The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 114

A10 Op BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE tfWSfcrt 197, WW5" era director Walter Felsenstein: The legend was also a realitv The death of Walter Felsensteiri is a great tragedy for his family, his friends, and the world musical community. His vision of music theater and his brilliant productions set unique standards of artistic excellence. Felsenstein achieved results with his company few others dared even imagine possible, and, having achieved, his own remarkable vision of what might be became clears' er and drove him even harder. He had infinite patience and grand impatience. He Was a great man, a great director.

He was my friend, will miss him sorely. Sarah Caldwell Last week, in an East Berlin hospital, Walter Felsenstein died of cancer at the age of 74." Inevitably his work died with him, for the art of the stage director is one that vanishes with the fall of the curtain: now what he did belongs to legend. But for that matter, Fel-senstein's work, for Americans, has always belonged to legend in the most basic sense: since he never worked here, few Americans ever actually saw any of his- productions. And when they did, there was the additive, glamorizing trench-coat excitement of the necessary trip into East Berlin. tremely small role would throw the entire production askew.

Or there is the distorting-mirror of Sarah Caldwell's work. Ms. Caldwell is Fel-senstein's best-known American disciple, and she has written a very touching statement about his life and death. Some of the Felsenstein singers have appeared with her company here, and traces of Felsenstein's influence are there to notice in several Caldwell productions, generally the least convincing ones, like the "Bartered Bride" of a couple of years ago. Back in 1965 Ms.

Caldwell advertised her production of Offenbach's "The Tales of RICHARD DYER For one who never went there, few means of fixing and measuring Felsen-stein's achievement offer themselves. One doesn't want to linger over all the press-copy stories, how the choristers in "Otello" (he always called them the "soloists of the knew exactly the knottage of the gale that was blowing them about and at just what angle to tilt, how Felsenstein would cancel a performance of "La Traviata" because the Annina he had rehearsed had fallen ill and he felt that the substitution of another artist in that ex Hoffman" as the "Felsenstein version" though it featured a tenor brought in only a few days before the performance. While the German and the American director are alike in their singleminded devotion to opera, and in their fervent belief that it is still an art to take seriously, it is difficult to think of two theatrical temperaments more drastically different the meticulous Felsenstein, the slap-dash razzle-dazzle Caldwell, making the most of little. There survive some horrid, dark kinescopes of some of Felsenstein's tv work, and there was a the- atrical film he made of Beethoven's "Fidelio" but that was not really based on a stage production. The film had an engagement at the Harvard Square Theater a dozen years ago, and some Images in it remain vivid in the minds of those who saw it the unleashing of the destructive forces of nature, the howling winds and the toppling trees and flooding waters during Pizzaro's aria, as well, alas, as the garlands of flowers that floated across Florestan as he sang of springtime in his aria.

Felsenstein himself visited America three times, most recently in 1971 when he led a series of seminars at Boston University under the sponsorship of Sarah Caldwell's opera consortium. Finally, this week 'sees the publication of what prove Felsenstein's American memorial, a book of his collected writings, translated and edited by the conductor Peter Paul Fuchs (W. W. Norton, Unfortunately Norton has got out the book quite shoddily there is not even something so basic as a list of Felsenstein's productions (and his repertory was amazingly diverse, running from the "Figaro," "Don Giovanni" and "Magic Flute" of Mozart, through "Rigoletto," "Traviata," and "Otello" of Verdi, Offenbach's "Bluebeard" and "Hoffmann," even "Fiddler on the or the necessary index. the composer ami author" followed by unexplained statements that one can be faithful while imposing cuts and ignoring the source-materials the composer and author worked with.

Interviewers kept asking Felsenstein the same questions, and, for answer, he would quote himself. The essays, mostly written for the program-books of premieres, show Felsenstein as not much of a writer: the most thorough exposition of his ideas here actually comes in an essay by Joachim Herz, a Felsenstein disciple who is general manager of the Leipzig Opera. All this said, the dominant ideas here are crucial ones, though as Felsenstein himself argues, they are not new these are the ideas that created a central tradition of opera, and that simply dismiss the kind of person whose notion of talking about opera is to tell you all about Beverly Sills' Aida in Newark 20 years ago, or about what Luciano or Joan or Jackie will be up to next. "The heart of music theater," Felsenstein writes, "is to turn music-making and singing on the stage into communication that is convincing, truthful, and utterly essential. All problems of "'9 LJazz And what is in the book is then, repetitive, self-contradictory, unhelpful about just the things we want most to know about.

Here are the statements about "fulfilling the intentions of the drama and of staging are secondary to this. Music theater exists when a musical action with singing human beings becomes a theatrical reality that is unreservedly believable'. The dramatic happening must take place on a level where music is the only means of expression. The performer must not give the effect of being an instrument or a component part of music that already exists, or of a marionette being manipulated by the music, but that of being its creative fashioner." The key element in Felsenstein's technique for enacting these noble beliefs is the notion of "Vorges-chichte," of "preliminary the bulk of the book is taken up with its exposition. The technique involves the full explanation of offstage events about which the composer and the librettist remain silent but which, for Felsenstein, generate the meaning of what we see.

"I know the characters. I know what they do and how they behave when they are not on stage, in scenes that have not been written; I have investigated their earlier livers, their private lives. That information must be imparted to the singers and to my collaborators." Somehow for Felsenstein's highly-trained corps of singers, these stories on the face of it no different from those volumes about the childhood of Shakespearean heroines that good Victorian ladies turned out triggered per- Tonight TEDDY WILSON with ALAN DAWSON A MARY KARLE sonal emotions and experiences that in turn found expression in the portrayal of Carmen or Violetta pj the Queen of the Night onstage. The suggestion 6'f off-stage life is exactly what John Moulson, a Felsenstein singer, so disturbingly did in the role Pierre in Sarah Caldwell's production of Prokofiev "War and Peace" hfe made a character much fuller than anything Prokofiev and his librettis had left, and one that seemed odd moving among the Tolstoy cartoons that peopled the stage. About just how this triggering works Felsenstein's book is completely silent.

It can't be said that Felsenstein's career was a greatly influential one, though the obituary in the New York Times claimed that for him. While Felsenstein had disciples, the rehearsal conditions which his methods required are simply not to be found outside his own theater, trje Komische Gper in East Berlin (perhaps they exist at Moscow's Bolshoi as welJ); the productions he did in other houses, for La ScaTa. Vienna, and several German companies quickly fell into wreckage because Felsenstein himself could ntt be there to supervise 4- The reports of those who saw his work remain as proof that the legend was also reality. Now the charge of that most unreliable of guardians, memory, the fact of his work, the truth that it once existed, joins the statements of the composers he so devotedly served, a rebuke to much of what we so carelessly praise, i I III EXPERIENCE THEIR NEW 1975-76 MUSICAL SHOW 150 INTERNATIONAL PERFORMERS 1 111 Mon. to Oct.

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