The world in a bottle and the archeology of staging: audiovisual recording as registers of opera productions

Abstract

This work focuses on the use of the audiovisual opera recording as a document to analyze contemporary stagings labeled by the German critics as director’s theater [Regietheater]. In director’s theater, Wagner’s total artwork project [Gesamtkunstwerk] achieves a turn in meaning, for the three artistic dimensions of opera – word, music and staging – become different texts. In this paper, we discuss the limitations of audiovisual recording as a register of director’s theater opera stagings, as well as filmic resources that allow for a reconstruction of the audiovisual text of such productions with solutions that are often quite distinct from those adopted on the stage. We are interested above all in problematizing the equivalence that is sometimes established between a staging and its recording – especially in the contemporary context of productions that frequently suffer considerable changes and are characterized by the unique aspect of each performance, always full of singular events and relatively autonomous regarding the general plan of the director. Thus, we will discuss problems and solutions of video direction of audiovisual recordings of stagings of the operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen [The Ring of Nibelungo], by Richard Wagner (1813-1883).