. When we refuse to take episodic norms and values seriously, we not only render the plot incomprehensible (the idiotic discrepancy between stage image and text is swallowed for granted in our time), but we also close ourselves off from a better understanding of “wie es gewesen ist” [“how it was”, a term from historiography].

Regietheater has not only created an indigestible discrepancy between text and stage image, but also, more importantly, between the music and the visual and dramatic aspects. Opera directors have been given a free pass to ignore the basic mandates of score and libretto. Historical instruments in the orchestra pit, but on stage singers in baggy sweaters and torn T-shirts.

Cultural degradation, work in progress!

Olivier Keegel

From and with (umarked) translated quotes from Heather Mac Donald “The Abduction of Opera”, City Journal, summer 2007