A three-page review of the 1925 performance by W. Thus Robert Donington, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement of 7-14 October 1988.Īs a youth, Donington, though an Oxford man, presumably saw the 1925 Handel Semele produced at Cambridge by Dennis Arundell, who both directed and designed the scenery, as well as the 1931 Fairy Queen. We do not want slanted productions we want straight productions in an idiom compatible enough to give us the true flavour of the total artwork. The fatal mistake is to muddle it up with personal preoccupations or polemical insinuations or any other contaminations from the intellectual sphere, and least of all as well-meant social propaganda. You do not make up a symbol if you are perceptive enough you find it in the work itself - and stage it.

Opera is a great purveyor of symbols, both individual and archetypal. When the words and the music are in a certain congruous style, so too, within reason, must the staging be for if it is set out with the period changed and the idiom modernized and all manner of gimmicks used which are of our own age, with the laudable but misjudged intention of involving the modern audience more enticingly, then the clash of styles overpowers the totality of the whole, and the modern audience, so far from becoming more involved, is left confused by the inconsistencies and robbed of the naturalness which that totality has all along been able to establish, and no misalliance of words and music with an incongruously modern staging can ever really hope to achieve. Nevertheless, the components can only add up if they are treated as a threefold challenge that has to be taken as one.

Words and music come down to us more or less intact staging does not, since any production is ephemeral and must be recreated when the opera is to be newly staged. An opera is an artwork to which three components chiefly and jointly contribute: words, music, staging. The grievance is that opera producers today are pressing to an extreme a principle of which the motives are excellent but the effects are almost infallibly counter-productive. Sir, - May I air with you a grievance concerning opera production which I think a number of opera enthusiasts might well share?

Components of opera music