OPERA as theatre? You must be joking. But Tom Sutcliffe isn't for in this scholarly survey of 50 years of opera productions in Britain and Europe he takes very, very serious issue indeed with those who believe that opera is merely about dressing beautiful voices in pretty costumes and allowing them to deliver well known set pieces to a complacent audience. He defends some of the most controversial operatic productions of recent times, including Patrice Chereau's 1976 Ring cycle at Bayreuth, which began by being roundly booed and ended by being considered one of the classic stagings of the century, and David Alden's sickeningly violent chain saw Mazeppa of 1984 "challenging but reasonable," pronounces Sutcliffe stoutly.
It is an approach which will enrage those who like their Carmens in mantillas and their Walkyries in winged helmets. The purpose of this book, however, is not to enrage but to en flame. Sutcliffe believes passionately in opera and wants it to survive and if, in order to survive, it has every so often to burn down and begin again, well, too bad. After all, as he points out, it is extraordinary that opera as an art form has survived at all. From the very beginning it has been attacked as elitist and unrealistic, yet in the late 20th century it is more accessible, and more popular, than ever before.
Why? At least partly, argues Sutcliffe, because of the current emphasis on staging and dramaturgy, often dubbed "produceritis" by its critics. The fact that theatre directors have attacked and deconstructed the classical repertoire is not merely intriguing it is essential. How else can you grab the attention of a sophisticated audience accustomed to a diet of cinema and rock videos, with their sequential editing and non naturalistic techniques?
In Rossini's and Donizetti's day, novelty was valued above all else, forcing composers to produce a stream of new operas at production line speed. In our own times, new operas are rare, and often rarefied, events. Instead, the same well loved works are performed over and over again nowadays, the novelty lies almost wholly in the interpretation.
It is, he admits, a risky business. When it doesn't work you end up with a dog's dinner but when it does, as in Peter Sellars's inspired 1989 updating of the Mozart/Da Ponte comedies which put The Marriage of Figaro in a duplex 52 floors above Fifth Avenue, Cosi Fan Tutte into a Roseanne style diner and Don Giovanni on to the mean streets of Manhattan, complete with graffiti, boarded up shops and an aluminium shuttered church, you end up with dramas which might have been written yesterday.
Dealing with the complex symbolism of Wagner's Ring cycle is one of the most formidable challenges faced by any would be opera director, and Sutcliffe doesn't shy away from detailed discussion of Rings by Ruth Berghaus, Peter Hall, Richard Jones, Herbert Wernicke and Patrice Chereau. This is courageous, for it inevitably involves a good deal of repetition, but for the reader who perseveres in the face of yet another set of cunningly off beat costumes for the Rhinemaidens (particularly frustrating for Irish readers, perhaps, since we never see the work of any of these famous producers), the rewards are great, for Wagner's epic cycle marks both the beginning of a new kind of music drama and the end, or very nearly the end, of the tradition of grand opera as we know it.
Which brings us neatly to the most crucial question of all how long can opera continue to concentrate on the standard repertoire without turning into a museum of old masters? It's a bit like asking how many Barbers of Seville you can get on to the head of a pin, but the fearless Sutcliffe devotes his final chapter to a meditation on the future, making a dramatic plea for the restoration of good tunes ("Poetry must sing. Poetic drama must sing. When it can once again, opera will have found a voice for the new millennium") and ending with a ringing declaration of his own personal relief in opera. A new kind of opera, he insists, is kicking in the womb of the 20th century. How long the gestation period may be, alas, even he doesn't dare predict.
