THE ART OF OPERATIC PRODUCTION—that is, bringing a piece to life on the stage—has been to a certain extent a victim of its own success. It has become the primary issue of any new presentation of an opera, with the singers and the total musical execution generally relegated to the final paragraph of critiques. Beverly Sills spoke of the success she had with creative new productions of the classics while at the New York City Opera: fans told her it “was like seeing an old painting in a new frame.” Lovely, of course, but it is a sad day for art when critics spend 90 percent of their columns discussing the frame and only 10 percent on the canvas. Nor is the emphasis on production ideas the only problem. The debate about styles of production has fossilized. It seems that either one must stick to the letter of the libretto, which is what is called “conservative” or “literal,” or apply some overarching concept on the whole work and twist everything to fit the concept, which is called “creative.” Whether the production is good or not doesn’t seem to enter the debate. I hereby propose a new standard: Does the production in question open up the possibilities of the opera or does it diminish them? A production of any genre can do either, and we who believe in the validity of Puccini’s art will be best served by productions of the first quality, whether they are “traditional” (another catchphrase) or “radical interpretations.”
It can be very exciting when a daring production succeeds. The clash of egos between the director and the composer can make for thrilling theater in and of itself. But more often it falls short. Not many directors have the genius to take on a composer as established as Puccini in anything resembling a fair fight. But this doesn’t stop them from trying. Wrestling with the operatic favorites is the only way to make your résumé as an opera director. That is as it should be. But we in the audience must always question the motives behind what is set before us. Half of contemporary opera production is comprised of directors trying to prove their moral superiority to the work in question. (Yes, moral.) And by implication, they are demonstrating their superiority to the people (us) who would buy tickets to such things. With Puccini, that fraction is even higher. Everyone seems to feel the need to rework Puccini. The notion is that his major operas are so familiar that they need to be presented in a new way or they will die. This is partially laudable, although it would be more accurate to say they need to be presented with respect to the issues at stake in each opera, or they will die. I also have to question what it is about Puccini that makes him above all other composers so in need of “interpretation.” One never sees “radical reinterpretations” of Berg’s Wozzeck, for example, even though at this point Berg’s opera is as familiar to audiences as Fanciulla and Trittico, if not Bohème and Tosca and Butterfly. Deep down, I think Puccini’s frank emotionality embarrasses a lot of people, who like to tone it down with a lot of extraneous commentary. I love an interesting production of a Puccini opera, but I resent directors trying to save me from Puccini.
With Puccini, we also have the whole problem of realism (except, perhaps, in Turandot). Bits of stage business are not incidental; they are the core around which the score is constructed. When Wieland Wagner removed the props from his grandfather’s operas, there was no loss to the drama. Indeed, Tristan and Isolde were discovered not to need a cup to be understood as drinking from the cup. The cup was a metaphor to begin with. In Puccini, the prop onstage can be a metaphor—the sword of Cio-Cio-San’s father, for example—but it is also very much what it purports to be in real terms. Thus the candle and the key in Act I of Bohème, the deck of cards and the drops of blood in Act II of Fanciulla, and the eponymous overcoat in Il tabarro, for example, must be visibly present onstage unless total confusion is to ensue. Therefore, whatever updating is involved, or whatever concepts are grafted onto the original stories, there is a sameness to most productions of Puccini’s operas. And when anyone attempts to do something different, which is laudable in and of itself, it often fails to address the core of the work in question. Puccini is difficult that way.
Manon Lescaut gets less interpretation from directors and designers than most of the Puccini repertory. It is a story that is firmly rooted in a time and place, not merely as a detail of its libretto but at its very core. The issue of luxury is inherent to Manon’s nature and therefore to the story. If there has ever been a moment in history better equipped to explore the conflicts of love and luxury than rococo Paris, it has yet to be discovered. The only issue at stake is how much one wishes to comment on the luxury itself. This subject arises specifically in European productions, primarily in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The impetus came from German productions, particularly those of Götz Friedrich in Berlin from the ’70s through the ’90s. In his Wagner productions, most notably Tannhäuser and Meistersinger, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie (respectively) were represented as corrupt. Well, duh, one might say, but again this is the German predilection for making explicit that which is implicit. Crippled, eye-patched well-to-do’s crossed the stage making their nefarious plans. It seems apparent to me that this is in fact an endorsement of the ancient prejudices rather than a rejection of them, since it supports the idea that corruption is evident to the naked eye. Conversely, if it looks good, then it is good. Oh well, it was a phase, and one must applaud Friedrich and his imitators for attempting to wrestle, however clumsily, with their culture’s difficult history. But the “ratty wallpaper aristocracy” idea has since been done to death, in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, in Verdi’s Don Carlos, and probably everywhere else. In Manon Lescaut, it makes no sense whatsoever. Geronte’s palace must seduce us as it has seduced Manon or she is nothing but a flighty slut, which is another story altogether and one that does not work with the music provided. If you come across this idea in a staged version, either shrug it off as passé and tedious or boo the production team, according to your own preferences.
The ur-production of Bohème, and a good point of departure for any discussion of this opera in stage, is the Met’s. It was conceived in 1977 by Franco Zeffirelli and is still going strong. Zeffirelli is excoriated in many circles for being visually overcooked, hopelessly traditional, and generally retrograde (his right-wing political affiliations in Italy have not helped this perception). There is no doubt that he can be—usually is—all of those things, but taking the Met Bohème on its own merits helps us to understand its enduring popularity. It is big, overblown, and punctiliously traditional, but it is well done on all those counts. Zeffirelli solved the problem of the small garret on a huge stage well in Acts I and IV with a module room against a backdrop of the rooftops of Paris. The protagonists can be seen well within this module from every corner of the Met, which is nothing short of miraculous. Act III looks like any other Act III, basically, except perhaps for more snow than has probably ever fallen on Paris at one time. The controversy comes from Act II, which has always been the problem in staging Bohème. Zeffirelli noted that Puccini and Illica defied logic by placing this scene outdoors, and took them at face value. So he gave us the Latin Quarter—all of it—on the stage. There are throngs and throngs of Christmas Eve revelers, all appropriately attired in hoopskirts and whatnot, with many children running about and no end of “business.” In fact, it calls for more people onstage than any other Met production, which is saying something—210, compared to a mere 204 Aida. Parpignol arrives on a pony cart, and Musetta arrives in a horse-drawn buggy, which always brings forth applause from some people and makes the hipsters twitch. Fun and games for both camps, so far. One may like such extravagance or not according to one’s preferences, but it must be admitted that Zeffirelli was in command of his resources on this occasion. The protagonists can always be seen and heard within all this by a series of clever redeployments, lighting, even a moving wall or two, all having the effect of “close-up” shots. This is all that is needed to make the scene a success. Paradoxically, I have seen much smaller, more sober productions where the leads got lost, visually and aurally, in this scene.
The Met production is the ne plus ultra of one way of producing opera. (We saw in the previous chapter how labeling this method “traditional,” “conservative,” or “realistic” does not entirely explain the situation, but such terminologies are inevitable for the moment.) Not only is it “traditional,” but it is monumental. Only the Met could have done it on that scale. One benefit this has on other American opera companies is that it forces them to come up with new ideas, in theory, at least. There’s no way another opera company in America (or anywhere, for that matter) could out-Zeffirelli the Met’s Zeffirelli. They shouldn’t even try.
If one wants an alternative to the Zeffirelli approach, what are the options? The most common idea is to update the action to any time between 1840 and the present. Updating can be good or bad. Usually it is neutral, in and of itself, although critics still discuss the issue as if it were the trendiest point of the cutting edge. Directors eager to be discussed (a redundancy) therefore know they can get some attention by this not-so-new ploy. But a production must be judged on whether or not it brings out the drama, not by how terribly shocking it is to see Mimì in a leather harness (or whatever). Lately there has been a trend to suggest (or say flat out) that Mimì’s deadly illness is AIDS rather than tuberculosis. Of course, Rent went all the way with this idea, but Rent is another story for another chapter. The AIDS card is played in order to create that most dreaded of all words in the theater, relevance. But Bohème is not, at heart, a plea to the audience to fund a cure for tuberculosis, and therefore there is no gain by changing her disease. (La traviata suffers this fate as well.) Incidentally, tuberculosis is the leading killer of people with AIDS throughout the world, so in fact one could be even more relevant by leaving it as it was.
The most elaborate updating conceit I have seen was in a New York City Opera production by James Robinson in 2000. We were moved to 1915, and the action was set in contrast to the background of the Great War. Children played with gas masks in Act II, and newspapers hawked the names of the dead from the ongoing battle of Verdun, which ran up to thousands a day and whose casualties eventually exceeded the incomprehensible number of 700,000. Act III was set in a train station, where coffins—dozens of them—were piled on high as the lovers broke up. Translations in the supertitles were changed although the original libretto remained in the singing, which is another strange phenomenon of modern regietheater, and one fraught with problems. From the staging, we learn that Schaunard has been drafted and will shortly be packed off to Verdun, presumably as cannon fodder. Throughout Mimi’s death scene, Schaunard sat slightly apart, smoking, and pondering his own sure death. The cue for this departure does exist in Bohème. Schaunard’s hovering just outside the door while Mimì is expiring is curious and makes us wonder what Puccini had in mind for this character that never made it to the stage. I suspect it was this moment in Act IV that cued Robinson for the whole concept. But the result was not wholly satisfactory.
If the point of all this was to underscore the power of Bohème to make us consider our own mortality, the actual effect was, at best, of going all around the block to get to the house next door. The death of Mimì was made to seem insignificant. Perhaps they were trying to disprove Stalin’s adage that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths are a statistic, using the sadness of Puccini’s score to do so. Or perhaps les bourgeois were being épatés yet again, as in “How dare you sit there and weep for Mimì while you consign tens of thousands of young men to die at places like Verdun, and don’t think twice about it?” Schaunard’s death in war is posited as preventable while Mimi’s is an act of God, inevitable and therefore less tragic—a point that could be argued on many levels.
And leaving aside, for the moment, the traditionalist argument that the work in question is La (as opposed to the masculine Le) bohème—that is, it’s about her, not Schaunard—there may be a well-intentioned point in there somewhere beyond proving the director’s moral superiority to the always-despised opera audience. However, the hundreds of thousands of corpses at Verdun really ARE just a statistic unless we can see each of those bodies as a human being, as an individual whose life mattered. And Mimì’s life must matter as much as Schaunard’s or none of it matters at all. In other words, either Mimì’s death breaks your heart, or you haven’t got one to break.
Baz Luhrmann has been interested in Bohème for some time. His movie Moulin Rouge is, of course, a gloss on Bohème, but that, too, is a story for a later chapter. In 1993, Luhrmann staged a successful production of Bohème itself at the Sydney Opera House. The action was set in the 1950s which created no major problems (all right, the candle shtick was a bit of a stretch, but no big deal). The unbearably attractive leads (Cheryl Baker and David Hobson) were good and looked ripping in a pillbox hat and leather jacket, respectively. The sets were practical and appropriate, the major gimmick being the red neon sign proclaiming “Amour” in Acts I, II, and IV and letting us know this was about love in, well, neon lights. But the Sydney production was, in essence, quite conventional. All the everyday objects of the libretto were there onstage (hat, muff, herring, etc., etc.) and the “business,” like the hunt for the key, was handled creatively and with an attention to detail surpassing the obsessive Zeffirelli. You could tell Luhrmann liked this work, and it is well worth watching.
Luhrmann one-upped himself with his much-discussed production of La bohème on Broadway, which was very like the Sydney production, only more so. The basis of the production was Luhrmann’s desire to have young and attractive leads playing the protagonists. This is laudable, but it would appear that that alone was not enough to make it a smash. Opera is funny that way. Luciano Pavarotti looks truly ridiculous as Rodolfo, and cannot—indeed, has never even attempted to—act his way out of the world’s largest paper bag. Yet people will be talking about his Rodolfo as long as people will be talking. He remains a paragon who—somehow—can bring the story to life. Name the babes on Broadway who took the lead roles. I dare you. And of course they were amplified, which doesn’t help, no matter how “tastefully” it is done. Amplification creates a disconnect between singers and an audience that can only be bridged by an art form (rock, perhaps) that inherently relies on amplification as part of its mode of expression. In opera, fat and ugly with a voice beats young and pretty with a mike every time. Furthermore, it is rather rude, to say the least, to suggest that attractive leads have never graced the roles of Bohème. For my money, José Carreras and Teresa Stratas were as good-looking as people can be in their Live from the Met in 1979, and their acting was top-notch. Really. By any standards. Now, if we could have some sort of operatic time machine and connect those two in their primes with a Baz Luhrmann, then we would really have quite an exciting performance.
At least Luhrmann tried something, and since his love for this work is patent, I, for one, applaud him. The news headlines at the time, though, were enough to annoy any opera fan and apparently were not enough to lure in that elusive, entirely imaginary public-who-would-go-to-the-opera-if-only-the-singers-were-younger-and-prettier. The sense was that something truly revolutionary was going on, that Bohème was being freed from the clutches of the lorgnette-wielding Robber Barons of the Jurassic Operapark and being revealed, at long last, to the masses on Broadway. Actually, Bohème has been on Broadway (Lincoln Center) for years, so the whole issue really involved moving it south twenty blocks. Nor was it an issue of pricing. Top ticket prices may be higher, but low-priced tickets are cheaper at City Opera by far and even at the Met than on Broadway. So the Great Social Issues at stake existed only in the minds of the New York Times.
The issues of Protestant literalism vs. the Quadriga explored in the previous chapter become most evident, predictably, in current productions of Tosca. It is axiomatic that “interpretive” production values come from Germany while Italians have remained mired in “literal” productions. Those terms are not merely useless. In fact they are exactly wrong if looked at this way. In an Italian (or Italian-derived) production, you might see a Tosca where Scarpia wears a peruke and shoe buckles and Tosca a red gown and a tiara, so that you will know they are something other than a guy in a peruke and a woman in a tiara. A German (or a German-inspired) production does not allow for multiple layers of interpretation and therefore any meanings the director wishes to make clear must be patently visible onstage. If Scarpia is into kinky S&M sex, which he clearly is, then the peruke must go and the leather harness must come out. All of which is fine, as long as the Germans and Italians who create in these different ways have a grasp on their own cultural vocabularies. The real problems come with us Americans, who generally speaking have no grasp whatsoever on cultural nuance (and we are heartily hated by the world because of this). Mark Lamos in his slightly scandalous New York City Opera production of Tosca had to show Scarpia masturbating in church to let us know that Scarpia is a hypocritical pig. Of course this has the advantage of shocking the bourgeoisie, yet again, but the real problem is that it is too literal for a story such as Tosca. If we must see this to know what Scarpia is, then it is we, and not our Victorian predecessors, and least of all the Italians, who have repressed our sexuality into nonexistence. Across Lincoln Center, the Met continues to trot out Zeffirelli’s production, which re-creates the familiar Roman landmarks in question almost identically. Indeed, the apartment in the Palazzo Farnese is an exact replica of an actual room in the Farnese, in precisely the same scale. Lamos’s production, whether praised or panned, will be called “creative” and “progressive” while Zeffirelli’s will be called “literal.” Neither is either. Each reflects a whole stack of historical-cultural baggage on the subject of textual interpretation. To constantly praise one method while always decrying the other is nothing short of racism, pure and simple. I wish directors who write (at great length) about their work, and the critics who review it, would finally grasp this idea.
The fault may not lie entirely with the directors, who often are trying to get to the core of the opera in question, even if their ideas take them in other directions. Tosca was shocking in 1900, and it should be shocking now. It is shocking, if one is listening carefully. The violent clashes of the score, not to mention the libretto’s details of Scarpia’s ideas of fun (“spasms of hate, spasms of love…”) ought to be enough information for any audience. But is it, nowadays?
Lamos’s production moved the action to Fascist Italy, an idea that has become almost “Option B” for any production of Tosca. The film Roma, città aperta (Open City, 1945) used much glossing of Tosca for its story of the last days of the Nazi occupation of Rome, as we will see in the “Permutations” chapter. And there was a film version of Tosca made in Italy shortly after the war called E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma that did this, and many other productions have followed suit. It is not a bad idea in and of itself, and it generally works, although one does weary of always seeing Nazi and Fascist uniforms used to telegraph “bad guys” to the audience. How much more subversive and insightful when the bad guys look rather elegant and potentially charming! Besides, if one is searching for (shudder) contemporary relevance, it must be admitted that Fascist Rome is basically as remote as Napoleonic Rome to these elusive audiences who must be developed. Ultimately, it will matter much more how the characters interact than what outfits they wear. I’m sure fine directors like Lamos know this, and they too must fret over the lack of attention these aspects of their directorial prowess receive in the press compared to the sets and costumes. In general, the Big Concept will always be a problem with productions of Puccini operas because the concepts tend to quash the details. And nowhere is the adage that “God is in the details” truer than in Puccini’s work. We’ve already seen this in the case of Bohème, which is all about details, but it remains true for the rest of the corpus as well, even the “big” works like Tosca and Turandot. How Tosca communicates to Mario that he should color the painting’s eyes black, “Falle gli occhi neri,” is infinitely more important than how the Roman Catholic Church is represented, or parodied, in the Te Deum.
The great problem in Madama Butterfly is to frame the story in such a way that it is not a thoroughly offensive reduction of Japanese culture. This is difficult, since there is something inherently oppressive about projecting one culture onto another. Making the characters express themselves in Italian and in an Italian art form creates a problem right away. Directors and designers sometimes create new problems by bending too far backward trying to prove that they are not cultural imperialists. If this recent craze for “crossover” and “fusion” is anything but the latest incarnation of cultural imperialism, then I’m too dense to understand. The search for Japanese authenticity can only solve so much in what is, like it or not, an Italian opera based on an American play. Companies assume that hiring Japanese directors will de facto defense against any accusations of missing the point, and this has been in fashion for some time. Even Geraldine Farrar hired a Japanese actress to coach her on movement and gesture.
In the 1950s, the Met hired a Japanese team to produce a new Butterfly. The first thing jettisoned was the gimmick at the end of Act II, where Butterfly pokes three holes in the rice-paper walls to keep vigil. This was thought to be “wholly un-Japanese.” Of course, so is singing “Tu! tu! piccolo iddio” in Italian before committing ritual suicide, so where does one draw the line? In extreme forms, we have “Kabuki” or “Kabuki-inspired” (whatever that’s meant to mean) productions of Butterfly. These tend to create a clash of aesthetics that, while interesting in itself, overwhelms the opera. Yet there are exceptions.
Robert Wilson directed a production of Butterfly for Los Angeles and Paris using his hallmark stylized gestures and stage movements (or nonmovements), which are derived from Japanese theater. At this point in time, it is fair to say Wilson has made a mark by sticking to what appears to be one idea, involving near-motionless characters striking poses and moving, if at all, like chess pieces pushed by an unseen hand. Of course a man of Wilson’s talents has more ideas than that, but there is a sameness to the experience of a Wilson production whether it is Butterfly or Wagner’s Lohengrin or Tom Waits’s opera Alice or…. That is now. In 1993, it was a revelation for Butterfly, and many people who have only seen Butterfly trying to negotiate authentic geisha movements would still be blown away by Wilson’s production. Generally speaking, no Puccini opera blooms if it is stifled, and Wilson’s stage ideas can be stifling, but the production was entirely successful. Paradoxically, by restricting the movement and the stage “business,” it focused concentration on Butterfly herself and her inner journey. Any production that accomplishes that is working within the spirit, rather than the letter, of this opera. I doubt that even Wilson would suggest that his method should become the one and only new way of putting Butterfly on the stage, but it was a new way of appreciating this work and is therefore to be applauded enthusiastically. I only wish it had toured more cities.
Wilson’s production was also a good format for deriving from Japanese tradition. Again, he used ideas of the Japanese theater, but did not attempt to replicate the exactitudes of Japanese theater. As stated above, authenticity is elusive in a work like this. Besides, it spills over into the reductive and even the unintentionally comic. W S. Gilbert understood this when he directed the first run of his and Sullivan’s Mikado. Gilbert insisted on spending a fortune on authentic Japanese costumes and hired any Japanese person he could find in London to teach gestures. He even raided the staff of the Japanese tea shop in Knightsbridge for tutors. Then, when the character of Pooh-Bah struck an authentic pose dressed in magnificent robes and introduced himself as the “Archbishop of Titipu,” the effect was hilarious. Directors and designers need to remember this—“authenticity” can backfire.
Then, of course, there is the whole problem of Fanciulla. How does one address the California Gold Rush without eliciting howls of laughter? The best productions, in my experience, rush this problem head-on. Embrace the clichés, since Belasco and Puccini certainly did. That is, stage a “horse opera,” as Stravinksy called it, and let everyone howl away. A certain giddiness is appropriate to this piece—think of Minnie’s outburst at the end of Act II—and there are some wry and comic touches in it, particularly in Act I. The problem of Minnie riding in on a horse to save the day is even more acute now than it was at the premiere. Few are the sopranos who can add horsemanship to the other requirements needed for this role. Yet having her walk on with pistols waved in the air falls short of the big buildup in the orchestra. The best solution I ever saw was Hal Prince’s for San Francisco in 1980, his first opera production after being enshrined as the King of Broadway Directors. It was also his best opera production. He brought Minnie on for her big Act III “Here comes the cavalry!” moment on one of those pump carts used on rails in mining, the kind Wile E. Coyote likes to use for chasing the Road Runner. It brought down the house. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some hats tossed in the air and pistol shots fired from the audience as tokens of approval. In Act II, Prince used the long, moody orchestral introduction for a shtick where a bear rummaged through the garbage cans outside of Minnie’s cabin. Everyone who had ever spent a weekend at Lake Tahoe or Yosemite, which is to say most of the audience, guffawed, and in the right way. As Shakespeare well knew, a little laughter does nothing to diminish real drama. In fact it heightens it, not merely by ironic contrast but, I believe, by loosening up some of the audience’s well-guarded emotions. The important thing was that the old pro Prince never lost sight of the principals. The details in Fanciulla are every bit as important as they are in Bohème, and even more devilish to manage if stage directors are to be believed. The half-smoked cigar in the ashtray, the deck of cards (with three aces and a pair readily available), and, above all, the drops of blood landing on Rance’s hand in cue with the music must all be readily perceived by the audience if this is not to devolve into farce. Prince accomplished this, and Fanciulla was the hit of the season.
Il trittico is such an expensive and risky proposition to begin with that companies generally opt for reasonably safe productions. There are exceptions, however, especially since the three operas are often given separately. Tabarro generally doesn’t get a lot of reinterpretation. The scruffy denizens of Paris’s seamy underbelly don’t seem to need a lot of disguise to be made digestible to modern audiences. The only visual suspense, when the curtain rises, is how scruffy they are, and how hard the point is driven home that manual laborers are underpaid in this world. Angelica, though, has its own problems. Moving it out of the convent is sometimes tried. New York City Opera’s production moved it into a children’s hospital, which seemed like a compromise and didn’t really come off well. The hospital idea should work in theory—it’s a close relative of a convent. But shouldn’t it have been a mental hospital? This would have at least underscored the opera as Angelica’s private hallucination, which seems much more palatable than the straight sentimentality of the convent-based story. The religiosity was lost, of course, and Angelica is not much without the religiosity. Most productions of Angelica retain the convent setting, even if only to make rather banal digs at Catholic ritual. This serves the double purpose of making the production “edgy” yet leaving all that theatrically delicious Catholic ritual intact. We can be involved and above it all at the same time. Beware of this tendency in productions. Either you take Angelica on its own sentimental terms, or you had best put something else on the stage. However, it is best to avoid the outright kitsch of the original productions: Geraldine Farrar’s false eyelashes really must have made them howl even in 1918. They were a greater offense to religion than any Andrés Serrano art installation. And the statue coming to life amid a shower of glitter never comes off well anymore. In fact, it didn’t come off too well in 1918 either, judging from contemporary accounts. A little magic from the lighting crew will work the true miracle at this problematic moment. The best Angelica productions go for an austerity that is appropriate to the setting: this convent is a severe place, not an early version of St. Trinian’s. Besides, austerity in design highlights the soprano, who must bear almost the entire burden of this work if it is to succeed at all.
Gianni Schicchi gets produced very frequently, and is a favorite of universities and other smaller companies. But it’s not an easy opera to produce. Comedy is always tricky, and Schicchi can be very funny when directed right. Unfortunately, too much slapstick usually detracts from the comedy in this case. Since Schicchi has the reputation of being a good introduction to opera, you will often feel the director almost begging the audience to like this art form. Furthermore, no great shtick is worth compromising the ensemble’s musical timing, without which there’s no point to this opera. If you have a great Schicchi with real presence, the comedy will take care of itself without making it necessary for the aged aunts to do backflips. As for messing with the setting, the medieval Florentine ambience of the libretto is hard to ignore, and the much-tufted outfits of the epoch make good opportunities for comedy. Besides, the relatives are money-grubbing climbers. So if the rented costumes are a bit ratty, all the better. Yet Schicchi’s setting is not sacrosanct. Film director William Friedkin had a success at the Los Angeles Opera with his Schicchi done in a high-Victorian Florence, with much white linen and straw hats in evidence. It was a smart idea, because the Florence of E. M. Forster is every bit as mythical a time and place as the Florence of Dante—perhaps even more so. The essentials of the Florentine setting are still there—that is, a place where young love with all its hormones are ready to burst forth and sweep away all the old hypocrisies. Pay attention to the issues in a given opera and one cannot go wrong. And yes, folks, even Puccini has “issues.”
La rondine is so rarely given that productions tend to be rather straightforward. The main issue at stake is how glitzy to make it. The New York City Opera has been trotting out a rather simple production of Rondine for years: it’s neither this way nor that way, and as such it works fine. Conversely, critics complained that the notable Covent Garden production of 2000 was de trop: Magda’s salon was a palace; the sordid Parisian nightclub where she meets Ruggero was too grand, and so forth. Of course, audiences like seeing lavish sets, and Rondine is a bit of a hard sell in the best of times. The problem is that this places it firmly within the camp of operetta, since such sets are perfect for, say, The Merry Widow. Rondine has always suffered from comparisons to Viennese operettas, and it is better if the issue is avoided. Rondine is a small, intimate opera and thrives when it is presented as such. The very modest and intimate premiere in Monte Carlo in 1917 was a success. They didn’t overdo it. The score, as always, is the best indicator of an appropriate production format.
Then there is the other end of the spectrum: Turandot. We learn from contemporary accounts that the Met premiere of the opera in 1927 called for “120 opera chorus, 120 chorus school, 60 boy choir singers, 60 ballet girls, 30 male dancers and procession leaders, 30 stage musicians, 230 extra supers—650 persons in all, beside the eleven-star cast and a hundred orchestra players in the pit” (Tuggle, quoted in Phillips-Matz, p. 310). So basically it’s impossible to overdo a production of Turandot.
Not that people don’t try. I worked on a production in San Francisco many (ahem) moons ago that featured a giant Buddha onstage who shed tears of blood. Never mind the muddled history of the conceit—statues of the Buddha in China belong to historical rather than legendary times, and the libretto is careful to avoid specific religious allusions. It was unbelievably ugly, not to mention a bit offensive. You would think there would have been some comments from the large local Chinese community, but perhaps everyone was distracted by the casting of Eddie Albert as the emperor. That’s right, the guy from Green Acres. He wasn’t half bad, actually.
Zeffirelli took on two important productions of Turandot in the 1980s in his own inimitable way. The first was at La Scala in 1982. The centerpiece of the production was the huge, and, from the sketches, beautiful rendition of the Throne Room in Act II. I didn’t see it live, but the buzz was that he built the set as a series of bridges over a real pool of water, and stocked said pool with large, expensive live goldfish. I can’t verify the live goldfish part of the story, but friends who were there swear to it. Maybe Zeffirelli’s real genius lay in making people think there were live goldfish in the pool. He dispensed with the pool and the goldfish, or rumors of goldfish, in his 1986 Met production, although the rest of the Throne Room set remained the same (if slightly enlarged, taking advantage of the Met’s Brobdingnagian proportions). The critics hurled abuse at Zeffirelli’s excesses, and we were getting rather a lot of him just then. But lost in the howling was a good critical analysis of what worked and what did not. Act I was singled out as being excessively vulgar, with raggedy throngs mulling about and heads on pikes mounted throughout. Hey, read the libretto, people. That’s the least of the problems! The bamboo walkways on which half the population of China scurries about are a bigger problem, acoustically, than mute disembodied heads. On the plus side, Zeffirelli took advantage of the Met’s elevating stages to make the Royal Palace rise up in the background in Act I (again, the libretto…). It never fails to elicit gasps, even twenty years later. Act II is big and monumental and basically quite effective. Some of the more outrageous touches have been toned down over the years. Originally, Turandot made her entrance with three banner-bearing poles inserted into the back of her costume. As each of the riddles was answered, a single banner was unfurled and taken off, as Turandot is symbolically raped of her secrets. Sounds good, but it was a total mess. Manuela Hoelterhoff said the flags “looked like those things they stick in bulls.” The flags are long gone. Another “touch” in the premiere season was the casting of gay porn star Frank Vickers (no relation to the famous tenor—at least I don’t think there’s any relation) in the nonsinging role of Pu-Tin-Pao the Executioner, complete with a leather hood and an ample bare chest. None of the reviews caught this detail, or admitted that they caught it. Act III was utterly inexplicable—two little pagodas with a bridge between them. Whatever.
Turandot can shine in big, outdoor productions like those at Verona and Caracalla in Rome. Okay, so the backdrops aren’t authentic Old China, but they are monumental and very old, which is half the fun. Some performances have been timed so that the moon will rise at the appropriate moment. I can only imagine what the logistics for this would be in a large production in Italy. For monumentalism combined with some level of authenticity, it would be hard to beat the performances mounted at Beijing’s Forbidden City itself in 2000, the Turandot 2K, available on DVD. Many of us rolled our eyes when we first read of plans for this production, but it must be admitted that it all came off rather well and was, in fact, a bit of a hoot. The audience seemed genuinely entertained by the spectacle, even as they contemplated how weird European notions of China are. Zhang Yimou, China’s leading film director, had been invited to create a production for the Florence Maggio Musicale the year before. There were some wonderful touches in that production. In Act I, the choristers huddled under little roofs, in groupings of two or three. It was an excellent solution derived from Chinese tradition, suggesting all of the city onstage more effectively than a huge throng of choristers tripping over each other (and bamboo walkways). Or at least it looked like a wonderful solution. The little roofs mounted on poles turned out to be heavy for the choristers to carry, and there was no end of complaining about directorial impracticality Oh well, at least they got to sit still. An even better solution, also in Act I, was Yimou’s idea for the Executioner. No hulking porn star in leather for him! Yimou gave the role to a woman, a tiny firebrand acrobat/ gymnast/dancer who performed an amazing sword dance. The director explained her as the spirit of execution, with much scholarly metaphor. His explanation went entirely over my head, but I could appreciate the energy of the moment. Furthermore, her dance made sense with the music, bringing out the ferocity and violence of the score much better than a sweaty muscleman walking about, snarling and flexing and otherwise trying to strut the time away until he can walk offstage. I admit it—it was an instance of “crossover” that worked. But it worked because it was a way of opening up the possibilities of the score, not a way of forcing them to conform to imposed ideas.
The idea came to move the production to the Forbidden City itself, and score a great coup in international relations and artistic cross-pollination. The Chinese government jumped at the chance and threw open the resources of the world’s most populous country to the international production team. Eight hundred extras were engaged. Actually, “engaged” might be too loose a word, since the Red Army itself was pressed into stage duty. Thousands—literally thousands—of people worked on the costumes. Whole villages were pressed into sewing service. The entire affair was done with a totalitarian spirit that must have made every other opera director in the world gag with envy There were clashes of temperament and aesthetic values. The lighting designer, a certain Guido Levi, strongly disagreed with Yimou about lighting the background of the scene (and what a background!) at certain moments. Yimou could not resist. He had done it before for some pageant at the Forbidden City, and it had been a great success with the audience. Besides, who could argue with wanting to see the Forbidden City, for heaven’s sake? Levi continued to argue. Puccini, he explained, is about characters, even in Turandot. To sacrifice the human for the monumental was, for him, a “monstrosity” he would not tolerate. (Who is this guy? Why isn’t he directing opera somewhere?) Emergency diplomatic summits were called. Yimou refused to back down, feeling that he knew what to do with the Forbidden City better than any Italian. In the end, Levi acquiesced, but only partially. For the moments he felt most strongly about, he actually sabotaged the lights, so that they couldn’t function, and played apologetically dumb. Damn, opera is fun.
Sometimes a more minimal approach is tried, with varying success. David Hockney came to the rescue of San Francisco’s “Bleeding Buddha” production with a new production of Turandot, a vision in dark blue and red. Flats replaced statuary, and the protagonists seemed outlined in color, and the opera was beautifully filmed for television. Less successful was the introduction of Chinese acrobats in the brief interlude between Act II’s Scenes 1 and 2. One sees this sort of thing every now and then, and it always proves that “overdoing it” in Turandot isn’t really a question of too large a chorus or set, but too many ideas. Authenticity is an even more spurious goal in Turandot than in Madama Butterfly, which is a modern story of real people rather than a fairy tale. I can’t imagine what was meant to be accomplished by the acrobats, unless it was a sort of apology to the Chinese community for the bleeding Buddha. The Royal Opera mounted a splendidly minimalist production in the 1980s that was sent to Los Angeles for the cultural festival around the 1984 Olympics. This attempted to explore the opposite end of the Chinese aesthetic from the florid bright colors we associate with the tackiest souvenirs in Chinatown, and must have made quite an impression on people who assume that all Chinese art is busy and loud and only Japanese art achieves the minimal. The problem is that Turandot is busy and loud, so there was a disconnect between what one saw and what one heard. Critic Martin Bernheimer quipped, “Sometimes this is Noh Turandot and sometimes this is no Turandot.” Tsk tsk.
Levi’s comment about characters underscores that even Turandot is about people, albeit in exaggerated form. Most of the conceits in Turandot are applied to the sets rather than the characters, except when Liù’s inherent masochism is made manifest in the most garish ways (use your imagination on this one). One recent production in Berlin, however, decided the story was too offensive as it was and added a touch at the very end to mollify the audience: after Turandot “submits” to love, she throws a wink at the audience to show that she is not going to be a docile housewife after all. Even the Berlin critics found this puerile. It’s heartening to see that people are sensitive to misogyny in opera, and that’s a huge issue to be addressed by each generation in its own way. I just wonder if there wasn’t a better way to do this rather than with a wink. If we did not live in a tone-deaf era, then it would be clear that Turandot expresses her equality with Calaf through her voice. She sings her validity, and in fact usually comes out on top, so to speak. The Berlin shtick brings to mind every bad high school production of The Taming of the Shrew one must endure. Also, it does seem that directors pull out all these rather desperate ideas more for Puccini than for other composers. There is something “immediate” about what emanates from the stage in a Puccini opera that seems to demand this sort of thing. I have never seen any such shenanigans in Wozzeck, to repeat the example. Wozzeck is as misogynistic as any other opera, but perhaps the expressionist texture of its magnificent score forms a divide between the issues onstage and the audience, allowing us to digest them with more ease.
This speaks to the power, rather than the weakness, of Puccini’s work. If it makes people uncomfortable, well, isn’t that one of the points of theater? Isn’t Wozzeck’s purpose to challenge its audience? And if it can challenge people with sentiment rather than revulsion, shouldn’t that be celebrated rather than masked? Many directors can support their ideas with the claim that those who don’t like them are traditionalists, a hateful name in the world of the arts. (In Europe, it’s a code word for “fascist.” In America, if you think about it, it means absolutely nothing. What tradition?) As Alex Ross has so aptly pointed out, this pose is a brilliant and foolproof defense—it protects the director from any criticism whatsoever. Anyone who would criticize is automatically disqualified from the discourse.
I believe, therefore, that we should retire the words “traditionalist,” “literalist,” and “avant-garde” from our perceptions of what we see on stages at the opera house and everywhere else. (Is there even such a thing as “avant-garde” anymore? Is there a word with less meaning?) We should judge a production by how it makes us feel about the work in question. Does it make us want to know it better? To see it again in other incarnations? Do we leave the theater amazed at the many layers of an artist of Puccini’s caliber, or do we leave feeling superior to him and to everyone who went before us? Some of the onus for forming a new dialogue on this subject falls to us in the audience. Can we experience something unfamiliar without automatically booing, or, conversely, cheering? Can we experience something very familiar and question why it must remain so, perhaps representing some significance we had not previously considered? In other words, can we sit back with open minds and ask ourselves whether or not we are engaged in the piece we are attending? Perhaps if we in the audience trusted our own instincts more, and did not walk into an opera house as if we were attending some arcane ritual to be endured for the sake of self-edification, then perhaps the critics and the directors would have to respond in kind. Then we would see a lot more truly creative productions, whether set in legendary times or in outer space.