Playing with the Big Boys

Reports are coming in that the Metropolitan Opera's new tech-heavy production of The Ring has ambitions beyond its ability to deliver; the rainbow bridge that should afford the gods entry victoriously but callously to their new castle across the river fails to materialize, and the poor bedraggled band is left to seek out a Donner Party-like solution to its predicament while the orchestra blazes with triumph and the curtain slowly falls.

In an economic downturn that is the worst since the Great Depression, even the big boys are setting their sights too high. In his recent op-ed piece in the New York Times Wagner for a Song, Alex Ross tries to argue that spending multi-millions of dollars on the new Met production is worth the investment, and yet he lets on in the last line that only a handful of people might benefit from the endeavor. A scandalous admission such as that is worthy of Wotan himself, supremely out of touch with the reality of the lives in the parallel universes his stage buddies occupy.

Is there no place in opera for the imagination? Are audiences so meager in their capacity to suspend their disbelief that the rainbow bridge must appear in fact and not in suggestion? Must millions of dollars be spent to mount this opera? The waste of the Met's production is the effort to produce (or on Monday night, fail to produce) for $16M what the imagination will produce for free.

In the 19th century, summoning up a rainbow bridge was guaranteed to get the audience saucer-eyed because there were no other comparable visual experiences. Unused to the wizardry of the movie industry, audiences were easily impressed by stage devices that we today would find quaint or silly.  Now, opera's rival is film, and in a world where anyone can be transported across the universe and back for less than $10 it is an easy bet who is going to come off looking slick and fabulous and who is going to come off looking like a cut-price educational video.

Computer animation has handed Hollywood a first class ticket on the Simulated Reality Express and opera cannot afford to come along. Grand Opera came of age with the steam locomotive; its milieu is the Pullman Car and the leisurely chugging-along tour of the countryside, not a rocket-powered intergalactic fantasy ride, unless it has Hollywood's financial resources to invest, which at the moment it does not, and perhaps never should.

Opera is not a realistic medium. People do not sing when they are stabbed, crowds of onlookers never comment in unison on dramatic events. The world of artifice is the world of the imagination, and appealing to the audience's imagination would be doing them a better service than conjuring up more and more elaborate and expensive engines and costumes. As the prologue to Henry V has it in his appeal to the budgetary constraints of the time, "Think when we talk of horses, that you see them printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth; for 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings."

Shakespeare's concerns are both practical and financial; the Globe Theatre couldn't possibly contain the number of actors necessary to do justice to a reenactment of the Battle of Agincourt, but more importantly his troupe simply did not have the cash to invest without making a mockery of the attempt. He commands the audience to "suppose" and "think" to make up the budgetary short-fall.

The chain of rivalry is a long one. The big boy opera houses look to the movies and end up staging budget Indiana Jones remakes, the small time opera companies look to the big boys and end up putting on a show in the barn, and the big loss is the credibility of opera as a medium.

Living within our operatic means would entail understanding the historical and anthropological context in which we live and would transform the world of opera. It would reduce dependence on the latest technical gadgetry, it would energize the audience and engage them with the music, and it would challenge directors to stage the music and not stage a movie of the music. It would encourage composers to write with practicalities in mind, and it might stimulate some talk about what 'get real' means to an opera singer.