About the charm of intimacy
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About the charm of intimacy
Patrice Chéreau in conversation with Opernwelt
Interview : Stephan Mösch
Mr. Chéreau, when your "Ring" came out in 1976, you were only thirty-two years old. Looking back: What role did the work at Bayreuth play in your development as a director?
This production was extremely important for my entire artistic work. It was all about mastering a piece of fourteen or fifteen hours duration, about thinking the big picture. That was inevitably a lesson. I had to learn to master the big form and only then to go into the details. In 1976, rehearsals began on May 1; by mid-July I had my first dress rehearsal. So there was very little time for the first attempt.
Some details of your staging changed in the second year of the festival. The Valkyrie rock first looked like the Matterhorn and then became closer to the Böcklin rock. Valhalla was radically enlarged...
We completely redesigned about a third of the production in 1977. Besides the two sets you mention, I restaged almost every third act. After that, nothing fundamental changed.
How did you prepare for the Ring?
German was my first foreign language at school. Later, at the Sorbonne, I also learned Middle High German. I had read the Edda and knew who Wotan was and who the dragon was before the offer from Bayreuth came. Otherwise I would not have been able to accept it. Perhaps it was an advantage that I am French and German is not my mother tongue: contact with Wagner's text was very easy for me. The Ring poetry never seemed pompous or ridiculous or foreign to me. It was simply part of a language I had learned. New for me was the experience with Wagner's music. But even this contact was not complicated: This music literally pushes you toward the theater. Wagner, like Shakespeare or the Greek tragedies, is great, original theater. In this respect, he cannot be completely foreign to any theater person.
In practice, opera in the seventies was usually anything but theater; especially with Wagner, inertia prevailed, and the lighting was often more flexible than the performers. In retrospect, I think that the special, even revolutionary aspect of your interpretation of the Ring lies not primarily in the political aspect, which other directors had also aimed for, but in the way you deal with bodily expression, in the recovery of naturalness. Was it difficult to convey such completely new tasks to the singers?
No, not at all. I always got answers to my ideas. Singers never say no if you make reasonable suggestions and build characters logically. Besides, I had a wonderful team that learned very quickly. Gwyneth Jones, the Brünnhilde, would have been an actress if she had not come to opera. Rene Kollo was very talented; Heinz Zednik literally rediscovered Loge and Mime ("Siegfried"). In fairness, I must also mention singers who were no longer with us when the film was recorded: Hannelore Bode, my first Sieglinde, was great, and Zoltan Kelemen, the Alberich of 1976, who then unfortunately died very young, remains unforgettable to me.
Is there now a new generation of singers who have already learned to deal with their bodies flexibly during their training?
That may be. Since I don't stage much opera, I can't judge that in general. My experience is that it was no harder or easier in 1976 than it is today. There were always brilliant actors among the singers; I'm thinking, for example, of Waltraud Meier, with whom I did Wozzeck. That has nothing to do with the generation.
After the success of the Ring, Wolfgang Wagner offered you Tristan und Isolde. Why didn't that interest you?
That was in 1981, immediately after the Ring had played, and it seemed too early to me. When I was considering the matter, I was often told, "But you staged the first act of the Valkyrie so well, so Tristan is no problem for you." But I think both pieces are on completely different levels. You can't bring Tristan to the stage with the means of the Ring. If I succeeded in the Walküre, that doesn't mean that my Tristan would have been just as good. Besides: five more years of Bayreuth? Another five years up and down Maxstrasse? I'd rather not! It was better that way. Imagine that you had already seen two Tristan productions and half a dozen other Wagner operas by me. Then I would be exhausted as an opera director today. So I am still fresh at the age of sixty-one. (laughs)
You once said that when and which opera you direct has always depended on chance. Exception: Mozart's "Lucio Silla. Now that's not exactly the kind of piece that directors fight over.
That was ultimately also a coincidence. In 1972, the Piccolo Scala in Milan offered me Lucio Silla. The production never came off. Ten years later I proposed the piece because I had already worked it out.
In the opera scene, there is currently a widespread trend for film directors to stage operas who know little about music...
...and who, unfortunately, as film directors, have little idea of theater.
Are you saying that you have to know something about theater to make good movies?
Of course! I no longer make a distinction between opera, film or drama. It's always about telling a story, building roles coherently, conveying emotions to the audience in a credible way.
Whereas the composer has already clarified a lot of things that you first have to invent as a director in film or drama: tempo, pauses, rhythm, the relationship of the voices to each other....
I wouldn't overestimate the differences. Actors also have voices. Even a text without music has its rhythm and tempo. You just have to make the effort to figure it out. Of course, the music in opera dictates a lot. But this constraint also makes free. In the absence of freedom there is great freedom. Any performer will tell you that: when the framework is precisely fixed, things often really get going. That's why, for example, an opera seria like "Lucio Silla" came very easily to me.
Let's return to the relationship between opera and film: do you see a future for opera beyond the peep show, for example in multimedia hybrid forms?
That can only be judged on a case-by-case basis, and I'm no prophet. What I fundamentally reject, however, is showing cinematic images on the opera stage. That doesn't help. Intimacy in opera is created in a completely different way than in cinema. When I said that I make no distinction between opera, film and drama, that applies to the principles of the work. But the means are, of course, completely different in each case. There is no analogy at all. That's why, in consultation with Pierre Boulez, I refused to realize the film Berg had planned for the premiere of the three-act Lulu in Paris. I have also always said no to all offers to make a film of an opera. If I want to make a film, I make a film.
Keyword intimacy: what characterizes your opera productions from the Ring to Cosi fan tutte is the elaboration of great closeness between the characters, which of course can also show itself as distance, as strangeness. "Intimacy" is the name of one of your central films. Are there any themes that you are concerned with across genres, so to speak?
That's hard to say in a few sentences. Ultimately, it's about details. What interests me, and what certainly emerges as a constant in my work, are things like desire, love, the body, longing, and the infinitely subtle facets that are connected with them. That's what it comes down to more and more. So it's no coincidence that there are only two characters in my latest film, which comes out this fall.
Against this background, would it appeal to you to direct a song cycle?
I've never seen anything like it. I know: Marthaler has done it. I thought his "Pierrot lunaire" in Salzburg was very clever. In general, I find his theatrical language fascinating. But as I said: I have never dealt with the staging of songs.