‘Opera remains in Britain a resident alien’
OperaHave a relisten to the 2012 Lebrecht Interview with Graham Vick.
He hated the ‘red and gold’ opera houses and the somnolent estalishment that inhabited them. He was turned on by the Pierre Boulez cry to ‘burn down the opera houses’.
Listen, and you can imagine what might have been had Graham stayed with us a little longer. He died of Covid in July 2021.
Click here.
I think the photo was from Stockhausen Mittwoch aus Licht (Birmingham 2012). I wonder if NL enjoyed it ?
Indeed, this is in the stage of the act “Weltparlament” from Mittwoch aus Licht. Graham Vick did a really great job on that Stockhausen Opera. One of my most impressive opera experiences. By the way: This interview brought M. Lebrecht to my attention. As a German I had never heard of him before.
Well the country produced composers such as Purcell, Vaughan-Williams and Britten so it’s it’s not that bad.
Obviously not the equivalent of Mozart, Strauss, Wagner, Verdi, Beethoven etc. (among multitudes of others) but I suppose that makes the point.
Why are almost all the pictures of these interviews so blurred looking??? It’s not that difficult these days to make a sharp picture?
I only saw one Vick production and it was his early Giovanni with Scottish Opera which I disliked intensely. It was critically mauled but then it was for a subscription audience which Vick in his own words actively disliked. To be fair he also agreed that the production was over-ambitious and not properly thought through. But unsurprisingly he was never given a chance to revive it.
I wish I could have seen one of his Birmingham productions to fully understand how different and immersive they were compared to those staged in the “red and gold” Opera Houses he also seemed so actively to dislike. Yet that did not stop him from taking pots of cash from those same Houses over several decades.
He clearly had his admirers even though on this I have to sit on the fence. He was very obviously a man steeped in opera and knew exactly what he wanted and why. From comments on this site and elsewhere, he was also much loved by singers. But given his antipathy to the traditional opera audiences, I do wonder what he could actually have achieved, as NL suggests, had he enjoyed a longer life.
Having listened again to the interview, I find Vick’s comment about his career has been guided by Tito Gobbi’s maxim that it’s essential to “study all of the words carefully before you study the music” more than strange given at least his Rome Giovanni production during the 2018/19 season available complete on the internet. As an example, this makes it perfectly clear that Anna knows perfectly well who has seduced her at the start of the opera, not only because they are looking directly at each other throughout as they get dressed but it is in daylight. This surely makes nonsense of Giovanni’s comment that she’ll never know who he is “chi son’ iI tu non saprai,” and later in Anna’s recit prior to “Or sai chi l’onore” when she finally realizes that her seducer and therefore the murderer of her father was Giovanni. After all in the interim the two have already met in the preceding quartet.
Also having the Commendatore being an invalid using a zimmer frame equally is absurd. For the fight, all Giovanni does is knock the frame away, hit his unarmed opponent with a stick and then suffocate him with a handkerchief. There is no resistance. Then when it comes to “O statua gentilissima” the Commendatore has just dug himself half out of a grave! I totally fail to understand how these and some other production elements have been guided by da Ponte’s words. They certainly fly in the face of Mozart’s music at these points in the opera.
Perhaps he should have studied Gobbi’s 1982 masterclass vdos also available on YouTube. Here the great maestro states it is “not honest to change the period . . . we have to accept [the world] as it was.”