Acting and Directing in the Lyric Theater: An Annotated Checklist

Abstract

The lyric theater as we know it today emerged during the beginning of the 17th century. Monteverdi's Orfeo, a towering creation of genius, exploded on the musical world to create a new art form-the music drama. Since that moment composers, librettists, performers and production personnel have struggled with the problems and challenges of the music drama, and not incidentally they have contended with each other in an effort to influence all the various forms of the lyric theater. For more than two hundred years singers dominated this wonderful magic world. The prima donnas and the primo uomos quickly became the pivot points with all other production elements assuming a secondary role. Verdi and Wagner managed to break this stranglehold and reassert the primacy of the composer, but singers still retained monumental influence. With the advent of Gustav Mahler in Vienna this influence began to flow from singer to conductor and Toscanini continued the trend. However, the other forces were contending for the spotlight. Hans Gregor at the Komische Oper in Berlin was among the first to place great emphasis on the stage director and this initiated a drift which has gathered momentum up to the present time. In retrospect the period since World War One could be termed the era of creative staging. The importance of this emphasis can be clearly seen if we place it in the context of an observation by Thurston Dart in his wonderful little volume, The Interpretation of Music. The lyric theater is one of those arts . . which need re-creation on every occasion that they are to be experienced; thus each performance of a play or a dance or a piece of music is a unique phenomenon which may be similar to other performances of the same work but can never be said to be identical with them. The stage director is really the dominant factor in today's recreations! Unfortunately his ideas are difficult to pin down. Actual staging and production concepts are one of the neglected areas of theater research, especially lyric theater research. Several minutes in the music and theater sections of any