Sofia Coppola’s La Traviata was slated on its Rome premiere. But will a cinema audience have an entirely different perspective? Stuart Jeffries wonders whether an outsider’s eye is an advantage for an art form increasingly consumed outside the opera house.
At the end of Robert Lepage’s 2012 production of Götterdämmerung for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Brünnhilde called for her horse Grane. A puppet animal with a bouncing head was brought on stage. It looked, as one critic put it, like “nothing so much as a mechanical bull in a country-western bar”. Undaunted, our heroine rode it into Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Moments later, the heads of statues representing the gods exploded as Valhalla burned.
This was all too much for New Yorker critic Alex Ross. Yes, he’d set aside his doubts about Lepage and hoped for “some high-tech razzle-dazzle, along the lines of his work with Ex Machina and Cirque du Soleil”. But Ross was ultimately defeated by what he felt was the Canadian theatre director’s “clumsy, comic-book approach”. He switched from sorrow to anger. “It’s an embarrassment that this catastrophically vapid spectacle is what New York will be offering to the world when the Wagner bicentennial arrives next year,” he wrote.