Now, “there” means the populated globe, excluding some areas of Asia and Africa. And “now” follows, first, the increased compositional complexity and growth in orchestral and choral forces that occurred during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which made a more centralized command over stage and pit mandatory and, second, well over a century of accelerating cultural homogenization—which is to say of a loss of specificity, immediacy, and localized variety—and of a progressive distancing from presumed understandings. And over that duration, the creative energies of opera, those employed in the fashioning of viable new works, have been scattered to the winds and only meagerly productive. We are Post. And acting is a part of that, too. Now, nearly everything needs to be taught, particularly the skills and understandings required for persuasive performance of the canon, or, rather, canons. If we are left with only the skills and understandings of the Post, opera’s no more than a sad freak show on our overcrowded cultural midway.

The second way in which acting can be detached from the theme, the tone, the spine, and meaning of a work is the one we see now. We are nearly always given it in some dosage, for nearly all productions have made use of it for several decades past. Any merely updated production, however friendly to the creators’ vision in other ways, will effect that detachment. But we have come many rest stops beyond that on the Post Road. We have come beyond the complete breakdown of the integrated production—that is, one wherein all the constituent elements are reconciled to a coherent whole—and on through its opposite, the total adversarial production, wherein those same elements are turned against one another to reverse a work’s socio-politico-cultural meaning and value system. We have arrived at a clearing, a workyard, wherein the performers’ physical behavior must be responsive to a scenario continually at odds with the sources of vocal and musical expression, the very words and music being sung. And this has not come about by application of intellectually sophisticated, abstract Late Modern notions like that of the separation of elements (to avoid “parallel illustration”) deployed by Robert Wilson and others in their opera productions. Instead, it’s been an ironic, contemptuous coup: the hardwon techniques of the modern acting sensibility, of integrated production and “concept,” have been used to demolish the ideals from which they sprang.

We have  a handy example: the production of Verdi’s La Forza del destino, directed by Mariusz Trelinski, which I wrote about last April 19. In it, the performers physically enact one scenario while singing the words and music of another. And whereas the singers of the Forza productions I wrote about earlier (see the posts of 1/12/18, about the opera, and 1/27/18, about the performances,) along with all their predecessors from the time of composition forward, would have been puzzled or outraged by the demand that they do any such thing, Trelinski’s do it rather well; hence, an “improvement.” On occasion, their behavior even corresponds, at least at the surface level, to what the music is telling us. An instance comes in the brilliantly set Act 1 passage, allegro agitato, in which Leonora’s inner conflict over her flight with Alvaro is graphically conveyed by halting, unevenly distributed fragments of phrases and self-contradicting words, ending in muffled sobs. The performer (Lise Davidsen) illustrated the musical/vocal pattern for us with a series of accurately-timed nervous moves and gestures. She did this with enough conviction for us to “get it” and, at first thought, to accept it as well acted. The tone of it was all false, too light and flighty, its impression much affected by her costume—sleek contemporary bourgeois vs. the mid-settecento aristo of the original. That is a style contradiction inherent in the contemporized production as a whole, and there is nothing a performer can do about it short of adapting or rebelling—i. e., getting fired. There is a more serious problem with the sequence, though, even within the bounds of the director’s scenario. The character’s conflict is powerfully delineated in the music; any operatically conditioned ear cannot fail to detect it. The actress’s job is to show as little of it as possible, to conceal it from Alvaro. Leonora, the text says, begins weeping about halfway through the passage, and is overcome by sobbing as the music winds down. “Your heart bursts with joy . . . and tears?” sings Alvaro after a timed pause. “Your hands are frozen as in the tomb?” That Leonora has had a difficult time hiding her feelings, that a little has shown through in her actions despite her efforts, is logical enough. But the reveal is in the voice, in the sound of little bursts of wordnotes quivering at first, then being slowly suffocated in sobs. She tries to hold them back, too, but she doesn’t succeed. It’s the tears and the touch that Alvaro picks up on, and since neither can be directly conveyed to the audience, the voice must be the primary medium of communication. As in opera, it usually is. And Davidsen did not do that. She sharply observed the pacing (and yes, that alone conveys something), but she did nothing inflectional, nothing we would call “acting with the voice.” I cannot know whether this was because she didn’t want to or doesn’t know how to, or because her director (or conductor—we assume his eyes are shut, but what about his ears?) didn’t want it. My outsider guess is that both performer and director judged that, having made the timing both vocally and physically clear (having “enacted” it), they were happy with the result. Oddly, they had created a fine piece of the dreaded “parallel illustration”—of showing the same thing twice, for eye and ear—while leaving out the true-to-life behavior and the emotional point as transmitted by singing.