by Theodore Dalrymple (October 2015)
A few nights ago I went to the opera, or rather to the local cinema in which the opera was relayed live. It was La Traviata from the English National Opera company.
For some reason, which is, perhaps, not difficult to fathom, directors of operas these days feel the need to make their mark by innovative productions, for example by setting Così fan tutte on the Moon, or The Flying Dutchman on Lake Titicaca, or The Barber of Seville in Nazi Germany. more>>>
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Thanks – now I understand why the “Alice in Wonderland” play we saw this summer in Charlottetown, PEI, was so bizarre. It had some resemblance here and there to the story, but was greatly abstracted. I’m not sure we liked that.
My daughter’s former horse trainer’s grandmother was from Florence. Her father, a shopkeeper, was acquainted with Puccini, and she remembered meeting him many years ago, in the good old days of Madama Butterfy.
Good art is timeless. Always a novel experience to a new viewer or listener, So called new or contemporary productions often miss the mark because in the hands of lesser men, different is confused with good, a little like graffiti, giving Venus a tattoo or Apollo a jock strap.