Opera in Performance: “Regietheater” and the Performative Turn

Extract

The opera stage must challenge spectators in such a way that they are drawn to the very edge of their seats, wide awake, and are each compelled to risk a private debate with what they see and hear, with every aria, every fugue, and movement.¹

This remark was made by opera director Hans Neuenfels to Der Spiegel in 1982 following the scandalous production of Aida in Frankfurt with which he laid the foundation for what is now referred to as “Regietheater” in opera. It is the dialogue between stage and audience invoked in this remark that interests me: the active relationship between performers and spectators/listeners, and what plays out between the participants in a performance. And by participants, I mean the musicians and singers as well as the listeners and spectators. In what follows, I would like to present a few fundamental considerations from my research on “opera in performance,” which has attempted to forge an interdisciplinary approach suitable for the analysis of opera stagings from the last fifteen to twenty years.² This approach draws to a large extent upon theater studies—and, more specifically, upon performance theory—but is also complemented by elements borrowed from musicology.³ My reflections are concerned primarily with those opera stagings that could be described as “Regietheater,” or as what the Anglo-American press refer to with evident pleasure as “Eurotrash”; that is to say, stagings from (to give a few examples) Hans Neuenfels, Peter Konwitschny, Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito, or Calixto Bieito. These are often stagings of so-called repertory classics—works by Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, etc.—i.e., those operas that form the core of what’s performed in our opera houses and which are presented in ever-new interpretations. The question becomes: What aspect or aspects of this phenomenon can be better described and formulated by means of an analysis that focuses on the performative?