Word: operas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When David Henry Hwang was a student at Stanford University, he and fellow residents of the "Asian-American theme dorm" used to refer derisively to any female peer who seemed overly deferential, too traditionally feminine, as "doing a Butterfly." Hwang, for one, had no actual complaint against Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. In fact, he had never seen or even heard it. But what he had gleaned of the plot -- about a Japanese girl who kills herself for love of a faithless American sailor -- summed up for him many of the stereotypes Westerners imposed on Orientals...
...theory, nobody should object to any adventurous director's attempting to modernize the tradition-encrusted masterpieces of opera. At best such attempts can bring new vitality to works that have become numbingly familiar; they can enable us not only to see an opera in new ways but to see ourselves in new ways as well. And at the very least they create talk and controversy. In the case of Sellars' Mozart, unfortunately, that is about all they create...
...These operas do not require powdered wigs and candelabra to make their political points," says Sellars. True enough, but if Sellars had really wanted to modernize Mozart's opera, his hero should have been a Wall Street arbitrager, or perhaps a rock star. For that matter, he should sing in English, but Sellars characteristically prefers that Da Ponte's witty text remain obscure, that "the audience ((be)) forced to take in information through other pores...
...agree to adopt disguises and try to seduce each other's fiancees. Alas, it proves all too easy, but after a reasonable amount of tears and outcries, everyone is reconciled at the end. Not in Sellars' version. Here they finish in an angry brawl, and according to Sellars, "the opera ends as they scream the words 'beautiful calm' against gale-force turbulence in the orchestra...
...festivities began with a tribute to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, attended by President George Bush and 33 other world leaders. Then Mitterrand inaugurated the glittering new $400 million steel-and-marble opera house overlooking the Place de la Bastille. The celebration culminated two days later on July 14, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, as fireworks exploded over the Place de la Concorde, once the site of the dreaded guillotine. Attended by a crowd of 500,000 and beamed to a worldwide TV audience of 700 million, the $15 million "opera-ballet" by French advertising...