The rich man's Rocky Horror Picture Show?

An Associated Press article chronicles Zurich Opera's problems with their current production of Fledermaus. Its general director, Franz Wesler-Möst, who is also music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, has refused to conduct the last two performances on May 17 and June 20 because of "artistic reasons." Apparently, Wesler-Möst is unhappy with vein of the stage director, Michael Sturminger's production, mainly, that the he has chosen to infuse the opera with vampires, complete with Dracula's castle.

Well, after all, it is called Die Fledermaus ("the bat"). lol! I guess the modern trend of juxtaposing operas against weird places and time periods goes against Wesler-Möst's staid, prude sensibilities. And one might see how he might think that. The thing that has always bothered me about Fledermaus is the lack of a direct connection of the story with the title. Those familiar with the story know that "the bat" has very little to do with the opera. The plot is based on Falke's scheme to seek revenge on his dear, old friend, Eisenstein, for leaving him passed out and dressed in a bat outfit one night when they were bar-hopping. So, really, there is no "bat" in the opera itself, just in the backstory. The opera story is based on the tried-and-true Mozartian plot of mistaken identities, character substitutions, and a big finale where all is revealed and all are forgiven.

Now, how Sturminger was able to bring his "vampirical" vision into the plot remains to be seen, unless you happened to have gone to the previous two performances, which Wesler-Möst conducted. Ironically, in one of those twists that Mozart's librettists would have been intrigued by, W-M's (I'm sick of typing "Wesler-Möst"--do you know how hard it is to generate an umlauted "o"?) performances will be seen by more people, as the two performances he did conduct will be edited for release on DVD in a few months. So... he won't conduct the remaining two live performances but will be forever perpetuated as the conductor of that production on a digital format likely to last for the next 25-30 years.

Of course, the production could turn out to be a hit, a tour de force destined to be brought up whenever opera cognisceti talk of Fledermaus or mentioned on some future, mutated version of Dan Berry's "Echoes of a Golden Age" radio program on WUOT... but, judging from the Vienna Times (Wiener Zeitung) review of it (or, rather, Babelfish.com's machine translation thereof), that doesn't appear to be the case. The review is generally lukewarm, which is what the review says of the production: run-of-the-mill, humdrum, "phoned in." (BTW, Orlofsky turns out to be the Dracula, I think.) So maybe W-M's rep is safe.

Maybe the Zurich will forgive him, or those that have seen the production, sympathize with him. He's due to direct Carmen this summer and Rosenkavalier, Figaro, and Così next year. One would think that those would be tame productions. (Though, with Carmen, we KOans can speak from experience on outré performances.) I guess if some stage director was off his/her rocker, they might have a red-painted horse and rider (naked?) on stage for Rosenkavalier. After all, those northern European houses are well-known for their bizarre productions. Considering that, a few years ago, I was reading in Opera Digest about a Handel opera at... maybe Vienna State Opera?... and looked down to find a picture of a giant dinosaur on the stage, a Dracula in Fledermaus wouldn't be quite so odd.