In Munich, I recently saw a new "Eugene Onegin." During the Polanniase that is supposed to open the last act, a group of shirtless, strapping cowboys danced around a bed and then jumped into the bed and had a simulated orgy.

The director said he was trying to evoke Tchikovsky's repressed homosexualilty. C'mon. The director was depicting his own fantasies, and we the public were coughing up big bucks ($225 for a side-orchestra seat) to witness this juvenilia.

The Muencheners booed at the end of the ballet (I was at the third performance; apparently the booing after opening night was savage).

This isn't theatre. This is trash.

BRAVA!

This is the most thorough treatment yet on the subject of Regietheater, its origins, current status, and what it means for the future of opera in the U.S.

An operagoer for nearly 50 years, I also am a Patron who provides some of the much-needed financial support to the Met in addition to buying tickets. When we lived in New Jersey during the 1980s and 1990s, my wife and I would attend 20 to 25 Met performances each season. Now we attend five to seven.

I am becoming increasingly disturbed at how directors have subverted productions to their own political and social agendas. Frankly, I don't go to the opera to get angry; I go to be moved, to be taken out of myself by an art form that can be nothing less than a spiritual experience.

Unfortunately, we are also experiencing a decline in the number of great singers. Compare the current crop of singers to those on the scene during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. I have often said that the only way most of today’s singers would get into the Met when Mr. Bing ran the house was if they bought a ticket. There are of course a few notable exceptions, one of whom is Mr. Pape...and I agree that his performance as King Philip was "monumental." I was in the house on the night he made his debut.

Mr. Gelb, in a well-publicized effort to fill the house and create new audiences, has sought to change the make-up of the Met audiences by bringing in a younger audience to displace the older, 60-plus retirees like myself who prefer our opera to be produced the way the composers intended. This younger audience is also more likely to accept the style of productions to which you article refers. I question this move since it first brings in a less discriminating audience incapable of telling a good from a mediocre or bad performance or production. Secondly, it may fill the seats, but what effect will his efforts have on those of us who contribute financially in addition to buying tickets? If Mr. Gelb loses this base of financial support, he will have a serious problem on his hands that even Mercedes Bass’s mega-gifts cannot solve.

When you combine the emergence of Regietheater, the decline in number of great singers (this especially worries me since great singing is a tradition that is passed on from one generation of singers to the next), and the lack of a discriminating audience, what I see is an art form that is becoming increasingly irrelevant for me. Like the German conductor, Wolfgang Sawallisch, I am about to walk away from the opera house and not return. I have the feeling that I am not alone.

Many thanks for so eloquently expressing what I have seen and felt for the past ten years.

Dear Madame,

Thank you so much for this wonderful article which expresses all thoughts and emotions I have been keeping inside for years now. European opera stage is in a pitiful situation and is at the hands of ignorant, pretentious so-called intellectuals. I strongly share your position about the future of the Met productions (which I can only follow through the Opera News or DVDs) and hope that the Met will continue keeping up its well-established tradition.

Strasbourg, France

Thank you for treating this awful trend in opera staging with the scorn and exposure it richly deserves. The last time I went to the Los Angeles Opera, they had totally bastardized Mozart. I believe it was Marriage of Figaro. It was disgusting, awful, vile, sexualized, offensive.

And when the director came out for a bow, I booed long and hard. Many people looked around and then joined me. There were a lot of boos. The PR people, of course, insist that the audiences love it, but I do not believe them for a minute.

You've done a great service to opera in writing this article. It would be well to rearticulate that the trend to Regiebuhne began in the U.S. some years ago. As an active opera solist in the '80s and '90s, I can tell you that by then directors held the power, with few exceptions. I often longed for the days when a powerful, decisive conductor would create the vision of a production. Alas, I was a part of few productions of that ilk. Perhaps part of the problem was a lack of powerful, decisive conductors?

I do predict that the fashion for regietheater will wane. Eventually, audiences will just give up on it and the music and composer's vision will prevail.

I recently attended an Australianized production of L'Elisir d'Amore and was less than amused as, inter alia, I found the translation hacked into exaggerated Australian slang and sensitive moments of the utterly charming work interrupted by spontaneous outbursts from apparently demented cows and unbalanced sheep!

While this staging did not reach the height of insensitivity featured in Mac Donald's piece (indeed arguments could be successfully put for a legitimized transplanting of the pastoral setting into the drought-ridden Australian outback), it was blatantly "ocker for the sake of ocker" without any considered thought as to how to carry the change intelligently; I have no doubt that the brains behind the outfit considered themselves pretty clever. In fact they should feel the opposite.

Reading this contribution made me feel somewhat relieved that somebody out there is articulately arguing for an intelligent approach. A small private victory given that the Adelaide Festival will be subjected the premiere of Sellars' Ainadamar in 2008.

As a composer, I could not more agree with Heather Mac Donald's article on Regietheater. In Amsterdam, we are fortunate enough to have a well-run opera theater that presents, on average, decent realizations of the repertoire. Only occasionally there is an abberation, like a live horse in a treadmill, to which the protagonist makes love, while "blood" is dripping from the "walls"—this was a Louis Andriessen "opera," the fruit of an old sixties-quasi-enfant-terrible—but audiences just shrug their shoulders and run for the next Wagner opera.

Updating "old" opera to "modern standards" indeed often means debasing it. But there is a great longing, with audiences and musicians, for a return to meaningful, musically appropriate opera direction and at some stage (in both meanings of the word), this will return, also in Europe. Chapeau for Mac Donald's apt analysis of what is wrong with European Regietheater. That kind of "modern" nihilism should be reserved for contemporary opera that indulges in it.