Reading List: Warum Oper?

The last few weeks of my reading-on-public-transit time have been spent with "Warum Oper?" (Why Opera?) a collection of interviews with opera directors which was published in 2005. Barbara Beyer, herself an opera director, leads 14 conversations circling around this question. "Why opera?" quickly splits into "Why do you dedicate yourself to engaging with opera?" or "Why does (or should) society engage with opera?" The answers provided by those interviewed are remarkable for being both rigorously thought out and intensely personal. Working one's way through these conversations provides insights and opinions from a "who's who" of directors working primarily in German-speaking Europe: Calixto Bieito, Claus Guth, Peter Konwitschny, and Martin Kusej among them. Somewhat to my surprise, Karoline Gruber was the only woman whom Beyer interviewed. I loved reading the book, but its virtues make it difficult to summarize. Rather than working through a set list of questions, the conversations as reproduced here seem to flow from topic to topic, responding to issues raised, sometimes structured to provide contrast with (or responses to) other interviews in the book. As someone not very familiar with the history of movements and key figures in 20th-century opera direction, I enjoyed the background provided on previous generations of directors, and was surprised by the diversity of approaches and philosophies represented by those interviewed. I was also impressed by what all the directors (with the possible exception of Sebastian Baumgartner) shared: a deep passion for and trust in opera scores, and tireless willingness to challenge themselves.

Beyer's system of questioning brought out several shared topics, on which the directors expressed a range of opinions which (among other things) exposes the absurdity of the notion that anyone doing anything that could be described as Regietheater must be a member of some sort of iconoclastic cabal.  As Karoline Gruber points out, any way of staging an opera is an act of interpretation.The question of audience engagement brought out perhaps the most conspicuously diverse replies, from expressions of faith in the possibility of simultaneously challenging and drawing in an audience; to vehement disavowals of a wish to "educate" audiences; to hesitancy to speak of collective audiences, working rather with the idea of engaging as many individuals as possible. Hans Neuenfels offered in summing up that the public should sense that something is happening on stage that is being taken seriously, and that is not patronizing. The discussion of rehearsal process and concept development (used loosely, not as a translation of Konzept) might be of special interest to beginning professionals, but I found it fascinating from a lay perspective. The directors' points of entry for working with a piece range from extensive writing (Baumgartner) to being caught by one particular musical phrase (Esterhazy and others) and were often given as different from opera to opera. Claus Guth speaks of how he was inspired by Poe in taking on Der Fliegende Holländer; Christof Nel offers a meditation on feminist interpretations of music ("Salome's dance doesn't have to be a piece of perfumed orientalism; it doesn't have to be filtered through the male gaze") that made me want to revisit his work. Peter Mussbach discusses the score in most detail, but the music is central for nearly all. The rehearsal process is also spoken of as crucial--although not always in a positive sense--to a production's development; Wieler and Morabito, Baumgartner, and Gruber all described their rehearsal processes as heavily improvisatory. It was Calixto Bieito, somewhat to my surprise, who laid the most emphasis on the importance of positivity in rehearsal space.

So what happens when the work actually gets to the stage? Understandably, the book doesn't go into this in nearly as much detail, as what's on stage is of course available for assessment and interpretation by audience members all the time. Still, I would have been interested in more discussion of work with singers and stage logistics (there is some; the role of the chorus is discussed in some detail both by Kusej and Wieler and Morabito.) It is Kusej who points to the centrality of the work between the director and the conductor, and the importance of the latter not only in political terms but in getting a work to be heard anew. Andreas Homoki engages with the perennial question of clichéd ideas about operatic acting and choreography, concluding "a gesture doesn't have to be naturalistic; it does have to clearly arise out of a realistic emotion." A profound belief in the emotional power of opera, and in the mysterious alchemy through which the art form can communicate emotion, were also given eloquent expression. "For instance," says Paul Esterhazy, "that Gott! cry of Florestan's goes through bone and marrow together; those words spoken on a stage wouldn't reach that."

Many of the interviewed directors were impressively articulate, and all were stimulating, but Peter Konwitschny proved decidedly the most quotable. His commentary on the fact that some audience members walked out on his Don Giovanni and slammed the doors so hard that the Komische Oper had to have them repaired: "That is stupid and dramatically false, but of course better than having them fall asleep." Beyer's attempts at polemicizing were consistently resisted, but met with impassioned explanation rather than stonewalling. Konwitschny was eloquent concerning his desire "to keep these sacred works of art [hehren Kunstwerke] grounded, through ordinary and sometimes through drastic situations." Hans Neuenfels offered a bon mot which I think deserves to be applied in reviews of numerous lazy productions: "You can't make a staging of an opera 'contemporary' by sticking a Porsche in it instead of a carriage." Many of the directors assessed similar problems in opera, as well as similar opportunities: reception traditions that detract from or obscure the real substance of works, and the relatively small number of operas in the standard repertory. For all that, I came away from reading with my own optimism renewed by the numerous examples of faith in opera as open and evolving; not a closed form or a closed system but always in conversation with--sometimes in tension with--the world which receives it.