The lacquer of virtue

To state the case bluntly, is there in fact any place for opera in the twenty-first century? What is the use of opera? Many would say that it is a moribund art form, traditional and arthritic, class-ridden, a minority and élitist pursuit of an arcane society harbouring secret rituals in the mode of cabbalists with their adherence to vision and the genealogy of seers. My questions suggest some kind of crisis. Yet they are unanswerable because, like all art at a profound level, opera is useless. Opera began as a recreation of classic Greek tragedy. It depicts both dramatically and vocally the hegemonic style of an era and, quintessentially, is an attempt to place the human voice at the centre of lived experience at its most intense. It presents an allegory of the emotions at that invisible margin where the ineffable is evoked as a response to ontological questions about human existence. From this perspective, opera appears like a lost dream of expressive cohesion. Yet the peculiar thing is that, as the support for European classical music sadly declines, the passion for opera among its enthusiasts appears to remain steady. Each state, with the exception of Tasmania, has its own company. The hiatus caused by the merger, in 1996, of the Victoria State Opera with Australian Opera has recently been rectified with the emergence of the Victorian Opera, while the awesome power of Australia’s first locally produced Ring Cycle by the State Opera of South Australia in 2004 still sounds in the memory of those who experienced it. Surely opera in Australia is in a healthy condition? My immediate response to such optimism is that, while the art form thrives, its institutional resources struggle. At the centre of that battle for survival sits the national flagship, Opera Australia – part cultural icon, part tourist attraction, part game park for the savage, the feral and the talented. It is this conundrum that its recently retired artistic director Moffatt Oxenbould records in his memoir of life ‘backstage at the opera’. Oxenbould’s career almost exactly coincides with the establishment and maturation of a national company. He was born in 1943 and began a lifelong involvement in opera at precisely that moment when a local company was formed to cater for that interest. The Elizabethan Trust Opera Company (ETOC) was established in 1956 to provide a cultural focus for music during the Melbourne Olympic Games year, and not, as Oxenbould asserts, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s birth – the blurring of Melbourne’s participation in cultural activity is typical of the author’s modus operandi. In 1961–62, Oxenbould attended the producer’s course at NIDA under the direction of Robert Quentin. Always the master of the charmed life, he went straight from graduation, after a brief attempt on the English opera scene, to a job as an assistant stage manager at the ETOC, under the direction of Stefan Haag. Over the second half of the century, his career led him through the administrative structure of the ETOC, which became the Australian Opera in 1972. Principal arts administrator under John Winther, Peter Hemmings, Peter Veitch and Donald McDonald, he was appointed artistic director of the restructured company (now Opera Australia) under McDonald’s general managership, and then retired from the position in 1999. That curriculum vitae encompasses the major events of the Sydney opera world. Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti toured Australia triumphantly in 1965, stars of the Sutherland–Williamson International Grand Opera Company. The Sydney Opera House was controversially redesigned and opened in 1973. The near-bankrupt VSO merged with the Australian Opera to form Opera Australia; and, at the end of this overlong memoir, the author marks the appointment and speedy demise of his successor, Simone Young. In meticulously recording every detail of every production undertaken by the Sydney company, Oxenbould has given his readers a chronology of singers and productions, and insights into how the company pursued, and failed to attain, that elusive element: an operatic house style. He has also opened a Pandora’s Box within which we may glimpse a lethal mix of star egos, transitory allegiances, managerial backstabbing and ambition, and that curious synthesis of innocence and experience, artistic risk-taking and mean-spirited power-broking that is the inevitable character of every large theatrical company. Reading this memoir against the grain of its surface gloss demonstrates that the avowed perspective of the author has the sticky consistency of a nougat bar: smooth chocolate on the outside and teeth-breaking resilience within. The prevailing style cloys with oversweet naïveté, an unconvincing embrace of the status quo of production and administration, no matter what or where, and an enthusiasm that irons out all critical, or indeed personalised, response. His first sight of the Acropolis suggests the paradigm: ‘Nothing had prepared me for the sublime reality of this extraordinary place.’ And that is all. No description. No placement in the particular moment. No risky critical discrimination. Replace the monument with Joan Sutherland or the Sydney Opera House or the chain of productions or stars that he encounters and the response holds true. It is a style that replicates the garrulous unctuousness of Bridget Jones’s Diary. This Panglossian openness to experience marzipans over the dramas behind the scenes. Inevitably, Oxenbould is caught up in the power struggles and the changes at managerial level. His assertions that he is an innocent bystander are innocuous. In the middle of a particularly nasty piece of bloodletting in 1980 involving the general manager, the public utterances of members of the board, and the publication of the McKinnon Report, which exonerated the company from covering the national demand for opera, the author declares his professional practice to be ‘to make a genuine effort to appreciate both sides of the argument and acknowledge one’s role in the disagreement’. It is a philosophy noted more in the breach than in the performance. Not far beneath the lacquer of virtue, a portrait emerges of this outwardly genial man as the consummate courtier, always apparently neutral and discriminating, sympathetic to the losers and, at the same time, placing his bets with the emerging power from behind the scenes. When all else fails, the timely threat of resignation delivers advancement. In spite of his charm, Oxenbould carries a long memory in retributive vindication. The reader is constantly reminded by the author of the long incubation period of his fine Madama Butterfly in 1997, but he is less generous to many of the gifted directors of his generation. Jim Sharman is dismissed as being ‘conscious of image and the need for self-promotion’, while John Bell’s production of Don Giovanni is declared a failure because he saw his directorial purpose as, ‘an opportunity to reinvigorate a moribund art form’. The distinguished Shakespearean actor–director hasn’t been invited back since. Oxenbould is particularly scathing about Stefan Haag, director of ETOC and his first mentor. But Haag, the author learns, had demanded his dismissal because he held Moffatt responsible for messing up his 1968 production of The Magic Flute. In aside after aside, Haag is not forgiven. There is a persistent sense that the artistic director’s principal task is to rein in the more innovative and vivifying concepts of his peer group. Memoirs can be a witty and parodic account of backstage follies and gossip. They can be insightful into the success or failure of particular artistic visions, or they can interrogate the nature of opera itself and distinguish certain trends experienced at close hand over almost forty years, so that trends and aporias distinctive of opera in Australia are illuminated. Unfortunately, only the first of these options is taken up. Descriptions of actual productions are scandalously inept. There is no clear sense of production designs, no outline of dramatic context and directorial emphasis, no addressing the question of interpretation of opera as aesthetic work: just a setting for celebrities to shine, as though opera is a glass cage in which style, ego and god-given vocal gifts are offered like a circus of skills in never-to-be repeated performances for a minority coterie. This is memoir, inexorable chronicle and groupie gush where we might have hoped for something more intelligent and substantial. If this were a faithful report of the condition of opera in Australia, then the prognosis is life-threatening. Fortunately, Opera Australia’s various achievements are more substantial, diverse, controversial and artful than this autobiography would lead one to conclude.

John Slavin

From the New Issue

Non-Essential Work by Omar Sakr

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills

Birds and Fish: Life on the Hawkesbury by Robert Adamson, edited by Devin Johnston

Woven: First Nations poetic conversations from the Fair Trade project edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu

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