Pero este hombre, ¿habrá hecho una encuesta entre el público o tendrá dotes de profeta?.
En el primer caso, ¿a quién le habrá hecho esa encuesta? Entre los aficionados que yo trato, diría que en su mayoría no se quejan de "la escena de cartón", entre otras razones porque ultimamente no pueden verla, sino de la preponderancia que ciertos experimentos escénicos (perpetrados con dinero de terceros, eso sí) han adquirido en los teatros actuales y que nos quieren vender como la marcha inexorable de los tiempos

, en lugar de una opción que ya empieza a estar apolillada.
En lugar de ese discurso trillado, falto de imaginación y anclado en propuestas que pretenden ser transgresoras pero son simplemente irrelevantes y autoreferenciales, apostemos por cuidar la ópera, este arte maravilloso que nos ha dejado nuestro pasado, y crear nuevo arte, con composiciones del siglo XXI.
Ya he pegado en otro hilo, mucho menos seguido que éste, las opiniones al respecto de un compositor de nuestros días, un creador de nueva ópera
de verdad, el nortemericano Mark Adamo, a las que no puedo añadir ni quitar una coma:
Isn't it time, for example, to entertain the notion that the best way for opera to face today's world is not to impale Violetta Valéry with a dirty syringe and dump her on the Lower East Side or in Brixton — all while Verdi's 19th-century orchestra flails away — but to commission a new Camille from, say, Kaija Saariaho?
Commissioning that new piece then frees a director to stage La traviata as written: in the 18th century (or, arguably, in the 19th, as Verdi had planned to set it in his own time but was forbidden by censors to do so). In other words, isn't it time for artists and opera companies to intelligently distinguish between their creative and their curatorial responsibilities?
Isn't it time, as well, to challenge directors to define their art as something more than revisionist set design? Placing Don Giovanni in 1920s Newport may excite the costumer, the program annotator, and the overworked freelance writer looking for a hook on which to hang his preview piece for the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section. But dressing Leporello in Beau Brummels rather than breeches isn't the same as deeply understanding how characters are expressed in music and text, guiding a cast to realize those characters, and designing stage pictures and patterns that arise from, not merely frame, those characters' interplay. This is a more thankless job in opera than in the spoken theater, because the opera composer is really the director. He's made so many non-negotiable choices about the pacing, interpretation, and emotional temperature of any given scene that there's less room for a director to make the decisions that really color the performance of a play. This, however, is not Mozart's problem. Want more interpretive room? Direct plays: they're more flexible documents. Plan to direct opera? First admit that the score (at least from the 18th century onward) has done much of your work.