Mr. Tcherniakov, composers, singers, directors, stage designers, opera directors and dramaturges recently spent a whole day discussing "political music theater today" in Heidelberg. Can you relate to this term? Does it have any meaning for your work?
(ponders for a long time) There were perhaps times when this term was important. For Ruth Berghaus, for example, or for Peter Konwitschny, whom I greatly admire. Ten or fifteen years ago, I tried to see everything he did. I also heard about the symposium in Heidelberg. I know that Konwitschny staged two new plays there. I am fully aware of what we are talking about here. But what I have done in my life is something else. I don't believe that artistic expressions can really change people's consciousness. At any rate, I have very rarely experienced that. Books can perhaps change something, but the performance of an opera? No. For me, opera has always been a very personal experience. I discover many things in it that concern me: Losses, complexes, fears, certain experiences.
Your productions are often interpreted in a political sense, especially in Germany: "Boris Godunov", with which you made your debut at the Berlin State Opera in 2005, seemed like a picture book of post-Soviet society. The story of "The Tsar's Bride", your third Berlin work, created in 2013, is set in a mediocracy controlled by hidden forces, which in some respects is reminiscent of the Putin system. Do such associations bother you?
It used to bother me a lot. When I staged "Boris Godunov", I wanted to avoid any kind of concrete allusions. I'm afraid of direct analogies. In the case of "Boris", I wasn't interested in current events at all. I wanted to tell a universal, existential parable. That's why the plot is projected into the future ...
There was this clock that stopped in 2018 ...
Exactly. And this clock doesn't just tell the time. It marks the stages of a development that is heading for a major catastrophe. No one can stop it. Neither Boris nor anyone else. In the end, death and darkness seem omnipresent. It is as if time has stopped. But then come these strange final bars of music, played by the strings, which don't seem to fit the apocalypse of the finale at all. I didn't understand it for a long time. It was only during the rehearsals that this music opened up to me. It seemed like a faint light to me. Maybe it's not evening every other day after all? Maybe something new is beginning? We don't know what will happen next. Time jumps back to zero. When I read in a review after the premiere that my Boris was a brother of Putin, I soon went crazy. Putin didn't interest me one bit in this work at the time. Boris as Putin? That's political cabaret for me.
Were you also not interested in politics and power in "The Tsar's Bride"?
Yes, it was exactly the same there. Of course, I address issues that concern us all. The manipulation of people, of entire societies. It's about people in power who believe they can control everything. But as soon as they come into contact with normal life, as soon as they are confronted with passions, they feel that they have nothing under control. They no longer understand what is happening, are completely helpless and become victims of their own manipulations. I didn't want to stage a sarcastic pamphlet about Russia in 2013. The scope is much broader. I wanted to tell a story about real and imagined conspiracies. During rehearsals, I always tried to get away from this Russian context. The Berlin audience shouldn't immediately think: Aha, it's about these poor, somewhat strange people in the East. If the audience doesn't relate what they experience in the theater to themselves, something is wrong. At the time, I couldn't have imagined that one or two years later, reality would have caught up with fantasy, even surpassed it. Compared to what is happening in Russia today, my "Tsar's Bride" is a children's fairy tale.
You studied at the Academy of Theater Arts in Moscow in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That was a time of turbulent upheaval: perestroika, glasnost, the end of the party dictatorship and the Soviet empire, attempted coups, etc. You were interested in one thing above all: theater and opera. Where did this passion come from?
(Pause) I don't know. (laughs, pause again) I don't come from a theater or music family. In mine, everyone was always an engineer. Something happened to me when I was twelve. I took the trolley bus past the Bolshoi Theater almost every day. One day, it was May 21, 1983, my mother took me to a performance - she had received two tickets from her company as an award for good work. It was a guest performance by the Kirov Theater, with Yuri Temirkanov conducting. I don't know why, but I was deeply impressed. In the fall, I went to the Bolshoi on my own for the first time. Of course, it was almost impossible to get in. At first I tried with "search ticket" signs. At some point, someone told me a better method, and it went like this: You press an old ticket with a rouble note underneath into the woman's hand at the entrance. You had to know her, of course. And make sure there was no militia nearby. That's how I spent almost every evening at the Bolshoi Theater for six or seven years. Back then, I never dreamed of becoming a director. It was a mania. From a theatrical point of view, the performances were pretty dull. For a while, I was only interested in acting. I suddenly had a huge hunger for "real" theater, without the plush and pomp. When I decided to study directing, spoken theater was my world. Opera didn't really come back into my life until 1998.
And you immediately realized that this was something for you?
Yes, something snapped. Again, I can't say exactly what it was. One of my first opera productions was Rimsky-Korsakov's "Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh" at the Mariinsky Theater, and soon afterwards I was also invited to the Bolshoi. When I was invited to do "Eugene Onegin" at the Grand Theatre in 2006, I thought I had come full circle - it was the same play I had seen there as a child with my mother in 1983. There are strange connections.
Let's go back to your student years at the Academy. How important was it for you to engage with the Russian film and theater tradition? What role did the theories, visual and physical choreographies of Eisenstein, Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Tarkovsky and Lubimov play in your own development?
When I was a student, I had major inferiority complexes. I wasn't one of those who had grown up with theater, I felt alien in this world. I thought, you only have a chance if you know more, if you are better than everyone else. I started reading like a madman, ran to the theater and to the Moscow Film Museum. A wonderful museum, founded and run by a wonderful man: Naum Kleiman. I knew him well, he let me in everywhere. He was honored for his life's work at the last Berlinale. I went there almost every day for about four years to see films and study film theory. Another obsession.
You often use film in your productions, sometimes even the dramaturgy seems to be influenced by film. We've already talked about "The Tsar's Bride". Prokofiev's "The Gambler", for example, your second Berlin production, seemed like stage cinema with its widescreen look and rapid sequence of scenes ...
That was not intentional. I don't follow any theories or programs. Most of it comes from the subconscious. When I build narratives, images, spaces, everything I've ever read, seen, felt, lived somehow also resonates. But I couldn't say how these influences suddenly awaken in me. It can also happen that nothing stirs at all, nothing comes to mind. And sometimes I see everything very clearly in front of me, like characters or scenes from those fold-out books that I loved so much as a child. That was the case with "The Gambler", for example. I only had to find out whether the inner images would work on stage.
Directing, stage design and costumes - you do everything yourself. Why is that? Are you a control freak?
(ponders) I'm not a set designer. I never studied it. When I started out, I wanted to work with the actors, not design spaces or costumes. I stumbled into it by chance. It is a funny story. For one of my first drama productions in a provincial Russian town, I was assigned a renowned set designer. What I then saw of him had nothing whatsoever to do with my ideas. It was like a trauma. A physically unbearable feeling. It was as if a complete stranger had invaded my own home. I realized that I had to do it myself. I asked whether the man had received his money. And I knew that he wouldn't come to the premiere. Then I went to the director and explained that I would rather throw myself out of the window than accept these backdrops. She wasn't thrilled, but eventually let me do it. And so I made my first stage set. Hardly anyone knew about it. The "old" name was still on the posters and cast sheets. I don't know why the artistic director tacitly covered it all up, perhaps out of maternal pity for this somewhat wacky nobody from Moscow (laughs).
Last year, you made your Met debut with Borodin's "Prince Igor". Would you have staged the piece differently if the production had not been intended for New York, but for, say, Vienna or Moscow?
No. The house, the place, the country in which I work are one thing; thinking about the story, the themes, motifs and characters of a play is another. For me, the one has nothing to do with the other. What interests me on stage is a language that is understood everywhere, a language that works regardless of the cultural context of the venue. Maybe that's not always a good thing. A few times I tried to correct myself a little: in "Eugene Onegin" in Moscow, for example. Why? "Eugene Onegin" at the Bolshoi Theater is something sacred. The old production had been on the program since 1944. Everyone knew it. Everyone had it in their heads. I had to find a new language that would keep the audience in dialog with me. And of course I couldn't ignore the "Onegin" image that had been cherished at the Bolshoi for six decades. I am not a provocateur. I'm not looking for a fight. I want to tell a story and I have to make sure that I reach people. Whether they ultimately find "my" stories convincing or reject them is another matter.
Galina Vishnevskaya, an icon of the Bolshoi, apparently did not get through to you: after seeing your "Onegin", she was fuming with rage. Your production of Glinka's "Ruslan and Ludmila" for the reopening of the Bolshoi Theater in October 2011 was massively disrupted by whistles and heckling. Since then, you have not been engaged again in Russia. Even your former patron Valery Gergiev apparently no longer wants to hear from you. Are you now persona non grata in your home country?
First of all, there is a practical reason for this. Theaters in Russia don't plan very far in advance. In Western Europe, I have to commit much earlier. I'm now so well booked there that I could hardly squeeze anything in. The second reason is : you know how much Russian cultural life has changed over the last ten years. The state is getting more and more involved in cultural institutions. They want beautifully decorated shop windows. The Bolshoi is, of course, under particular scrutiny. The cultural and political climate is very conservative. The Bolshoi has shown five of my productions. But now I don't seem to fit in anymore. And one more sentence about Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater: My last work for St. Petersburg was "Tristan and Isolde", which was ten years ago. We have gone in different directions since then. I am very grateful to Gergiev. He was the first to bring me to a major opera house.
Today you mainly work in Western Europe. However, you still live in Moscow. Is it the best place for you to switch off and recharge your batteries? Is the city a kind of refuge for you?
No. The Moscow of today has nothing to do with the city where I grew up. I don't find peace there at all. And yet: no other place is as familiar to me. I'm very attached to some things. I can't imagine moving away from Moscow just yet. But one day that could happen. Who knows how things will develop in Russia.
You do an average of four opera productions a year. There is hardly any time to recharge your batteries, to take a mental breath. From Heiner Müller there is the phrase that theater is "controlled madness". Do you agree?
Madness? I don't know. I always had the feeling: you're not afraid of anything, you have to jump off the bridge, into a hot river - you'll find yourself there. I was never cautious. But now I'm gradually realizing that I need to rethink things a bit, manage my energy better, change my rhythm. Perhaps my approach to the works is no longer up to date. The basic feeling for theater changes every ten years. What was true ten years ago can seem stale or pointless today. Sometimes I'm afraid I won't notice when I'm repeating myself. I feel that I need to take time out more often to think about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, whether I'm still being honest with myself or whether I'm fooling myself.
You are currently in the middle of rehearsals for "Parsifal", your second Wagner production. There is this cliché that the "Kitezh" legend, which you have already tackled twice (in St. Petersburg and in Amsterdam), is the Russian equivalent of the Parsifal tale. Did Rimsky-Korsakov accompany you on the way to Wagner's "Bühnenweihfestspiel"?
(ponders) No. The pieces have nothing to do with each other. To be honest, I was quite shocked when Daniel Barenboim offered me "Parsifal". At first I thought I had to wriggle out of it somehow. The music had a drug-like effect on me, putting common sense to sleep. And I couldn't resist it. I didn't like that at all. The theme, the characters, everything in me seemed to be resisting this work. This is going to be too painful, I thought, you won't survive it. That was my first reaction. But then I felt that this inner resistance could become the starting point of a journey into the piece, that I had to accept the challenge for myself.
That sounds as if "Parsifal" was a personal test for you ...
Exactly. A test that I imposed on myself. I said to myself: you have to force yourself to understand everything, to overcome the forces that have kept you away from the theme and the characters in the play. I wanted to sort it out for myself. My starting conditions for dealing with the material are completely different from those of any German "Parsifal" director. I didn't grow up with these Grail stories, I came from outside. At some point I realized that this was probably the very reason why I was invited to direct "Parsifal" in Berlin. As an outsider. The whole thing is an experiment.