To perform such works honestly, interpreters must divest themselves of our ironic airquotes and abjure anything that treats of comment, of abstract or emblematic choices, of reduction-by-definition, of anything that helps them avoid immersion in the emotional and sensory sources of the work’s world of belief. It means unconditional surrender to the manifest meanings of the verbal text and to, above all, the music, which bathes us in those sources and meanings. It means that the interpreters (the director first of all, since he or she guides and influences) must allow themselves to be seen as credulous—which brings us back to the horror of the naïve. Credulity implies gullibility, an inability to resist the appeal of emotional and sensory persuasions. It means an absence of the kind of intellectual rigor we vaunt and what we call “critical thinking,” which are our lines of defense against such appeals.

In Opera as Opera, I trace a line of development in modern and postmodern ways of thinking about directing opera (see especially “Down the Post Road,” pp. 563 ff., and most especially pp. 573-578, wherein I discuss the attitudes and techniques prevalent in contemporary European conceptualizations, culminating in reactions to Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth production of Der Ring des Nibelungen). There, I note that a large majority of the influential directors working with these postmodern, or even “postdramatic,” attitudes and techniques were/are from (the former) East Germany or Soviet bloc nations, and that while they share characteristics with non-traditional auteurs here in America and elsewhere, there is a different tone to their work, one that is darker, more “alienated.” I don’t see any way to not view their efforts as a part of the general European, but particularly German, project of ridding themselves of association with their own culture, except for the husks of its works, for which they have found no replacements. And one affect that must never be acknowledged is this credulousness, or gullibility. I was struck anew by this thought upon reading Jennifer Szalai’s NYT review of Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, by the esteemed historian Peter Fritzsche. One of the subjects taken up by Fritzsche is how quickly and completely so many already-disoriented Germans proved gullible to the shrewdly directed and suddenly inescapable Nazi propaganda, with the newish medium of radio central to its propagation, and how important an element of this brainscrub was a nostalgia for the triumphalist  early-WW1 days, with its evocation of a folkish, communitarian (author’s note: naïve) culture, part real, part imagined. How could we have been so gullible? A nation of suckers!

We Americans of 2020 are well advised to be extremely humble with respect to political gullibility, new-media propaganda, and Old-Times nostalgia. But the cancelation of our High Culture (if, in terms of opera, we had much in the way of that) would not be a constructive response to our own suckerdom. I don’t think I’m slathering paint with too broad a brush. Girard is French-Canadian, of a younger generation than the pacesetting pomo auteurs, and so far as I can tell not reflexively Marxist in mindset. He doesn’t seek to erase narrative, “merely” to re-write it. So he’s not, strictly speaking, “one of them.” But like most interpreters in our living arts, he takes up their presumptions, which collectively constitute the language of “sophisticated” contemporary production. He’s been born into auteuristic privilege and has, I suppose, no reason to question it.