Vingt Regards:II. A New Era, Indeed

One evening, after the curtain comes down on Iphigénie, I’m backstage with Gockley and his girlfriend, Linda Kemper, a nutritionist. I say I was knocked out by the intensely grim opera, with its stark stage and ghostly dancers dressed in black.

“Between you and me, it’s hard for me to empathize with these characters,” says Gockley. “But I respect it, if I can’t love it. It’s so dark and so symbolic that I’m not getting the deep resonance of what it’s supposed to mean to me.”

—Kevin Berger, "A knight at the opera," San Francisco magazine, 9/07

Oh well, too bad Iphigénie was only the most creative and engaging production of the past couple of seasons, from my humble vantage point. At least we'll get some more Tannhäusers to amuse ourselves with.

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Vingt Regards: I. Strange Bedfellows

Comments

[brian]

So disturbing and yet so unsurprising. Apparently we now have the operatic equivalent of "truthiness". Nothing has any meaning of its own, only the sense of what it is supposed to mean.

[sfmike]

You're quoting "San Francisco" magazine profiles? Oh, puhleeze.

And for a really crappy "Tannhauser," you should have seen the production I was in from the early 1990s that Lotfi Mansouri directed with Gerard Howland designing. It was real crapola. The latest production may have been a failure in your eyes, and you're certainly not the only one who feels that way, but at least it was an attempt at working with the problematic source material in an intersting way.