Three Cheers for the Partisans

By Michael Walsh

What does it matter when and where an opera is set? Does the nature of Verdi's Rigoletto fundamentally change if the action takes place in the court of France (Verdi's original intention), 16th century Mantua (his ultimate choice) or even 20th century Manhattan as long as the relationships among the characters are preserved? Adventurous stage directors, for whom tradition is the memory of the last bad performance, are answering that in many cases, it does not. "Tradition is slovenliness," exclaimed Gustav Mahler. His cry has never seemed more apt, and it is being taken up with brio in the opera world.

In London last month, the English National Opera (ENO) unveiled Director Jonathan Miller's production of Puccini's Tosca set during World War II and played in the style of one of Hollywood's gritty, black-and-white melodramas of the period. Earlier this season, the same company presented a Mad Max version of Bizet's Carmen by David Pountney that replaced castanets and mantillas with feral children darting amid junked American automobiles. In Paris, Producer Seth Schneidman staged Strauss's Elektra as a dream-theory psychodrama, freely mixing images of Greek antiquity and 19th century Europe.

Most of this experimental activity takes place in Europe; what Old World audiences find adventurous, American operagoers often consider brazen. Protective of the cultural talismans bequeathed by distant European forefathers, Americans tend to mistrust radical interpretations. Europeans, more at ease with their own heritage, feel freer to experiment with it. Those seeking a bold approach in the U.S. will rarely find it in the big houses. In New York City, the Metropolitan Opera favors conservative productions, sometimes elephantine ones like Franco Zeffirelli's La Boheme and Tosca, that reinforce the company's role as a musical museum. Occasionally, the rival New York City Opera makes a cautious foray into modernism, often with indifferent results -- Frank Corsaro's tepid Spanish Civil War version of Carmen, for example.

Smaller companies, such as the Santa Fe Opera and Opera Theater of St. Louis, offer off-season stimulation, and Director Peter Sellars has made a reputation scandalizing the bourgeoisie, for example, setting Mozart's Cosi fan tutte in Despina's Coffee Shop. Still, dullness prevails in the largest companies, where opera is viewed as a closed, dead art; innovation is largely a guerrilla endeavor carried on by partisans hiding out in the hills.

By contrast, Europe's buzzing controversies are full of life. West Germany, with the liveliest opera scene, is chockablock with radical restagings of the classics -- in extreme cases to such an extent that the original work is almost obliterated by the new context. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production of Berg's Lulu in Munich sets the action in a four-story madhouse with Wedekind's tawdry story played out in front of an onstage audience of gaping mummies. To be sure, London's Royal Opera and the Vienna State Opera remain committed to traditional opera staged in traditional ways, sung by the same coterie of jet- bound stars who appear at the Met. And the old style still has its rewards; the Royal's Der Rosenkavalier, a rococo dream handsomely sung and lovingly led by the company's new music director, Bernard Haitink, is impossible to envisage any other way.

Like plays, operas have no genuine existence away from a stage. A play can be profitably read, and an opera enjoyed on records, but neither really lives until it is performed in the theater. The music is the irreducible element (although Peter Brook's 1981 La Tragedie de Carmen even fiddled with Bizet's score and orchestration). After that comes the controversy.

Similarly, there is no canonical form that producers must slavishly adhere to -- no original, ideal performance to be imitated and, in some cases, not even an authoritative score. What, for example, constitutes the definitive Don Carlos by Verdi, a work that the composer was amending as late as the rehearsals before the first Paris performance and later shortened by an act and recast in Italian? What is the version of Carmen that conforms most closely to Bizet's intentions? For many years, Carmen was unthinkable without the recitatives that Ernest Guiraud added after the composer's death. Now it is unthinkable with them.

"People don't understand that what they have in their hands is something that is undergoing change," says Director Miller, whose previous ventures into operatic transposition include his 1982 setting of Rigoletto as a 1950s Mafia romance. "These works tumble down through history and change their identities. The charge of tampering is a philistine objection. To do them at all is to tamper."

In a recent book, Subsequent Performances, Miller discusses what he terms the "afterlife" of a work of art: "In the past when opera was accepted as a dramatic work it was for an audience whose sensibility was so different from our own that we cannot accept the way in which it appealed to them. In order for it to reassert itself as first-class music and drama it has to be emancipated from the formal presentation in which it may have been conceived but has now been imprisoned."

Like his Rigoletto, Miller's Tosca (first seen last summer in Florence) is a transposition. In moving the action from the Napoleonic era to 1944, the director found cognates for both character and events. Scarpia, the oily chief of police, was based on the notorious Italian Fascist Pietro Koch, for example, and the original libretto's reference to the battle of Marengo becomes Anzio instead. The opera's familiar locales, such as the Farnese Palace and Castel Sant'Angelo, have been eliminated in favor of a huge drab gray space, extravagantly tilted, which serves as church, interrogation chamber and execution room. When Tosca (Soprano Josephine Barstow) jumps to her death, she does so by crashing through a window. Everyone in the cast . wears black, white or gray; as conducted by Jan Latham-Koenig, the production lets Puccini's vivid, cinematic music provide the color.

Pountney's Carmen took an even more radical view. Rather than discovering a parallel setting, the director simply created one, reveling in the anachronism. The gypsy girls, now prostitutes, conducted their business in the back seats of cars, and the bullfighters in the final act made their entrance in motley cholo low riders. So far, so shocking -- but only if one believes that Carmen is about the working conditions in Spanish cigarette factories, instead of sexual obsession, violence and death. In fact Pountney did not go far enough. Micaela -- a character not found in Merimee's gritty original novella -- was her conventional, boring bourgeois self, and the reserved British performers did not really get the sleaze factor right. This should have been Carmen: Beyond Thunderdome. Still, it boasted a brilliant performance by Mezzo Sally Burgess in the title role and some crisp conducting from Paul Daniel.

The Paris Elektra was the most daring in concept but the tamest in execution. Schneidman rather naively promised an "arena of the psychodrama buried deep in the tomb of the unconscious," but what occurred onstage was a fairly standard day in the death of the House of Atreus. The real pleasures of the production were the whiplash performance of Soprano Hildegard Behrens in the title role and the gloriously haunted Klytemnestra of Mezzo Christa Ludwig. Conductor Seiji Ozawa, leading his first Elektra, sought out the brutal score's elusive lyric elements and found most of them.

Whether transposed or superimposed, opera today admits a multitude of possible interpretations. Innovation, even if it is not always completely successful, keeps the art fresh; and in any case, those who claim that the real drama in opera is found in the singing can have no reasonable objection to new stagings. American companies would benefit from a jolt of European bravado. It is not a sign of degeneracy but of vitality.