On Music JOHN SIMON
MUSIC
On Music Questioning the Wunderkind By John Simon Today's most controversial opera director is almost certainly Germany's 27-year-old Tobias Maria Blauschuh. He lives in Munich and...
...Or perhaps darker...
...I was proud to show off not just his operatic talents...
...The world will be in shock...
...Simon: Isn't there a difference between a pleasant surprise and unpleasant bewilderment...
...Blauschuh: I am not at all sure about that most...
...And electronic music when it does not sound like instruments...
...Sorry, I said no names...
...Simon: Why, Herr Blauschuh, are you viewed as Germany's most radical opera director...
...Simon: But in Spain, would you still do the traditional Carmen...
...Simon: An American director, Michael Kahn, has already done the play that way...
...Blauschuh (laughing): Never...
...Blauschuh: Excuse me, it's a professional secret...
...Simon: Hair grows back...
...If I were less modest, I would say genius...
...And Elvis Presley...
...Blauschuh: I think all audiences come under false pretenses...
...but are not two better than one...
...It was very effective...
...With a white Otello, and everybody else black...
...An audience wants to be astonished, as Diaghilev knew...
...Follow the story...
...People read the program notes and say, 'So that was supposed to be an elegant ballroom, but the director has turned it into a lusty country dance.' And then they realize that there is not much difference between an aristocratic soirée and a popular feast...
...Simon: But will the audience be able to make sense of it...
...Sitting in large leather armchairs in his vast library, we drank an excellent Moselle wine as he fitfully caressed his Pomeranian, Henze, ensconced in his lap...
...If a child has to eat hated spinach, he uses his fork to scatter it all over the dining room...
...what you call scores...
...Simon: Wasn't having been a courtesan flaw enough...
...What are they...
...Not even to see, but to be seen...
...The most obvious is rebellion...
...If he looks good naked, he knows this will get him many new lovers...
...they give me ideas for staging...
...All the important operas, and some unimportant ones...
...The Police Commissioner tried to close it down, but the Mayor is my friend, so there was no problem...
...Simon: Do you often spend an evening studying a score...
...Simon: I can hardly wait...
...it makes her just like a Greek tragic hero, who is not perfect but has a slight tragic flaw...
...We don't want an audience coming under false pretenses...
...Or Marguerites, you call it...
...But I can tell you, it is a sound never heard before...
...He is just now directing at your Metropolitan Ferruccio Busoni's Dottor Faust...
...He was, as you say in America, very well hanged...
...Also, I have commissioned some entirely new kind of music from a few leading composers...
...Afraid of a famous director...
...At this point the butler, a muscular young man in black leather, with a short beard and a strange accent, comes in...
...Although Blauschuh has staged operas all over Europe, South America, Australia, and Japan, the Chicago and Los Angeles Operas are only now negotiating to sponsor his North American debut...
...SIMON (looking around): We are sitting in your library, and the walls are lined up to the ceiling with large, uniform, sumptuously leather-bound volumes...
...And everything for the sitar...
...Or I'll have to think of something else...
...If you don't make her like us, she is outdated,' they say...
...But even the few remaining conservative critics do not dispute his originality and vivid imagination...
...Simon: Who...
...Simon: How did you manage their headless bodies...
...Simon: But if you hate opera, why should you allow pure sound...
...Can you fiddle with that...
...Blauschuh: Good question...
...I put in more nudes than you usually get, more copulation...
...Simon: Just how does your hatred manifest itself...
...Simon: What wouldbeyourideal opera production—something you haven't done yet but hope to do...
...Oh yes, there is also Peter Mussbach...
...For example, the scene in the grand ballroom of the Duke of Parma is played among sand dunes...
...It works either way, and in the end love and hate cancel out...
...I was about to say I don't play the violin...
...Which operas or composers do you prefer to stage...
...Why should the ignoramuses dictate to those who know...
...This way she is slightly guilty of her death...
...However, in Germany it should be soccer, and so on...
...Blauschuh: For that there are program notes...
...For example, if the opera calls for a palace ball in an ornate ballroom with a grand staircase, I change this to an open field...
...Blauschuh: Admire, no...
...Blauschuh: As soon as the drama season in Berchtesgaden is over—terrible drama, by the way, they stick to the text slavishly—I will do my next opera there: Otello...
...I had Dalila cut off not only Samson's hair but also his balls...
...But at least a Tosca, Rigoletto or Werther are easy to hate, sol can do some really good deconstructing...
...Simon: Well, which one of those...
...I always thought imposing modern values on past times was an anachronism...
...I, on the other hand, use hatred as my starting point...
...It is not quarter tones or anything like that...
...You see, I relate to the composer rather than to his opera...
...Blauschuh: Toss your cookies...
...The majority of opera directors speak glibly about their love of opera, with which they are in fact increasingly bored...
...But they all make too many compromises...
...He was naked, of course, but he wore a mini-body stocking to look like a eunuch...
...Take Faust...
...He lives in Munich and has started his own company in Berchtesgaden during what used to be the Municipal Theater's off-season...
...That idiot Ren...
...He is the wise man who is trying to teach me something through his work, which is changing me as I direct it...
...The set designer is even called Erich Wonder...
...Blauschuh: Ah, there I have a problem...
...Blauschuh: Whatlwouldreally enjoy is a snuff opera, where a fat soprano actually gets killed at the end...
...After all, she was a courtesan and could easily have slipped up in her precautions...
...Later I realized it was better without the hair...
...I must remember that next time I see Jimmie Levine...
...Blauschuh: Easy...
...Not to relive the experience of Lulu or Moses und Awn, or even Tosca, but to be surprised...
...That is what I'll be staging in Los Angeles...
...At the right moment—Velcro, you know—he was quickly himself again...
...Our Samson was an amazing actor and could act the new genitals splendidly...
...And you must convey that: Show her giving him the condom...
...The guillotine, which I made twice as large as the real thing, was downstage center, and the audience saw everything through it...
...Blauschuh: If worst comes to worst...
...Are you saying that the director's relation to the opera is that of a patient to his analyst...
...Sometimes where I see the marking fortissimo, I stop the action completely...
...It makes perfect sense...
...Can balls grow back too...
...Not to hear, but to see...
...Simon: Could you give some examples...
...Blauschuh: Not anymore...
...Blauschuh: I am quite simply an orthodox Freudian director...
...Perhaps the reason she got AIDS was not even so much carelessness as love—her trust in the man who in fected her...
...If you are do ing Carmen in a country that has no bullfighting, why shouldn't Escamillo be a racing-car driver...
...It's like loving or hating your psychiatrist...
...Blauschuh: Thank you, deafening...
...Well, I guess I have to keep the French Revolution...
...But it is totally different: 13-tone music...
...But then I will also work in the guillotine and show a few heads being chopped off...
...Laughs.] Only kidding, as you say...
...Simon: One more question along these lines...
...Simon: Is there some other kind of music, nonoperatic, that you like...
...It is still spinach, but instead of food, it has become aprojectile...
...Laughs.] They have worked out a production that sounds really wonderful: In not one scene do they follow the text...
...Please don't tell anyone in Germany about it...
...And these singers are also cowards...
...They got a real thrill with each new head in the basket...
...If Violetta, in La traviata, is dying of tuberculosis, the young operagoer thinks, 'An obsolete disease...
...There have to be gay couples, too, lesbian couples, and perhaps a—how do you say it?—sheep lover or two...
...In a field used to radical stagings, Blauschuh's invariably stir up vehement controversy...
...Not real sand, of course—artificial sand dunes, so that you cannot be quite sure what they are...
...Robert Wilson is quite good, and Peter Sellars...
...Blauschuh: Operas...
...How can you go beyond 12 tones...
...Simon: But if it wasn't the authorial intent...
...Or like fire and ice...
...Anyhow, he tried to copy it in Vienna, but didn't quite know how, and he became a laughingstock...
...Marvelous...
...Simon: Highly unlikely, I'm afraid...
...Or have a giant condom hanging from the ceiling.Butletmegiveyouanother example...
...Instead of columns, I have hayracks...
...instead of candelabra, campfires...
...A colleague of mine—I don't want to mention any names—directed a sensational production in which there were 12 Gretchens...
...I interviewed him last December at his elegantly furnished home—part Biedermeier, part Scandinavian modern...
...Blauschuh acquired a remarkable fluency in the language during a year he spent in San Francisco...
...SI???: Sorry...
...Blauschuh: They will not...
...Blauschuh: Samson is Jehovah's champion, and Jehovah can work miracles...
...The chef has outdone himself: Tournedos Rossini à la pêche Melba with rutti frutti ice cream...
...There are really only two kinds of philosophies: individualism and populism...
...You know, like in the cinema...
...You trust your impulses...
...Blauschuh: Oh, when it gets really loud—how do you say taubmachenal Simon: Deafening...
...So I am condemned to do more conventional stuff...
...Why should we care about her?' Simon: Isn't that playing into the hands of know-nothings...
...Simon: What is your next project...
...One who wants to remain a good girl, a virgin, till marriage, and at the same time another who responds to Faust, is excited by him, wants initiation...
...Simon: To make you toss your cookies...
...Blauschuh: Certainly...
...Simon: Well then, Tobias— this will take getting used to —are there any other opera directors you admire...
...Blauschuh: Precisely...
...Blauschuh: Please call me Tobias...
...It doesn't matter, you know...
...Blauschuh: In many ways...
...Better yet, with a little more updating, he could be a gorgeous black basketball star, like Michael Jordan...
...But how do you get your standard opera singer to do all this...
...My favorite composers—John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi, Maurizio Kagel, and, of course, Karlheinz Stockhausen—did not write much opera, and how often can you do Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti...
...In an old, puritan society, no doubt...
...Simon: Let me understand...
...Simon: (trying not to toss his cookies): Danke schön...
...Also Graham Vick...
...Simon: Well, yes and no...
...Blauschuh: Conventionally speaking, yes...
...Blauschuh: That is where intuition comes in...
...Or more red...
...instead of elegant dancers, rowdy couples carrying on like a Braegel painting...
...He has these wonderful boys working for him...
...Blauschuh: No...
...it is more lasting and dependable than love...
...Simon: Would you please explain...
...Or when it is completely silent...
...But tell me, Herr Blauschuh...
...Where I see a lot of notes bunched up, I translate that into visuals by making the action more intense, the lighting brighter...
...Orgies are excellent...
...Similarly, althoughl do not change the words and music of an opera, I put them to deliberately contrary provocative uses...
...In my Bremen production the nuns did not go offstage to die...
...Simon: I don't get it...
...There ought to be more of them in opera...
...When you enrich the meaning, you get more people interested in coming to the opera...
...In Moses und Aron, how would you stage the Golden Calf orgy...
...Same with The Dialogues of the Carmelites...
...I did a very good orgy in Berchtesgaden for Samson et Dalila...
...Deep down, no...
...BUTLER: Dinner is served Maria...
...Or a small, not-so-black rock star, like Michael Jackson...
...Simon: And you think the music and words will adapt themselves...
...The time is the French Revolution...
...Partituras...
...Other directors have made various uses of Freud, but I go back to his key pronouncement that in a successful analysis the patient must either love or hate his therapist...
...Just balls...
...Maybe bicycles...
...But I, the patient, do not really want to be changed, and take out my resentment of the composer on his work...
...Because they are stupid...
...What better way of conveying this than having two Gretchens— Marguerites—as a pair of Siamese twins joined at the hips, where sexuality dwells...
...That is when music is at its best...
...Everything becomes pure sound...
...A useful lesson, I think...
...The greater my hatred, the more striking the result...
...Blauschuh: Good, then I can tell you...
...That is his name, isn't it...
...Blauschuh: To hell with the authorial intent...
...As for radical, if that word applies to me, it does so only in a very special sense...
...The singers have to walk between them, which makes it harder to sing and produces interesting tortured tones...
...To my mind, I satisfy both: myself, as a creative individual, and the audience, as the populace of hedonists out to be entertained...
...Everyone should be in his seat a bit early to study the program—an excellent method of avoiding latecomers, by the way...
...Simon: Well hung...
...Laughs.] In between it is not so good...
...Anyway, a purely virginal Marguerite is incomprehensible to most young people today, an anachronism...
...Blauschuh: I like Bavarian beer hall music...
...Simon: Well, now you are about to do Andrea Chenier in Bielefeld...
...Isn't that what we are all trying to do...
...But a kept woman, the mistress of several men over a few years—is that any worse than being a wife...
...Blauschuh (laughing): Oh, slang...
...Simon: With Alfredo, whom she loves even more, she takes precautions and always makes him wear a condom...
...Blauschuh: Superficially, yes...
...Simon: Why do they put up with it...
...Zum knochenkotzen...
...But that is just the point: Drama is conflict, and what could be more conflicting than such a staging...
...Strictly speaking, they both burn...
...But modern audiences—young people—see it otherwise...
...It sings on the plate...
...If a few words in the text have to be changed, where is the harm...
...And if she had been an out-and-out whore, that would still be condemned...
...It wouldn't be economical to kill a good soprano, and I would not work with a bad one...
...Tolerate perhaps...
...Blauschuh: I mustn't mention names...
...All my friends call me Tobias...
...Blauschuh: Too bad...
...Now 12 Marguerites is too much...
...That is my little secret for now...
...Simon: Let's move on to other things...
...Also, as you know, I make no secret of my homosexuality, and my Samson was one of my lovers...
...Blauschuh: Tell me, are any important singers going to be reading this interview...
...So why should I? But I do like to look at scores...
...I believe absolutely in torturing singers...
...Isn't it rather the other way around...
...Who the hell dies of ?? anymore?' But let her die of AIDS and it becomes meaningful...
...Blauschuh: Funny you should ask...
...I know this will shock you, but I can't read a score...
...How do you say that in English...
...In America, you have already had Carmen Jones, where he was a boxer...
...There have been great singers who couldn't read music—Caruso, Mario Lanza, many more...
...You engage a relative unknown who is ecstatic to get his big break and will do everything you want...
...The only bad thing is that the composer will get all the glory for my idea...
...Blauschuh: Let me explain...
...We spoke largely in English...
...Laughs.] My lovers call me Maria...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
