Production values

In the absence of any operas to attend, I’ve been reading the most recent defence of ‘director’s opera’, a book with the characteristic title Unsettling Opera, by the American academic David J. Levin.

In the absence of any operas to attend, I’ve been reading the most recent defence of ‘director’s opera’, a book with the characteristic title Unsettling Opera, by the American academic David J. Levin. Anyone braving one of these books — there are plenty of them now — needs to have a high tolerance for jargon, indeed for deformed prose of many kinds. They tend to rehearse the same basic argument, in Levin’s case with close attention to a small number of operas and (usually) DVDs of some productions.

The idea is that ‘literalist’ productions, which set an opera in the period indicated in the libretto, and have the characters behaving as described there, or as you would expect given the context and the action, most often fail to arouse any fresh or interesting responses, in fact, are scarcely more than a ritual, the main variables being the singers and the conductor, and the main purpose of many opera-goers being to attend the performance to see how it compares with ones that they have seen in the past or know from recordings.