CONTEMPORARY ASPECTS OF OPERA STAGING AND THE RISE OF OPERA DIRECTOR

Text topic: Cultures of Rhythms and Spectacle

Text author: Александра Ђуричић

With the emergence of the first operas more than four hundred years ago, and their first stagings, has emerged the problem of finding the most adequate staging solutions deriving both from the opera works themselves, and from the style and taste of the epoch, ever since the baroque largely influenced by the audience too. The 20th century introduced significant, even revolutionary changes into opera staging: the interventions of directors ranged from cutting, adaptation, time transposition, to social actualization and innovative visual dimension of opera performances. So, the improvement of opera direction has, on the one hand, instigated the rise of opera stars and performances appealing to the audience, while on the other has been a search for a new, more modern expression, sometimes getting close to the theatre of absurd, static performances or even opera without libretto. More than ever the 20th century opera became accessible to everybody everywhere in the form of live performance as well as a live broadcast of opera spectacles or their filming, that significantly enlarged the number of opera admirers around the world. Two basic claims follow from the mentioned:

a) That since a certain exhaustion, evident since 1960s, overwhelms opera authors, opera classics have been adapted to the new audiences;

b) That the opera directors have been more and more inclined to a syncretic expression using all available means on the stage (among others: film, video, PC) thus becoming complete authors of a musical-stage spectacle far away from classic opera expression.