To make an unpalatable but, I believe, necessary proposal: suppose we see the problem not so much as economic, but political? Suppose it’s not capitalism, but our representative democracy, that is coming to the end of its age of accommodation with the arts and humanities, and will tolerate only for-profit show business? Can it find a way to build and maintain a civilization?

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In his book, indications keep cropping up that Sharon, for all his involvement with it, never has come to really like opera. He finds Adam Sandler’s Opera Man, a crude bit of the popcult mentality mocking the classical one without the wit to come close to any of its targets, a hoot; says that Il Trovatore‘s libretto is “so stupid that even Verdi’s great music can’t save it;” and suggests that if, for some arcane reason, you really must be in touch with opera’s past, you’ve got it right there on your phone, your pad, your laptop, etc. Sharon looks forward to the end of what most of us would call opera. Then, he seems to think, he will be at liberty to pursue his ambiguous, anti-elitist form of postopera, liberated from ritual and open to the new. Meanwhile, though, he will be applying his “new philosophy of opera” to monumental canonical works under the conditions that prevail in an international-level repertory opera house. Maybe his  Lohengrin will offer clues as to what we can expect.^(I)

But the 2018 Bayreuth Lohengrin was “his” only in part. He took it over when its original director dropped out, and inherited the visual production scheme already settled on between that director and his design team. I gather that work had already gone forward to a fairly advanced stage on executing the designs. Sharon was not a last-minute replacement—he had plenty of time to think it all over and negotiate with the designers. So although the only aspects of the production we can confidently assign to him are the staging and the Personenregie, it’s not unfair to examine his work. He accepted the assignment, so he must have thought he could make his ideas work within it. And though the look of a physical production establishes the given conditions of time and place and, symbolically, the dominant themes of the interpretation (Sharon calls this the “macro” level of interpretation), staging and Personenregie (that is to say, everything about the characters and their actions) are finally the most important aspects of a director’s work.

There is nothing ambiguous about Sharon’s take on Wagner’s scenario. He seeks to contradict its central values and conclusions. No use asking if this makes any sense vis-a-vis the music and words being played and sung—we’ve long since turned that corner. And Sharon is, I think, disingenuous on this matter of making sense. He cites Picasso’s protests about people wanting to make sense of his paintings. Why do we love the wonders of nature that surround us without feeling a need to understand them and yet, when it comes to a painting, we have to understand it? Sharon surely knows the answer—which is that as distinct from the mysteries of nature, a painting is created by a person, and the person must have had something in mind. And just as he knows that an opera is not a painting, and that much as he may like to represent ideas or forces symbolically, once the idea is embodied in a performer and the performer commits an action, the symbol vanishes. It is a peculiarity of Sharon’s discussions of operas with significant mythical or occult content (The Magic Flute, Parsifal, Pelléas et Mélisande) that he ignores that content altogether. ^(II) Since he also isn’t keen on pinning down the legendary/historical aspects of a tale, Lohengrin, the opera Wagner wrote, is left high and dry.