Two decades on, Lorin Maazel’s opera gets dusted off
NewsThe conductor’s only opera, based on George Orwell’s 1984, was premiered at Covent Garden in April 2005.
The premiere was paid for by Maazel, who also owned every facet of the production.
I wrote at the time: Lorin Maazel’s opera of George Orwell’s 1984, directed by Robert Lepage, arouses something akin to ambivalence in the crush bar, if not outright embarrassment. It is a matter of public record that the composer has paid the physical costs of the production out of his own pocket, a contribution tantamount to self publishing. It is also no secret that Maazel is 75 years old and has never written an opera before… (More here).
After a few performances in London and Milan, the opera fell into disuse.
Next week, we learn, it will receive a German premiere at Theater am Bismarckplatz in Regensburg, Bavaria. It’s been so long, I’m almost curious to see it again.
I watched the DVD of the Royal Opera House production and thought it very good.
We learn that August Everding of Munich originally commissioned the work for his Prinzregententheater.
We learn that Maazel was in his 50s when he started composing “1984”.
Has his time come?
We learn that Maazel’s widow currently owns the rights.
What we don’t learn is why Regensburg is dusting it off (not Munich)?
Conductors attract a lot of emotional critical comments because their art is subjective, (above a certain very high professional level) incapable of being analyzed in entirely objective parameters and because everyone subconsciously nurtures the aspiration of conducting an orchestra. LM for some reason has always attracted a significant chunk of such criticism. Perhaps because he was SO good. I will never forget his electrifying Mahler 6 at the Royal Festival hall with Pitsburgh in 1992.
You must have been furious when he cancelled a whole season of Schubert and your own symphonies with the LSO in order to complete his opera in time.
I was! I saw the opera – front row of stalls at Covent Garden. An enjoyable evening, but I would much rather have had the Schubert and Bruckner cycle.
Maazel never had any intimate connection with Mahler and was conducting his symphonies only because 1) Everyone else did from 90s 2 ) Great effect on audiences…. Don’t get me wrong, he was a good professional, an excellent technician and performer, but i rarely felt he had something to say about the works he conducted, it was more matter of pose, like with Bruckner.
Also had a production in Valencia.
The entire opera is on youtube. The sound is good, but the image a little blurry. There are also excerpts, like this love duet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CbfBZzaWlY
It leaves no doubt that Maazel, who was a prodigiously talented musician, has full command of the resources of opera. His effort is far better than most. He goes beyond the simple, quasi-sentimental themes that define most of the more successful recent opera. Still, I think the question is whether Winston Smith and Julia can effectively be made into operatic characters.
Maazel felt the message of 1984 was very important. It’s now more relevant than ever in our surveillance state where humans are not served by commerce but have literally become part of its apparatus. Everything we want to know or are curious about, every desire for a product, the metadata for all our messages, our social media history, and countless other details, are on record. Precisely detailed info of a few billion people is used for precise social engineering.
On a simpler level, we might consider countless drone assassinations by cybernetic death squads based in Nevada spying on and killing people on other continents.
Not even Orwell understood what was coming. With the right kind of staging that doesn’t fall back on outdated Orwellian clichés of drabness and shaved heads, but that instead captures the meanings of the actual surveillance state we live in, then Maazel’s work could be something to see. Problem is, Winston and Julia portray the monolithic political ideologies of the 20th century and aren’t mindless suburbanites with their hollowed-out lives buried in a cell phone that’s recording the details of their lives and using it to enthrall and control them. Perhaps the folks in Regensburg will find some staging solutions.
“Self-publishing” is held in higher regard, or at least has become so common as to be accepted rather than dismissed out of hand, than it was not so long ago. Same for so called vanity press recordings.
Charles Ives paid for the publishing and distribution of some of his works, in particular a collection of 114 songs and the “Concord Sonata.”
Marcel Proust paid to publish the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu in 1913 when no one else would.
I play the DVD every year or so…it’s shockingly dissonant, something I didn’t expect – but it is also very moving and thought provoking. Now if we could only get a recording of his Symphony that the Vienna Philharmonic premiered.
NL still is as disgruntled and bitter at the world. Glad to see somethings never change! Bravo on hearing the news that 1984 is back.
I found this clip from the new stage version: https://youtu.be/i_xGS8DyoBU