You have to hand it to Placido Domingo, the General Director of the Los Angeles Opera. In June 2010 he loses $6 MILLION on an ill-conceived and ill-executed production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and yet in September 2010 he is starring in the premiere of an opera that was commissioned to highlight his talents.
Riding the American wave of Actor-Presidents, Movie-Star-Governors and Comedian-Politicians, Domingo is the Tenor-Executive, the Singer who is presumed to know his way around the board room and the donors’ dining room as well as the stage. Yet the Ring’s staggering financial loss is in part due to his managerial absence, having taken on the role of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra at the Metropolitan Opera in New York during the Los Angeles run; clearly a conflict of interest was at play here.
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| Domingo, as Neruda, listening to the Postino |
And now, the apology for the Ring fiasco is Il Postino, a faithful operatic adaptation of the 1994 film, by Spanish composer Daniel Catan. This sumptuous, old-fashioned romantic opera sets back the clock at least 100 years, labeling opera once again as the expensive playground of the dilettante classes. It is a challenge-free audience pleaser, unabashedly modeled on the most successful and longer-lasting works that Puccini wrote between 1900 and 1910. Rich with cut-price romantic lyricism, it is a surefire cozy hit, a cheeky Mediterranean mea culpa that restores opera to its role of the safe vanilla artform.
- First of all, anyone who loses $6M because he was not minding the store should be fired immediately.
- Secondly, if the only reason to turn a movie into an opera is to provide a singer with an opportunity to show off, you should spend your money on something else, especially if that singer should have been fired in the first place (see ‘First of all’.)
- Thirdly, and most importantly, the lesson that audiences will take away from Il Postino is that opera is trivial, that it is a Victorian nostalgic irrelevance, and that it is a harmless divertissement for the upper classes to waste their money and time on.
Historicist art is art that repeats safe and successful models from the past; it appeals to the cowardly because there is no risk. There is no risk of exposure to real emotion because the veneer of nostalgia prevents interaction with anything in the present day.
In the 1960s it was standard practice to keep children away from funerals because it would harm them. Steering audiences away from interaction with the present day by anesthetizing them with nostalgia is a similar, over-protective move, and is certainly not introducing people to art, it is letting them slip into a coma of entertainment that masquerades as art. But do not be fooled; art is at the intersection of the temporal and the eternal, not at the intersection of capitalism and celebrity.
Great singers deliver themselves and their emotions, they don’t merely sing about them, great composers deliver themselves and their stories, they don’t describe them. Great opera poses a threat to the emotions of the stunted or inexperienced, which is why charlatans have to hide behind petty make-believe rather than risk the exposure of a true encounter with a potentially life-changing medium.
Thankfully time will weed out disingenuousness and all this play-acting will fall away.