More Meyerbeer ruined?

[Alan Howe]

MDT are advertising a new DVD of Les Huguenots, albeit presumably sung in German and with a pretentious-looking staging:
http://www.mdt.co.uk/meyerbeer-die-hugenotten-angela-denning-stefan-soltesz-arthaus-musik-dvd.html
Thoughts, anyone?

[Mark Thomas]

It's sung in German and its staging "caused somewhat of a sensation when it was first performed .... Giving the period and content of the work new reference points, [the] staging becomes almost oppressively contemporary: he sets the opera in divided Berlin".

No matter how well performed, I would avoid it like the plague!

[Gareth Vaughan]

he sets the opera in divided Berlin".

Oh dear! WHY? one wonders, despairingly.

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Hang on, all you who condemn! I do agree that if it is sung in German then that rather disqualifies it as a 'library version'. But, apart from that (admittedly rather crucial) issue, has anyone actually seen it?

I have attended many an opera production where I had to fight to overcome my strong inclination not to attend on the grounds that the production seemed downright silly, if not crazily perverse. But in some cases (I admit, not too many) the production turned out to be a veritable marvel and I was so glad to have seen it.

Moral: to condemn (or praise) without actual evidence runs the risk of indulging in sheer prejudice....and, oooh, you wouldn't want to be charged with that, would you? (And yes, I know I'm not going to convince anyone, so don't throw back brickbats!)

[Alan Howe]

Well, one has to come to some sort of (pre)judgment in order to decide whether to buy it, or not. Otherwise one just buys everything willy-nilly...

[eschiss1]

... do they hide out in sheltered bomb Sellars, is what I want to know... (erm... or not.)

[Derek Hughes]

'It enrages a good Protestant to hear his most cherished hymn shouted upon the boards, it enrages him to see the bloodiest drama in the whole history of his religion degraded to the level of a farce at a fair'. Schumann, of course, on Les Huguenots. Now we are enraged by the degrading of the degrader.

As I pointed out in another Meyerbeer thread, Les Huguenots was plentifully rejigged in Meyerbeer's own lifetime, as I Ghibellini, Gli Anglicani, and Die Anglikaner und die Puritaner (the last conducted by Lachner). Despite all this, and despite the fact that one shouldn't condemn productions without seeing them, I am depressed by the idea of this version. The relocation is at once obvious and unilluminating. With complex and coherent works, such as Wagner's, Regietheater almost inevitably overlays complex originality with something simpler, cruder, and more predictable. With weak libretti, it simply makes the weakness worse: simpler, cruder, and more predictable. The destruction of the original context destroys such consistency as the original text possesses. One needs a fictitious Renaissance court to make sense of the Chenonceaux act, for example.

I gather that the production dates from 1987, while the wall still stood. According to one account, 'the wall symbolizes the division of the two German states' ('die Mauer symbolisiert die Trennung der beiden deutschen Staaten'). Wow. It took a mighty intellect to work that one out.

I wonder which side are the baddies? Does Honecker command the death of his daughter? Or is it Helmut Kohl?