The proverbial excrement hit the fan in Hanover, Germany last week, when the Hanover Opera’s award-winning ballet director and chief choreographer, Marco Goecke, objected in a most peculiar way to bad reviews of his work.
Having withstood the test of time, this fine revival of Dialogues des Carmélites should be a lesson to the Met Opera management as it seeks a new direction.
When the Russian Ball was founded during the Cold War, many Russians in Washington who attended came from the first wave of émigrés who had fled the Revolution to become patriotic Americans fighting against the communist terror that had seized their country.
The nude form is regarded by conservatives, not as pornographic, but as a manifestation of beauty, innocence, and our divine origins. This applies to its representation in Romeo and Juliet, the story of an innocent love crushed by the wicked vanities of a corrupt society.
The score of Tristan, an opera that commands what Dudamel claims to be his obsession, radiated brilliantly with a fine Gallic touch from the Opéra’s orchestra.
It is sad that we as a culture have become so desensitized that we do not even blink an eye at the relatively ‘tame’ nudity of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.
Whiting and Hussey recently decided that their nude scenes in Romeo and Juliet—their only claim to anything approaching fame—had exploited and abused them.
An apt but uncharitable description of Medea’s incongruities might paraphrase Woody Allen’s description of a monster as a being with the body of a crab and the head of a social worker to say that Cherubini’s work sounds like a Mozart opera with a Beethoven overture.
