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Pountney's Carmen took an even more radical view. Rather than discovering a parallel setting, the director simply created one, reveling in the anachronism. The gypsy girls, now prostitutes, conducted their business in the back seats of cars, and the bullfighters in the final act made their entrance in motley cholo low riders. So far, so shocking -- but only if one believes that Carmen is about the working conditions in Spanish cigarette factories, instead of sexual obsession, violence and death. In fact Pountney did not go far enough. Micaela -- a character not found in Merimee's gritty original novella -- was her conventional, boring bourgeois self, and the reserved British performers did not really get the sleaze factor right. This should have been Carmen: Beyond Thunderdome. Still, it boasted a brilliant performance by Mezzo Sally Burgess in the title role and some crisp conducting from Paul Daniel.
The Paris Elektra was the most daring in concept but the tamest in execution. Schneidman rather naively promised an "arena of the psychodrama buried deep in the tomb of the unconscious," but what occurred onstage was a fairly standard day in the death of the House of Atreus. The real pleasures of the production were the whiplash performance of Soprano Hildegard Behrens in the title role and the gloriously haunted Klytemnestra of Mezzo Christa Ludwig. Conductor Seiji Ozawa, leading his first Elektra, sought out the brutal score's elusive lyric elements and found most of them.
Whether transposed or superimposed, opera today admits a multitude of possible interpretations. Innovation, even if it is not always completely successful, keeps the art fresh; and in any case, those who claim that the real drama in opera is found in the singing can have no reasonable objection to new stagings. American companies would benefit from a jolt of European bravado. It is not a sign of degeneracy but of vitality.