Vienna chief is caught texting during opera
NewsHaving assembled Vienna’s biggest team of all-stars for Aida, the director of the State Opera did not seem much focussed on the stage.
Here’s an observation from critic Eric A. Leuer in the influential Merker Online.
As always, Bogdan Roščić has worked primarily with name dropping due to a lack of artistic concept. That may work in the provinces, but it doesn’t belong at an opera house like the Vienna State Opera. This is underlined by the fact that Mr Roščić was mainly busy typing on his mobile phone or whispering with Harald Mahrer for most of the evening (both box 13, right, 1st tier) – self-revealing as so often.
Full review here.
press photo: Elina Garanca. Vienna State Opera/Michael Pöhn
If the reviewer was watching Box 13 for
“for most of the evening” then he wasn’t paying much attention to the stage either.
Do read the full review in the original or Google translation. At the very least the author is a knowledgeable critic who is not being compensated by the venue he is reviewing. (And yes, it quite easy to observe several things in parallel. Even expected when viewing staged performances…)
I was seated towards the side of the galery, above the row of boxes where the Director was seated, and could see from there only a small portion of the stage on the other side of the auditorium. Therefore I was listening more than watching the performance. Just “listening” avoids one’s being distracted by the action on stage. Had I seen what the so-called Director was doing, I would also have asked myself: WHAT is he doing? But this would not have kept me from listening, and that more attentively the the Director.
Dixie commented in another SD post on January 15 that primarily listening to Aida allowed Dixie to observe that Anna N. was “surprisingly good.” This is high praise because Dixie is usually very critical of Anna Netrebko. Dixie was more negative about Kaufman and Garanca. Dixie is more credible than the vitriolic review written in German.
Thank you!!! That was not “high praise”, it was just the impression I had from her performance. After all, the topic of conversation is the opera Aida, not a war. You might enjoy my observation of 17 January regarding Trumpetherald’s comment of 16 January. If there is anyone in the opera world to whom I would love to give a generous piece of my mind, that would be Bogdan Roscic. What he is doing to the Vienna State Opera is criminal!
What else do you do when faced with such a yawn -inducing cast. Or the intendant is tweeting around pseudo -apologies for his engaging of Putin and Gergiev’s long -time lapdog.
God forbid that we have a cast of opera stars at one of most important opera houses! (I guess this guy would prefer to go to Linz over Vienna.)
The Guy is doing his Job! running the company – He is not sitting there as a Fan! and has far more than one performance on his shoulders. Don’t shame people , before you walked in their shoes or know the circumstances.
He’s not there to enjoy the performance like everyone else. He is at work! I can’t believe this is even an issue. I guess they really had nothing else to report on.
If the report is true, then the behavior is totally unacceptable.
What if he had been doing his work from his office instead? I am sure he would follow the performance from a monitor.
It is a serious issue because texting and whispering constitute an unacceptable distraction in the context of a live performance. Moreover, someone in the senior management really ought to be leading by example (it is bad enough when ushers start whispering to each other or letting latecomers in at inappropriate junctures). If the director needs to send messages or talk to people during the show, he/she should not be in a box visible and audible to the rest of the audience, but in an office, backstage area, or some kind of operations booth. If an unexpected urgent situation arose during the show that required the director’s immediate response but did not require any interruption to the show itself, then he/she could have left the box (unlike in a general seating area, it is often possible to leave a box *relatively* quietly and discreetly during the show).
“Verdi’s Aida is an opera whose libretto is certainly not convincing.”
Which libretto ever was? More tragic is the view of directors that they could make it theatre by deconstructing the beauty that is in the score: the music.
So, were the big names great singers?
According to the review, only Garanca was. Be that as it may, I have doubts even regarding that. The review is not convincing, when there are not just few errors here and there, but chapters printed twice.
The critic makes a great effort to convince the reader that he did not like Netrebko`s singing owing to dismerits, regardless of politics. I can believe that, but his objectivity I dare to doubt.
Which libretto is or was convincing? Good question. While we are at Verdi, I’d say Arrigo Boito’s for Falstaff.
He was texting the trombonist to find out what the opera was about. The trombonist has been paying attention.
He is an uneducated, unmusical dumb pleb
Your comment is brutally correct, which is sometimes the only way to get the point across. Bogdan is not really uneducated, i.e. he at least went through the motions of higher education. In 2017 he was accused of plagerism in his dissertation on Th. W. Adorno, but the charges were dropped on 17 November 2017 because the passages in question were deemed harmful rather than helpful to his disseration theme. In other words, he could not even cheat successfully. The question that has been upmost in the minds of truly informed opera lovers – of which there are many not only in Vienna, but globally – is: HOW ON EARTH DID HE LAND THE POSITION OF DIRECTOR OF THE VIENNA STATE OPERA?
. . . by whistling Dixie, obviously.
Good try, but not very funny! Just so you know, I refer to myself as Dixie because of a joke during my high school days. It had and still has no political relevance. And I seriously doubt that Bogdan even knows how to whistle, and if so, certainly not Dixie!!