HEATHER MACDONALD
On Peter Sellars
Peter Sellars's detr:tctors and supporters agree on one thing: his modem
stagings of classical operas constitute a powerful assault on performance
tradition. His most infamous productions to date - Mozart's
Don Gio–
vanni,
Le
Nozze di Figaro,
and
Cosi Fan Tutte,
set respectively in Spanish
Harlem, a penthouse suite in Trump Tower, and a Long Island seaside
diner, and shown last season on PBS's Great Performance series - have set
off howls of treason in the musical establishment.
The view of Sellars as raging iconoclast, however, misses the para–
dox of his seemingly revolutionary stagings: they grow out of a philoso–
phy of art that is positively old-fashioned. To translate an eighteenth
century opera into a twentieth century setting signifies a radical com–
mitment to the work's universality - a concept currently as politically
incorrect as that of aesthetic quality. Every decision to stage a work of
theater begins in the perception that the work speaks to a contemporary
audience. Sellars takes that perception one step further: Not only do
Mozart's operas still speak
to
us today, they speak
of
us as well. No mere
"dead white male," Mozart is a contemporary, and Don Giovanni and
Figaro ourselves.
Sellars's commitment to the continuing relevance of "canonical"
works of art set him at odds with his colleagues in the avant-garde
establishment. The reigning orthodoxy in the academy and the arts re–
gards any claim of "universality" as a thinly-disguised tool of oppression.
That orthodoxy would reject the commonality between Mozart's con–
cerns and the modern world presupposed by Sellars's stagings. In the
place of universality now stands "difference." The politics of difference
splinters the cultural universe into a congeries check of different voices
determined by the speaker's race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orienta–
tion. Art does not transcend these differences, it merely reproduces them.
Once the race, gender, and ethnic identity of an artist is known, there is
little reason to study his or her work further. Carried to its logical ex–
treme, the politics of difference dictates that we speak only to ourselves,
because every other person is separated from us by some insuperable ge–
netic difference.
The problem with Sellars's productions is rather that they do not
pay
enough
attention to difference. If art is about certain timeless prob–
lems, it is also inevitably about a particular time and place. Deeply
marked as it must be by its milieu and by the perceptions of its creator, it
