What does it matter when and where an opera is set? Does the nature of Verdi's Rigoletto fundamentally change if the action takes place in the court of France (Verdi's original intention), 16th century Mantua (his ultimate choice) or even 20th century Manhattan as long as the relationships among the characters are preserved? Adventurous stage directors, for whom tradition is the memory of the last bad performance, are answering that in many cases, it does not. "Tradition is slovenliness," exclaimed Gustav Mahler. His cry has never seemed more apt, and it is being taken up with brio in the opera world.
In London last month, the English National Opera (ENO) unveiled Director Jonathan Miller's production of Puccini's Tosca set during World War II and played in the style of one of Hollywood's gritty, black-and-white melodramas of the period. Earlier this season, the same company presented a Mad Max version of Bizet's Carmen by David Pountney that replaced castanets and mantillas with feral children darting amid junked American automobiles. In Paris, Producer Seth Schneidman staged Strauss's Elektra as a dream-theory psychodrama, freely mixing images of Greek antiquity and 19th century Europe.
Most of this experimental activity takes place in Europe; what Old World audiences find adventurous, American operagoers often consider brazen. Protective of the cultural talismans bequeathed by distant European forefathers, Americans tend to mistrust radical interpretations. Europeans, more at ease with their own heritage, feel freer to experiment with it. Those seeking a bold approach in the U.S. will rarely find it in the big houses. In New York City, the Metropolitan Opera favors conservative productions, sometimes elephantine ones like Franco Zeffirelli's La Boheme and Tosca, that reinforce the company's role as a musical museum. Occasionally, the rival New York City Opera makes a cautious foray into modernism, often with indifferent results -- Frank Corsaro's tepid Spanish Civil War version of Carmen, for example.
Smaller companies, such as the Santa Fe Opera and Opera Theater of St. Louis, offer off-season stimulation, and Director Peter Sellars has made a reputation scandalizing the bourgeoisie, for example, setting Mozart's Cosi fan tutte in Despina's Coffee Shop. Still, dullness prevails in the largest companies, where opera is viewed as a closed, dead art; innovation is largely a guerrilla endeavor carried on by partisans hiding out in the hills.
By contrast, Europe's buzzing controversies are full of life. West Germany, with the liveliest opera scene, is chockablock with radical restagings of the classics -- in extreme cases to such an extent that the original work is almost obliterated by the new context. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production of Berg's Lulu in Munich sets the action in a four-story madhouse with Wedekind's tawdry story played out in front of an onstage audience of gaping mummies. To be sure, London's Royal Opera and the Vienna State Opera remain committed to traditional opera staged in traditional ways, sung by the same coterie of jet- bound stars who appear at the Met. And the old style still has its rewards; the Royal's Der Rosenkavalier, a rococo dream handsomely sung and lovingly led by the company's new music director, Bernard Haitink, is impossible to envisage any other way.