International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts
Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle
Recent Opera Events - As Lost As Ancient Opera?
Dr Thomas Siedhoff
The Theatre and Theatre Collections / Le théâtre et les collections de documents
International
Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing
Arts
16th International Congress, London, 9-13 September 1985
Proceedings of the Congress
Société Internationale
des Bibliothèques et des Musées des arts du spectacle
16ème Congres Internationale, Londres, 9-13 september
1985
Procès-Verbal
London 1986, pp. 25-28
First of all, an episode:
When, during the final editing of the first volume of the Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, we tried to get knowledge about the different versions of the finale of the opera The Smile At the Foot of the Ladder by Antonio Bibalo, we met with general helplessness even of those who should have been most familiar with the altered appearance of the work: The publishers did not know anything about different versions of this work, which didn't have its first performance beföre April, 1965 at the Hamburgische Staatsoper. Neither did the producer, Kurt Horres, have any records about the alterations made by himself later for his productions in Darmstadt and Munich with the consent of the composer. The composer did have no materials either, but informed us that he would accept either version. Only further inquiry at one of the theatres where Horres had staged the work with his alterations, after a lengthy correspondence, helped us to materials that enabled us to describe the parts differing from the printed score by means of a still faulty, internal video recording. Before we were able to work with this material, however, considerable concern of the Munich Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz about the danger of copyright misuse had to be removed through complicated guarantee declarations.
This procedure, which can be compared with any number of similar cases, makes clear that the preconditions for theatre documentation haven't changed a lot since the beginning of a specific research in theatre science despite all technical innovations: There is hardly a difference whether we want to inquire e.g. the alterations of Donizetti's opera Poliuto, which underwent several changes between 1838 and its final 1848 version, or whether we trace the reception of contemporary stage works. The episode mentioned may be a reason for some general considerations:
Artists and documentaries have little kinship of spirits; mutual attitudes range from mistrust to contempt. Theatrical practice is little convinced of the necessity of documentary activity: the most expensive and, at least in Europe, most widely spread and often excellently subventioned cultural realm of performing arts regards itself as self-sufficient. It lives for the moment rather than for the memorial of its artistic effect; the fast-moving product of theatre - the production - is not intended to be taken out again, considered and valued decades after. The opposite is true: The feeling to copy an older style or single ideas of other people even unconsciously makes the practician unwilling to look back. This may explain the fact that even today, in the age of limitless want for informations, the institution of theatre, with all its financial resources, has no need of its own for such purposes. If there was a substantial interest underlying, if it was urgently necessary to be able to resort to historical documents of one's own, as is the case with broadcasting companies, theatres would have helped themselves long ago, since but small percentages of their total budget would be sufficient to run a flourishing documentation by their own efforts. Also the theatre information system TANDEM, accepted and taken over by documentaries on all sides in the meantime, has met scepticism and rejection just from theatrical practice.
The interest in chronistic activity was, and still is, less on the side of theatres than on the side of philologists, while these do not even form an over-proportionally large share of the audience. This is also the reason for the one-sided criteria by which our work has been done so far: The interest was confined to those objects closest to a philological approach, e.g. through musical and theatre science, and which, out of this tradition, are also most easily obtainable: to the works, in fact to the scores and texts. Both are media with only restricted reference to theatrical realization. The publishers' practice of our time interferes with chronistic interest today more than then: While the huge number of libretto prints and the varying music prints up until the end of the 19th century testified the changes in reception, today there are often only more such documents - if there are any at all -, that no outsider will be allowed to buy or see. The mostly little expressive programme is the only commonly accessible memorial. Our task to preserve and convey a lively image of theatre is more difficult than ever, faced with justified and increased demands. A library with the few obtainable music prints of contemporary repertory would be a distorted image of reality with at least 100 novelties a year in international musical theatre. The more perfect the possibilities of technical reproduction of theatre events have become, the more were they protected against further circulation. Legitimate commercial interests keep urging us towards the border of steady trespasses against copyright law. Our narrow budgets do not permit us to pay off the rights of use as required in cases of video tapes, sound recordings, or photo serials. While the sole possession of such documents may still be legal, legislators, patience mostly ends when you want to convey these documents, i.e. make them accessible to the public - our audience. Schiller's realization that the posterity won't bind wreathes to an actor seems not necessarily to be regarded as a disadvantage by stage artists, unless the laurel be bound out of personal affection of the audience which remembers persons more easily than entire works of art. Several private collections eloquently testify a person-fixed, subjectively led idea of collecting. The few public museums lead a hard and widely unnoticed life both in cultural policy and in public acceptance, compared with similar preserving institutions. The city of Vienna, crazy about theatre as it is, didn't set up a one-storey museum until 1976; at the universities of Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg they are unloved children; and it seems that the birth of an independent British Theatre museum, watched by us anxiously over years, wasn't a mere trifle either. It seems as if today we still had to persuade wide circles of our justification to exist.
It will hardly lead us further to reason about our disadvantaged situation which is known to all of us and which theatre documentaries presumably all have to suffer more or less from. Facing such widely spread disinterest, it will be necessary instead to illuminate the relation of our institutions to theatrical practice and to the audience and to check our conception of ourselves.
Going back to the example mentioned in the beginning, we halt at the stations of the daily ascertainments of our editorial staff, since they have key functions for our work. The music publishing house in the sense of a stage sales department is the negotiator between authors and users (not a nice but a universal word): Until the development of complicated performing rights there was no distinction between stage publishers and publishers to the public. All publishing houses had the task to spread the works through prints, and the concern to stand up for the works of their house at theatres and impresarios. This relation has reversed: Publishing houses have degenerated to agencies that procure performances and supervise royalties. Many smaller music publishing houses have efficient book-keepings but no readers' department. Works of musical theatre are often handed down only more in the shape sometimes defaced through the bad habits of theatrical practice. The cultivation of the original was neglected: The original shape of August Dellinger's operetta Don Cesar, first performed in 1885 and still distributed by renowned Berlin theatre publishers Felix Bloch Erben, could only be reconstructed through our efforts. The culture of Spanish zarzuela, flourishing until this century, is large threatened with extinction, since neither the national theatre agency nor the national music publishers have set up a functioning archive: Of many works there are only more single numbers from the concert repertory existent today.
Today it is only after calculable profits out of multiple exploitation that require no engagement from the publishers, like TV productions or radio transmissions, that print or record release of a new stage work are made possible. Only then can the audience get to know the novelties outside the auditory. Antonio Bibalo's opera, however, will stay concealed until some theatre decides to stage it anew. It is obvious that a contemporary opera can thus hardly achieve the popularity Freischütz had after its first performance and which, today, only some worldwide musical successes like Evita and Cats are attached with.
The audience that gives popularity is, in Western Germany, mainly conceived as the group of customary theatre-goers and too tightly connected with this institution. Interested persons already do no more belong to this circle and are today only more connected with the world of theatre through TV and radio, and thus even more passively recipient. The soliciting of the occasional visitor, guarantor of a lively theatre culture, seems little developed but would be one of the tasks that might be taken over by our institutions: We have the chance to convey informations about structure and performance history of stage works, to watch and document the contemporary repertory. We have made the experience that especially those theatre publishers who cultivate the entertaining repertory, which is largely neglected scientifically anyway, rely more and more upon our cooperation and knowledge. Our institution drew advantage from this good relationship and now, after eight years, has the best library on this repertory in Germany.
Authors and composers rely on their publishers after the first performance; rarely do or did they have any talent for the catalogization or cultivation of their own works: So, e.g. Rossini's and Donizetti's close relation to the everyday needs of theatrical practice allowed no respect for the appearance of their own operas, as is proved by numerous adaptations, reshapings and self-quotations. The appearance of operettas and musical comedies still changes with nearly every new staging: a pragmatic mentality that derides the thought of so-called faithfulness to the original which people like to cultivate when fighting a production in which the emphasis is on the staging. Eight versions of the operetta Gasparone that were made alone during Millöcker's lifetime give the notion that some authors were hardly interested in the different stages of their works or how little they could - or wanted to - remember them.
Our task is the development of a complete library of historical and contemporary text prints, if possible, in cooperation with composers and authors, some of whom have meanwhile taken over the distribution of their works themselves because of distrust in the publishers.
Theatres are little interested in an after-effect of their products, sometimes they even develop considerable energies in the destroying of documents. Hurt pride of some directors has resulted in complete destruction of some, though unpretentiously led, archives, unclarity about the property of scenographic designs has precious illustrative material decaying. One of the tasks of our theatre libraries and museums might be taking over all functions of a theatre archive, as the Frankfurt City and University Library has done for the Städtische Bühnen for some years to the satisfaction of either.
The tendency among dramaturgists of our stages to accompany and complete their productions by associative material both scientifically and artistically causes new demands. Theatre practicians come to theatre documentaries with wishes that can be suitably fulfilled only by a universal library or a picture service. This diminishes our possibilities to help dramaturgists with their daily and most difficult work. Our part is then confined to collecting the results of work done without our help, which is often felt annoying.
For the documentation of ballet, we are - beside compiling a good library - completely dependent on cooperation with choreographers and dancers: Beside the small Cologne Tanzarchiv, there was no institution in Western Germany to take over the difficult task to competently document the growing and multi-faceted ballet scene about after the example of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library. The tradition of these works is left over to chance. Only gradually do also theatre publishers (not music publishers!) become aware of the experimental works of Pina Bausch, Reinhild Hoffmann and Hans Kresnik; our institutes have no access to documents of these productions, choreological records and video recordings, also for the mentioned copy-right reasons. Theatres, but theatre documentaries as well, will, in at least one generation, be helpless faced with the information demand to be expected with the part of the ballet scene becoming ever more important: For example, an inquiry to the Wuppertaler Tanztheater concerning the composers of music numbers for Pina Bausch's piece 1980, which is still part of the repertory, could not be answered, because the documents on the sources of the sound collage had been lost in the theatre.
In order to get out of the petitioner's position, it will be necessary for us to make ourselves useful and even indispensable. With the Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, which is looked after and edited by a small staff of only ten colleagues and is based on the knowledge of over 300 international contributors, we wanted to do a first step into this direction with our means. Our models were the Literaturlexikon by the editors Bompiani and Kindler and the Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo, both works that have in the meantime become essential implements to us. In our work, we were especially concerned about the demands of theatrical practice which could hardly be satisfied by any of the traditional opera, ballet, operetta, or musical comedy guides. Numerous notes on performing practice, instrumental casts, complete cast lists with voice ranges, detailed bibliographic notes to primary and secondary literature beside the description of the plot, a valuing commentary and the reception of the work give suggestions to producers of musical theatre that might also be a chance to liven up the museally rigid repertory and to enrich it with unjustifiedly forgotten works. With this project describing about 3,000 works from all fields of musical theatre, we try to build a working base for a field under-represented so far in musical and theatrical science, which is based on new research and contemporary documentation and is to excite further curiosity with both philologists and the public.
At first sight, the
image of musical theatre, especially through its ever-growing
number of reperformances of old and oldest works, appears
to be an impressive spectrum of a nearly 400 year old
history of theatre, yet at closer observation it turns
out that the contemporary musical scene is, through its
punctual and accidental, economically conditioned spread,
less and less noted and preserved. The difficulties
mentioned here must not, however, get us to putting
future generations to even greater problems than those we
have to face in rediscovering the historical repertory.
URL: http://www.theatrelibrary.org/sibmas/congresses/sibmas85/london85_02.html
Last updated: 27.11.2002
Information about this page:
Maria Teresa Iovinelli, General Secretary
Executive
Committee
Comité exécutif
Institutional Members
Membres institutionnels
Joining SIBMAS
Adhérer à la SIBMAS
International Directory
Répertoire international
National Collections
Collections nationales
Research Sites
Sites de recherche