Heavenly lengths…yeah! Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs discuss Steffani’s Niobe and the future.
There is a lot of talk about long operas these days, in the light of the Boston Early Music Festival's triumphant production of Steffani's Niobe, Regina di Tebe, which, as cut by the directors, lasted about 3 hours 45 minutes; and now an important revival of Rossini's Guillaume Tell is coming up, which also promises to be a long evening, potentially as long a five hours. Huntley Dent has just reviewed Henrik Ibsen's early rarity, Emperor and Galilean, presented by the National Theatre, London, with the play's two parts of four hours each reduced to a single evening of three and a half hours. It seems this goes against the modern grain, although blockbuster movies tend to be long and certain genres of popular novels very long. Yet Francesca Zambello, in her interview with Seth Lachterman for the Review, pointed out her concern to keep the Glimmerglass production of Carmen within temporal bounds that would be acceptable to a wide audience (in actuality 2 hours, 50 minutes, with intermissions, which is pretty well standard), and length is usually the first thing an operatic neophyte complains about.