What is it that makes a wonderful experience?
It’s hitting a historic moment; getting the right moment in history for a work to be introduced. The place should be very excited about it, and not treat it as though it was just something they’re doing. They should be thrilled. The theater that is thrilled is behind it all the way, and the cast should be in their prime. Then it all adds up to be exciting, and a wonderful experience.
We’ve been dancing around this, so let me ask the big philosophical question. What is the purpose of opera?
It’s a very large-scale, intensive attempt to represent reality, to say what is the nature of experience. It comes through all of our senses, and at the same time it goes beyond them. It exists in time, but our sense of how that time is moving is frequently ambiguous or fabricated. It takes a very, very private level of emotion and interior life, and presents it in a very public arena for a large number of people who are invited inside. The combination of its big civic profile and the large-scale political implications of its subject matter, and the idea that singing is actually the most personal form of expression possible means that you have this fantastic combination of the inner and the outer worlds held in perfect equipoise to put forward in the center of a community as a large-scale statement of value. There’s nothing like it.
In treating opera as this serious business, where do you find the balance between the serious expression and the entertainment value?
Opera should be entertaining. Like most things, you get farther if you engage people, so there should be something that really compels people’s attention, and from time to time check to make sure they’re awake! I do feel that an audience having a good time is an audience that’s awake, and that’s important. Most composers were intent on insuring that their works had high entertainment values, and it’s irresponsible to produce them in any other way. There are a lot of slothful productions — which are, frankly, boring — of pieces which are by no means boring. It’s one’s job, as stage director, to come up and meet the piece at its own level. Wagner considered himself a man of the theater, so it’s unbearable to him that a section of the piece would be dull. That’s a little strange to imagine, so you have to go out of your way to actually try to imagine it. You have to get inside that piece and find out where its motor is and make sure it’s working.
Are you simply making sure the motor is working, or are you doing the driving?
You figure out what the composer had in mind with his audience and how he intended to impact them.
Do you try to impact the audiences of today the same way audiences were impacted 50, 100, 150 years ago?
It’s probably impossible to do it the same way because it’s a different audience and a different set of social circumstances. On the other hand, yes, one does search for something that is analogous. One does search for a way of resuscitating that initial sense of surprise and that initial sense of direct encounter. So many of these pieces are so mediated for us by their histories and our awareness of their histories, that it’s very hard to just experience them with freshness. We take so many things for granted.
Do you wish you could take each audience member and erase all their memory of that piece?
No, because I use what they know of it. That’s actually something very potent that we can use. We take into account what baggage people walk in with. You then can address yourself quite specifically to that baggage, which I enjoy doing. It stimulates and creates the effect of howling. It’s impossible to do Wagner and not know that the music was used by the Third Reich. We know that now, and we can’t listen to that music without knowing it. It has nothing to do with Wagner, but it’s an association that has come on later, and you can’t pretend that it didn’t exist. You can’t say it didn’t happen because you know that everybody in the audience knows. So automatically that baggage now comes with Wagner. Certainly, it was not Wagner’s original program, but one has to address that if one is doing Wagner. You have to acknowledge what is around these works — whether it’s true or false, relevant or irrelevant. The production has to find a way of sorting that out, and eventually getting back to the composer. You have to climb over plenty of things to get there.
When you speak of baggage, everyone comes with somewhat different baggage. How do you account for 4000 different awarenesses in a single evening?
One tries for images that have certain potency that carry beyond parochial levels. At the same time, the simple answer is that you can’t account for them all, and I don’t want to. I love it that there are all these different reactions to a production of mine. My productions never provoke a monolithic reaction. Everybody has their own reaction; everybody saw a different show, and I love that. It’s so interesting, and it’s what gives people something to talk about afterwards. No two people do see the same show, and I count on that and I play for that. I really intend to set up most of my productions so that people have very different experiences on the same evening. Part of that is just technical — I make too many things happen at once so you have to decide what you’re going to look at, and whatever you’re looking at you’re not looking at something else. Someone else may be looking at that, and I deliberately set up confusing situations sometimes so that the audience is making their own choices. I like that. It’s what separates live theater from TV or film. In television of film, your gaze is always channeled. You are not consulted; you’re told where we’re going to look next. What I love about opera is that your mind wanders, and my job is to set up an interesting landscape to wander in. No two people come out having smelled the same clump of flowers.
So they all go in the same place and come out the same place, but what they do while inside the maze...
...is very diverse, and that’s what’s wonderful. Obviously, the music is there as a form of communication that hits people pretty correctly, but again, even there, the beauty of music is its ambiguity. You can’t quite put musical experiences into words or describe what it is that’s happening to you. I love that.
Don’t you want to be more than a traffic cop?
In one way it’s sort of choreography. I do take possession of people’s bodies because my stagings are elaborately physical. To fill in the inner life of the character is the responsibility of the artist. I’m happy to participate in that discussion, but it’s hardly for me to delineate it in any way. I can’t stand directors who play mind games with the performers and with the audience.
Then how do you balance the music and the drama?
I think the music always takes priority because music is a more precise language than words, and is frequently able to be exact, whereas words are approximate. The words kind of point you, but in an opera, the composer always has the last word because the text is written first. So, in cases such as Mozart, you’re in positions where the music absolutely contradicts the words. So who do you go with? Finally, Mozart.
Are we limiting someone such as John Adams by having permanent audio and video recordings of the production so anyone can see exactly what was done with the composer present?
Right. I’m the first person who wants additional productions of Nixon. Every new opera that I produce makes me want the second production. Some have been done in Germany and were very different from mine, and I’m very pleased with that. The composers have been horrified because they preferred mine [laughs], so I tell them that they no longer own the opera. Others will do all kinds of things to their works, and that’s what gives it life. That’s what’s wonderful.
So the composer and librettist live, and the director comes in, does his work, and then dies?
Right.
Do you like being a comet?
Yeah. You accept early on that you are a second-class creator. The first-class creators are those who start with an empty piece of paper. Where there was nothing, they make something.
Is the director getting too much power these days? That’s been a somewhat constant complaint recently.
In a decadent period in the history of opera, it’s only logical that the attention is focused on the side-shows. As soon as the repertory consists mostly of new pieces, believe me, the focus will go right back to the music where it should be. For the first half of this century, there was this aberrant focus on the conductor, and for the last part of the century there is an aberrant focus on the stage-director, and all the way there has been a certain aberrant focus on certain star singers. Frankly, the reason we’re all there is the music and the text. That’s where I’d just as soon the focus be. Everything that I do is just about trying to get close to those two items.
Why the special interest in Wagner? What about him piques your imagination?
I have a very complex relationship with Wagner because I distrust him. I distrust the material. I distrust Wagner, and I hate that he has such control over me. I hate that it’s so compelling. The greater the opera, the more abhorrent the message. I find it morally extremely complex. On the other hand, the Ring and Tristan each fascinate me. I have to say that I think those are the great achievement. I’m dying to do the Ring and I will do it probably in this decade. You’re the first person I’ve admitted that to publicly! I always pretend that I hate it, but it interests me and I listened to it recently again.
How do you see the Ring?
Well, I don’t know. That’s one of the hardest things. There are lots of operas I have productions fully-formed in my mind and ready to go, but for the Ring I have a couple of images, but I really don’t know. Those are pieces I wouldn’t know how if I had to stage them tomorrow.
So if a manager says he’d like to stage a Ring sometime when you’re ready for it, how much time are we waiting?
Five years. I really need to just soak in it for awhile. These things don’t come fast. I spent ten years on these Mozart operas. After awhile, they got good, but it took a long time.
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