11月20日付The Independent紙、12月6日付The Guardian紙には一部辛口なくだりがあります。一方、12月6日付のBBCのサイトのニュースは淡々と事実を追っています。
2004年12月6日付 The Guardian 紙より
Yet though La Scala's standards remain high and its ambitions are undimmed, there is no getting away from the fact that, like every other aspect of the Italian operatic pyramid which it commands, La Scala is in decline. No Italian opera of importance has been written since the death of Puccini 80 years ago. There is no obvious successor to Muti. And the standards of Italian singing are declining by the year. The tradition that ran from Grisi and Pasta, Tamagno and Caruso, Schipa and Gigli, Tebaldi and Freni seems to be at an end. After Pavarotti - long banished from La Scala anyway - who?
No visit to La Scala is complete without spending time in the La Scala museum, a shrine to the great men and women who made this wonderful theatre what it once was. No opera house in the world could or does have a museum like it. But the reality is that, in spite of its modernisation, the theatre of La Scala itself is also becoming a living museum. The days when it created new wonders are gone. Like all opera houses, La Scala has to make do with recreating its past - just as it will do with Salieri this week.
2004年11月20日付 The Independent 紙より
Throughout the 19th century, La Scala maintained its status as the world's greatest opera house, unchallenged headquarters of the Italian style, but also an important place for the very different opera (abhorrent then and now to many Italians) of Wagner.
Today La Scala is still thought of in the same terms in Italy, and with its splendid new refurbishment that status has been reinforced. But La Scala's problem is that fewer and fewer opera-lovers outside Italy feel the same way. Its celebrated musical director Riccardo Muti, in place since 1986, is an institution in Milan - but, in theatrical terms, La Scala's productions under his baton seem increasingly stale. In its new, EUR60m outfit, La Scala is all dressed up. But as long as Muti is in charge, critics say it has nowhere to go.
Are La Scala's days as one of the great opera houses over, despite this impressive and intelligent restoration? Not necessarily: this theatre has weathered such doldrums before. In 1838, Franz Liszt described La Scala's work in the most unflattering terms. "In this happy country," he wrote, "the mise-en-scene of an opera seria ["comic" opera] is not in fact a serious business; often 15 days is enough. The orchestra and the singers get no encouragement from the public, which chatters or sleeps (in the fifth row of boxes they eat or play cards); distracted, torpid, freezing cold, [the musicians] present themselves not as artists but as people paid a wage to make music ... The singers seem like sleepwalkers, one can truly say that they are singing simultaneously, but not together." Liszt's comments provoked a declaration of "war on Liszt" by three Milanese newspapers. And La Scala's days of glory were all ahead.
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