Tonight we'll talk about our first non-musician classical musician - the East German opera director Walter Felsenstein. I had a long conversation with a good friend last night about traditional vs. modern opera productions and how there is a reactionary and trollish group called 'Against Modern Opera Productions' which trolled reviews of a production she really loved. Apparently it didn't take much research to figure out that the troll also belonged to a men's right's group....
I understood her point of view and had lots of sympathy with it, the only people who truly want to relive the same experience over and over again are dead inside, but revisionist opera productions are a very recent phenomenon, it's only truly in the last forty years that they've become an unalterable fact of opera. Even 50 years ago, it was enough for hundreds of opera lovers in every city, even thousands, to know that every time, they'd see different singers, a different conductor, who would perform the same work differently. But in our era, very few people know Verdi and Wagner well enough to remember how one opera musician differs from another anymore, so the differences in their mind must be made according to the mis en scene's relation to the plot. But even modern opera production can fall prey to the same unvarying sameness - I remember sitting in a bar with a friend's friend who's father spent his career in European opera, as we tried to explain to our mutual friend that all European opera productions seem to follow the rule that all modern opera productions must include 'Cocaine and Sodomy.' A lot of modern opera productions are incredibly illuminative, but a lot of them demonstrate little knowledge of and little but contempt for their source material.
Those old traditional productions had some glorious moments, and never more often than in mid-century German speaking lands on either side of the iron curtain, where mostly forgotten names like Felsenstein, Max Reinhardt, Petr Weigl, Otto Schenk, Götz Friedrich, created traditional opera productions that so engaged with the drama, were so nuanced and grounded in the text, that they were works of art in themselves. There is no more modern, revisionist opera productions without directors like these (or Italian equivalents like Zefferelli and Visconti) showing what an extraordinary theatrical experience opera can be.
Much of this work, particularly Felsenstein's, was done behind the Berlin Wall and the iron curtain, and the difference is that for the vast majority of Communist history (though curiously not all of it) an modern, updated staging would have been considered politically subversive and ironically combed for all sorts of 'counter-revolutionary' meanings. Paradoxically, aristocratic arts like classical music, opera, classic drama, classic literature, were the only places where many citizens of Communist governments felt that they were truly alive.
If you ever want to understand what an extraordinary, sublime theatrical experience opera can be, look up Walter Felsenstein on youtube, and just look at any of the movie versions of his productions. it is ground zero of opera production, Felsenstein, even more than Reinhardt or Wieland Wagner, showed the opera world that opera is as much theater as music, and he did it in one of the world's most colossally difficult regimes. In the 20th century totalitarian regimes, the space for artistic innovation was so small that the effort had to be put into what there already was, and created an artificially preserved 19th century whose recreations of the 19th century were, ironically, perhaps even more glorious than the original.
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