Moreover: no matter how a performer has been trained, and whatever his or her instincts or compatibility with the cultural Zeitgeist may be, there’s been a change in production philosophy in recent years that has altered the basic conditions of acting in opera. The change has gone beyond those of a general visual dominance, auteurial hubris, and the forcing of cinematic imagery and cinematic rhythms onto stage imagery and musical rhythms. As usual, America has been a little slow to respond to trends launched elsewhere, and has failed to launch any trends of its own. But the change is here in full force now, as many of the productions I’ve written about in this series have made clear. It could be encapsulated in a view often expressed in reviews or devotee commentary on a director’s work: “The Konzept is off the rails, but the Personenregie is great.” As if a concept—the theme, the spine, the tone, the very meaning of a stage work—can be detached from performers’ efforts to interpret it.

But at that, it can. One of the ways that can happen is quite old: don’t have a Konzept, or a director, or a design that is anything other than a setting. That was more or less the situation in both spoken and sung theatre not so terribly long ago, just as, in opera, the singers and musicians did not have a conductor as we understand that function. And sometimes I wonder if that might not work out quite satisfactorily for many sorts of opera. Give operatic performers some solid training in movement and body alignment and mimetic expression related to the kinds of music they’ll be singing, and in rhetorical techniques of poetic expression with their voices; get them out from under the interpretive determinism of a conductor and his or her associates on the musical side and of a direction/design team on the dramatic; give them a skilled stage manager to block in the scenes and see to it that things look OK out front, and a choreographer wherever called for; tell everyone to do what it says there in the text, with passion; set them all in motion and ask them to cope with one another, and stand ready to tidy up where needed. I’m certain that would be fresher and more interesting than what we’re getting most of the time now, and would set the more talented performers on the way to personal possession of their roles.

The trouble is, that was then and there, and this is now and here. Then, “there” meant the countries and cultures of opera’s origins, all sharing an in-common Europeanness in greater or lesser degree, but each proudly distinct in language, folk ways, and musical and theatrical practice. Interpretive custom in opera fashioned itself in rough parallel with its counterparts in the spoken theatre and dance and in a close, symbiotic relationship with the creative evolution of the artform, “performance practice” emerging as the works themselves were being born. Both creation and interpretation simultaneously responded to and helped shape their cultures and societies, in specific and immediate ways. Acting was a part of that, in variations highly localized in place and time. Not much with respect to style or the uses of language needed to be taught, being native to time and place, and the notions of an integrated production and of a concept autocratically imposed were no more than oddball fantasies.