Authorship and ambiguity. As my regular readers will know, I am in fundamental disagreement with Sharon’s claims regarding the director’s role. I do not grant the director the status of co-author, running (as he puts it) on a third parallel track with the composer and librettist. So far as I am concerned, the director is an interpreter, sharing with the conductor the status of interpreter-in-chief in what I see as a chain of interpretation. How the director handles that privilege is a proper topic of debate, including the professional sort we label criticism. But this fundamental contradiction can’t really be argued, because it proceeds from opposed premises. My premise presumes the existence of hierarchies and boundaries, as necessary ways of bringing order to our lives. That they can be misused is not open to question, and the ordering of hierarchies and the setting of boundaries can and must be debated. Sharon appears to plump for an egalitarian attitude. But that’s only a pose, calculated to elevate his own standing and to leave him not only in autocratic control of his own jurisdiction, but to overrun those of the conductor and performers, no matter how “collaborative” his personal approach.

Sharon’s assertions of auteurial status are not, of course, his alone. In fact, they are the current Standard Operating Procedure, the very heart of Regietheater. But Sharon wishes to distinguish himself from your run-of-the-mill régisseur of that type, and he has some trenchant observations on their excretions. His principal objection is that many of those simply find clever time-and-place displacements, and so exude a “patina of boldness,” only to bring us out once again at that same damned place, and make the same old sort of sense. ^(I) Thus, they remain “closed,” and a multiplicity of interpretations is possible only by comparisons among productions, and not within a single production. Now, each receptor will naturally have his or her interpretation of any given opera or production of an opera—we have always had that option—but that is not what Sharon is talking about. He means that each production should, in and of itself and by intention, create an ambiguity of meaning, a “blurred view, a resistance to legibility.” He sees music enslaved by narrative, and disputes the established assumption of a dramatic narrative in the E-19 symphonic literature. (Not a problem. We simply  perform, say, Beethoven’s 9th with the movements in reverse sequence and their internal structures scrambled. At least the singers get to go home early.) He wants us to receive a performance not dramatically, but poetically. Exactly how, though, and to what end, shall this ambiguous, poetic reading be consummated, especially in a work of genius whose complexity of means are directed toward a clearly defined end along a strong musical and verbal dramatic pathway that is already of a poetic nature? The now-standard bobbings and weavings of Regietheater are apparently insufficient, and I can’t help noticing that for the autocratic auteur, the ambiguous multiplicities reinforce the advantages of the time curves. If the receptors (audience and critics) can be kept in a state of blurry disorientation, anything goes. As Sharon observes in another connection, the sowing of confusion creates the hunger for an authoritarian response.