Question: When is a
forest not a forest? Answer: When in a modern stage
production the text specifically calls for one.
Director’s theater—which I define as the
artistically impotent becoming managerially
omnipotent—has been bad enough in the theater; in
opera, nowadays, it is lethal. If the action is laid in a
pleasure garden, expect an abattoir; if in a village square,
expect a spaceship. Until fairly recently, the idea was to
make an improbable setting still vaguely believable; now it
is to make it totally preposterous and thus exquisitely
titillating.

My concern here is with two mountings of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande,
one at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, staged by Peter Sellars,
the other at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, directed by Jonathan
Miller. I have given more than passing thought to which was the
greater abomination, but I still can’t decide. Confronted with
bottomless idiocy, all yardsticks fall short. Though there was quite
a bit of booing at the Los Angeles première, there was none at the
Met, perhaps because it marked Frederica von Stade’s silver jubilee.
But more likely because audiences have become so brainwashed—or have
so little taste, intelligence, and knowledge of opera—that they lap
up whatever offal is shoveled at them.

First, let me refresh your memory about Debussy’s only completed
opera, one of the flawless diamonds of the repertory, and certainly
one of the most beautiful and influential modern operas, arguably the
most beautiful and influential. Debussy