Here are the ones chiefly responsible for “crazy productions”:
Auteurial concepts: We treat the director’s job as if it were the generative creative function, as in the movies. This idea seldom goes unabused.
Production as criticism: The auteur’s political, social or aesthetic agenda is made to serve as the spine of the production, which becomes a commentary (often adversarial) on the work.
Abstraction as a style: A valid and useful theatrical philosophy, abstraction burrows molelike in E-19, undermining the romantic-realist specifics it needs for coherence and belief.
Symbols and emblems: These attempt to convey meanings through fixed visual statement, rather than to derive them from the characters’ actions.
Displaced behavioral codes: These deal with action, but in a time-place framework other than the one stipulated.
Visual overload: This is a favorite of the “traditional” designer-directors. The principle is simple: a brain occupied with reception and interpretation of a cluttered visual field cannot be guided by the music. Opera’s ear-eye hierarchy is inverted.
High tech: Advances in lighting techniques, stage machinery, and set construction, which could help sharpen illusion or clarify events, are instead used to increase the dominance of the visual, or to heighten theatricalization.
Repertory transfusions: For the nonstandard portion of the menu, we select works of sufficient musical or dramatic anonymity to constitute a tabula rasa for all of the above, and all the following.
And as for “boring music”:
The textual loyalty oath: Composers’ notations, restored and examined with scholarly care, are rendered according to a Doctrine of Original Intent, performers’ Bill of Rights not included. No liberties allowed, except those documented as authentic performance practice. They are compulsory, and thereby cease to be liberties.
The new orchestra: Cleaner, leaner, silkier, more refined and lucid, more “exquisite,” brighter in timbre and sharper of detail, it is less rich, less big (though frequently louder), more purely musical, and less dramatically involved than the older models, and more insistently attention-getting.
The new voice: Incorporating many of the new orchestra’s qualities, it has registered some gains in fluidity and precision, and in a safety-net competence. It has suffered major losses in amplitude, color span, individuality of timbre, and emotional expressivity. It rarely dominates. It fits in.
The well-coached interpretation: At every step of the training and rehearsal system, the new performers learn to make stylistic and interpretive decisions not as personal responses to living musical and dramatic circumstances, but according to sets of rules in the vacuum of the studio.
The devalued song: Song, which reached its apogee during E-19, is the musical assertion of individual will, desire, conflict, and need against forces that seek to co-opt or pacify. Only so long as its melody—essentially simple, conjunct, and transparent, springing directly from our elastic, rhythmic selves—remains the primary organizing element of music can the individual’s supremacy be said to exist. In opera, song is born of dramatic intent: the melodic structures range from glorified line readings to more complicated word-note tensions that still embody an interpretive, inflective logic. In most post-E-19 composition, these relationships are changed. The song is caught in surrounding structures and processes that become its determinants, and is usually torn loose from any discoverable interpretive sense. The individual loses his battle. These contemporary relationships bleed through into E-19 “performance practice.”