Chapter 18 - Directors and the direction of opera

Summary

The most important thing is: I believe that you are not one of the producers who look at a work only in order to see how to make it into something different.

Such a wrong could never be greater than if done to me, since while composing I had all the scenic effects in mind, seeing them in the utmost precision.

(Schoenberg, in Stein, 1964: 139)

A performance of The Mask of Orpheus is unthinkable without a director. It needs a single artistic/organising mind to focus its technical and scenographic components. Effectively it is written assuming the director. The rise of the director has changed the way opera is conceived.

From the early nineteenth century parallel developments took place in music, ballet and theatre as a result of growing artistic and technical complexity. The increased size of orchestras and length of scores required the conductor to hold the players and the work together. Once in place this led to the conductor as interpreter – adding, as it were, his own voice to that of the composer. In theatre and opera this had been the responsibility first of the playwright, librettist or composer and then the Stage Manager who understood the technical resources and staging tradition. Until late in the nineteenth century everyone knew what an opera ‘looked like’. Increasing technical resources simply added to the realism of the stage picture: interpretation did not arise. There was almost no currency to the idea of older works having to be performed other than in the current production style. However, as David Pountney says, increased technical resources meant that: ‘This was the era…in which production-books first became common…the scale and intricacy of the stagings that became a fashionable and necessary ingredient of grand opera occasioned the practical demands that would lead to the invention of the director’ (Pountney, in Charlton, 2003: 132).