Acting up | 17 January 2013

There was a time when the major objection to operatic performances, by those who were wondering whether or not to give them a try, was the level of acting in them. That was in the days before ‘elitism’ and other excuses had been invented. I haven’t heard much about that lately, though of course there are complaints about specific singers and performances. But 30 to 40 years ago people who were used to going to plays would regularly contrast the level of acting in them with the alleged level in opera. So I’m led to wonder whether there’s a general feeling that things have improved. My own feeling is that they have got more complicated, with many more factors to consider.

In the first place, the once widely held view that until Callas became a major figure in the early 1950s opera singers just stood on stage and held forth is an absurd falsehood. Anyone who has watched Lotte Lehmann’s master-classes on DVD will know that, even in her mid-70s with no singing voice and no props, her impersonation of various roles was more moving than almost anyone else’s. What made Callas so extraordinary — one of the things — was that she brought the intensity and inwardness that Lehmann brought to Sieglinde to such roles as Norma and Lucia. Her acting, of which there is a miserably small amount on film, was extremely powerful but highly stylised.

What that shows is that naturalistic acting, of the kind one can see in a contemporary play, or more powerfully in the highest-quality TV, in such series as Mad Men or The Wire, is something completely different from what one would want in all but a small number of operas.