“In the Score”: Music and Media in the Discourse of Operatic Mise-en-Scène

In 2017 French director Olivier Py explained his staging of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète at the Deutsche Oper Berlin with the following words: “There is an orgy in the score, and therefore I stage an orgy… . I am completely faithful to the work absolut werktreu.”1 For Py, then, staging an opera means making visible what “is in the score” (in German, a little more emphatically, “in der Partitur steht”), a course of action that ensures fidelity to the work in question on the part of the director. Such statements might seem uncontroversial to those familiar with recent debates about operatic mise-en-scène, or, more broadly, to anybody who has some interest in opera. Even a passing backward glance at history, however, suggests that they are a fairly recent development, and that they would have made little sense to our operatically inclined ancestors up to around the middle of the twentieth century. Why on earth should a director stage what is in the score rather than what is in the libretto, they might have asked. And why is the score equated with the whole work, so that being faithful to the former automatically means being faithful to the latter? These imaginary questions from the past prompt more concretely historical ones: How did such beliefs come about? And why?