"In an environment where productions of opera will increasingly depart, often radically, from the `norm' ... it is imperative to be able to understand the bases for these rethinkings. This book is of major importance to the field of opera today. Patrick Smith, editor-in-chief of Opera News The staging of opera has become immensely controversial over the last twenty years. Tom Sutcliffe here offers an engaging and far-reaching book about opera performance and interpretation. This work is a unique tribute to the most distinctive and adventurous achievements in the theatrical interpretation of opera as it has developed in recent decades. Readers will find descriptions of the most original and successful avant-garde opera productions in Britain, Europe, and America. Sutcliffe beautifully illustrates how updating, transposition, or relocation, and a variety of unexpected imagery in opera, have qualified and adjusted our perception of the content and intention of established masterpieces. Believing in Opera describes in detail the seminal opera productions of the last fifty years, starting with Peter Brook in London after the war, and continuing with the work of such directors and producers as Patrice Chreau in Bayreuth, Peter Sellars and David Alden in America, Ruth Berghaus in Frankfurt, and such British directors as Richard Jones, Graham Vick, Peter Hall, and David Pountney. Through his descriptions of these works, Sutcliffe states that theatrical opera has been enormously influenced by the editing style, imagery, and metaphor commonplace in the cinema and pop videos. The evolution of the performing arts depends upon revitalization and defamiliarization, he asserts. The issue is no longer naturalism, but the liberation of the audience's imagination powered by the music. Sutcliffe, an opera critic for many years, argues that opera is theater plus music of the highest expressive quality, and as a result he has often sided with unconventional and novel theatrical interpretations. He believes that there is more to opera than meets the ear, and his aim is to further the process of understanding and interpretation of these important opera productions. No other book has attempted this kind of monumental survey.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The tension between opera's conservatives and innovators has gone on for years: the defenders of an established canon take issue with those who want fresh perspectives. Directors grow increasingly daring, and they often stir controversy with extreme interpretations. Tom Sutcliffe, a British opera journalist, stands firmly with the innovators. He sees opera's future health in its ability to reimagine its classics. His descriptions of the work of provocative directors in the past two decades make a persuasive case, even when some of the productions sound like misfires.
Sutcliffe locates the true effect of a performance inside the mind of the spectator. For him, "believing" in a performance--the ability to become engaged and stirred by it--is the crucial sign of its worth. It is a measure that allows the greatest latitude in interpretation. He examines the work of some aggressively imaginative directors: Patrice Chéreau's violent Ring cycle at Bayreuth, whose stabbings had audience members screaming "Enough!"; Peter Sellars's Americanized Mozart (Le Nozze di Figaro set in a New York penthouse and Don Giovanni among drug addicts in the South Bronx); Richard Jones's garish Die Fledermaus, which sought to shove bad taste down the audience's throat with sets full of dancing champagne glasses and chocolate boxes. Robert Wilson, more influential than any of these, gets strangely little mention.
Live performances are difficult to write about for those who haven't seen them. Sutcliffe fails to solve the problem with excessively minute descriptions of staging, which tend to obscure his larger points. His uninflected prose style, perhaps designed for reportorial accuracy, doesn't help. Nevertheless, his study will stimulate those who see opera as a limitless source of theatrical riches. --David Olivenbaum
From Library Journal
Sutcliffe brings his long association with opera as both performer and critic (for the Guardian and the Evening Standard) to this exploration of the opera productions he considers most interesting or innovative. Star performers take a back seat here. Instead, Sutcliffe uses his extraordinarily wide experience of opera productions (especially those in Britain and Europe from the mid-Seventies to the present) to portray the producer as central in the process of renewal, creativity, and even controversy that is essential for a healthy, evolving opera. The influences on opera production of changing technology in other fields of entertainment, including film and video, are evident. Sutcliffe definitely offers a fresh perspective, leaving the reader with a good awareness of the course of recent opera production. Some will be stimulated to think of new possibilities. Recommended for larger opera collections, especially those serving areas in which opera production is of interest.?James E. Ross, WLN, Seattle, Wash.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pure Rhetoric,
By jerry i h (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Believing in Opera (Hardcover)
Few subjects have produced more twaddle in print than the current, regrettable fad of decontructionist staging of opera, and this book is no exception. Like flappers and disco, this too shall pass. The current generation of opera producers have grown up with television and commercials. They have the attention span of a gnat. One suspects that they have never taken the time to read Shakespeare's plays or the Bible. Their style of opera consists of a random jumble of visual elements and designs taken from disparate sources, cultures, and time periods. Mr. Sutcliffe has been a British opera critic for a very long time and has seen the ebb and flow of many trends in the opera house. His book would be more valuble if he had concentrated on documenting rather than trying to justify the off-the-wall staging of opera.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A spirited defence,
By A Customer
This review is from: Believing in Opera (Hardcover)
This is a spirited defence of the indefensible, and most idiotic, trend of modern opera: the movement away from an emphasis on singers and conductors towards the director and the production itself. Dramatically, most opera is essentially absurd. Nineteenth century opera is largely based on dramatic forms that have not survived into this century and have primarily historical interest for scholars. No one, for example, would ever stage the kind of melodramas so popular in the preceding century with a serious expectation that an audience could enter into it in some dramatic sense. Neither can any kind of production, in itself, bring Il Trovatore (my favorite opera) "alive" for me or make me "believe" that the second act of Tristan and Isolde (my second favorite opera) is anything more than overblown romantic twaddle with a German transcendental twist. Opera simply does not live in and through its silly plotting and narrative. Rather, it the the glory of the music, as it is realized through great voices, that makes these operas of real interest and gives them emotional power. There is a wonderful video of Tebaldi and Corelli singing La Forza del Destino in Naples in front of a typical, old-style Italian set: a painted curtain that looks like it's from a bad high school play. Yet this video captures one of the most glorious moments of singing I've ever heard: huge, matchless voices singing Verdi's great music (and uttering the rather predictable words characteristic of melodrama). It's the singing that brings this alive, and no production can have much of an effect without that as it's basis. In an age where conductors are more intent on flying around the world rather than truly learning about voices, and few singers can even begin to match the great voices of the past, we might indeed look to the director to bring us relief from the second rate. But Serafin didn't need a director to bring opera alive, and Callas didn't need a strange production to make us "believe" in opera. If the production has taken center stage, it's because audiences have accepted the second rate.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A spirited defence,
By A Customer
This review is from: Believing in Opera (Hardcover)
This is a spirited defence of the the indefensible, and most idiotic, trend of modern opera: the movement away from an emphasis on singers and conductors towards the director and the production itself. Dramatically, most opera is essentially absurd. Nineteenth century opera is largely based on dramatic forms that have not survived into this century and have primarily historical interest for scholars. No one, for example, would ever stage the kind of melodramas so popular in the preceding century with a serious expectation that an audience could enter into it in some dramatic sense. Neither can any kind of production, in itself, bring Il Trovatore (my favorite opera) "alive" for me or make me "believe" that the second act of Tristan and Isolde (my second favorite opera) is anything more than overblown romantic twaddle with a German transcendental twist. Opera simple does not live in and through it's silly plotting and narrative. Rather, it the the glory of the music, as it is realized through great voices, that makes these operas of real interest and gives them emotional power. There is a wonderful video of Tebaldi and Corelli singing La Forza del Destino in Naples in front of a typical, old-style Italian set: a painted curtain that looks like it's from a bad high school play. Yet this video captures one of the most glorious moments of singing I've ever heard: huge, matchless voices singing Verdi's great music (and uttering the rather predictable words characteristic of melodrama). It's the singing that brings this alive, and no production can have much of an effect without that as it's basis. In an age where conductors are more intent on flying around the world rather than truly learning about voices, and few singers can even begin to match the great voices of the past, we might indeed look to the director to bring us relief from the second rate. But Serafin didn't need a director to bring opera alive, and Callas didn't need a strange production to make us "believe" in opera. If the production has taken center stage, it's because audiences have accepted the second rate.
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