Curating Opera

Reinventing the Past Through Museums of Opera and Art

Stephen Mould

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000338607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Opernmusik

Curation as a concept and a catchword in modern parlance has, over recent decades, become deeply ingrained in modern culture. The purpose of this study is to explore the curatorial forces at work within the modern opera house and to examine the functionaries and processes that guide them. In turn, comparisons are made with the workings of the traditional art museum, where artworks are studied, preserved, restored, displayed and contextualised – processes which are also present in the opera house. Curatorial roles in each institution are identified and described, and the role of the celebrity art curator is compared with that of the modern stage director, who has acquired previously undreamt-of licence to interrogate operatic works, overlaying them with new concepts and levels of meaning in order to reinvent and redefine the operatic repertoire for contemporary needs. A point of coalescence between the opera house and the art museum is identified, with the transformation, towards the end of the nineteenth century, of the opera house into the operatic museum. Curatorial practices in the opera house are examined, and further communalities and synergies in the way that 'works' are defined in each institution are explored.

This study also considers the so-called 'birth' of opera around the start of the seventeenth century, with reference to the near-contemporary rise of the modern art museum, outlining operatic practice and performance history over the last 400 years in order to identify the curatorial practices that have historically been employed in the maintenance and development of the repertoire. This examination of the forces of curation within the modern opera house will highlight aspects of authenticity, authorial intent, preservation, restoration and historically informed performance practice.

Part I

1 ‘Curationism’

Curating the world

We live in an age of ‘curationism’: one of many offshoots of the verb ‘to curate’ that have proliferated in recent decades in response to the growing perception of the act of curation as a process that is central to the way we chart and navigate our civilised world. The word ‘curate’ continues to transform in ways that indicate a rapid shift in meaning and usage – ‘curate as a verb … the adjective curatorial and the noun curation’¹ – not to mention ‘curationism’. A recent book bearing that title claims to show ‘how curating took over the art world and everything else’.² Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, has noted that ‘the recent appearance of the verb “to curate”, where once there was just a noun, indicates the growth and vitality of the discussion … new words, after all, especially ones as grammatically bastardised as the verb “to curate” (worse still the adjective “curatorial”) emerge from a linguistic community’s persistent need to identify a point of discussion’.³

A century ago, the term ‘curator’ evoked a shadowy figure, working behind the scenes in musty, unventilated rooms, pulling invisible strings that animated the inner workings of the museum. Today, our world is widely and visibly curated, with the new wave of curators enjoying, in many cases, almost the status of pop stars. The author has, in recent memory, taken part in both a curated cheese and a curated wine tasting, as well as being invited to a curated exhibition featuring the newly released models of a luxury car manufacturer. Our world is increasingly populated by content curators, biocurators, data curators and digital curators, to name but a few of the types emerging in recent years.

Within the art world, the term ‘curator’ has substantially altered in meaning, the result of a division whereby the same word can signify quite different functionaries. Public art museums still employ curators who perform the same background roles as in the past, albeit in a slightly more visible way. In recent times museums have begun to interface more actively with their visitors, marketing the experiences that are offered, and demystifying the practices that they employ in maintaining and presenting their collections. The figure of the traditional curator has become more visible to the public as institutions seek to promote the value of the museum experience within today’s society. The new generation of modern art curators are cut of very different cloth from the traditional curator type, being typically glamorous, charismatic or quirky: figures such as Hans Ulrich Obrist, Harald Szeeman, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Rose Lee Goldberg embody the post-war phenomenon of the self-styled, celebrity curator who dominates the contemporary art world of today, being often referred to as an Ausstellungsmacher.⁴ These high-flying figures have transformed the art world, and in so doing, have redefined the relationship between the curator and the artist, with the former not infrequently emerging as the dominant force.

In light of the emergence of curation as a driving force in our culture, this book interrogates the world of opera in order to discover what curatorial forces drive and define the art form. Both the history of opera and the workings of the modern opera house are explored, revealing curatorial processes that have been gradually taking shape since opera’s rise in the early seventeenth century. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the opera house had assumed an identity as an ‘operatic museum’,⁵ and opera companies increasingly occupied buildings whose façades resembled those of the traditional art museum. As the production of new operatic works began to atrophy, a fixed repertory gradually defined itself, effectively becoming the ‘core collection’ of the operatic museum. As the creation of new operas continued to decline, works from the existing repertory began to assume canonic status, forming a collection of operatic classics, which today is curated according to established principles, ensuring the survival of a genre that is generally recognised today as being a ‘museum culture’. Who are the opera curators of today? Who makes the decisions that lead to new productions and repertoire selections? How have operatic works survived over time, and what curatorial practices have facilitated their survival? Are there synergies of approach that emerge when the processes of the opera house are compared with those of the traditional, public art museum? Does a consideration of how artworks and operatic works are curated within their respective institutions shed light upon both institutions, revealing the games that are played within modern museums to ‘dish up’ the past to audiences or visitors? Having established a division in the meaning of ‘curator’ in the art world, is a similar division discernible in the world of opera? Is operatic practice also governed by a combination of shadowy custodians and more visible personalities, the modern powerbrokers in the business of opera?

The inner workings of museums have traditionally remained closed to the general public, a circumstance that has often been perceived as a lack of transparency and has, at times, led to a crisis of faith in museum processes, causing controversies to erupt. Such cases often play out dramatically in the press, affording the public a glimpse into a hidden world that they barely grasp, and bringing the realisation that this world subtly influences their experience of the museum and its collections. Artefacts are restored and prepared for display; information relating to works is organised and disseminated in the form of catalogues, gallery labels and audio guides. The opinions, knowledge and even personal aversions or enthusiasms of curators are transmitted in their choices and decisions when planning exhibitions. In the operatic museum, the musical score is the basis of the work’s identity when creating productions. The ‘support’ of the operatic work (the libretto) is critically examined and frequently altered in a variety of ways to render it accessible and relevant to modern audiences. Both institutions make their works/collections available for public consumption, a transaction that may, or may not, include an admission fee on the part of the visitor to gain admittance. Is it possible to guarantee that curation will remain an altruistic process when the presentation of works for the public also involves attracting a paying audience to the hosting institution that may be (partly) dependent upon such takings to fund its operations? The experience of visiting an art exhibition or an operatic performance involves entering a complex environment and taking part in a ‘staged’ experience, guided, in many of its aspects, by unseen hands. The assumption is that such museums employ established methodologies and underlying philosophies when engaging with works and preparing them for performance/exhibition. At the heart of these processes lies the guiding principle of authenticity (Werktreue), which involves consideration of the circumstances under which the work was created, the period in history from which it originates and at what point the work may have been considered by its creator to be complete – raising complex questions of authorial intent which, in turn, begs the question of the exact identity of a ‘work’, posing potential dilemmas for its preservation or restoration.

A seventeenth-century painting created for a predetermined position in a sombre, dimly lit church will acquire a different aura when hung in a brightly lit, modern gallery. Objectively speaking, the painting remains the same, but the context of its surroundings redefines the viewer’s perceptions. How does the viewer begin to contextualise this experience? What kind of ‘authenticity’ is being offered by the curatorial team? While defining ‘authenticity’ is already a complex matter in the context of the art museum, the complexities multiply exponentially when considering works as multi-faceted as operas.

How is it possible to convince an opera goer that they are attending a performance of, for example, Mozart’s Così fan tutte when, as the curtain rises, instead of a café in eighteenth-century Naples (as specified by the librettist), they are confronted with a contemporary diner in a north-eastern beach town in America? Does the familiar sound of the music override visual perceptions, providing audiences with the reassurance that this is Mozart’s music, so it must be Così? What is the essence of the opera Così fan tutte? Does it reside equally in the music of Mozart and the text of Lorenzo Da Ponte, or has the balance shifted today? Why is the music generally performed according to prevailing notions of ‘authenticity’, whereas the plot and the text have become negotiable fields? These are complex questions to ponder, and although the posturing of radical stage directors has weathered its fair share of criticism over the years, transpositions of place and time in operatic plots have become almost de rigueur today. A visitor to a modern opera house will probably find that the staging of most productions bears little resemblance to the instructions contained in the libretto. The musical elements of the production will most likely have been prepared with some reference to ‘authenticity’, for example working with a scholarly critical edition of the score, giving due consideration to stylistic matters, and undertaking preparation according to current understandings of historically informed performance practice (HIP). In spite of these efforts to engage with notions of musical authenticity, it can be safely assumed that what is heard in such a performance does not resemble that which was heard at the work’s première in 1790. The search for authenticity that pervades so many aspects of contemporary life and culture remains disturbingly elusive, and we discover that ‘the past is a foreign country’.⁶ Foreign it may be, but our culture inclines heavily towards it, longingly. Our next task is to enter this foreign realm, the past as presented in a modern museum. When a visitor enters a museum to engage with works and objects, how exactly does their experience unfold?

Visiting the art museum

On approaching an art museum, the visitor may well pass beneath a classically referenced façade through which they enter an outer foyer that, by its design, suggests a hallowed Temple of Art. What is the intention of the visitor? Perhaps to view works by a favourite artist, or from a particular period, or school of painting? To wander randomly, flaneur-like, drawn to works that catch...