Don Ottavio’s age is a crucial part of how his character behaves, the consideration of his effectiveness is at the core of his actions. From a historical perspective, it would be natural for Ottavio to be an older man in relation to Donna Anna- in fact, he could very well be close to the Commendatore’s age, or slightly younger.
This choice, as mentioned before, makes sense from a historical perspective (it is hard to conceive that Donna Anna would have had much of a say in the choice of her fiancé at this point in history and social rank) but also puts a contrast between Don Ottavio and the titular Don Giovanni. Giovanni is young, strong and full of energy, whereas Ottavio is no longer the young man he used to be: his actions are covered with the extra layer of caution one is likely to acquire with age (if not through more judicious thinking, then at least out of self-preservation.) He is far from being Don Giovanni’s physical equal and to confront him without solid evidence (which he gets at the end of Act I) is to take unnecessary risks.
Age also changes the perspective from which he attacks his two arias. “Dalla Sua Pace” sung by an older Ottavio must acquire a certain melancholy: he wishes for nothing in the world except for Donna Anna to be happy, and his happiness is directly tied to hers. He is an older man who now must be more than a future husband to his distraught fiancée, he must adopt a paternal position (Don Ottavio as an older man is reinforced in Act I, Scene III, No.2 where Ottavio says “lascia, cara, la rimembranza amara: hai sposo e padre in me” during their duet immediately after discovering the Commendatore’s body) and his first thought is not one of avenging Donna Anna, but a gesture of affection and a mature reflection on their intertwined fate.
“Il Mio Tesoro”, on the other hand, becomes the moment of redemption for Ottavio. In the face of all the atrocities committed by Giovanni (and which link him to the original crime- the Commendatore’s death) he can no longer be cautious or hesitant- it is time for him to finally awaken and bring much-delayed justice to bear upon Don Giovanni’s head ( with perhaps the best moment for a full dramatic awakening of the character happening on the “vado” of “a vendicar io vado!” which culminates on a held high F, and which descends down an octave.) This is the moment in which Ottavio passes from reasonable doubt to absolute certainty, and it should reflect in the character’s expressions and movement, his sense of resolve has shifted from protecting and comforting Donna Anna towards full retaliation. In truth, Ottavio’s turning was triggered at the Don’s party, but this is the first time Ottavio has an opportunity to have a moment all to himself, dramatically.
Ottavio’s heroic purpose is not insincere, but fortunately he is spared having to deal with the Don himself: his purpose and morals are noble, but we have already seen the Don is most capable in a fight, and we get the impression Ottavio wouldn’t survive a duel with Giovani. Rather, the Don finds death comes to visit him as a result of his own actions--- leaving Donna Elvira to find closure, Donna Anna to mourn, and Don Ottavio to hope perchance to marry her someday.
If Don Ottavio is played as a young man, I think it would be important to play him as a younger man to Don Giovanni: whereas the older Don Ottavio is at a physical disadvantage to Giovanni, the younger Ottavio would be at a social disadvantage. As a younger man Giovanni’s ‘friendship’ to him would become more of an older man(mentor) to a young man recently introduced to society (and perhaps even add an extra layer of deceit and cruelty to Giovanni’s actions, since he essentially might have befriended Ottavio in order to get to Anna.) Having Giovanni be Ottavio’s mentor figure would explain Ottavio’s reticence to act from a different angle—Ottavio has grown accustomed to Giovanni’s front as an honorable man, and is loath to think that someone who has been such an important figure to him could be two-faced. Also, being older than Ottavio, Don Giovanni is more established a name in their society of nobility than the younger man, thus making the prospect of accusing someone with greater influence a daunting one.
In both cases Ottavio is cautious and needs proof before he acts, but in each case it comes from a different perspective (or end of the age spectrum, as it is.)
The other issue at hand is that of social rank: Giovanni and Ottavio are both equals in rank, though we don’t know exactly how powerful each truly is (who has a greater number of land, riches, etc.) The nature of their stratified society makes dealing with Giovanni a more difficult matter, since although nobles could adjudicate to lower classes, targeting someone in the strata of nobility was tricky. Frank E. Smitha writes that “In Spain the landed aristocracy was holding on to its powers, and many if not most Spaniards clung to the values of the aristocracy. They believed that business was fit only for Jews, Arabs and other foreigners. (…) Spain's nobility was one tenth of its population. They spent some of their fortune seeking government office, and in government, it is said, were thirty parasites for every man who did an honest day's work. Some of the nobility maintained customs barriers as a source of revenue, taxing commerce and driving up prices.”
It is clear that Giovanni has been getting away with his trademark conduct for some time, and that he has not come to an untimely death only to the possibility of his influence. No amount of influence, however, can eventually keep his misdeeds from coming to a head—Don Giovanni as an opera demonstrates what is possibly the worst day in the life of the Don, but also the breaking point of the privilege which has shielded him for so long—he has accumulated outrage after outrage and strung them up through his life like a collar of pearls. The end of the opera shows what happens when the string breaks and the pent-up hatred he has accumulated runs unchecked: his enemies gradually hound him to destruction. The true catalyst (in the opera) of Don Giovanni’s misfortune is Donna Elvira, whose mixture of insane devotion and righteous revulsion allows Ottavio and Elvira to find an ally, and sets the Don’s doom in motion starting at the end of Act I, with the Don’s apparent victory (by escape.)
Ottavio at his very core is a noble character. He is not ideally heroic, as his caution robs him of the opportunity to end evil before it can cause more harm, but he nevertheless does not waver when he knows that his course is true. To portray him in weakness is to mistake the nature of his character: he is not a dashing personality, his most natural impulse is to protect, and it is this impulse that he eventually must overcome in order to champion Donna Anna.
As more and more Gen-Xers (birthdates somewhere between 1969 and 1981) come of age, I have come across more colleague opera singers who harbor an interest in videogames.
As a teenager in Ecuador, having the ardent wish to become an opera singer immediately set me aside as one of the ‘weird ones’ – the kind of extremely diverse (and at times unsettling) subcultures you find in American high schools nowadays is a phenomenon you don’t visibly find back in Ecuador- in my particular high school there were no Goths, ‘Artsy’ kids, and since it was an all-male high school cheerleaders were definitely out of the question (the notion of male cheerleaders may still be something that will have to contend with the typical Latin American Machismo.) You essentially had three sub-divisions: The Sporty/Cool Kids (out of which you had a good number of Bullies), The ‘Smart’ or Intellectual kids, and the Weird ones.
My voracious love for reading might have placed me in the second category, but my near-terminal boredom with almost all of my subjects (except Philosophy and Literature) didn’t merit high enough grades to seriously classify me as such.
Being an aspirant musician meant that you didn’t have many (or any) peers in school: during ‘my time’ no school had a decent music program (that’s why you went to private Conservatories for a musical education and youavoidedthe State Conservatory, known crib of flagrant corruption and mediocre musicians, like the plague) and if any of my peers were interested in musical performance, it was often the kind of ‘Nueva Trova’ whiny-singing-whilst-strumming-the-guitar politicized (often socialist in tone) folk-progressive song trend that suffered (or inflicted) a rebirth in Latin America during the 90s.
I spent most of my recess time (we got two, one short one and a long one) either reading or listening to my Discman. I didn’t have much interest in the current bands at the time -my last favorite band had beenRoxetteduring the last part of the 80s and they weren’t exactly ‘in’ by the 90s.
By this point I had also rediscovered and fallen in love withABBA(in, I guess, a precocious premonition of the soon-to-comeABBAmania around the world whichmissed Ecuador completely), which were even less ‘in’ thanRoxette. Aside from those, my playlist consisted exclusively of either classical music and opera, Nana Mouskouri (seriouslyun-cool for any teenager at the time, since Lisa Loeb wouldn’t make the parted-down-the-middle hairdo or the librarian glassescooluntil the end of the 90s) or the French singers like Mireille Mathieu, Dalida and Edith Piaf (Edith Piaf, while definitely living and dying like a rock star, did not quite have the Gene Simmons image with my generation.) Definitely one of the ‘Weird’ kids: I liked (gasp) reading books, listened to strange sounds and wasn’t terribly interested in parties or surfing.
The other part of the ‘weirdness’ was that, unlike most of my peers, I didn’t have a console gaming system—no NES, SNES, SEGA Genesis, Gameboy or GameGear (how many of you still rememberthatlittle failed experiment?), I was definitely an early PC boy (making my start with a decrepit Atari 1040 ST.) I wasn’t too into the arcade gaming that seemed to comprise most of the console experience at the time, preferring instead the complex world of role-playing games (I wasdesperate to do somerealrole-playing games myself, being an avid lover of tabletop games, but the Dungeons and Dragons/White Wolf role-playing craze was yet another thing that never made its way to Ecuador during my childhood, so computer games were the next best thing) and my favorite among them were the Richard Garriott masterpieces: The Ultima series, speciallyUltima VI, with its complex moral problems and intricate world detail.
I started hanging out, then, with the gamers at school. I knew two others who had the same interest in computer games, but eventually ended up hanging out with only one of them: Juan Francisco. Through him I got a gradual introduction to the world of console gaming and found out some very interesting things- I fell in love with quite a few games, but I also came across a unique experience, and a tremendouslybizarreone, when two spheres of my interests that werecompletelyunrelated collided: Opera and Video Games! Since it happened during the course of a role-playing game (or a subset of them known as JRPGs- Japanese Role Playing Games, which are console-driven and different from the PC genre) for the few minutes that the scene lasted, I realized, I was actuallyplaying at being something I wanted to be. And most importantly of all: my career choice wasn’t being ridiculed!
Opera singers are often the target of jokes--- you’ve seen them all: the fat tenor stereotype and the temperamental diva stereotype seen in movies, Adam Sandler (the subpar comedian par excellence) and his OperaMan, and so on and so forth. The butt of the joke is always the assumption thatnobody likes opera and everybody hates what opera voices sound like. Other singers know precisely what I mean, and truthfully it has always irked me that very few times my chosen profession has ever been portrayed by Hollywood or the TV industry with the passion and power that it actually possesses.
So who knew videogames would do what neither Hollywood nor TVLand could? What follows is a brief list of games that have used opera not as a detrimental caricature but as significant parts of their storyline or poignant plot—points. If at times the musical portrayals fall flat of actual thrilling opera, they can be forgiven. We’ll begin our list with that one JRPG I mentioned earlier, and which is considered by many to be one of the best games of all time…
I. FINAL FANTASY 6 (1994) [Super nintendo]
When we talk about the Final Fantasy series, we’re usually talking about one of the royal dynasties of the world of videogames. The brainchild of Hironobu Sakaguchi and Squaresoft , the first installment of the series premiered in Japan on December 18, 1987. Back then, the sinking Squaresoft’s initial games were not entirely successful. Sakaguchi was just about fed up with failure and was planning to quit the video game industry altogether (recently shaken by the infamous repercussions caused by theE-Tgame, but that’s another story…) and had decided, of all things, that he would become a fisherman. Wanting to at least go out with a bang as opposed to closing shop like he originally wanted, Hironobu Sakaguchi declared that his final game would be a fantasy RPG.
To Sakaguchi’s amazement, his Final Fantasy was a breakout hit becoming the second most popular RPG franchise in Japan afterDragon Quest(owned by Enix, and which by now has been completely eclipsed by Final Fantasy… with Squaresoft nowadays being known as SquareEnix.) Final Fantasy was one of the most influential early console role-playing games, and played a major role in legitimizing and popularizing the genre.
That was then. Now, as of 2010, there have been 28 games published in the franchise for many different systems, with each new Final Fantasy being greatly anticipated and usually considered system savers (when Playstation 1 was floundering, it was Final Fantasy VII that gave the system a much-needed boost in sales during the console wars of its day.)
With every new installment seeking to outdo the ones before in terms of storytelling, graphics and mechanics, the series reached its narrative cusp with the middle installment of the numbered series, Final Fantasy VI, which features the famous Opera Scene: Aria Di Mezzo Carattere.Destructoid’sdescription of the game (and the scene) are perfect:
The Setup
Like most of theFinal Fantasygames,Final Fantasy VIinvolves a huge cast of characters working together to thwart a world-threatening plot. But thisFinal Fantasyupped the stakes on all accounts, with, to this day, the biggest playable cast of characters yet, all interacting and battling in a huge, rich world.
InFinal Fantasy VIyou start off playing as Terra, a young woman and almost unwilling participant in the Imperial raid of a peaceful town by the evil Empire. In the game (acting as a central plotline), the Empire is a huge organization with one goal in mind: to capture and harness the power of the most magical creatures in the world, the Espers, and use their power to take over the world.
For much of the early part of the game Terra is the main character and most of the primary sequences revolve around her.
One thing aboutFinal Fantasy VIthat is so cool (and so different from other games in the series) is that the main characters frequently “pass the baton” to other characters, allowing for new stories and subplots to come into light.
Such a shifting of focus occurs about a quarter of the way through the game, when Terra discovers that she was actually born an Esper. Upon learning this news, horrified and confused, Terra flies away, leaving the game (until later) and displacing control to someone else in the group.
The remaining party, wanting to understand the connection between Terra, the Espers, and the Empire, makes plans to travel to the Magitek Research Facility in capital city Vector, a mysterious factory run by the Empire and home to many secrets (as well as a multitude of captured Espers).
Unfortunately, Vector is located on a southern continent with no access by way of the sea. With all other options unavailable, the party decides they have no choice but to recruit the help of Setzer, a notorious gambler and owner of the only airship in the world.
To make matters even more difficult, Setzer is known to be almost impossible to contact and very unhelpful (to say the least). The party realizes the only way they will be able to enlist the shady captain’s help is to trick him … somehow.
Through the magical world of perfectly timed video game coincidences, one of the members of your party, Celes, an ex-Imperial general, looks almost identical to a world famous opera singer by the name of Maria (an obvious reference and hommage to the legendary singerMaria Callasand, as Nobuo Uematsu hinted, also to the previous legend of her day,Maria Malibrán). And, of course, Setzer just so happens to be planning the kidnapping of Maria at the end of an upcoming opera performance.
So, with a masterful plan to disguise Celes as Maria and let her get kidnapped, gaining access to Setzer and, most importantly, the airship, the party heads to the Opera House, leading to one of the most surprising and wondrous video game moments of all time.
The Moment
After changing clothes to look exactly like Maria, Celes heads backstage to prepare for her debut performance.
Almost more nervous about performing opera in front of a sold-out crowd of people than actually being kidnapped, Celes carefully reads through the lyrics of the songs she must sing. Once she is finished perusing the entire script, her moment in the spotlight finally arrives.
At this point in the game, control leaves the player and an extended cut-scene begins.
The orchestra in the pit below begins playing as Celes steps onto the stage. Using a primitive (but still remarkably beautiful for the time) synthesized voice sound effect, Celes actually “sings” the opera (although unintelligibly) as the music swells in the background.
nstead of just sitting back and watching the entire sequence unfold, however, the player is actually asked to provide the next set of lyrics at several predetermined spots in the aria. Any players who by chance hadn’t memorized the lyrics earlier in the game are unfortunately left to just guess what the next part of the song will be (although the choices are, luckily, fairly obvious).
The extended sequence continues, as Celes flawlessly performs the challenging and dramatic aria.
Even though Celes’s singing is the most memorable part of the entire Opera House sequence, many other great moments occur as well.
Once Celes is finished with her section, the opera continues to a new scene and the control switches back to the other characters in your party. While watching the drama unfold onstage, the party comes into information that not only is Setzer planning on kidnapping “Maria,” but another shady character is actually set to execute her as well (by dropping a giant 4-ton weight on her head during the opera, of course).
Suddenly, a countdown timer begins and it is up to the party to race to the rafters above the stage and stop the baddie from killing Celes.
Right before the assassin goes through with his evil plot, the party manages to intervene, resulting in everyone toppling off the catwalk above and onto the opera stage. This part is particularly clever because once the characters fall onto the stage the theater’s audience immediately starts whispering to themselves as the orchestra comes to a sudden halt. A boss battle then begins between your party and the assassin, visually framed by the stage’s curtain, with the audience watching intently in the background. Once the battle is complete, the audience cheers as if all of the chaos was part of the show.
Once the audience applause dies down, a spotlight falls on Maria/Celes. From out of nowhere Setzer enters, grabs “Maria,” and leaps away into the darkness above (luckily for Celes the rest of the party stows away on the awaiting airship, saving her and recruiting Setzer to join the mission).
After all of this, the orchestra plays one last time as the curtain closes, ending one of the greatest video game moments of all time.
The rest of Destructoid’s articleis good to peruse, specially since it talks about the use of narrative power to overcome the lack of advanced graphics. He argues that the superior quality and power of this 16-Bit game over many of today’s realistic, high-detail contemporaries rests in the fact that, having a limited palette to paint with, Squaresoft’s team had to make sure they used everything in their power to create truly memorable and innovative moments as opposed to today’s videogame industry which relies heavily on glitz over substance.
He may have a point. Let’s look at the opera scene:
Interestingly enough Draco, the hero of the opera, is a basso, whilst Ralse, the villain, is a tenor, and Maria –the heroine- is not a soprano but instead a Mezzo-soprano.
Definitely one of the most memorable moments in my gaming experience as an opera singer. Critically, the music isn’t anything special when you compare it with the likes of Verdi or Bizet- but as far as it goes, one can consider Nobuo Uematsu’s very nice score as a loving tribute to the art form.
Interestingly enough, although the text is seen in English and Japanese, Uematsu wrote an italian text to use mainly for the music, all other versions merely being translations or new versions of the original italian text, which we reproduce here:
Amor mio, caro bene Perché vai lontan da me? Giurasti un amor, che mai non dovea Aver fine per noi
Nei momenti di tristezza Nei momenti di dolor A te, mia stella, penso Con infinito ardore
Un legame senza speme Perché mai dovrei aver? Che cosa tu vuoi ch'io faccia oramai Mi devi dire tu
Ti ringrazio, caro bene Amor mio, vita mia Al grave doler, al buio timor Che il cuore mi turbó
Dolcemente, con amore Hai risposto al mio gridare Per sempre ognor, per sempre ognor Qui a me, t'attenderò
Now let’s move to the next feature on the list, another game that came only a year after Final Fantasy and which incorporated an evenlongeroperatic scene:
II. GABRIEL KNIGHT 2: THE BEAST WITHIN (1995) [computer]
The history of adventure games begins with text adventures. A long time ago, when graphics were monochrome and 64K RAM was enough for everybody, the first adventure games appeared. Although graphics existed at that time, they weren't initially employed for creating adventures. Both input and the output were text only. But most of the basic features of an adventure were already there: You could "look" at things to get their description, take objects and use them with other characters, talk to those characters, and solve puzzles in order to progress in the game.
Most popular text adventures of that time were developed and produced by "Infocom", the most famous examples being the "Zork" games. Later, text adventures with graphics were created, but the graphics only served to illustrate your location in the game world; input was still text-only.
Then came 1984, a year that was significant in many ways, but none of which had anything to do with Orwell.
"Darling, what do you think about making a graphic adventure?" - A young Californian couple, Ken and Roberta Williams, had probably no idea what an impact this question will have on then world of computer games. They founded "Sierra-On-Line", a company that soon became the biggest power in developing and producing adventure games.
Roberta Williams' idea opened new horizons to both developers and players: from now on, you could MOVE your character in a virtual graphic world! The 3rd person perspective adventure was born. It is customary to name "King's Quest" the first graphic adventure.
The Classic Era of the adventure will be forever associated with Sierra's "Quest" games. Among the most well-known examples of those games are the first four "King's Quests", the first three "Space Quests", and the first three "Leisure Suit Larry" games. All of those games were still using a text parser input as interface and color graphics to display the game world and protagonist.
Nobody was able to compete with "Sierra" at that time, but a programmer named Ron Gilbert who worked for the company "Lucasfilm Games" (today "LucasArts", too busy milking the Star Wars cow dry to bother with things such as Original Intellectual Properties) developed what seemed to be the most innovative concept of the time: the SCUMM system, the point-and-click interface. Instead of typing the desired action, you had a choice of several small textual icons; clicking on them with the mouse allowed you to choose the action and thus to interact with objects and characters. It was this system that later brought the Golden Age to the adventure games.
Gilbert's first attempts, "Maniac Mansion" and "Zak McKracken", were still in 16-color EGA and had certain restrictions concerning the new, revolutionary interface. It was not until "The Secret Of Monkey Island" when the point-and-click genre reached its utmost perfection. In this game (which was originally made in 16 colors, but is most known for its fabulous 256 color VGA version), the interface, the dialogue system with optional answers, the inventory-based puzzles, the graphics, the music and the humor, so typical for adventures yet to come, were combined into a whole. The story was the core of the adventure; dialogue and inventory were pillars supporting it.
Everything was integrated to perfection, and this scheme became the standard for many future adventures. "The Secret Of Monkey Island" started the glorious line of LucasArts adventures. In 1993, "Day Of The Tentacle" was released, a game that started the tradition of the "cartoon adventure".
The developers at Sierra, seeing that a new power had conquered the throne, answered with their counter-weapon. Imitating the icon-based interface of LucasArts, they created many games which were in the eyes of many the most serious rivals of LucasArts' masterpieces. "Sierra" wasn't the only rival. Many other companies ("Westwood", "Microprose", "Adventure Soft") also produced very good games in classic style. The adventure flourished. Games that are now considered legendary or classic appeared in the scene, such as the haunting LOOM (a game that integrated music into its mechanics, and classical music at that) and the Monkey Island Series. It is in the Golden Age of Adventure Games that our next entrant was created: Gabriel Knight.
Gabriel, a creation of Phillip K. Dick award-winning writer Jane Jensen, is a New Orleans author and bookstore owner who finds that his destiny is to become a Schattenjäger, or "Shadow Hunter"- a hunter of all things supernatural and evil. Gabriel's assistant, sidekick, and sometime romantic interest Grace Nakimura is a major supporting character.
As the Beast Within opens, Gabriel has moved to his ancestral home in Bavaria, Germany to write his new novel. The population of Rittersberg, the seat of the Schattenjägers, are well aware of his family's reputation and when word reaches them of what is reported to be a werewolf attack in Munich, they compel Gabriel to go and investigate.
Gabriel is joined in Germany by Grace, once she learns that he has begun a new case and hasn't asked her to join him. Whilst Gabriel follows a trail from missing zoo wolves to a mysterious men's hunting club in Munich, Grace conducts research back in Rittersberg and around Bavaria.
Her investigations lead her to the history of King Ludwig II, the composer Richard Wagner and a shadowy figure known as the Black Wolf. Eventually the links between the cases become clear, and Grace discovers that the person in the greatest danger has become Gabriel himself. Their travels take them to Munich, King Ludwig II's famous Neuschwanstein Castle, Altötting and Bavaria's forested countryside.
Their efforts lead them to uncover the truth about King Ludwig's mysterious death (he was a were-wolf!) and discover a lost Richard Wagner opera: “The Curse Of Engelhart.”
The opera here deserves a special mention: Despite its high quality (for the time), a huge majority of the game is played in silence, with only sound effects and character voices. It says much to Sierra’s credit, then, that they put significant resources towards the ‘opera’ scene. The music, composed by Jensen’s husband Robert Holmes, tries very hard at sounding like authentic Wagner. Holmes, unfortunately, falls severely short of the mark and the vocalists engaged in the production are, of course, not top-notch… but your average gamer will hardly notice this. In 1994, way before our days when video games make more revenue than Hollywood blockbusters, no game company anywhere could have afforded to pay a prestigious composer for a ‘Wagner snippet’, a cast of Wagnerian specialist singers, a top-notch orchestra, sets… etcetera.
Rather, the effort with which it was all put together with what they could afford can be seen from miles away and by video game standards of the time, it was stunning. That it takes place at one of the climaxes of the plot is highly significant as well. It was impressive to see the lengths that Sierra went to make this feel authentic. The Williams and Jensen always had a high regard for the art form, and it is shown in how much care went into the final product. Let’s take a look at the scene:
Now let’s grab our antibacterial soup and scrub ourselves well, because our next entry in this list is…
Parasite Eve (1998) [Playstation 1]
Opera singers would have to wait for three more years before they could strut on the digital stage again in yet another Squaresoft game. If Final Fantasy and Gabriel Knight used operas significantly in their plots, then Parasite Eve took it one step further by making the opera singer the main villainess in the story!
The game, interestingly enough, is based on a Japanese novel of the same game. The novel's plot supposes that mitochondria, which are inherited through the female line of descent, form the dispersed body of an intelligent conscious life-form, dubbed Eve, which has been waiting throughout history and evolution for the right conditions when mitochondrial life can achieve its true potential and take over from eukaryotic life-forms (i.e. humans and similar life) by causing a child to be born that can control its own genetic code.
The game begins with Aya Brea, an NYPD rookie, attending an opera with an unnamed date. During the opera, as the diva sings the aria “Se il mio amore sta vincino” (composed by Yoshihisha Suzuki) everyone in the building spontaneously combusts, except for Aya, her date, and the diva on stage named Melissa Pearce. Aya confronts Melissa backstage, and Melissa says that Aya’s mitochondria needs more time to develop. Melissa then mutates into a beast and flees into the sewers, declaring that her name is now Eve.
The fact that Melissa –or Eve- is an opera singer isn’t completely relevant to the rest of the plot, but it remains a part of her character nevertheless- and the introduction is unforgettable, with the Diva essentially “bringing down the house” and setting the house on fire to boot.
The original version of the intro simply had soprano Judith Siirila’s voice sampled into a synthesizer and simply ‘oooing’ to the music composed for the game, Siirila eventually recorded a sung version of it (which is used in this video) along with the intended italian text:
Se lo sono quello che mi dicono quanto crudele e Dio Che mi ha dato la vita
Credimi lo somo una provera donna Desiderando il mio amore
No Anche se nessuno mi crede Se il mio amore sta vincino a me Volentieri riceverro qualsiasi punizione Per Favore, Dio Senti le preghiere di questa provera donna
Again, it falls short of an actual operatic experience but it still feels like an hommage of sorts. While it would have been nice to use, say, a scene from “Tosca”, I imagine no game composer would want to admit they couldn’t create at least something of their own to match it.
Although we’ve seen divas in their full bloom in games so far, the respectful portrayal of aging divas has found its way into the video game platform as well with…
Benoit Sokal’s Syberia (2002)[Computer]
Syberia is ‘one of those games’: when enthusiasts of the Adventure Genre reminisce about the Golden Age of Adventure, Syberia is one of the games they often talk about when looking for a worthy descendant to the line (after, of course, talking about the crown jewel of the genre, The Longest Journey.)
Syberia was released around the same time as The Longest Journey and has the distinction of featuring the second notable heroine (the first being TLJ’s April Ryan) in a new trend of adventure games featuring, for the first time, strong independent women in adventure games, a genre previously dominated by male protagonists (with the solitary exception of 1993’s The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate.)
The game’s heroine, Kate Walker, is a high-powered lawyer sent to the remote French village of Valadilène in order to finalize the take-over of a toy factory there.
Once at the village, Kate learns that the woman who owned the factory has just died, and that she has a brother who must be contacted in order for the takeover to proceed. Her mission takes her across Central and Eastern Europe, gradually leading her to question her own life. The titular Syberia is a mythical island on which mammoths are said to live.
During her travels Kate stops in Komkolzgrad: The place is run by the eccentric and somewhat crazy Serguei Borodine, who intends to construct the biggest stage possible for Helena Romanski, a retired and reclusive pera singer with whom he is obsessed. Kate has little choice but to fetch her from a nearby spa in Aralbad on his behalf.
After many tribulations Kate meets up with the now retired Diva. Helena believes she is too old to sing, having lost her legendary voice which at one point was the toast of Europe. Nevertheless, Kate convinces her to sing for Serguei. The aging diva decides to sing the Russian folk song “Ochi Tchorniye”, accompanied by an automaton:
The performance in Komkolzgrad does not go quite as planned: Helena’s voice, though obviously worn, still retains some beauty, and that is enough for Serguei to act on his obsession and imprisons her! He wants to keep Helena at his side so that he may hear her voice forever.
Kate, using her mind and resourcefulness, is able to free Helena and take her back to Aralbad.
Helena’s portrayal is very respectful, if sad: even the most beautiful voice will one day grow too old to sing, that is the reality all singers live with and which is ever present at the back of their minds. Helena is a sympathetic character and it is very easy to commiserate with her.
Finally down our list… what if you want to play at being an opera singer?
Opera Slinger (2007)[Computer]
Well, not quite. Opera Slinger is a Student Showcase winner at the 9th annual Independent Games Festival was written by a group of 10 students, who called themselves the Treblemakers, from the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. As such, it only has one level.
You're the protagonist, Forte — long blonde locks and a red coat with epaulets and tails secured by a medallion on your chest — riding in on a "motorbike" that's a treble clef on its side.
The premise of the game is very simple: The evil diva Aria, Queen Of All Opera, has totaled the opera house and set the audience against you. There is only one way to claim back your opera crown: It’s a singing duel!
You jump around the ruins of the opera house and race for the spotlight (literally a moving spotlight) against Aria. When in the spotlight, you duke it out vocally with her in a series of ‘opera’ songs—only two of the selections actually having music from an opera whatsoever (the Anvil chorus from Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and “La Donna E Mobile” from Verdi’s “Rigoletto”)- you won’t be singing in Italian or German, however, as the text has been changed in order for you to sing taunts at your enemy.
Everybody who has played it remaks on how fun the game is—I wouldn’t be able to tell you because, unfortunately, the game isn’t compatible with Windows Vista or Windows 7, Microsoft being the putrescent spawn from hell that it is, but it is compatible with Windows XP, so if you have a copy of that old platform download the game and have some fun—it’s tongue-in-cheek, but from what I hear it is very entertaining. Unfortunately the Trebblemakers aren’t interested in making a full (and updated) game out of this concept.
Well, that’s pretty much the end of our list. The next time opera graces the virtual stage of videogames, however, I will release an updated list. Until then, sing well and sing healthily!
Linda Rogers, whom I know as Kate Miranda on Second Life, is an arts administrator who has worked with many organizations, including Opera Ontario. On her blog, “Bread and Roses” Linda discusses how classical performing artists can expect to get more bookings:
Daily as an arts manager I receive dozens of unsolicited emails and material from artists I've never heard of and those materials are instantly discarded to clear my inbox and desk of excess clutter. Meanwhile I sometimes meet talented artists who ask, "how do I get booked to play more?"
Quite a number of years ago I had my first fulltime job in arts administration in a major US orchestra. I assisted the General Manager in administering the contracting of guest artists. The first thing I was told was to throw out all unsolicited material--no one wanted to see it, or hear it. I was horrified at the waste and for awhile made the effort to return the material--only to be met with angry inquiries and indignant letters about why I hadn't put the material in the correct hands! Needless to say, from then on I simply trashed unsolicited promotional packages.
So if emails, glossy packages and promotional CD's won't get you a booking, what will?
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?" which is the artistic variation of the postmodernist quote “How can you be sure of anything?” If you want to see an unhealthy helping of it, search "intention" and "composer" at what is unfortunately the most influential site about opera today, Paterre.
Here's a notable quote illustrating of what I am speaking: "Even we dusty academics stopped talking about 'composers’ intentions' long ago. They’re unknowable in any final sense, the phrase is always introduced as a false appeal to authority, etc. etc."
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. You either have a way to glean the composer's intentions through the material he left behind (some more clear than others) or not, on principle.
If it were not possible, on principle, to glean meaning here then all art would fail to move and communicate, it would be simply noise, color and shapes (or, in other words, post-modern art)- form follows function.
In his late 60s one of the top tenors of the 20th century sings one of the most difficult arias in the tenor repertoire with an aplomb that most tenors in their prime wish they could manage. What about those high Cs, including that ringing and prolonged high C at the very end?
It has now been five months since I began studying with my M, my new voice teacher and the improvements are many and noticeable. I have gained greater ease and vibrancy, and my upper register is coming along. Now a G is “just a G”, and the rest is coming in easier than before- if not with full ease, then it is preparing to get there.
I still have to fight the age-old habit of ramming my voice when ascending to the higher register- compression + force does not make for a happy sound. Fortunately nowadays the incidence of this is less than it used to be, and I find myself constantly obsessing about it—when I can’t sing (due to it being too late in the day or too busy a day with other things) I find myself thinking about it, over and over and over, feeling the space within and imagining the process.
Breath support is another issue about which I had been confused all of these years. Essentially the approach I was taught initially, and which wasn’t re-checked all of these years- was the Germanic outwards push approach, which ended up causing a great deal of sub-glottal pressure. M told me that the first thing she would fix would be my closed, narrow and high larynx before she proceeded to the breath issue. Finally, we’ve started working on that!
Fortunately, I have recorded videos of a good number of my classes to this day (I sometimes forget to bring the camera, a very handy i-Flip) and I review them regularly, watching myself. Recently I found a recording I made a few months before I started studying with M, singing Il Mio Tesoro. Fortunately one of our lessons last month included working on issues on that same aria, as I was to sing at a public venue and that was one of my arias.
I have made a comparison recording (Mp3 file) which you can listen to by clicking on the image of the cassette below. You’ll find what an interesting difference five months make.
You will first hear part of the earlier recording, then you will hear snippets from the lesson in question.
1. DON’T STAGE THE OVERTURE. Surprise: Verdi and Rossini and Wagner Mozart actually worked in the theater most of their lives, so give them credit for knowing that the overture is there to get the audience in the mood, to ease their transition from “outside” to “inside.”
Resist the temptation to interpolate a mimed prologue. During the Siciliana to Cavalleria rusticana, we do not need to see Lola and Turridu making out in their underwear. Corollary#1A: this holds true for interludes as well — no dream ballet during Siegfried’s Funeral March.)
2. SPARE US THE OLD RAZZLE-DAZZLE. Some operas are a little weak musically or dramatically, and it’s reasonable enough to want to jazz them up a bit with clever staging. But if you feel you have to overhaul the opera completely, better let it alone. No acrobats doing backflips during Handel arias; no bands of Merry Commedia dell’Arte Players mooching for applause during Rossini. And the Tenor-with-the-Hanky gag deserved to die about 20 years ago. Think of yourself as a chef: choose the freshest, best-quality ingredients, prepare them with care, and lay off the sauces.
3. IF YOU WANT TO SEND A MESSAGE, USE E-MAIL. It’s Act 4 in some German Bohème production. Mimì is expiring downstage, while upstage (in an apartment across the street from the bohemians), a well-to-do family welcomes a well-to-do doctor who makes their little well-to-do daughter all better — just as poor indigent Mimì barfs her lungs out. Those darn inequities in the health care system! Yes, I know art is about serious issues, but when an audience realizes you’re preaching at them, they either lose interest or get angry at the director. But if you can make your points subtly and entertainingly, the public can have their entertainment and then go home and think about the issues you raised.
4. IT’S THE CHARACTERS, STUPID! Human behavior is like an analog recording: there’s an infinite amount of data there waiting to be accessed. Lighting effects, moving platforms, smoke machines and giant puppets with Ara Berberian’s voice basically are interesting only the first time, and even then not so interesting as living, breathing humans acting human. Personenregie, please. It’s not so hard as it looks, because most opera singers are pretty decent actors, if you take the time to learn what they can and cannot do. Even so notoriously inert a stage figure as Pavarotti could come to life in Bohème, delivering one of the most moving dramatic performances I have ever seen. Sure, playing with lasers is fun — but is the stage of an opera house really the proper place for boys and their toys?
5. YOU CAN’T DO MOZART WITHOUT BENCHES. A properly designed set will encourage interesting and characterful movement from the performers; a lousy set will leave them just standing there (in the dark, probably). In an opera with long reflective ensembles, it’s good to offer the performers the option of sitting now and then, if only to add a little variety to the stage picture. And doesn’t it irk you when Donna Anna or the Countess have to sit on the floor? Yes, I know those benches are “traditional”, and that’s a dirty word these days. But has it occurred to you that traditions become traditional because they WORK. Corollary #5A: You can’t do TRAVIATA without a chaise longue.
6. ONE SIZE DOESN’T FIT ALL. “That dress looked great on Scotto, but somehow it made Caballe look sort of, you know, fat…” No, costumes designed for one artist’s figure don’t always flatter another’s: and the same is true of stage movement and business. For almost 40 years, every Nedda who sings at the Met has to attempt the hyperactive staging Franco Zeffirelli devised for Teresa Stratas: you know, that aerobics routine she does during the Ballatella. But you know, that skipping and stuff looked fabulous when La Stratas did it — in fact, she needs a lot of physical activity on stage or she’ll tense up and the high A-sharp will go to hell. But other performers obviously have different needs.
7. SAD IS BAD. Of course some operas are sad. But it’s the audience who’s supposed to cry, not the performers. Sorrow is not an energizing emotion — in fact, it tends to suck the force out of anyone’s performance. Mimì when she is saying “Addio” should be brave, or bitter, or hopeful — something that will give her character some dignity and backbone. If Mimì is just feeling sorry for Mimì, then the audience needn’t bother.
8. UPDATED IS OUTDATED. Exactly what is gained by resetting, say, The Rake’s Progress in the 1920s? Are today’s audiences really all that better acquainted with the habits and that mores of that period than the 18th century? Very often, it seems like a director changes the period of a piece simply because he can’t think of anything else to do that looks “different.” (See Rule #2.) Besides, updating risks distortion of the social background of the piece. What employer in 1985 New York would dare hassle such hard-working, smart, and (let’s face it) white servants as Figaro and Susanna? The best bet is to stick to the original period (without turning the opera into a historical costume parade) or else to use simple, non-specific garb suggesting no period in particular: what Dr. Repertoire likes to call Star Trek Clothes.
9. LET THE GAMES NOT BEGIN. Creation in the theater is a collaborative process, with no room for dictators. Keep in mind that when a singer questions one of your ideas, he may not really intend a power struggle: in fact, he may just think it’s a lousy idea. Bend. Compromise. Discuss. And for God’s sake, stop sniping at that poor girl who’s singing Zerlina. She’s doing the best she can. If you’re directing because you’re into the whole power trip, do us all a favor and go to an S&M club instead.
10. SAFETY LAST. (And first and always.) No effect, no matter how spectacular, is worth injuring an artist — not even a chorister. It’s your job to make the production as safe as humanly possible. Be there when the blank pistol is loaded. Walk the set and make sure it’s solid. Do a fall on the rake and see if you end up in the orchestra pit. And take a nice big lungful of that Roscofog and then try to sing Wotan’s Farewell. If you survive, then you can give the cast a try. And if ever they refuse to do anything on grounds of danger, it’s not fair to whine, to bully, or, worst of all, to threaten, “If you don’t do it, we’ll find another singer who will.” Better they should find another director — one with some regard for human life.
You’ve prepared yourself for a night at the Erfurt Opera, you’ve bought your tickets and go forth to watch the production, secure in your knowledge of the libretto and looking forward to good acting, directing and singing.
Only something must be wrong, you realize, as the curtain goes up: You do not remember Verdi’s Un Ballo In Maschera taking place in the middle of a post nuclear holocaust wasteland, and you are almost certain that the libretto did not call for a Female Hitler (who manages to maintain Der Fuehrer's signature moustache in an estrogen-defying feat), Uncle Sam, or a chorus of naked elderly men and women wearing nothing but Mickey Mouse heads! Where is the King of Sweden? What happened to the costume ball? Did somebody switch your ticket when you weren’t looking?
Or, let’s say, you show up for your first “Norma” rehearsal and the ‘concept’ of the show is explained to you: the sets are geometric, the costumes look like Cirque Du Soleil rejects, and you are informed of the proliferation of a good number of naked people onstage—and you are one of them.
If any of these, or weirder, have ever happened to you, then you have my commiserations: You have encountered Eurotrash or Regietheater.
How can you tell what a Regietheater/Eurotrash production is? Well, let’s look at some of the properties that these productions usually exhibit:
It is an European house, or it is a production staged by Famous European Stage Director #125.
A specifically defined historical or fictitious event suddenly acquires a completely different, unrelated and ‘polemic’ subtext that wasn’t obvious to any of the Great Unwashed who studied the libretto but which did not escape The Great Director’s clever interpretation (the assassination of the King of Sweden in Un Ballo suddenly becomes a Marxist anti-capitalist critique of North America in the midst of the September Eleven terrorist attacks. What? Didn’t you notice? It’s obvious, for crying out loud!)
Natalie Dessay is somehow involved (not 100% true all the time, but if she’s there your odds become considerably higher)
Someone, somewhere, is walking around butt-naked for no discernible reason (other than maybe a desire to catch pneumonia, considering the temperature of most theaters).
For some reason, a sexual act is simulated, usually Out Of Character (such as Scarpia’s use of prostitutes to perform fellatio on him during the recent Met Tosca— Scarpia is a rapist, not a sex addict, and rapists don’t pay their victims) and performed in the most shocking or ridiculous manner (that is, if your own spouse were to act that way you would be served with divorce papers after you laughed yourself silly).
Something ‘symbolic’ is taking place onstage (or above it, below it, to the sides, etc) which serves as a means to tie the Great Director’s vision with what the libretto actually says, and it is usually as subtle as a firecracker in an oil field (as she sings Sempre Libera, Violetta climbs onto the giant clock that looms over the stage and attempts to push its hands backwards--- telling us that Sempre Libera is just the 19th century version of Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time! )
Something happens onstage that could have only been inspired by generous doses of Peyote (human-sized bumblebees are dancing the Charleston around a soprano during one of her challenging coloratura arias).
Semi-humorous lists aside (we wish we were making things up), we can say that Eurotrash / Regietheater is the practice of allowing a director an unprecedented level of freedom in devising the way a given opera is staged so that the composer's original, specific stage directions (as well as location, timeline, cast, plot) can be changed to suit whatever The Great Director’s vision is.
Tracking Regietheater’s roots, we find that a Wagner is at the heart of it. In this case, Wieland Wagner, grandson of the infamous misanthropic composer Richard Wagner (a man who was the exemplification of the Kant-Heidegger dynasty of thought).
After World War II, Wieland ran into several problems concerning his grandfather’s works onstage: during the apogee of the Third Reich they had been appropriated and adopted as the Reich’s ideological banners, with Wagner being named the composer whose musical ideas were the artistic expression of National Socialism ideology (this is no coincidence, as Quee Nelson demonstrates in her book “The Slightest Philosophy”: The chapter “The Same Walking as Dreaming” is dedicated to demonstrating the continuous and harmful effects of post-modern philosophy, starting with Kant and Heidegger and their insane philosophy’s hand in the birth of the Third Reich).
Wieland was the ideological pupil of Adolphe Appia, a famous theorist of stage lighting and set construction. Many of Appia’s approaches were revolutionary- including the preference of three-dimensional sets over flat painted ones. In Appia’s theory of artistic unity, Wieland found the answer by which he could sidestep the unfortunate political undertones that were attached to his grandfather’s works: instead of focusing on specifics, he would divest the production of all detail and instead emphasize a minimalistic approach in order to render it more symbolic and, in doing so, put the focus on the universal quality of the Wagnerian dramas – with a heavy dose of Carl Jung on the side.
Most stage directions were reinterpreted or discarded as, Wieland said, they were already illustrated in the score (of course, we would have asked him ‘then why bother with a costly fully-staged production? Just put the whole thing on as a concert version and we’ll close our eyes, since it is all illustrated in the score?’ We imagine Wieland would not have liked this question.)
Unfortunately, this is where one of our stereotypical villains first makes his entrance: Say hello to monsieur Jacques Derrida, the father of Deconstruction. Derrida first published Of Grammatology in 1967, and the seeds were planted.
Incidentally, Monsieur Derrida admitted to be indebted to none other than Heidegger, without whom (he said) he would never have said a single world.
So what is Deconstruction, and why is it important in the field of Eurotrash? J. Hillis Miller, a deconstructionist himself, put it best: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air.” ("Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure," Georgia Review 30,1976)
Essentially, the whole point of Deconstructionism is that any text has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably and that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible. Sounds absurd? No more absurd than the fact that Derrida, who created the movement, was completely unable to express a definition of it: "I have no simple and formalisable response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question."
The only attempts Derrida ever made towards defining his philosophy occurred only in negative statements: He says, for example, that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method, without saying that it has nothing in common with an analysis, a critique, or a method. This is as effective as saying, when attempting to describe an automobile: “It is neither the moon, a centipede nor a pregnant milkmaid.”
By refusing to define deconstruction, Derrida allowed himself the con man’s way out: he could include anything under the realm of deconstruction, and thus allow for the possibility for the deconstruction of everything.
To say that post-modernist philosophy aims towards the destruction not of all standards but of the mind itself is not an exaggeration: Derrida and his anti-intellectual philosophy are perfect examples of the nature of the beast. When deconstruction swelled as a movement, Wieland’s adaptations of Grandpa Wagner were seen in a new light: they were the ideal tools for post-modernists such as the disciples of Derrida, a perfect means to represent their non-standards.
Skip to 1976: nine years after Derrida’s first publication, Patrice Chéreau is tapped to produce the centenary Bayreuth production of Wagner’s Ring. Chéreau, applying the postmodernist (and Derrida’s) approach towards meaning, took the story of the twilight of the gods and created an anti-capitalist and Marxist sub-text (that is another thing that postmodernism has: capitalism is always en vogue as a target of a reinterpretation of anything ever said or written), so the Rhinemaiden became three ragged prostitutes doing business before a hydro-electric dam, the gods are (of course) industrialists, and Siegfried used an industrial steam-hammer to forge his sword.
Since then, the operatic world—specially in Europe and particularly in Germany—has undergone a strange and harmful madness. Because of postmodernist approaches to the libretto and the score, they are no longer considered to be useful guides from which to derive meaning but rather they’ve been supplanted by some obscure crystal ball into which the Great Director glances, sees what he wants, and from which he extracts a deconstruction of the original material which, when examined, has very little to do with the context of what either composer or librettist wrote down: one gets the impression that the Great Director would get rid of the pesky inconvenience of these two personages if only the singers and orchestra didn’t have to sing and play what they wrote.
Over the years we have seen productions that suffer from terrible dissociations of context: We have seen a Contes De Hoffman which takes place in a sanatorium with fly-away walls and elderly extras who apparently take delight in rolling on and off the stage (Natalie Dessay was cast as Olympia in that particular production, is anyone surprised?), We have seen eggs singing, enormous foetuses a la Space Odyssey 2001 suspended from the ceiling during Sigmund and Sieglinde’s passionate exchange (how subtle and foreshadowing!), A Sonnambula that was essentially a meta-mockery of opera, and more nudity, lewdness and vulgarity than you could ever find in the whole of Las Vegas.
When allegory, heavy-handed metaphor and rampant symbolism hijack the staging so much that the actions that take place (and the environment in which they take place) are so absurdly bizarre that they could pass as a Dadaist’s secret fantasy, then you’ve gone too far. The audience is not incapable of understanding and, in fact, applying these ridiculous postmodernist approaches is a double insult: You’re essentially telling the audience that it is too stupid to understand the actions and meaning of the opera without your Magnanimous Intervention, and you are saying the composer/librettist team was too much of a boob-troop to make the opus understandable.
An example is Emma Dante’s most recent crime, a ‘radical re-imagining’ of the opera Carmen. To the opening she has added the cheap effect of a hearse, and whose undertaker waits for Carmen at the beginning of the opera and takes her away at the end (postmodernist subtlety at its finest). Every character will have a doppelganger accompany them around the stage -- a priest for Micaela (a metaphor for her desire to get married, explains Dante), and Escamillo (Erwin Schrott) under his cape will hide a third arm as a metaphor for his bullfighting and his swordmanship. And five gypsy girls will always follow Carmen, silently, just like five veiled old women will never leave the stage, as silent witnesses of the action, a symbol of inescapable Fate. Escamillo’s bullfighting costumes are inspired by Michael Jackson’s wardrobe. The point of all this? Nobody really knows, except perhaps to chastize Bizet for not writing any allegorical characters into an opera that was never meant to be a symbolist’s paradise in the first place.
I would like to point out that there is a difference between the updating of an opera, a re-interpretation of it, and Regietheater/Eurotrash.
Many operas can be tastefully updated: Fidelio, for example, can be transported forward in time to the dictatorship of Franco in Spain without losing a great deal in the process, although it does provide some incongruence due to the appearance of Don Fernando at the end, the savior minister of the King (this being Franco’s regime, he was the de facto regent starting in 1947 and therefore Don Fernando would have been sent by Franco himself- this incongruence could be seen as defeating the whole argument of the opera because Florestán and Leonora are being freed from the tyrant Pizarro only by the superior force of the greater tyrant Francisco Franco).
Nevertheless, these difficulties must be confronted by many opera updates: any updating of Rigoletto proves troublesome because of the explicit mention of titles of nobility and the plot resting on the power relations between an aristocratic class system that does not exist in our current society as an adequate parallel. Likewise, updates of Nozze di Figaro run into similar predicaments because the power that the Count of Almaviva exerts over his wife, Susanna and Figaro also has no parallel in modern Western countries.
At their best, when done with taste and sagacity, these updates can be a breath of fresh air. Most of the time they end up a mixed bag of brilliant moments and awkward ones (when anachronisms and incongruence appear), and sometimes they do not work at all.
While updates can still follow the score and libretto as guides for establishing parallels in the updated settings, Regietheater seeks to create a whole new subtext that was not present before and use it as the main focus of staging and interpretation.
Because postmodernists lack standards (since their eternal loop on the ‘meaning of meaning’ leaves them impotent to actually perform a judgment of values,) these Great Directors of the Regietheater world resort to all sorts of macabre and depraved effects in order to drive their ‘Concept’ across. Journalist Heather Mac Donald wrote in her article “The Abduction of Opera,” explaining to what lengths one of these Great Directors (the culprit’s name is Calixto Bieito, don’t forget it!) proceeded to mutilate Mozart’s famous rescue opera, Abduction from the Seraglio:
“Mozart's lighthearted opera The Abduction from the Seraglio does not call for a prostitute's nipples to be sliced off and presented to the lead soprano. Nor does it include masturbation, urination as foreplay, or forced oral sex. Europe's new breed of opera directors, however, know better than Mozart what an opera should contain. So not only does the Abduction at Berlin's Komische Oper feature the aforementioned activities; it also replaces Mozart's graceful ending with a Quentin Tarantino--esque bloodbath and the promise of future perversion.”
Nudity, vulgarity, needless violence and perversion are Regietheater’s best friends. Only a postmodernist mind that could be capable of conceiving of any of them as central exponents of a serious and worthy intellectual proposition. Let us not be fooled here: Underneath the posturing of intellectualism, these promoters of Regietheater and ‘avant-garde’ productions are little more than savages who delight in seeing any proposition of structure or coherence consumed by flames. The champions of this ‘art form’ are posturing, false intellectuals who hide behind a murky and undefined concept of metropolitanism by which anything is proper onstage, as long as you can create a flimsy argument to rationalize it.
These faux intellectuals accuse those who dislike these shenanigans of being ‘provincial.’ There is nothing provincial in attacking Regietheater, but those who fight against it must know the reasons for which they must decry it, mere emotional appeal will not work, but rather one must take these people on what they pretend are their terms- no concept within the universe of Regietheater will remain standing when ruthless critical judgment is applied. They make great show of their circular intellectualism and esoteric arguments questioning the validity of esoteric arguments, but a postmodernist is no more an intellectual than a cow is a barn.
Another attack the Regiespecters use to defend their master’s works is the appeal against Puritanism. Their use of nudity and sexuality, they claim, is a celebration of the beauty of the human body. There is nothing wrong in using the naked body in productions, and it is you who should be ashamed to find anything wrong with it.
Yet, if there is nothing wrong with onstage nudity, why are only a select number from within each cast deigned to be naked at one time or another? And why does this nudity come, as it always does, at a moment that seems all too specifically engineered to cause shock, dread or horror?
The truth of their sham is that there is nothing ennobling in their use of the nude body. Their appeals to innocence are tarnished by the fact that they used nudity as nothing more than a gut-level shock-value. Scarpia’s prostitutes flashed their breasts at the audience, not in celebration of their beautiful bodies but as a brazen and infantile slap at the public on behalf of Great Director Luc Bondy.
Cherubino’s simulated masturbation to the tune of Non so piu, the aforementioned depravities in Seraglio and the pervasive nihilism of similar antics do not state “Behold, here is man in his greatness, with his body as his manifestation on earth, celebrate and admire it!” but they rather seem to say “Behold, you are a depraved and monstrous creature, here you lie naked like the beast you deserve to be!” It cannot be any other way: Postmodernism is a philosophical movement that hates the mind of man and its achievements above everything else, and therefore will hate man for being man. Whether consciously or not, these premises cannot help but concretize themselves in the horrendous actions that these Great Directors thrust upon the audience.
It is fitting that Great Directors are fascinated with prostitutes, because they are not unalike: when it comes down to it, anyone can have sex- but very few can actually make love. It is easy to appeal to the carnal and instinctive, but creating something of great significance requires a level of mental and emotional integration that a postmodernist mind simply cannot conceive. Hence, the prostitute is the perfect symbol for them, whereas their opposite would be the Romantic Ideal. It is inescapable to compare the nude creations of the Renaissance masters with the abominations of the Regietheater: The great masters sought to express internal and external perfection in their nudes—true celebrations of what it means to be truly human, whilst the postmodernist artist wants the human subject to be depraved both within and without and, in the fashion of true monsters, revel in its sight.
The greatest singers of our age have managed to move audiences to all manners of emotions without the removal of a single item of clothing or the use of any gimmick. Shirley Verret’s early Dalilah, for example, is the quintessential seducer- she exudes beauty, passion, danger and eroticism whilst remaining completely clothed. Natalie Dessay, Queen of Regietheater and onstage histrionics, could sing Lucia’s Il Dolce Suono stripped to her unmentionables (and in her case, indiscernibles) whilst swinging to and fro on a hobby-horse and not a single member of the audience would experience a single transcendental moment compared to what Callas achieved (even with a flawed instrument) in the role.
So let us be provincial, if that is the way they wish to call us (I prefer the term principled), but we have to call a spade a spade: Regietheater is nothing more than a grotesque gimmickry, pornography masquerading as the celebration of the body, anti-intellectualism passed off as deep thought. It must end, and it must end now so that true and talented directors can take over and truly perform innovative and fresh approaches with these works of art, without resorting to the horrible postmodernist tool set.
“Why not just trust the audience to know that this is a fictionalized portrayal of historical events that, as far as modern parallels are concerned, fits where it touches? This may of course lead to productions where the hero of A Masked Ball is an 18th-century Swedish monarch who is assassinated, or Henry V has a sword rather than a submachine-gun that he, for some reason, fails to employ against his enemies, but if that’s the case, we’ll just have to put up with it.”
As singers who hold our art as a great standard, it is our obligation (if we hold Honesty to be a virtue at all) to put a stop to the atrocities perpetrated by these Great Men, and if possible to end the Age Of The Director once and for all in favor of the Age Of Opera, simply put.
We are the instruments of the opera- through us, the orchestra and the set and house crew the will of the composer is manifest into a complete multi-sensorial work of art, and we add our own individual and unique interpretations when we truly sing and act at our highest potential.
What, then, should be our call to pride when we allow men and women of such low caliber to use us to cheapen and debase that which we love most?
What statement are you letting someone else make with your body?
I am currently reading three books on the subject of singing (and related), which I wish to review for this blog soon. They are (in the order of in which reading I am furthest ahead)
Marketing For Singers by Mark J. Stoddard
The Third Line: The Singer As Interpreter by Daniel Helfgot
An Interpretive Guide to Operatic Arias by Martial Singher
As soon as I finish a book I will post a review of it here.
Sarah Cremer, Baroque dance specialist and guest of The Covent Garden Minuet Company, performs the Minuet at a masquerade ball. The company is a London based dance group performing the social dances of the 18th century, in particular the minuet, in full authentic costume. They aim to recapture the spirit and atmosphere of the grand events that took place in the Georgian Assembly Rooms.
While we’re talking about dances, let’s look at the closing chaconne from Rameau’s opera Les Indes Galantes:
makes his entrance: Say hello to monsieur Jacques Derrida, the father of Deconstruction. Derrida first published Of Grammatology in 1967, and the seeds were planted. 
