[Taking Out The (Euro)Trash From Opera]

A.C. thank you for pointing out this omission. With your permission I will mention this addendum in my article? The issue itself is so gargantuan and has so many fronts that I had to decide upon what I would cover and what I would leave out. Perhaps I will focus a second article on the issue of composer intentions--- one thing I have noticed that is plaguing the modern opera scene is the postmodernist approach of "How can you tell what the composer's intention was?"

Thank you for your response, Kainscalia.

I'm not sure what permission you're seeking from me. If you mean quoting my previous post here, none is required as this is a public forum. If you mean quoting from my previously linked S&F article, consider permission granted as long as proper attribution is given.

As I previously remarked, this whole business has long been a matter of concern on S&F, consequently there are a large number of articles therein dealing with the problem, almost all having to do with the operas and music-dramas of Richard Wagner as along with the operas of Mozart they're of special interest to me. One S&F article ("On Interpretation", which 2004 article can be read here) deals in a general way directly with the problem of creator intention in performed works of art as remarked on above by you. As I wrote in that article (from which article, as with all articles on S&F, you're also given permission to quote with proper attribution):

Such [Eurotrash Regietheater] productions are, of course, clear outrages (criminal immediately suggests itself as an appropriate additional intensifier), and perfectly idiot in both conception and realization. For while all such interpretations profess to be true to the ideas of whatever work happens to be in question, they're in truth anything but, prodigiously clever intellectual justifications for, and rationalizations of, the outrages notwithstanding. What each of these interpretations in fact does is take a concrete view of some idea or other embedded in the work in question, dress it without textual or musical warrant, as the case may be, in modern-world-relevant garb (using the term both literally and metaphorically), and present the resulting "concept" as a fresh realization of the deeper meaning of the whole, thereby thoroughly emasculating the work as a work of art by wantonly robbing it of its hallmark capacity to provoke in a receiver a wealth of multifarious resonances and meanings because fixing all resonance and meaning to the interpretive artist's concretized "concept".

As regards your,

I think that the composers' intentions concerning operas should be considered in the light of the material available. It is impossible to say that 'intentions are unknowable' without having to necessarily discard *everything* from libretto to score in one fell swoop and just abandon it all.

I've often quoted on S&F what I'm pleased to call The A.C. Douglas Opera Director's Prime Directive: "Thou mayest do any bloody thing thou wilt in order to realize a dramatically and aesthetically evocative translation of the score (music, text, and stage directions) of the opera into its concrete physical form onstage so long as what thou doest is at every point consonant with the score and contradicts or diverges from it at none."

ACD

[Taking Out The (Euro)Trash From Opera]

I enjoyed reading your spot-on essay on Eurotrash Regietheater (not all Regietheater is Eurotrash), Kainscalia. The subject has been a matter of major concern on my blog (Sounds & Fury) for many years now, and I just want to call to your attention that your essay failed to point out perhaps the greatest danger (and I use the term advisedly) of the growing pervasiveness of Regietheater in opera houses worldwide; viz., the disappearance of any point of reference for those new to opera (either generally or new to a specific opera) of the opera composer's original Konzept, if I may be permitted the term in this context. As I put it in a 2005 S&F piece dealing with Regietheater as it applies to the operas and music-dramas of Richard Wagner (which can be read here):

[T]he Met is today [i.e., the pre-Gelb era] perhaps the only major opera house in the world where one can still see Wagner's operas and music-dramas realized as Wagner envisaged them. Reflecting later on that matter of fact, the full implication of the thing struck me with unwonted force. What, I asked myself, does that mean for those who've no prior experience of these timeless, universal, and deathless works of art in their original form, and who today have almost no opportunity of ever seeing them realized as their creator intended them to be realized, and therefore lack any proper point of reference? It's quite as serious a problem as would be, say, having the plays of Shakespeare available to the general public only in versions utilizing modern settings and with dialogue in modern English, the opportunity of reading and/or seeing them performed in their original form nowhere to be had except within the confines of a single institution.

I point out this omission in your essay not to be picayune, but because this very real danger posed by the pervasiveness of Regietheater in opera houses today is, sadly, rarely discussed in articles dealing with the subject.

ACD