REFLECTIONS ON THE PROFESSION
Tension, strain and every evening the famous stage fright, from which no artist is free.
If you don't have stage fright, you can't create tension on stage. The greater an artist is, the more he wets his pants, as they say in good German. I know singers who don't have stage fright, but you don't need to look at them. These are the so-called reliable ones. I have insane stage fright, but I never show it. That's why many colleagues think: hell, he has a calm. But I can't drive myself even more crazy. I have to play it down. That is also a question of discipline.
Creating tension also depends on the other side, the audience.
You can't measure the audience during the performance, only after the acts, at curtain calls. You can only sense whether you create tension yourself, and even then you are sometimes mistaken. I've often had the feeling that I had done something special. When we went out to dinner with friends, I was always waiting for someone to say something about how great it was. But nothing came. On other evenings, when I struggled and thought that there was nothing going on at all today, people came and raved. It's different in cabaret, where you can tell right away whether a punch line is right or not. In the opera, that's not possible. The tension between the partners has to be there. It can be created, or better, it must come from within. True tension and great performance cannot be created with technique alone. That's what's so terrible about theater, that there are so many factors that you can't measure.
That, I think, is the beauty of it, that you can't measure the essentials, not even charisma, personality. To recognize them, it certainly depends on the sensitivity, the judgment of the audience. If all this is missing, an artist must suffer a lot.
The audience is by no means as stupid as is often claimed. It instinctively reacts correctly to great performances, it notices immediately when something special has happened, without being able to explain it. Like a small door has been opened to God. And that is what art can do in the ideal case.
In our conversation we have arrived at the people and places, encounters that have strongly influenced the artist, the man Kollo, and brought him further.
In the sense of a career, Solti with the Tannhäuser recording, Karajan of course, Strehler, Chéreau - and the moments when I said no - have brought me further. Solti I privately consider the great humanist among the great conductors. In Chicago he rented a huge estate. He invites the whole crew to his place during the recordings, an Italian cook cooks for you. You can go out every day, have something cooked, swim in the swimming pool, do whatever you want. Solti usually retires to his study. I have not experienced anyone among the great conductors as gracious and charming. Of course, going out with Bernstein after the performance is cozy, too. But Solti's patriarchal style of gracious hospitality, without trying to play patriarch, I find unique. In this respect, he is definitely the most humane of his colleagues.
Suddenly Kollo goes into raptures about Wieland Wagner.
He is the kind of opera director who will be around perhaps once in 100 years. His productions, his Wagner interpretations were a fundamental experience for me. Among the singers, it was Wolfgang Windgassen whom I personally experienced on stage. The other, whom I hold in very high esteem, Jussi Björling, I know only from recordings. The only one I could judge by his charisma was Windgassen, who was so strongly shaped by Wieland Wagner. His Tannhäuser, his Tristan were exemplary. He impresses me strongly because he also came from the lyrical to the heroic field.
Bayreuth. A place of special significance in René Kollo's life?
Of course it was. My real career began there when Wolfgang Wagner engaged me in 1969 as Steuermann in Holländer. It was the breakthrough. A year later Solti came with his Tannhäuser offer, also because of Bayreuth.
A place with an incomparable aura ?
Yes. In connection with the time, the 19th century, which preoccupies me incessantly. I saw there for the first time what I had been dealing with for years. That's also exactly how I felt in Tribschen. When one knows what spiritual power had gathered in Bayreuth, what world-moving spiritual processes had been initiated here, one comes there in a strange mood. Bayreuth may not have been something sacred for me, but it was a place that one had to enter with tremendous respect.
What is your relationship to professional criticism ?
It exists, and it probably has to exist. I find it partly stimulating, not always objective. Even if one does not want to admit it, it is a stimulus, occasionally also a help. If not exactly a professional one, because generally not much comes out of it for a singer. One can measure whether it arrived, what one wanted. The response is important for the artist. On the other hand, when they read in one review how terrific it was, and in another that something like that shouldn't be on stage at all, criticism is already strongly put into perspective. I mean that you shouldn't be guided by the critics, because you are your own strictest critic. When I stand on stage and sing the first note, I know best whether it was good or bad, I don't need a critic for that. You have to be more than critical of yourself. Nevertheless, criticism is stimulating and sometimes useful. After all, it is read by all artists, even if some claim the opposite.
How do you hear yourself as a singer on stage, in relation to the orchestra?
That is a crucial question. I sang in Der Freischütz in London, in Götz Friedrich's production. I came on stage and suddenly thought : what's wrong, I've lost my voice. It all sounded dull and dry, it was a disaster, a nightmare. I had a contract for the next season for Lohengrin. I thought to myself : if I have such an acoustic for Lohengrin, I will go home immediately. I got through the couple of performances of Freischütz. The next year I came back with very mixed feelings. But the theater had no money, Lohengrin was playing in a square room, there was hardly anything on stage. At the first rehearsals I realized: my God, this is like being in a bathtub, fantastic! It all came back. I could control myself the way I need to. It was a joy to sing. I am completely dependent on the acoustics. It's not least the question of the stage design. The more you put on stage, the more it swallows up from the voice.
Denis Vaughan wrote an interesting essay in OPER 1981 about acoustic problems, noting that today's stage designers hardly think about the optimal acoustics for the singer. He reproached them and the directors of the theaters for hiring expensive stars whose voices do not come out as they should because of stage sets that swallow up most of the sound, and that in doing so they cheat themselves and the audience. For these singers are degrees better than they can be heard. In the 17th and 18th centuries, stage designers were excellent experts on the acoustic problems that are hardly taken into account today when a stage design is created.
This is absolutely true. A stage design can destroy a singer. Today everything has to be real, with lots of silk and damask. That actually looks quite beautiful, only it swallows up almost everything. A nightmare for the singers, who have to hear and control themselves so they know what to do with the sound. This is a crucial question of today's opera theaters.
Do the great European houses have good acoustics?
They are almost all dazzling, if the stage design is good. And the less there is on stage, the better they are.
What comes out of the orchestra pit onto the stage?
In normal opera houses, it's kept within limits, but in Bayreuth it's several times that. Because you get everything on stage first because of the sound cover (Schalldeckel). If you don't know that, you can only despair. You think: I'd better stop singing, it's no use anyway, I will never get through this.
That's interesting, because the acoustics of Bayreuth are so famous because of the covered orchestra pit.
Yes, yes. But not necessarily for the singer. At first you feel it's hopeless to sing against that mass of orchestral sound. But if you sing lean, you still get through. But at first, you are slain by a flood of music. If you wanted to do a song recital in the house, with piano accompaniment, it's a dream of acoustics. But when 180 men sit in the orchestra pit, it becomes very difficult. Especially with the conductors we have today, who are all far too loud and can hardly differentiate. The only one who can conduct opera so quietly that it is a pleasure to sing is Karajan. He can also produce a viable piano. The others conduct in a unified forte. None of them today have the theatrical experience of Karajan. Solti has a theatrical nerve, without question. But he is always very intense and tense. It is exhausting to sing with him. Karajan also has the ability to just let it flow in one evening. He conducts whole stretches in such a way that everything is just fine. And then comes a climax that makes people go crazy. Most conductors have one climax after another, so that it sometimes becomes unbearable. But the high art of interpretation consists precisely in the alternation of tension and relaxation.
DIRECTORS
With "operatic theater" you have given me a key word, which I would like to use. Nowadays we call it musical theater.
I think this buzzword is rather misplaced. There is opera and there is theater, they are two different concepts. The term music theater, which has such a modern ring to it, has ruined opera in the meantime - and it hasn't helped theater one bit. Nor has it helped the theater in the opera, because the opera is subject to completely different laws. And these have been virtually forgotten.
You have clearly formulated your criticism of the excesses of "Regietheater" in our conversations. Among the great directors Wieland Wagner was among your fundamental artistic experiences. You found the collaboration with Noelte stimulating and fascinating, as well as that with Ponnelle. These were directors who embodied what you understood to be meaningful, great opera directing. As a collaborator, you also supported those who stepped forward in favor of the controversial director Patrice Chéreau in Bayreuth. They immediately recognized the brisk newness and theatricality of this staging, the new dimension that Chéreau introduced to the Wagner scene.
Not just in the Wagner scene, but in all of opera. An unusually gifted and compelling theater man.
Who knew the play to perfection? His detractors claimed otherwise.
He knew it inside and out. He drew my attention to some passages that I had overlooked or not noticed until then. His direction of the characters was simply brilliant, his concept for the Ring, however, was not correct, I think. Not because of the politicization, as some of his opponents claimed, which I did not experience at all, at most in some aspects that were not essential to the whole. I found the sets exceptionally beautiful. As for the problem of the stage concept, any concretization deprives Wagner's philosophical poetry, and the Ring's humanity parable in particular, of timeless-actual expression, of its important abstract dimension. Modernization gives it a petit-bourgeois narrow-mindedness. Staging the Ring in such a time-bound concrete way is not my thing. To transpose a universal story of scraping, envy, power struggles, which Wagner very consciously placed in an indeterminate time, to a concrete time - I don't know if that opens up a new perspective.
But how does one capture this imaginary time? Certainly not with a historicizing, mythologizing naturalism.
The design that Wieland Wagner came up with for this, I think, was ideal. It was timeless, not politically updated and nevertheless modern in terms of scenic design. An all-embracing story like the Ring acquires a small-minded newspaper character, something journalistic, through political updating. I could generally imagine this happening with other plays. The mythological component in the "Ring" cannot be eliminated. Despite these substantial limitations, I admit that Chéreau's direction was simply magnificent, perhaps the best that has been achieved in opera directing since Wieland. However, I personally cannot get used to this diminutive actualization, I miss something essential, namely the uplifting, the abstraction of humanity issues in a timeless parable. Time-boundness is not long-lived, because it is time-dependent. As an example of a staging that does justice to the work, I would like to return again to Noelte. He always starts from the play and its inherent atmosphere. The authors who wrote the plays were certainly no less intelligent than those who perform them now. Great directing occurs when the play remains the anchor point and the director does not use it as an instrument for scenic incursions and comments.
One production that you were very much looking forward to was "Lohengrin" directed by Giorgio Strehler at the Scala of Milan ( season 1981/82 ), because you expected Strehler to give you a vision of "Lohengrin". It ended with a scandal. After defamatory articles and interviews with those involved in the production, you had difficulty persuading yourself to sing at the premiere. You cancelled all further performances. Once again we had proof of the troublemaker Kollo, who only makes noise and is very difficult to work with. Even a premiere at the Scala with the best-know names he lets fail, purely to assert himself. You expected something new and refreshing from Strehler, a concept that would playfully set itself against many cramped intellectual German interpretations. It didn't.
No. But to cut to the chase: I'm not difficult at all. I've been on stage for twenty years and I've had maybe three conflicts, which is not an exaggeration. I just think you shouldn't have to put up with everything, as often happens these days. I am not a servant, who has to take directions haphazardly, but an artist who thinks about the things he does. I am also open to any convincing theatrical idea, even if it does not fully correspond to my own ideas. However, I become unruly when I perceive that there is nothing. I don't live forever, and I don't have that much time to adapt to idiotic productions with which I can't identify at all.
It was Strehler's first Wagner staging from which anything could be expected.
All the greater was my disappointment, because I had hoped, that something playful, something Mediterranean, was going to happen. "Lohengrin" perhaps not purely philosophical, but as a fairy tale. Nothing happened, however, beyond an idiotic political interpretation. In this "Lohengrin" there is only fighting. He comes to the world only to fight for King Henry. He is a "guerriero," a fighter, who meets Elsa purely by chance. In the half hour that my conversation with Strehler about the play lasted, this is what he told me. Lohengrin comes exclusively to fight for the king and pierces Telramund. The relationship between Elsa and konig Heinrich, between Elsa and Lohengrin, Elsa and Ortrud did not interest him. Only the the military. During the rehearsals I heard nothing more from Strehler.
There were also problems with the knight's costume that you refused.
Lohengrin was to perform as a knight, a warrior. He appeared in a knight's costume. However, that was not made to the body, as was done in the Middle Ages, but I had to squeeze myself into it. That armor weighed almost fifty kilograms. Strehler and Frigerio thought it was fantastic, but I couldn't breathe.
How do theater practitioners react to singers' very plausible arguments in such situations?
Not at all. Nowadays, a singer is exclusively a puppet who has to get ready and participate in everything. Uncertainty is also a cause. Directors cobble together a concept in small back rooms, and when a singer says he can't do it, they are lost. A director of the old school, on the other hand, would immediately offer a different solution. This was the case with all the good directors I worked with, and it is the same today. As an example I would like to mention Rudolf Noelte again. Every time he asked, overly polite as he is, if I could do it this way. If I said no, he immediately found another solution, which was usually even better than the original. This is where I think the good director shows himself. His approach remains unchanged, it's only about a few details that are not immediately feasible. With such directors I never had problems, because they are interested in the work and not exclusively in themselves and their ideas. With a Noelte, the ideas come from the work, because he understands it and doesn't just want to argue politically.
If you are disappointed in such a renowned house as the Scala, you must ask yourself whether the legends are still true, whether the aura that surrounds such a theater is still true.
The legends are absolutely not correct. The Scala, Bayreuth, Berlin, Dresden, etc. have an aura of holiness from the past, because people know that in these theaters roamed all those who had names and fame in this art. This determines the aura of a house. The contradiction between this reputation and the actual artistic level is often very painful. At the moment I am at a point where I no longer feel like singing in the opera. And God knows how much I love doing it. But I don't need it. I can also give concerts and song recitals, and I like that very much.
An insight that saddens me.
It makes me most sad myself. From staging to staging I become more and more disillusioned. You also get older and make demands. It gets worse and worse.
And that brings us back to the responsibility of theater management.
After all, the theater directors are usually the people who do it themselves. How should they change it? Only someone who is only administratively and generally artistically responsible could do that. The former theater directors only acted themselves in exceptional cases. Of course, there was a Mahler, a Gründgens, but that was a different category; most of them were only theater directors. Today, with the possible exception of Grische Barfuss in Düsseldorf, there is hardly anyone who is not also artistically active. If you run a theater, you can't direct or conduct at the same time. Liebermann recognized this; he kept his house free. What kind of climate can develop at a theater when most of the people who work there don't even know or get to see the artistic director. This affects the overall quality. Although the conditions for quality work are certainly given, the theaters are secured, they have a huge apparatus. That is slowly the only thing that is left of the theater. Today you have the bloated apparatus and hardly any people who you either dislike or like, but who stand by their cause.
Isn't there a generation of singers growing up that already works a priori with this willingness to compromise?
That goes without saying. And that also understand less and less how to move on stage, that does not know what a role entails, what should be done with it in terms of stagecraft. That is frightening. And it doesn't matter to them either. When I look at the stage, I often do not believe my eyes.
This is in sharp contrast to the directional theater, which we claim to cherish.
Those are just slogans. "Regietheater" doesn't exist, there are good directors who make good theater. But that's the way it always used to be. Regietheater is in itself a silly word. Theater always needs direction. It is the same with the word musical theater, as I said before. Because opera has been put in a bad spot, reminding one of grandpa, or something conservative, regressive. But good opera was always musical theater. It has become the cover name for provocative staging, working with scenic slogans that do not reflect at all on the essentials, namely the human relationships within a piece. In the last twenty years, personality has been deliberately suppressed on stage; people only want puppets who stand there, collect their fees, and go home without any critical comments. Moreover, I must ask you: what is an opera director? What makes him different from a stage director? If he has understood a work, that distinction does not exist, Noelte and Chéreau are the best examples of this. Only today there are few who understand a piece in this way. Noelte, for example, always gets a response because the audience notices that they are seeing the play. So that the direction is hardly noticed. I want to see a play in the theater and not the whims of a director who wants to put himself in the spotlight. These circus acts no longer have anything to do with the essence... I will certainly continue to make opera, but only after a long test period, with people I know. Beforehand you have to look at the stage setting, the costumes and before everything else you have to talk to the director.
Above all, it should be natural, that the team leading a new staging should work out the concept with the singers.
This should be self-evident, but it is by no means so. Normally, before beginning work, each director should show the artists the sets and clarify his concept. However, this would weaken the director's solitary position. For today, the director, conductor and set designer are the creators. And then there are a few more people on the stage, which would be the singers. They belong, unfortunately, because without them you can't make an opera. But on closer inspection one would much rather do it without them. It sounds grotesque, but it is so. The opposite of this, namely opera without direction, which has also existed, is equally an abomination to me. A golden mean would have to be found, a collaboration of all involved. As things stand, I can only concur with Domingo, who does not come to rehearsals anyway, as he did in Munich. In Milan I was on stage for weeks. Until the premiere, one is so frantic that one can hardly perform optimally. A sad summary: I have been singing opera for seventeen years. In all that time I have met maybe three or four directors with whom the rehearsal work was really worthwhile. All those other weeks I stood there wasting my time. Time that was stolen from me. A very sad but true balance.
Source : Imre Fabian im Gespräch mit René Kollo, Orell Füssli, 1982. Translation: Jos Hermans