A New Beginning

For thirty-one years I have treasured my position as General Director of Seattle Opera. Today my successor, Aidan Lang, has assumed the position of General Director Designate. He is an excellent man, and I’m sure will excel at the position, presenting operas at the level to which our audience has become accustomed or to new, higher levels. Because of the dramatic change of my status, I am beginning a Blog, which shall continue after my retirement. I have been encouraged to do so, and in this way anyone interested can keep up with what I am doing.

I was sorry to close The Consul. In my years as General Director, I have also tried–and certainly the whole staff has as well–to make every opera a great experience and one of which we could be proud. Inevitably some stand out. I was asked the other day to pick the twenty-five or so productions that have most nearly fulfilled my expectations. I did so, and The Consul was one of them. In it we had the chance to present an important American opera that details a problem as real in 2014 as it was in 1950 when it was composed, a great score, and a great cast and conductor. Peter Kazaras, I think, did his best work for Seattle Opera as director, making the opera as real and forceful as it can be, and Carlo Montanaro conducted the work as a first-class post-verismo opera, not a Broadway drama.

Of course for many reasons some audience members didn’t like it, and the sales were those of most post-Puccini works. Those who didn’t take to it gave lots of reasons, such as an absence of tunes when the opera is filled with hummable, memorable melodies or as too sad when the most popular operas such as Madama Butterfly or Rigoletto are certainly dark. I think the real reason, which actually my question-and-answer audience after the performances gave me when I asked them was that the piece was too real, too intense for some. I’m sorry for those who didn’t like it, but it certainly delighted me.

On Sunday I spoke at the Mercer Island Jewish Center after a showing of Wagner’s Jews, a film of about thirty minutes in length that details Wagner’s own involvement with many extraordinarily talented Jewish artists who worshiped him as well as many of Wagner’s own anti-Semitic statements. The film is built around Asher Fisch’s aborted attempt in the summer of 2013 to bring a Wagner concert finally to Israel. The film is excellent, sad to this Wagnerian, but all too true.

I was asked to speak afterwards and answer questions. Many who were there were Seattle Opera subscribers and were trying to deal with the complexity of the question: is Wagner’s music properly forbidden in Israel because Hitler loved it and used it for his own purposes? Also does Wagner’s anti-Semitism justify keeping Israelis from hearing his music? The questions were interesting and the whole session a stimulating one. My own point of view is that although Wagner put more of himself into his music–and every one of his characters–than most composers, he still never in his faithfully recording conversations with his wife identified any character in his operas as a Jewish caricature. I think Asher is right in the film when he says that to deny an audience or players the right to hear or play Wagner is to deprive them of a vital part of world music. The audience, I must say, was warm and enthusiastic.