Final notice here before the grand event: The culmination of my series of videos based on Part 1 of Opera as Opera, hosted by Bel Canto Boot Camp, will be the Book Club meeting on Sept. 26 at 3 PM. It will feature open Q and A, and will be moderated by Will Crutchfield, which guarantees expert guidance of the discussion. This event is hosted by Eventbrite, and you can register here.
Being American and a resident of New York City, my focus is naturally here, where we experience the European, auteuristic, Regietheater mentality more often in a drip-down form, rather than at full strength. And since I disagree with that way of thinking and doing not on a production-by-production, what’s-this-about basis, but on principle, at the most fundamental level, I don’t find it terribly edifying for myself or my readers to endure or write about it often. But with live performance here still a couple of posts away, and with several correspondents and friends expostulating to me about two fresh examples, I decided to make the virtual trip. The productions are from major European festivals, at Munich and Aix-en-Provence, and are of the same opera, Tristan und Isolde. Vidop is an eye-dominant medium. No matter how splendid your sound system or how high you crank the volume, your will be watching first, listening second. That is vidop’s sensory order, and it’s idle to pretend otherwise. So I am going to consider the eye elements first, as they call for attention on our screens.
Among the cultural phenomena that have forced the masterworks of opera into concealment, I would identify three as most invidious: the intrusion of postmodern thought drawn from philosophy, litcrit, and artcrit into production conceptualization and performance preparation, with the auteur-director as medium; the only apparently contrary effort to popularize opera by reducing it to an entertainment genre, and then to pretend that this entertainment form, now adrift as merely one of many upon the popcult waters, can nevertheless occupy the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual spaces of the erstwhile artform; and the decline of acoustical singing, along with the collapse of critical standards for it. And it is rare to find all three of these in quite so swirling a confluence as we find them in the Münchner Festspiele 2021 Tristan. Festival Slogan: “Oper für Alle.”
The Munich Surround. It is actually the second of the three pressures, the popcult dragdown, that presents itself first. And I will testify, with right hand raised and the other on any text you deem sacred, that I knew nothing of the genial guy in the blinding blue threads with the hand-held mike who appeared unbidden as the evening’s MC, and that my first thought was that I’d stumbled onto a game show. Bingo!, as the host himself might once have said. He is soon identified as Thomas Gottschalk, and as a few minutes’ exploration on the net will confirm: he’s big! He is most famous as the longtime host of a show called “Wetten . . . dass?” (approximately, “Bet on that?”), on which celebrity guests bet against the house on someone performing a pointless feat—rather like David Letterman’s “Stupid Pet Tricks,” only with humans and wagering. But he also founded (so it’s claimed) Germany’s first hip-hop group, was ad spokesman for Haribo candies, won first prize on “Wer wird Millionär? ” for charity, owned a castle in Germany and a mansion in Malibu, acted in several films, and won numerous TV awards.