ack in the days of the nickelodeon, ten-minute silent films based on popular opera plots wowed immigrant audiences sitting spellbound in the flicker of the projector beam. Given the long association of movies and opera, it's surprising how long it took opera managers to realize the value in bringing film directors to the opera stage. Shortly after Rudolf Bing's arrival as Met general manager, in 1950, Hollywood director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, fresh from his successes with A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve, staged a new production of La Bohème. Luchino Visconti, of course, created landmark opera productions around Maria Callas in the 1950s, and Francis
Ford Coppola was enticed to stage Gottfried von Einem's The Visit of the Old Lady for its U.S. premiere at San Francisco Opera in 1972. But it wasn't until the early 1980s, after Academy Award-winner John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) directed Plácido Domingo in Les Contes d'Hoffmann at Covent Garden, that established filmmakers really began flocking to opera.
In recent years, directors such as Schlesinger, the late Herbert Ross (Pennies from Heaven), Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant), Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo), Coline Serreau (Chaos), Robert Altman (Gosford Park), William Friedkin (The Exorcist) and Andrei Konchalovsky (Runaway Train) have come to opera after many successful years primarily as film and theater directors. Maximilian Schell (Marlene) began tackling opera only late in his career, after distinguishing himself first as an actor, then as a director of plays and films. Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge) and Patrice Chéreau (La Reine Margot) resisted categorization, alternating stage, opera and film work from the beginning. For most of these artists, all the performing arts spring from a single basic element: storytelling, pure and simple. That process of effectively transmitting a tale to an audience is what unifies and guides their work, no matter what the medium.
Many film directors don't feel at all constrained by the opera stage. "I accept from the word go that it's a different set of ground rules," says Beresford. "And in a way, it's very exciting working out the direction of it with those boundaries in mind. I find that quite thrilling. It's interesting to sit down and know that the amount of music is finite, and that the singers are locked into saying the words of the libretto. The music between one aria and the next may be very brief, and you have to work out your dramatic groupings and staging within something that's cut and dried." Schell, whose Lohengrin met with acclaim at Los Angeles Opera last year, agrees. "There are no frustrations involved for me. Stage or screen, it's always the same square. The only thing I miss is the close-up, but you can do that by concentrating light."
Konchalovsky, however, is not convinced that many directors can move easily among different media. "I don't think film directors can direct operas. They just can't. It's like asking a ballet dancer to sing, or a violinist to play chess. You know, I'm not just a film director. I'm a film director, a theater director, an opera director -- and there's nothing in common among them, except that a director has to direct. There is still an absolute schism, an abyss, between genres. For some preposterous reason, critics will say, 'Film director Andrei Konchalovsky made some cinematic decisions in directing this opera.' There is such ignorance in these words! There is nothing cinematic in opera! People stand and open their mouths, and you see their fillings and dentures, and they scream about intimate things, and the audience cries. Opera is the biggest lie in the world! But -- at the same time -- opera makes us understand the metaphysics of reality."
Of course, the sheer theatrical genius of a Verdi or Puccini can make a director's job easier. But what of the burden of trying to wring compelling dramatic performances out of singers, many of whom have vocal talents that far outweigh their histrionic gifts? Schell solves the problem his own way: he has the singers sit down at the first rehearsal and read through their parts, speaking their lines as actors would, and embedding the words in their emotional memory. "I had seen a lot of opera," he says, "and often I never understood what they were singing. So I decided to have everyone sit down and read the libretto aloud, as they would a normal play. And it is fantastically helpful. Even in Traviata -- of course, Verdi is a master at putting words into music -- to know what you're singing is a completely different experience."
There is general consensus that acting on the opera stage has improved in recent years, and directors now work with singers who are in the main better equipped as actors than the generation that preceded them. "Did you ever see tapes of Jussi Bjoerling acting?" asks Beresford. "God, he was horrible! But what a voice! If only you could listen to him without having to watch him! Of course, the younger modern singers are much more aware of the fact that acting is critical -- Pat Racette, for one. She's phenomenal. She's a very sophisticated actress with a wonderful understanding of roles. When I was directing [Carlisle Floyd's] Cold Sassy Tree, she would come up and talk to me about character interpretation the way a film actress would, with the same sort of detail and questions, which I always welcome."
For Robert Altman, working with Ben Heppner and Catherine Malfitano in Lyric Opera of Chicago's world premiere of William Bolcom's McTeague in 1992 was a memorable experience. "I thought they were great, and I was really thrilled with their acting," he says. "But in opera, the main concern of most people is the music and the singing. And I have to leave that judgment to someone else. The process of what comes first, what's most important, is the problem, and many times it's hard to put their physiognomy into -- well, they can be hard to cast." Altman began his opera-directing career with The Rake's Progress, first at the University of Michigan, then at Lille in France, but since that production he has chosen to direct only original operas in which he is involved from the beginning as co-librettist. "I don't consider myself an opera director," he explains. "I consider myself a theater director. To me, it's theater. I can't read music -- I'm really inept in those areas. I don't have anything to offer the singers [of standard repertory operas], who already know those operas when they come in -- they have to. I can't help them musically. I don't feel I have any purpose there, so I've avoided it." Altman re-teams with Bolcom and McTeague co-librettist Arnold Weinstein in Chicago in 2004 for A Wedding, based on his 1978 film. "I have a nice concept for A Wedding, and Bill and Arnold have done a great job on it, so I think it'll be a lot of fun to do. But I think it will be the last of these I'll do. Well, there I go -- I should never say never. But when I finished McTeague ten years ago, I said, 'That's enough for me.' I was very frustrated by it -- frustrated by the rehearsals, frustrated by the very, very tight union rules. You don't run into that quite as much in the theater."
Schell has a simple remedy for those frustrations -- he plays soccer with the tech crew. "When I was doing La Traviata in Basel, I wanted to change very quickly between the two scenes of Act II -- from the country estate to Flora's house in less than ten seconds, with Flora's guests rushing up to the front of the stage from the horizon in the rear. You know, in Verdi's libretto, that scene occurs that very evening -- not months later, as some people assume. So I thought it was important to show the change as quickly as possible. My God, the poor stagehands! They worked so hard to get that done in ten seconds! I think it was only because I agreed to play soccer with them. Soccer with the stagehands came to my rescue in Berlin, too, for the quick scene changes I wanted in Siegfried Matthus's [Cornet Christoph Rilke's Song of Love and Death]. Götz Friedrich said to me, 'Oh, how do you get them to work so fast? They never do that for me.' I said, 'Well, that's because you don't play soccer with them!'"
It's true that a director who has spent time on Hollywood film sets, where he is used to having his every need met in the blink of an eye, has to make do with less instant gratification when working for an opera house. Within those walls, he can no longer play God. "The director in opera," says Konchalovsky, "is a frustrated person, for many reasons. First of all, directing is secondary. In theater, the director is the demigod, the creator, but in opera, it's the conductor. At the end of the rehearsal, everyone runs to the conductor -- no one goes to the director, unless it's a technical thing. So in that sense, you have to know your place. Certain directors, I think, get frustrated and are afraid they won't be noticed. When I direct opera, there is no satisfaction for my vanity whatsoever, because I'm subservient to other things. Unfortunately, not everyone can dare to say to the conductor, 'You know, you're not bad, but I think you could improve this here and here....' Especially not the director! But a conductor can tell the director, 'Oh no, I don't think what you're doing is good.' Everyone thinks they understand directing. As a director, you have to be extremely humble with people, otherwise you're going to be very frustrated. But if you know at the beginning that you've come here to serve the music, then maybe you'll come out without much damage."
The rapid spread of projected titles has been embraced by most directors, who see titles as having revolutionized the operagoing experience. "No question that they've helped widen the audience for opera," says Baz Luhrmann, whose 1990 production of La Bohème for Australian Opera received wide acclaim. He is about to direct a similar production for Broadway. Luhrmann is no fan of opera in translation. "We've all heard terrible translations of opera into English. The poetry and the feeling of the original language in the mouth fits the emotionality of it." He breaks into a few bars of "O soave fanciulla." "If it's not sung in the language it was written in, it robs the work of a large part of the emotional gesture." Beresford is convinced that opera has benefited enormously from the advent of titles. "Now the audience knows every single moment and every nuance," he says. "You can't take dramatic short cuts now. I'm always saying to the singers, 'Look, you can't be doing things that don't relate to what you're saying, because everyone in the audience knows what you're saying. It's all written up there. It's got to be completely dramatically coherent.'"
With titles making opera accessible to a wider audience, and film directors entering the fold, opera is even being tolerated by Hollywood. "When I was first in Hollywood, in my early days," says Luhrmann, "they used to call opera 'that unspeakable waste of time.' But now, because so many film directors have become interested in opera and are doing it, there's a much bigger awareness of it. Plácido Domingo has been a strong force in L.A. with the opera, and he's always trying to bring in directors from the film industry. Opera's not always easy for a director. With the music and libretto already predetermined for you, it's often bloody hard dealing with the constraints. But it's like making a movie -- if the script is really tight, your creativity flies within the constraint. And it's fantastic if you can get it right. It's very fulfilling for a director. I think you're going to see a lot more film directors in opera."
He's right. Academy Award-winner Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) is negotiating with English National Opera for a project to be determined, and 2006 will bring a new Ring cycle for Bayreuth by Breaking the Waves director Lars von Trier. (Despite widespread rumors and speculation, George Lucas has not committed to direct a Los Angeles Ring, though Industrial Light & Magic, Lucas's digital production facility, has signed on.) If Roman Polanski is finally allowed to return to the U.S. following his legal troubles of the 1970s, he may find that opera houses here are awaiting him with open arms, as Munich, Paris and Spoleto have done for his Rigoletto, Les Contes d'Hoffmann and Lulu. Could a Jane Campion Traviata or an Adrian Lyne Salome be far behind?
ERIC MEYERS is the author of Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis, recently published in paperback by Da Capo Press.
photo credits: © George Hixson/HGO (Beresford); © Dan Rest/LOC 2002 (McTeague)
OPERA NEWS, August 2002 Copyright © 2002 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.
Luhrmann on the set of Moulin Rouge (2001) with Nicole Kidman, opposite;
Maximilian Schell directing Erste Liebe (First Love) in 1970
Tenor Joseph Evans and Beresford in rehearsal for Houston's Cold Sassy Tree, 2000, above;
Jon Voight and Konchalovsky at work on Runaway Train (1985), below
Altman's world-premiere production of McTeague at Lyric Opera of Chicago, 1992, with Malfitano (center) and Heppner (far right)