Deciding on the piece with which to inaugurate my Royal Opera tenure kept me up nights. I chose Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in collaboration with director Christof Loy. It is a chamber opera, thus giving me the opportunity to get to know my first-chair players really well, and it addresses so many issues around creativity, composing, putting on a show, improvisation, the myriad obstacles, sponsorship – all clothed in wondrous-seeming chaos. A comedy and a tragedy, together. My own personal tragi-comedy started on day one of rehearsals when, early on that very morning, I had to have an emergency root canal dental procedure. If you could have seen what I looked like at that first rehearsal …
We had several heart-stopping moments in rehearsal with a visible stage lift continually giving up the ghost, costing precious rehearsal time. I thought we’d never open. When we did, after my entrance bow, I turned around to the orchestra and my electric-powered music stand popped up by itself to neck level. It was hysterical for sure, the musicians were in stitches, but I had to figure out in seconds (though it seemed like minutes) how to fix it, which I did. Phew.
The youth of this piece, conveying the spirit and talent of the young Composer, is like a drug for me: the backstage goings-on are a true picture of my daily life. Christof produced a sassy and ultimately very moving production – very much in the spirit of Strauss’s opera, with opulence and simultaneous elements of pure silliness. For the Prologue he and set designer Herbert Murauer created a sumptuous setting that captured the atmosphere of an “upstairs/downstairs”.
The downstairs was a somewhat grotty space with all the confusion of pre-performance – the tenor screaming about his wig, the soprano erupting like a cartoon diva, the soubrette flirting with her players, the composer of the evening’s opera in despair with all the last-minute changes … and a burgeoning love story. Does this sound confusing? It is. The evening is supposed to comprise a “serious” opera part with characters from Greek mythology, then a lighter comic part with commedia dell’arte characters.
I almost prefer this part of the show to the second. When it’s all on its feet and running, you feel you are part of an amazing improvisation act, yet it’s rehearsed to within an inch of its life.
The [second part] was set in a fantasy version of a drawing room, very spacious with big doors, and yet somehow retaining its intimacy, a very beautiful and vivid psychological space in which Ariadne could suffer. No need for the rock that she is supposed to be lying on in the libretto. The extreme beauty of the setting was crucial because when the comedians came on mid-scene with Truffaldino wearing a biker’s leather outfit and Zerbinetta in a tiny miniskirt, the way this impossibly out-of-place group looked as they barged in after the prima donna had been singing one dirge after another was so ludicrous that it caused a real shock.
For my second new production, I invited Keith Warner to direct an opera I had been longing to conduct: Berg’s Wozzeck. Wozzeck is a poor, pathetic, downtrodden soldier, mentally unwell, treated abusively by his Captain, exploited by the army Doctor who does psychological and physical experiments on him, and cuckolded by the Drum Major who sleeps with his partner Marie. Though the opera has the tight dramaturgy of Büchner’s original play, its scenic structure is laid out musically using traditional dance forms, much like a Bach partita. Berg successfully used atonality and followed the advanced language developed by his former teacher Arnold Schoenberg to express the harsh reality and cruelty of some scenes but, crucially, he was not imprisoned by this style. He was not afraid to come back to Mahler’s late-Romantic musical language when it suited him, to create moments that are uniquely moving.
Keith, like me, was doing Wozzeck for the first time, and as his productions often have dark set designs, I said to him and his stage designer, the late Stefanos Lazaridis, “Why don’t you do something in white instead of black?” They came up with a space that couldn’t have been whiter, a laboratory where the Doctor – a loony and very menacing character – does his experiments on Wozzeck. There were glass cases filled with earth, plant life, what looked like animal life and other more gruesome images. Wozzeck suffers from severe hallucinations, and these are embodied in what he sees in those cases – he sees both what is actually there and what he imagines to be there.
Keith carried this idea forward later in the opera after Wozzeck has murdered Marie. The lake is represented by a huge glass case full of water over which Marie is killed. Wozzeck returns in search of the murder weapon, but the allure of the water and his intensely fraught state of mind lead him to give up and drown himself. When I think of how this was achieved, it still startles me. Naturally, Wozzeck had to get into the glass case to complete the image. Matthias Goerne, who sang the title role in the premiere run of performances, had been a champion swimmer for East Germany when he was younger, and said to us, “If you give me an oxygen pump and you are able to hide it, I’ll stay underwater with my eyes open for the six or seven minutes during the following scene when the Doctor and the Captain come by and during the orchestral interlude after that.” This is what the audience was to stare at, a horrific sight and wrenchingly uncomfortable, yet underpinned by some of the most moving music ever written for the theatre. The staging of this scene was one of the greatest coups de théâtre I have ever seen.
Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur, with a libretto by the poet David Harsent, a retelling of the Greek mythological story of the Minotaur (half man, half bull), Theseus and Ariadne, was tailor-made for Birtwistle who had been preoccupied with myth for decades. The music he drew forth for the subject was not only primal and dreamlike, but also vividly human. It churns as the sea churns, wave on wave, but slowly, menacingly, keeping you aware of the terrible depths below. Harry orchestrated using every possible combination of bass instruments to create a thick molasses of musical matter that acts as an unstable foundation to everything that goes on above. It is eerie and hypnotic, but then there are flecks of light.
Supplementing this dark foundation was a dizzying array of percussion instruments, so numerous that we had to put many of them in the boxes on each side of the orchestra pit, giving a bird’s-eye-view to the audience of the kaleidoscopic inventiveness of the composer. It was theatre in itself watching the players negotiate their often freakishly demanding parts. Throughout rehearsals, Harry kept tinkering with the detail of the percussion parts, so much so that by the end of [rehearsals] I had no idea what he had taken out, added or enhanced. So much for my orchestra score.
Drama abounds in the ritualistic chorus scenes. The music becomes unrelentingly rhythmic and barbaric. The Innocents are sent to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, the drama demands music of the utmost savagery. It was up to me and my second conductor (we needed another one) to achieve a level of precision that made sense of it all. It was a truly scary ride. Though the chorus and orchestra were sharing the same basic rhythmic groove, which was complicated enough in itself, a group of drummers placed around them on stage was at the same time hammering out at full volume a completely different set of ritualistic and attention-seeking rhythms.
Harry sat next to me during all the preparatory music and staging rehearsals. Can you imagine what an inspiration that was for a conductor? I had myriad questions for him as I felt almost lost at the beginning, trying to decipher his musical language, having had no previous experience with any of it. A couple of weeks in, he paid me the greatest possible compliment: “You know, you conduct this like music!”
Sir John Tomlinson in the title role delivered a towering performance, capturing both the Minotaur’s frightening animalistic qualities and his hugely expressive and ultimately heart-breaking human ones. He did this both through his singing and his body language in a series of dream sequences where he is given the gift of speech. John frightened us and yet made us pity him, his enormous voice baleful and deeply personal. The sounds he conjured before uttering actual words were hair-raising and certainly painful to listen to. (I mean that in a good way, John.)
From the moment Lady Macbeth was first performed it caused controversy. Stalin himself was scandalised and set out to ruin Shostakovich – even putting his life in danger. Richard Jones’s 2004 production had all the brazenness and bravado and daring the piece begs for. It was my first production with Richard – the start of a wonderful ongoing collaboration.
I had first conducted the opera at La Monnaie in 1999, when the combination of its smouldering, brutal, violent, sexy music, coupled with wildly zany parts where the music parodies a circus, brought a completely new dimension to my idea of theatre. The difficulty of the score and the great challenge it presents for performers is a vital part of the theatrical experience. For the conductor, the challenges include very tricky ensembles, testing everyone’s rhythmic sense; dealing with often huge forces and the logistics that go with that; and the need for a film-score conductor’s precision of timing even in the intimate scenes. Precision is a word that I associate with Richard – but I don’t mean precision in a cold way. He has the courage to demand that the singers be absolutely precise about their expression … the expression has to be exactly specific to the given moment
In Lady Macbeth, Richard ingeniously used robotic elements for parody, most especially when he was working with the chorus: for instance, the stupidly mechanical movements of the police, rendering them automaton-like, emphasising this cynically ironic and biting vignette by Shostakovich on the ineptitude of the police in Russia.
Richard loves creating laughter at the most seemingly inappropriate moments. Katerina (the Lady Macbeth of the title) and her lover Sergei kill her husband, Zinovy – in Richard’s production she gives Sergei an axe to finish the job. After the grisly act, a shift in lighting reveals Katerina carrying a plastic supermarket bag dripping with blood. Obviously Zinovy’s head is in it, and although the moment is beyond terrifying, every night it got the hugest wave of laughter from the audience.
For all the opera’s stinging irony and dazzling daredevilry, Lady Macbeth is a profound tragedy: the final scene is barren desolation. After Katerina and Sergei have been convicted of murder and are doing penal labour in Siberia, Sergei begins an affair with one of the other convicts. Katerina is devastated and sings a plaintive monologue about a forest and a lake where the water is pitch black. There’s almost nothing for the conductor to do there except just listen to the soprano intone her hopelessness – and how wonderful Shostakovich’s theatre is here when just a few notes from the singer and a held pedal note in the bass can create the most moving stillness, in such contrast to what has gone before.
When Mark-Anthony Turnage and his librettist Richard Thomas pitched Anna Nicole to us, we were at first taken aback. It certainly offered an opportunity to bring to the stage something of today, subject matter that was still very much in the news and therefore remarkably prescient. I will admit that it took half of the rehearsal period before I was able to jettison those “What were we thinking?” thoughts.
Several months before rehearsals started, workshops were held to sing and read through the piece, provoking lively discussion about structure, tempo, length and language. This last item was hotly debated. Richard had written a no-holds-barred text full of expletives, and though it was hilarious fun to hear such outrageous words sung by opera singers, it was also a bit embarrassing, at least at the start.
How do you cast a title role such as this? There was never any question; it had to be Eva-Maria Westbroek. The real Anna Nicole was reportedly a very sweet person, but she made some bizarre choices in her life, driven by the rebel within her. A dream role, I think. Though some of the part is written “operatically”, vocally speaking large chunks of it are written in a quasi-pop-music idiom. Eva-Maria was game for all of it, even the prosthetic breasts and the pole dancing. She was radiant in the role, and was hugely sympathetic, as she is in real life. Other terrific roles were that of the mother, an imperious Susan Bickley; the oil billionaire J Howard Marshall, played outrageously by Alan Oke; the lawyer Stern, the smarmiest version of the amazing Gerald Finley I’ve ever worked with; and Peter Hoare as the overwhelmed talkshow host Larry King.
The opera also featured a host of other character parts: lapdancers, pole dancers and a rock band. Mark-Anthony grew up, much as my orchestra and I did, with the pop and soul music of the 1970s, and we share a love of jazz, too. He used these idioms to create a raucously splashy, sexy, unmistakably American musical environment. But the whole “show” is underpinned by an orchestration that reveals his encyclopedic technical knowledge and his showbiz nous, using dissonance sparingly but tellingly. We had a blast. I was most definitely bouncing around as well in the pit.
This was as close to a West End or Broadway musical as the Royal Opera House was going to get, and the rehearsals, though fun, were punishing. The timing of everything had to be spot on. The orchestra were a turbo-charged pit band and we had to be all razzle-dazzle, meeting the obscene patter coming from the stage punch for punch. The trajectory of the piece leads us on a more distressing journey. The opera becomes darker, desperation creeping in. Though it became a difficult watch, it was an opportunity for all of us to find other colours, other tempi – a relief from the relentless sleaze. The ending, though inevitable, was devastating.