Now, I’m no expert in baroque opera. I’ve done a little bit of baroque music, mainly the production of Poppea by Monteverdi that I did last year, and I certainly have a passion for pre 1750 music and the process of researching music of that time. However, watching this opera was a really interesting once to monitor my reaction. The production I looked at unfortunately wasn’t the best and so it was hard to really give it my most authentic opinion on.
What I was most struct with was practical questions around mounting older work like this in our time. The tropes and references of the work harken back to ancient Rome, Greece, christianity of the day and people of the day. So, it’s difficult if you don’t know the references. The characters are also generally quite one dimensional, the text isn’t usually to inspiring or poetic, especially when you’re dealing with a translation and if performed mediocre it’s really hard to understand if its the work that is intolerable or the performers.
This work had some really firey, exciting exchanges between characters written into it, but the execution was so banal and tepid, I found myself yelling “you just told that character to fuck off, you need to look like you’re pissed at them!!!” And this is always my bug bare with opera, I find myself 5 out of 10 times leaving a show complaining that the singing was nice, and the orchestra was fine but the acting and usually the direction, too, aren’t up to scratch.
Directing these dated works is very hard. You have odd musical structures and old timey theatrical techniques to navigate. You have to deal with pages and pages of static music, in-place to tell the story, or be an entertaining march depicting the decent into an under water fantasy land or long interlude put in place so that in sets could be moved and changed in the original production. So, as a director and/or a conductor you need to make very clear and good decisions around what to do with all this material that is hard to understand and difficult to structure. Theatres operate in different ways now. Performers too. The role of the director didn’t exist in the time we’re talking about with this opera, singers would be amazing and just have to sell the whole thing, with some basic blocking given by the musical director.
We have at our disposal so many techniques, trick and options as theatre makers and I feel so oft period work suffers from trying to be authentic to the work and the tropes. Work can get so bogged down in that. Singing always perfect, direction an after thought, orchestra precise but dull.
If I get the opportunity to work with period opera again, I would at least try my hardest to make sure that at all costs the story is being told and that the performers have as clear intention possible as to why they are on stage, otherwise what’s the point?