Director Barrie Kosky / Photo: Jan Windszus
“He’s the gayest straight composer ever, you know what I mean?” Barrie Kosky is speaking to me after his first week of rehearsal for a new production of Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten. “The music’s so queer, it’s outrageous.”
Kosky is in Aix-en-Provence, where his new production opens tomorrow. Frau is his fourth Strauss opera, after productions of Schweigsame Frau, Salome, and Rosenkavalier in Munich and Frankfurt. “I’m slowly working my way through the Strauss canon: after Frau comes Ariadne in Vienna and then at the end of next year I do Elektra in Amsterdam. And then I’m finished with Strauss — I’m not going anywhere near Intermezzo or Capriccio. You’d have to drag my rotting carcass into the rehearsal room to direct those pieces!”
He remains fascinated with the relationship between Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who wrote the libretto for several of Strauss’s operas, including Frau. “Their relationship fascinates me, like Mozart and Da Ponte or Weill and Brecht,” Kosky tells me. “In all of their pieces they manage to take a story and inform it with their own particular idiosyncrasies to create amazing theatre. And it fascinates me that they had this amazing, symbiotic artistic relationship but they were never friends. They always spoke to each other in the formal Sie. They never Du each other — it was always ‘Dr. Strauss’ and ‘Herr Hofmannsthal’. Can you imagine?”
“I think of all of their collaborations Ariadne is the masterpiece: it’s the right length, the right balance, and it’s extraordinarily radical in its theatrical landscapes. Elektra was anyway based on a Greek text, and it’s very compact. Rosenkavalier I struggled with until I directed it. And once I was in the rehearsal room I realized how amazing its structure is.” Frau, though, is a different story. “I’ve always had a slight distance to the piece,” he admits. “But I’ve always been amazed at the orchestration and the colors of the music.
“Conceptually, it was a brilliant idea to take Magic Flute into the 20th century,” he explains. “And I can see what Hofmannsthal was trying to, but by adding Goethe and Grimm and the Arabian Nights and the zeitgeist of the war, he created this labyrinth. As a director you’re constantly getting lost, and you have to turn back and try and find your way out of the metaphysical and the psychological and the mythological, with lashings of Freud and 20th-century trauma. It’s not an easy piece to direct, sing, or conduct. But that’s what makes it very attractive to me!”
All five principal roles are famously demanding vocally, let alone in the context of Kosky’s physically demanding stagings. “It’s monstrously hard. It’s unfair to ask singers to do it uncut — the only way is if you’ve got a production where they’re just standing and singing. We’re not doing the complete Böhm cuts, because those mostly don’t make sense, but we’re cutting some of the Amme’s stuff in the second Act. It amounts to 12 to 15 minutes of cuts, but we are leaving in the duet at the end!”
There’s also the matter of Strauss’s massive orchestration — this run marks Wunderkind conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s first time conducting an opera. “He was complaining the other day that he wanted 14 first violins, but he’s only got 12 because we can only fit 100 musicians in the pit. But still, that’s 100 people in the pit!”
Assembling a Frau cast is no small order, and Aix has been beset with cancellations: the originally-announced Elena Stikhina was replaced by Vida Miknevičiūtė as the Empress, and Tamara Wilson (a fabulous Empress herself back in the day) was recently replaced by Ambur Braid as the Dyer’s Wife. Braid is a veteran Kosky performer, having starred in his new productions of Salome and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. “I adore Tammy, and it was devastating for her and for us when she had to pull out. It could have been potentially catastrophic, but luckily Ambur was able to make herself available. Ambur is a very good friend of Tammy’s — she’s actually staying in the flat that Tammy was going to stay in — and she’s sung the role in Lyon before and she’s not frightened of anything.”
“Rehearsals with Barrie are a very fun deep dive into his whimsical and slightly disturbed brain,” Braid tells me, “and because I, too, have a whimsical and disturbed brain, it can be quite complimentary. We must all be a little mad to play these parts, to tap into these roles in such a way. He exhausts me and fulfills me. There’s an openness to finding solutions, and yet sometimes the best work doesn’t have all of the answers. We started our working relationship with Salome, then Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and now we have the untamed and unnamed wife of Barak. It’s been a beautiful development built on respect, trust, mutual inspiration and admiration. And a hell of a lot of bruises.”
Braid is part of a lineage of Kosky favorites, singer-actors unafraid to go to their dramatic limits. What makes a Barrie Kosky star? “I think of people like Nicole Chevalier, Allan Clayton, Chris Purves, Michael Volle, Marlis Petersen, Chris Maltman — I’ve done shows with them again and again. And in a way Asmik Grigorian, with whom I did three productions before she was a big star. But also, it’s very unhealthy for any artist to work with the same people for a whole lifetime — performers are much better off if they work with different directors and different conductors.
Kosky directing Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence / Photo: Jean-Louis Fernandez
“I don’t actually like the word directing,” he tells me, “because it implies that you’re a traffic cop. The movement, the mise-en-scène, that’s the easy stuff. The job is to draw out of what’s already there in a performer that they don’t know, using the music and the text. There’s a soul inside of a singer, a smoke or a vapor that I feel I can bring out. For me, directing is like I’m playing a pipe that can bring the animal out — the strange stuff, the weird stuff, the alchemy of the voice.
“The magic of opera starts with the magic of the human voice, and how it’s created with muscle and air. And why one person can make it sound like the angels, and another person sounds like a dying cow — who knows?” But, Kosky warns, this is not in praise of homogeneity. “What also links all of these singers I love is that they move away from this terrible thing where all singers sound the same. They all have their idiosyncrasies, and you can identify each of those people by their voice alone.
“All of these great artists I work with are talented and intelligent and sensitive. They’re all clowns: they don’t mind embarrassing themselves in the rehearsal room and in the theater, and they don’t mind exposing themselves emotionally. And they’re all people you just want to hang out with. It’s really just the people you admire and respect as artists but also want to have a drink with after a rehearsal and have a laugh. When I’ve got that combination, I’m in theater heaven!”
Kosky’s best-known productions have a camp extravagance, full of feathers, sequins, and exuberant choreography. But his more recent productions, including Berlin’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Salzburg’s Kat’a Kabanova, were effective precisely because they were set in nothing more than a single grey wall. Is the Kosky aesthetic shifting?
“Well, we have to demolish that idea a little bit. My most successful shows, as you say, have been these camp, queer, phantasmagorical shows, and it’s the outrageousness that of course attracts the attention but most of my productions are not like this. I have directed over 150 productions over the last 39 years, and the majority of these have been in virtually empty spaces. I like to call it ‘extravagant minimalism,’ where the extravagance is the emotion and the minimalism is the stripped-back space.
Barrie Kosky’s production of Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Komische Oper Berlin in March / Photo by Iko Freese
“I like to create imagery through the relationship between the performer’s body and an object, rather than the object alone,” Kosky tells me. “I’m much less interested in the clutter of scenography and more in the virtuosity of performance and the play of light on a moving body.” Does the precision of Kosky’s choreography make his work harder to restage? “In the next few years I’m doing fewer productions in repertoire. I did a Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy at the Wiener Staatsoper, and it ends up being hard to cast because there are too many compromises to restage it with a completely different cast with no rehearsal.
“I think it’s important not to have one visual style,” he tells me. “I have five different set designers I work with, and they’re all brilliant. And I choose very carefully who is doing which show. For Frau I’m working with Michael Levine, and it’s a very hard opera to design. It’s easy for it to be clunky or naff in its symbolism with, you know, the mountains, the steps, the sacred water, and all those animals and birds. It’s like children’s theater. In our production we begin with the Amme in a rocking chair. She’s in a pool of light, and she’s singing to the messenger who’s in the darkness. We don’t answer the question of where it’s set — we answer things like, what is the character articulating? And how can we convey the weirdness of this piece without alienating the audience?”
Kosky spent a decade at the helm of the Komische Oper in Berlin, which rapidly became one of the most adventurous, exciting opera houses in the world. Berlin is a city with three major opera houses, yet Kosky’s success lay in clearly articulating a purpose and aesthetic for the house. “You cannot underestimate the revolution that [the Komische Oper founder] Walter Felsenstein started, and how radical it was for its time and place.
Felsenstein believed that Berlin needed a new way of looking at opera, Kosky says, and he “brought Stanislavski into the opera house. He directed the chorus like they were Stanislavski actors. He knew their names, gave them identities. And sometimes he took nine months to work on a show — can you imagine that? But he could do it because he had a fixed ensemble, and he managed to radically reinvent the form.”
Director Barrie Kosky (and Komische Oper founder Walter Felsenstein) / Photo: Jan Windszus
The Komische Oper, like other German houses, is state-funded. With the precarity of the American funding model, does Kosky envision a socialist model of opera? “Well, I do believe in any theater or opera company functioning like a community. Whether it’s Pina Bausch’s dance company, or Emmanuelle Haïm or Raphaël Pichon’s baroque orchestras, they’re run like a family and there is a love and respect that is a joy to behold.”
And what of the American model? “It’s time for radical reinvention. You can solve two problems very easily at the Met. First, cut the theater in half. Put a big wall up and turn it into a 2,000-seat theater. No matter how much money is thrown at productions, you simply cannot do opera properly in a theater of 4,000 seats. There’s a reason the most successful houses are between 1,200 and 1,800 seats — it’s the proximity and the connection and the economics. Secondly, start an ensemble of American singers. Hire 20-25 artists for two years on fixed salaries, a mixture of young, mid-career, and older artists, and bring in guests. That would make the lives of singers a little bit easier and more joyful, instead of everyone scrounging for jobs or being forced to relocate to Europe. But of course we love having them here, because they’re wonderfully talented and spectacularly open and they’re an absolute joy to have!”
But there are some gleams of hope. “I love what Anthony [Roth Costanzo] is doing in Philadelphia, and Houston has always been quite forward-looking. And there are a lot of regional houses doing very interesting work and which should be encouraged. There’s a lot of regional opera in America that’s died, which is of course devastating for all of the people that work in those houses. But sometimes things have to die in order to be reborn.”
And what of the situation in Europe? “We have problems here too, and we’ve just got to ask ourselves whether it’s tenable to maintain the old-fashioned model of doing 40 operas a year with no rehearsal time. Is that what we should be doing? If we love this art form and if it is to have a future, we have to constantly question what work we’re presenting, why we’re doing it, and who we’re doing it for.
“I really hesitate to talk about opera in crisis, because in some cities it’s not. You go to the Komische Oper, and you’re sitting next to a leather queen, and behind you is an old East German grandma, and in front of you is an American tourist. There are five queens there, three lesbians there, a family over there. It feels like the world, and it feels alive.”
