Preface
Members of Glyndebourne are sent in advance of each season an attractive programme containing information about the operas to be staged that summer. When I received mine, I turned to see what had been written about the forthcoming staging of Parsifal, a first for Glyndebourne. Almost immediately, I was forcibly struck by the apparent presumption of the director Jetske Mijnssen who boasted about the fact that she had decided – for no good reason that I could discern – to turn this festival play for the consecration of the stage into a domestic drama, inspired partly by Chekhov and partly by her own family history. This course was justified on the basis, she said, that it was the only way in which she could approach Parsifal.
The present essay is my reaction, and sets the case of Ms Mijnssen in a context with which British (and other) theatre- and opera-goers will be wearisomely familiar. I sent the essay to a few friends, including Iain McGilchrist, who offered to post it on his Substack. His introduction conveys with rather greater economy and moral urgency than I managed what I wanted to say.
‘It seems that the arrogance of theatre and opera directors knows no limits. It has been like this since the 1960s, but it is getting more offensive, more extreme and more absurd. The role of a critic is not to show off, but to efface himself, so that the work of art can be seen more fully and more clearly. A good critic is in this respect selfless. Theatre and opera directors should be similarly grown up. But now they seem not only to believe themselves as equal in stature to Shakespeare or Wagner, but to be superior. I have always despised the kind of director who pretends to understand the work better than its creator. More recently there is a kind of director who cuts and inserts, and mangles and distorts the text or the music to fit a personal fantasy or a fashionable dogma. This is a deception, an attempt to suppress truth; and it is to travesty great art, to rob the audience of the possibility of experiencing it or of making up their own minds. It is like setting up a trampoline in front of the stage and bouncing up and down on it, shouting ‘Me? Me? See how clever I am?’ And then expecting people to pay to sit through this exercise in childish attention-seeking.’
Other friends’ reactions suggest to me that there is a widespread feeling of deep regret at the way in which the intelligent lay public is treated by a self-perpetuating cadre of directors and arts institutions. Another online comment struck a chord: ‘The tragedy is not just bad productions, it’s the starvation of a culture that no longer believes in feeding its soul. Shakespeare’s language, Wagner’s sacramental music… these are meant to inhabit us, not the other way around. When directors invert that order, they don’t elevate the audience but rather exile them from the very thing they came to experience.’ This is well said, and in truth there are many beautiful ways of expressing the same important thought – nostalgic in the best sense, longing for the return of a remembered time when it was possible to celebrate the greatest creations in the performing arts in a spirit of collaboration between the director and the audience, both intent on unlocking the inexhaustible secrets of a profound work of art as conceived by its creator.