Opéra national de Paris (2024)

A l’occasion de la nouvelleproduction de Cosìfan tutte mise en scène par Anne Teresa DeKeersmaeker, rencontre en répétition avec les chanteurs Edwin Crossley-Mercer(Guglielmo) et Michèle Losier (Dorabella), et les danseurs Michaël Pomero(Guglielmo) et Cynthia Loemij (Fiordiligi).

© Anne Van Aerschot

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All the same, men and women alike

Così fan tutte received an unusual welcome. Mozart composed the opera in 1790, a year after the French Revolution and a year before his death. These two shadows hover over the opera. This explains why, musically speaking, this comedy expresses a feeling of loss. We sense a farewell to life and a farewell to an era. The first unanimously acclaimed performances were followed by the sudden death of Joseph II, head of the Holy Roman Empire. He was not only Mozart's patron and protector, but also one of the most illustrious political figures of the Enlightenment. In particular, he had reformed marital law so that women could give their consent before marrying. In other words, they were able, for the first time, to choose their partner. After the French Revolution and the Terror came the bourgeois restoration with its stricter morals, at the expense of women, as always. In this transformed climate, Così fan tutte suddenly seemed too light, too frivolous, too sexually explicit. No doubt, the libretto was also responsible, walking the tightrope as it does between opera buffa and opera seria, between comic and serious.

The opera is not misogynous, quite the contrary. Both interpretations - misogyny and excessive frivolity – reveal, I feel, superficial reading. Above all, superficial listening. Prima the musica, dopo le parole. First the music, then the words. For it is in the music that everything is played out. The music transforms the burlesque banality of this boulevard comedy into a deeply melancholic, almost cosmic-religious contemplation on the relationship between desire and death, and on the complexity of the human soul. Especially the music of the female characters. In reality, the men are portrayed as idiots. They act like machos. Only their wives' faithfulness counts, it is a question of honour vis-à-vis other men. To be cuckolded, betrayed by another man, was the supreme humiliation.

Yes, but the libretto is also less naive than onemight think. Despina, the slightly older maid, is the female counterpart of DonAlfonso. While the men supposedly go off to war, she obliges the women,afflicted and left at home, to face reality. "Do you really think yourfiancées who have gone to war willremain faithful? My young doves, have no illusions. Instead of sitting sobbing,do as I do, go hunting!" She makes a plea for feminine autonomy, forpleasure and a sense of reality. The process they undergo invites them to takea new look at relations between men and women.
For the men too, Ferrando first,make the unsettling observation that they may be in love with two women at thesame time and that their courtly and aristocratic notion of love is toosimplistic.

By trading their traditional uniforms for the exotic clothes ofAlbanian soldiers, they open a door that allows them to escape protocols. Allof a sudden, love becomes a terra incognita, a laboratory where it ispossible to carry out experiments without knowing the result in advance, evenfor the men. Così fan tutte's plot is often compared to a chemicalprocess: four characters are merged and the audience observes the result.

How would you explain them?

The period during which Mozart wrote the opera canalso be seen as a transformation in the alchemical sense. The French Revolution,the transmission of power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, also bidsfarewell to the established order and heralds a quest for other possible forms.But these elements are not enough to explain the music's melancholy, whichoften occurs at times when the text is relatively commonplace. Take for examplethe two couples' moment of separation, in Soave sia il vento, when themen supposedly leave for war.
The music goes much further than the plot itself.Few pieces of music express with such nuance and force the relation betweendesire and death. Wherever the word "desire" is sung, Mozart places achord containing an unknown, almost modern dissonance.

Desire is brought intotension from a harmonic point of view. The same thing happens in Le Nozze diFigaro when Barbarina loses her pin in the grass. She sings that she cannotfind her pin and fears that the intrigue will be divulged. The statement couldhardly be more banal on the surface. But the music is elegiac in beauty. Mozartexpresses here a feeling of loss that we can frankly describe as existential.It is tempting to consider this scene in the light of his approaching andfar-too premature death. In Mozart, this moment echoes a consciousness ofconcrete finitude, and also suggests a consciousness integrated into the whole.

The function of dance is to underline the tensionbetween text and music, and even at times to emphasise it. As in VortexTemporum, every musician, every singer in this case, is doubled by adancer. This duplication creates a third visible voice alongside the music andthe text. It was above all because of the music that, despite my doubts aboutopera as a medium, I accepted the Paris Opera's invitation: it is so full ofmovement, both bodily and emotional. Taking music as a starting point, I hopeto attain a higher degree of abstraction, and through it discover the essenceof the work. In most productions, the beauty and depth of the music is drownedunder draperies, costumes, doors that open and close.

No effort is spared tomake the intrigue and psychology clear. It is precisely these aspects thatinterest me the least. In this respect, Michael Haneke is the exception thatconfirms the rule. His approach was very realistic, yet his staging wasmasterful. Others update the situation, like Peter Sellars who transposes thestory into a modern American diner and insists on the buffa aspect. Myobjective is different again: to use dance to disperse the tension betweenthe instincts of life and death. Howcan we make Mozart's ideas readable or better still tangible, withoutinterpreting them? How can dance elevate the anecdotal dimensions of the plotto a higher, more human, even cosmic level? How can we ensure that we are nottalking about men and women but about masculine and feminine energies?

© Eléna Bauer / OnP

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Dominique Pitoiset looks back at Falstaff

Dominique Pitoiset's productionof Falstaffwas created in 1991. Bursting with life, it is making a comeback at the OpéraBastille, with Bryn Terfel in the title role. An occasion for the director tocast a fatherly eye on his now grown-up child.

I first got to know Falstaff through Shakespeare.At the time of this production's creation, I'd had some major successes in thetheatre with Love's Labour's Lost, The Tempest and Macbeth. I had come out of the German school, and had beenassistant to Karge and Langhoff, then Giorgio Strehler, who himself had been BertoltBrecht's assistant. So my approach to Verdi came about via a post-Brechtian,"tangible" theatre. We thought about the mediation of objects, how toincrease the focal points of the interaction between the singers. This workedrather well with Verdi because with him, the movements are"musicalised" – dictated by the musical writing.

I had taken it on with the conviction that we shouldn't do anything too contemporary with it, while being aware that an Elizabethan aesthetic wouldn't dialogue at all well with Verdi's music. I thought it would be interesting to exploit the discrepancies by creating a world on stage that was visually closer to Verdi than Shakespeare. It's a production from the previous century, with an aesthetic that's a very far cry from my current projects. My standpoint would be different if I had to stage the work again. However, looking at the staging, I find it has a lot of charm, and I've immersed myself in it again just as you'd enjoy rediscovering an old comic book tucked away on a shelf.
This staging is fullof the ghosts of those who have inhabited it – and there are a lot of them. Atthe opera, the history of revivals is full of memories and the human element.If a production works and carries on for years, it's thanks to the community ofartists and technical teams who keep the whole idea alive. This is something wedon't see as stage directors. Once the first night is over, we generally turnthe page, ease off the pressure and move onto something else.

Changes always depend on the new singers'relationship with their roles, what their interpretation allows and the waythey move. With time, I have learned to observe them. Then I can makeadjustments and guide them along paths where they can develop. If you look at pastrevivals of this production, there have been some very different Falstaffs andAlices, for example. You have to factor in the artists' singularities andrequirements. Opera is a world where, with very short rehearsal times, peopleare putting their reputations on the line, and it's pretty scary. With thepassing years and each new project, my own fears have gradually subsided, and Inow take great pleasure in helping performers confront their anxieties morecalmly.

© Elena Bauer / OnP

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The lighting for Madama Butterfly

“I know few other directors who place as much importance on lighting as Robert Wilson. He is present at every revival, requesting a significant number of lighting sessions to refine his lighting and enrich it with the experience gathered from other productions that have marked his personal development. I have worked with him on the lighting for Die Zauberflöte, Pelléas et Mélisande, and Madama Butterfly… Madama Butterfly was our first collaboration.

When you think about the lighting for Bob’s productions, the first thing that comes to mind is the cyclorama—that stretched canvas upstage which helps to create huge and highly hom*ogenous luminous surfaces… It’s a key feature of his aesthetic which works to define the atmosphere on stage. He doesn’t use it in a descriptive or realistic way to depict the sky for example, as so many other directors do. It’s a dynamic form of lighting which evolves and adapt to the ebbs and flows of the drama: it turns red when the bonze storms furiously on stage to reproach Cio-Cio-San for having repudiated her family; it takes on a truly poetic shade of deep blue when the child, in all its fragility, walks on stage… This interaction between the lighting and the characters is one of the characteristics of Wilson’s aesthetic: there is a continuity between the different components of the production, namely, the libretto, the music, the direction of the actors, the lighting…

For his Madame Chrysanthème, Pierre Loti drew on memories of his own visit to Japan in 1885. When composing Madama Butterfly, Giacomo Puccini was inspired by the popular melodies and sonorities of Japanese voices. However, in the literary work, as in the opera, the heroine remains the same: Kiku-san or Cio‑Cio‑san, a young geisha betrayed by her western husband, the symbol of the meeting of two different worlds. Robert Wilson’s ethereal production espouses to perfection the dramatic intensity and underlying violence of this thoroughly Japanese tragedy.