Interview : Mike Ashman
As a British director, what are your experiences of German opera houses?
The system is completely different in terms of how rehearsals take place and how many performances there are. Also, the way revivals are done is alarming. If you go back and see your own work after two or three years, it's often unrecognisable. I'm not talking about moves and blocking - I don't care so much about that - but about the fact that whatever intensity or meaning you gave the production will have weakened into a vague singers' theatre. You see that there was originally a production on one side of the stage with ideas and a concept, then you get the singers performing it on a completely different plane. In Britain, revivals are given three or four weeks' rehearsal, and the original director, or at least a very strong assistant, is often asked back. Now, if I can't see a production in Germany in its first season with the original cast directed by the original director, I don't go, because you are not seeing anybody's work other than what needs to happen to get that show on, to keep the system going.
Is that because in Germany there are just so many performances of so many different operas?
Yes. The civic pride in theatre in Germany - which I think is a glorious thing - demands a large repertory in a season. They want two or three performances thrown in of Tristan, even if the production was ten years ago and nothing now bears any resemblance to what was originally happening. I can understand a German intendant's or theatre's need to have that system, but it just doesn't do it for me! One thing that is absolutely right about the British way of doing things is the stage management system. You have a stage manager, a deputy stage manager and two assistant stage managers in the rehearsal room with you the whole time. They know the production and they take it on stage. In Germany, having the production assistants transport the production on to the stage in the last couple of weeks of the rehearsal period in which nobody onstage knows what's going on is harrowing, unnecessarily ageing for everyone concerned, dangerous, and not very good for a sense of Gesamtkunstwerk. A production has, after all, grown up as an entity including the technical side.
What is your experience of German audiences?
Let me say something first about Japanese audiences. When you go to Japan, you are told that the audiences there have different expectations, that they want this and that, and that Japan is very dependent on big names. What I found there, at the most extreme place away from one's home that one can work, with an obviously different culture around you, was that the things that moved and affected people in the theatrical/musical experience were the same wherever you worked. As for laughter and comedy, if it's funny people seem to laugh and if it's not funny, people won't. In Germany the strengths and weaknesses of a production seem to work the same way as they do in England, but - and this I find remarkable and fantastic - ideas are very important to the cultural life of the German arts community. You can't just do a well-manicured, slick show and add fantastic acting on top of that, unless it's based on something which is about meaning and is linked to some sort of discussion of who we are and who we're not. That seems to me in Germany to override any aesthetic argument or even technical judgement as to whether somebody is, or is not, singing in tune.
What were the particular pluses and problems of working in Bayreuth?
I know, for some bizarre reason, that everybody wants you to slam into Wolfgang Wagner. But I've got to say that, for me, it lived up to every expectation you could have of the building. One of the great things when you go to a theatre that can help a production is that it is well organised. The more time that you can be in the rehearsal room not worried about other things, the more time you get for lighting and stagework, even in a very complex operation like Bayreuth where they are opening seven operas in seven days - all that has to be beautifully streamlined. Well, it is! Bayreuth just is incredibly, phenomenally well run. With the Lohengrin I went there for the interview/audition to get the job - there were several directors up for it. Wolfgang, at the beginning of that process, gave us a very hard time but, a bit like a mating ritual, once you had locked horns and grappled and proved yourself, nobody ever has given me more support and help to achieve what I wanted to achieve. There were things in the production that Wolfgang didn’t understand and like, but when it came to that terrible moment when you face the press and someone questioned one of the things that I knew Wolfgang personally didn’t care for at all, he immediately got up and defended it as if it was the best idea anyone had ever had.
Is there such a thing as ‘Werktreue’? Are you the servant of the work or the composer, or is the work raw material for your own productions?
There is something that can be 'werktreu'. If there is a living composer or writer, you can have them in the rehearsal room, and you can discuss and develop something between you. It can be very strong. I've done lots with modern composers and writers and I've never had one bit of bother or problem with them being upset or unhappy. What I think is impossible is to imagine that you know what Mozart or Wagner or Shakespeare would have said had they been present in the room. Consequently, I would say that I don't want anybody else telling me what they think Mozart or Wagner or Shakespeare would have said. From a philosophical point of view that's a nonsense. We know how living composers react to things you point out to them written in their script or score, saying ‘Don't take any notice of that’, or ‘I was young then’, or, to the conductor, ‘It's just too slow even if it's the „right" tempo’. This is the nature of being creative. There's also a huge misunderstanding about stage instructions. Stage instructions are a set of pieces of text that are aimed at the people who are presenting it onstage. They are nothing to do with the audience - that's why they're in brackets. When I, or you, or David Alden stages Götterdämmerung, nobody gets one ounce less or more Wagner. Conductors cut or change orchestration and choral writing - and people don't mind about that because they don't notice (which I think is interesting). I shouldn't think there is one Wagner opera seen today in a major opera house which is not musically altered in some way by the conductor. But the stage instructions are not meant as information in the nature of a legal document which is binding on the people who buy the ticket to the piece! They are helpful indications of moods, situations, locations and, of course, are completely bound by the conventions of the theatre of their time and so need to be updated/rethought/interpreted. This goes on to a bigger question about art now - an actual Derrida concept, the ‘yearning for presence’. In an age after the death of God, where we have so much uncertainty, the idea that we can have an individual relationship with a genius is somehow a reinstigation of a very important presence in our life. It’s a nonsensical misappropriation of psychological energy and will lead to tears – but it does somehow replace a religious experience for a lot of people.
Should opera affect society ?
That’s exactly what it should do. The Wagner revolution in the nineteenth century – and I still feel this is his greatest achievement rather than any specific piece – is this idea that theatre should be the central communal religious experience of a society. As someone who doesn't have any faith in God, I really believe that. That is, to me, Derrida's ‘necessary presence’, but not, of course, following any ideology or even aesthetic school. You also have to keep an open mind to all things that might reveal important truths and important experiences. So, yes: opera should affect society, and my admiration for Wagner is based on his believing that. He spent his life trying to write pieces that would have the power to effect that change. That's the all-important, ongoing challenge of his theatre: it debates all aspects of our society - politics, religion, archetypal psychology, the most difficult arcane parts of living. And the theatre is the place where you get all of that. Coming from my background, it was going to the theatre that gave me a chance of seeing a bigger world. I know it has the ability to change your perceptions of almost anything. But if theatre is only entertainment, it soon becomes flabby and decadent. When you think of what cinema can be, as opposed to what it's become in terms of entertainment and Hollywood commerce, it seems to me directly the debate Wagner was having. His theatre too was becoming commercial and just about entertaining people who came exhausted out of a long day at work. I'm sure that he wrote these long pieces so that they couldn't actually be presented in that kind of circumstance, tagged on to the end of a working day. You had to reinvent the festival. For Wagner it was all part of a scheme of rejuvenation of theatre as a cultural entity.
So Brecht was wrong - Wagner isn't culinary opera at all?
Absolutely not. You can see that at Covent Garden. The Wagner operas sell out because 40% of the seats are pre-bought by corporate entertainment for their clients. They find the increasing length of each of the Ring operas more difficult, so there are empty seats, even though there are people queuing up from five o'clock in the morning who can't get in. You don't go to Wagner with the idea that this is a culinary delight. Opera does need to affect society, but we can honestly say that the Wagner revolution has completely failed: it doesn't seem that theatre at this point is of any importance to us at all.