When problems arise for an institution like an opera company, history will always throw light on the matter. There's nothing new, for example, in the current controversy surrounding the San Francisco Opera and this season's concept productions. What is different is the public's uncertainty about the policies and intentions of the new general director. "Adventurous" or "innovative" settings of repertory works are not strangers on this stage. They've been present almost every season since about 1969, beginning with the productions of the late Jean Pierre Ponnelle, the major contributor to the company's "concept" opera experience.

The issue involving production (design and staging) seems to come down to two questions. The fundamental one involves the now decade-old trend of the visual dominating the musical, the producer becoming king. A company where the Regie (production) is consistently dominant is dubbed Regieoper. With United States opera companies, given their history, the operation of the market place, the box office and other realities, it does not come to that. Even with those productions on major opera stages that are adventurous, the visual concept of design and staging does not normally take over and rule. In America, the issue is one of artistry vis à vis concept. Specifically there is a striving to find balance in the creative effort. Put it another way, it's a matter of the degree to which the execution of the concept is felt to be sympathetic to and furthers the intentions of the work. Innovation and shock for their own sakes, just do not work. After the initial surprise, the dramatic effect is spent. To regard as modern, new, or innovative simply that which arbitrarily contradicts and denies the stuff of the work itself, is not an artistic impulse at all.

The two works the late Pier Luigi Pizzi designed and produced for the San Francisco Opera illustrate both ends of this. A designer with an architectural bent who took on directing, Pizzi produced in 1981 Rossini's Semiramide in a stark white setting, the characters costumed like three-dimensional white playing cards, little architectures. (The late Terence McEwen scathingly described the characters as wearing white plaster mantel pieces.) Not even Monteserrat Caballé and Marilyn Horne could make this succeed. It was a bare-faced design conceit unrelated to the opera in style or idea. In 1986, Pizzi came back with a brilliant Macbeth in a design concept and staging that looked deep inside Verdi's opera. He executed the concept and realized the opera artistically. It featured sliding partial walls, sharply focused dramatic light, and very few other elements, a throne chair, banquet table and some props. The costumes, even the military dress, were not specific to a period. It was brilliant because the artistry was true; hard to imagine why it hasn't been revived.

Ponnelle's 17 productions here (14 that he both designed and staged, three that he designed) were striking as a body of work, and individually, particularly because of the play between the man's original and provocative vision and his artistry. He was a trained and highly skilled painter, also a musician with a keen ear for nuance, phrase, and rhythm. (The choreography in his famous La Cenerentola designed as a highly detailed cartoon was choice, and movement in his other stagings were exquisitely well timed.)

A master but not the father of the conceptual production approach, Ponnelle did not go to the extremes of later practitioners. La Cenerentola (1969), since played all over the world and to be revived here in June, was designed in highly detailed black and white line drawings. His ultra-rococo cartoons strengthened the caricatures that were Rossini's to begin with. Ponnelle's Otello (1970) was hyper-realistic, capturing the "war-zone" intensity of the Cypriot castle. His "switchblade diptych," Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, set in the same town, were ultra-verismo. Cavalleria, focusing vividly on the taboos of the Catholic church, the naive, barbaric religious feelings, and the vendetta system, suffered from Ponnelle's own life-long anti-clerical vendetta that led him to drag in a religious procession or symbol not called for in the libretto, whenever possible, even in his Carmen.

One problem with the "surprise" element in the design and staging elements of Ponnelle's works and in all concept operas, is that it's a one-shot deal, and considering that, expensive, a throwaway. The initially striking sets of his Tosca, with the views from the rear (of the altar and the enormous avenging angel, by the fourth revival, had become almost tiresome. The revivals of Ponnelle's productions, mounted by his associates Vera Calabria and Grischa Asagaroff, as specified in his contracts, with slavish devotion to the original production books, never had the modifications that might have improved things nor the adjustments that would have been appropriate for the individualities of the different casts. Featuring the famous "Cab-Pav" casting of Caballé/Pavarotti, Ponnelle's spectacular Turandot (1977) with a wall-to-wall, mechanically operated Buddha, had brilliant strokes of staging but was never revived.

Evoking the sharpest critical response, the Ponnelle Rigoletto (1973, revived in 1981 and 1984) was an almost surreal socio-historical caricature. He created the production as a Renaissance painting brought to life with a gold molding enclosing the stage as a box frame, walls and ceilings covered with mural paintings of orgy scenes, 17th century mannerist style. The staging and treatment dehumanized the characters. Most controversial was his The Flying Dutchman (1975, and revived at least twice). It was conceived as the dream of the Steersman in which he becomes Senta's suitor, Erik. The Steersman/Erik is variously seen and not seen by the other characters during the opera, and is more central than the Dutchman. Ponnnelle's doing it the work in one act — clearly Wagner wrote it as an unbroken musical continuity — gave the work great propulsion.

The Ponnelle works that will last the longest were the least innovative, works in which he focused on the interior qualities and beauties: Cosi fan tutte (1970 and revived four times), Gianni Schicchi (1975), a striking set framed in a relief painting of old Florence, 13th century style, with quick, cunning staging, and Falstaff (1985).

A better term than concept production would be "point of view" or viewpoint production, especially when, as in the Ponnelle and other of the successful examples, the point of view is artistically informed and not just an arbitrary conceit, such as the relocation of the opera in time and space. Such viewpoint productions were the Spring Opera's 1971 season's Don Pasquale by Richard Pearlman, set in 1909 San Francisco, and Titus (La Clemenza di Tito) with a deliberate mixing of eras, and the Wieland Wagner Salome, Nikolaus Lehnhoff directing (1974). The most ambitious was Wagner's Ring (complete in 1985, revived, 1990), Lehnhoff directing. John Conklyn's designs evoked the 19th century styles of painter Caspar David Friedrich and set designer Karl Friedrich Schinckel, in an attempt to create a "dream picture" and consider the "relationships between humankind and nature" as a central idea of the Ring.

Other artistically informed "viewpoint" productions here were the 1981 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (revived in 1988), the 1981 (summer) Handel Julius Caesar in Egypt, an English National 0pera production in an excellent English translation, John Papscoe's sets with striking pieces and the scenes moving with the music, The Rake's Progress by David Hockney (summer 1982, revived in 1988) and Boito's Mefistofele in Michael Levine's designs, directed fancifully by Robert Carsen (1989, revived in 1994).

Then there were productions entirely dominated by the visual idea and their producers' insistent and uninformed "originality," unrelated to the music and spirit of the composers' works. These were "concept" opera as I take the term to mean. There was the "Zen" Parsifal of 1988, designed by Pet Halmen with illuminated figures of the Buddha, Christ and the Holy Spirit Dove, Nicolas Joel producing. Handel took it on the chin in 1989, with the Orlando designed by John Pascoe, John Copley producing, Baroque-styled but with modern notions that went awry. In 1991, an unfortunate Elektra by Andrei Serban featured corpses of bulls and naked women, and there was a forgettable Der Fliegende Holländer (1997, from Geneva, Pier Strosser designer) with a lot of stainless steel. In 1999, a very striking Parsifal — Raimund Bauer, designer — was admired by many, yet controversial in design, especially its final act. Possibly that Parsifal qualifies as an artistically informed "viewpoint" production, barely over the line in my view.

All the preceding examples from the San Francisco Opera's past 30 years were productions of repertory works. Not directly relevant to the "concept" opera discussion are the new or relatively new operas that arrived in the productions with which they had originated, or close to it, such works as the dramatically stunning Lear (1981, revived 1985) of Aribert Reimann (Ponnelle's production), several splendid 20th century works presented in Spring Opera in the 1980s, Gunther Schuller's The Visitation (1967), Andrew Imbrie's Angle of Repose (1976), Michael Tippett's A Midsummer Marriage (1983), Henze's Das Verratene Meer (1991), John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer (1992), Stewart Wallace's Harvey Milk (1996), Andre Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire (1998), Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking (2000), as well as works by Britten, Von Einem, three by Janacek, Ravel, Poulenc, Walton, Weill, among others.

Add to that such adventures as the operas imported from the Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg, War and Peace, Fiery Angel (1994), Ruslan and Ludmila (1995, a production originally staged there by San Francisco's Lotfi Mansouri), and The Tsar's Bride (2000), and Prince Igor (1996) as well as the Carmen and Tales of Hofmann imaginatively produced in the Civic Auditorium, and the picture is one of a rich San Francisco Opera experience.

This history makes the remarks in an article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times by its music critic seem very strange, as he greeted the current season of Pamela Rosenberg's with "It feels as if this 89-year-old company has been startled awake from a decades-long slumber." Say what? "And much to Rosenberg's surprise, even conspicuously conservative audiences, like the Tuesday night gown-and-tux crew, have gotten with the program." 'I expected that it would take three or four years to gain the audience's trust,' she admits. 'But it's as if they were waiting for this all along.'" Uh-huh. And on his own, the Times writer continued, "Under its previous general director, the attention-loving and often frivolous stage director Lotfi Mansouri, the company showed little imagination and occasionally distressing vulgarity." A lot could have been improved, indeed, but that's still pretty funny.

The "concept" folk are like marketers, looking for a gimmick. Mostly there's no creative thought there, certainly no understanding of the music, nor commitment to it and to the primacy of singing. The history shows that directors and designers of skill and imagination can bring fresh viewpoints to repertory works while respecting the style and spirit, the integrity of the originals. Between artistry and concept, artistry wins every time, and always will.

©2002 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved

(From September 1, 1998 to October 15, 2002, we have published, in addition to the Music News, feature pieces and weekly editorials, 1275 reviews of Bay Area performances by: 43 symphony orchestras (272 reviews), 64 chamber groups (140), 32 new music ensembles and programs (152), 32 opera companies (181), 23 choral groups (84), 13 music festivals (57), 27 early music ensembles (76), 18 chamber orchestras (55), 5 musical theater groups (13), world music (11) and recitals (227), youth music (7).)