Word: librettos
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...story, but Ponnelle has turned it all into the lurid dream of a young steersman. This allows him to dress Senta in an elaborate richly embroidered bridal gown and to make the opera into a series of nightmares and arresting tableaux. As thoroughgoing iconoclasm requires, Ponnelle also flouts the libretto. Wagner's Senta leaps into the sea to prove her love; Ponnelle's walks rigidly up the decks io the ghostly Dutchman's cabin...
Berg's libretto, brilliantly compressed by the composer from two works by the German playwright Frank Wedekind, fared less well, and therein lay the perplexity. The production was staged by French Director Patrice Chéreau, 34, who has built a controversial career on the apparent principle that anything worth doing is worth doing outrageously. His avant-garde Ring cycle for the 1976 Bayreuth Festival drew boos and hisses as well as cheers, and is still hotly debated inter nationally by Wagnerians...
...with only a vague idea of what's happening. They can tell the giants from the dwarfs, and maybe, after a couple of operas, they begin to realize the importance of that little gold ring. But unless you're willing to put in the time to read the entire libretto--and to study the leitmotif structure Wagner used to organize his music--the most you'll get out of the operas is a few gasps at the brilliance of the musical climaxes in between a lot of boredom. The subtleties Wagner took pride in disappear...
...project this enormous is a milestone, to be sure, but it doesn't accomplish its aim; you can't understand the words without the libretto, translation or no translation. Whether it is the over-resonant, mediocre engineering of the recording, the imperfect diction of some of the singers, or simply the nature of operatic singing that is responsible, the words are three-quarters unintelligible. Porter's skillful imitation of Wagner's alliterative verse style never has a chance. The translation works best in the long narratives, during which the characters stop to repeat parts of the story in new musical...
...need for this whole recording is dubious, anyway. Translation makes good sense in the theater, where the listener has an immediate need to understand what's happening. But for home listening, it's easy enough to follow the German with the aid of a libretto. And doing so allows you to listen to singers and musicians of greater skill than the ENO group...