What was the first opera you saw?
The first opera I saw was The Magic Flute at the London Coliseum. I was about eight. I sat there completely motionless and I absolutely loved it. I was hooked from the moment the overture started. Then my parents took me to see La Boheme there. I never looked back. I spent a lot of my pocket money as a schoolboy going up to London and going to the opera. I sat at the top balcony at ENO and Covent Garden. When I went to college, there was lots of theatre going on, much more interesting than Greek and Latin (laughing), and I came out wanting to be a director. I’ve been lucky to be able to do it.
You got to work at the Royal Opera House at a very young age.
Yes, I was very lucky. I started off as a stage manager and they took me on at Covent Garden as soon as I left university. For five years I learned so much, so much repertoire, watching good directors, watching bad directors occasionally… Listening to great singers and having a wonderful time. I was exposed to so much. Then I left and I went to Glyndebourne for five years and I came back to Covent Garden as a Staff Director. I have been freelance for the last 13 years. I’ve been very fortunate to work in many places around the world.
What are your current and future projects?
I am preparing Gianni Schicchi and Tabarro in Tokyo. I am directing and designing a production of Carmen for Singapore in January 2011, then I’m doing Rigoletto for Diva Opera in England next year, then a mixture of Wagner and Britten weekend for Meistersingers in Aldeburgh next May. Theatre design is also a passion of mine; I teach at Motley Theatre Design Course in London. It’s very interesting to talk to young designers how they hear music, how they see stories, how they visualise them on stage. I have also designed some scenes programmes in Japan.
Does they way you work differ depending on the country? Do you have to adjust?
There is a different tempo. A big company in America has its own rhythm, schedule, restrictions. In general, most American companies operate in a similar way: you usually get no more than three weeks of rehearsal. You have to go there knowing what you want to do, even if you don’t necessarily know how you’re going to do it. Which is not to say that working in America is imaginatively restrictive; it’s just more disciplined through budgetary reasons.
Working in the Far East is different. In Japan, the companies derive a lot from their structure from Germany. They demand an immense amount of detail and planning in advance. It makes them uncomfortable to have people who are vague, messy and not sure what they want before the start of rehearsals. Of course, it is because they just want to deliver everything to the highest standard and with the greatest accuracy. But it makes them very uneasy when I’m not very specific on the very first day of rehearsals what colour that newspaper photograph is going to be in five week’s time. It’s just a different way of thinking. Japanese way of thinking is very precise, ordered, highly organised and they are very proud of that.
In Singapore – what can I say, it’s a tropical country (laughing). It’s a different attitude. They still have the enthusiasm, but it’s a hot place to work. I wonder what it’s like in Finland?
Very Germanic. Does the purpose of theatre differ in various parts of the world?
Yes, in America you go to the theatre or opera usually to show off, usually because you’re pretty wealthy and it’s a big event. People don’t engage dramaticaly with the work on stage in the same way they do in England, France or Germany.
In Tokyo, the response of the audience can be very, very enthusiastic, but only at the end if the evening. Until then they sit very quietly. They don’t talk before the show begins. You can go into an auditorium in Tokyo, the house light’s up, nobody says anything at all. It’s very respectful. They sit and watch the play or the opera pretty much in complete silence till the end and you have no idea if they liked it or hated it. They don’t boo. I’ve never heard anybody boo in Tokyo - that’s far too rude. But usually at the end there’s a standing ovation. It’s very extraordinary.
The perception of theatre is very different in different parts of the world. For some people, it’s entertainment, for some an opportunity to show off. In Italy and in Germany opera and theatre are part of the culture: it’s something you do and something everybody does, because it’s part of life. I don’t feel it’s quite like that in England, I don’t feel it’s quite part of our cultural life. Here, it’s something we can afford when times are good and we can dispense with when times are hard. I think that’s wrong. I think theatre should belong in the heart of society; it should be a mirror to our society, that’s why we should do works in English, so that it can tell us something about our society, how it’s breaking down, how we fail to respect or love each other.
I don’t feel theatre is something you can take or leave; it should be essential to the cultural life of the nation, just as art galleries and museums and sports are. It’s about having a rich diversity.
What do you think about opera in English?
Of course. Opera is about communicating with the audience.
I just saw the brilliant Don Giovanni at ENO, directed by Rufus Norris. A very daring approach to the text by Jeremy Sams, mostly unrecognisable, with the Swedish au pairs in the Catalogue aria… And it worked a treat.
If the spirit is honest to the original and helps the audience have a good time, engage with the characters and the situations, I don’t think it does any harm at all. Da Ponte’s text is brilliant and those lucky enough to speak Italian can enjoy the richness and the flavour of the original. If you want to hear the original text, you can put on your CV or go to Covent Garden to hear it done “properly”.
Let's not forget we’re in the business of theatre here. This is about entertainment. This is about engaging people with stories and if we translate it into a more common idiom, I think it’ll be absolutely fine.
Do you ever go to other people’s shows?
I love going to other people’s shows. Jonatan Miller said once that there was no point in seeing other people’s work unless you were going to steal something (laughing).
Tell us more about your work as a director.
You open the score and you listen to what it says. You can do things with very little resources, just collaboration of people and time.
In order to achieve the best, you have to be lucky to have the right performers, people who are prepared to collaborate, talk and open themselves to the honesty of the dramatic situation. That doesn’t always happen. Sometimes one has to go in and block a show. I hate doing that. People ask what I want them to do. I say I want them to read the text, sing the music, get up there and do it. Yes, I’ve got some ideas but I don’t know what I want you to do, because I’m not doing it. You’ve got to do it. You’re the performer, you show me. And I’ll help you. We’ll sit in the rehearsal room and find out how we’re going to do the piece, what we can get out of it, what we want it to say, how we want to interpret it.
Theatre is about relationships, I talk to the performers how I perceive the experiences of the characters and I often find that one’s personal experience can help bring some enlightenments and insight to the dramatic situation. Most of the operas and plays we get to do are masterpieces, pretty fine works of art, and they deal with very complex, delicate, difficult, highly charged emotional situations. I talk about it in great detail with the performers, in order to get them to be responsive and articulate, clear in their emotional delivery in their performances.
My experiences as a human being hopefully can inform and stimulate a cast. I work a lot with young singers, who don’t have the same life experience as I. It is always fascinating to feed in something from my own life experience, to look at characters and to help the singers mature as performers. I can barely remember what it was like to be 20, well it’s not that long ago (laughing). I can remember what I was doing, but I don’t remember what it felt like. Sometimes you look at Susanna and Figaro, or Fiordiligi and Guglielmo and think what it’s like to feel like that at that age. They are young people’s operas. So is Boheme. I love doing Boheme with a cast of young people. It’s hard because it’s a tough sing if you’re not a mature singer, but Boheme with piano and 30-year-old singers is perfect, because they have an emotional freshness, possibly naivety, but also an ingenuous wonder about the whole romantic experience, which is fascinating to tap into and explore.
What operas fascinate you and get your curiosity fired up?
The Ring is one of those pieces – it seems I can never tire of it because it always has another facet to it, another political overtone, another insight into human behaviour, something to reveal about the way human beings behave.
Who are your favourite composers?
Beethoven is great passion of mine. I very seldom listen to opera at home, unless I’m working on it and I’m trying to learn something. I would rather listen to Beethoven’s piano sonatas and string quartets. I find huge relaxation in Beethoven. It’s intricate but passionate, emotional music. It’s a huge source of solace for me.
Janacek is up there with Benjamin Britten, together with Verdi and Wagner. The guys from the twentieth century really cracked it for me - that’s the music that I will always crave. Janacek's operas have everything: The Cunning Little Vixen is about the life cycle and the huge force of nature, all that glory and horror of the death of this wonderful animal, and then rebirth of her in her children. There’s something very life affirming about Janacek, even in Jenufa and Katya Kabanova.
Katya Kabanova is a very beautiful and tragic opera. It’s one of the pieces I love to watch, yet it always makes me so unhappy (laughing). What Katya does is the wrong way out of her marriage. Having an affair with Boris is never going to be the solution to her unhappiness - and it leads to her death. The piece is set in the society where people are not open with their emotions, they live in a very small, isolated part of Russia. The only thing that’s free in their world is the river that flows beautifully through the village. They are young people, Varvara and Kudryasha, they don’t want to get stuck in this very strict social background, where the mother-in-law is the dominant person and the husband is the weak character, so they escape. There is a huge amount of relief in the third act when Varvara and Kudryasha run away to Moscow and escape from this horrific, oppressive atmosphere, which is of course what destroys Katya.
Jenufa is a terrible story of obsessive murder and yet there is a bit of hope in the end, when Jenufa and Laca walk away and go to a new life, after so much pain. He says they can repair their life and try to do it better next time. From my experience, I find it very moving and highly personal.
Janacek’s characters are all human beings, even the Vixen. Yes, so are Verdi's and in Wagner's characters, but there they tend to be more epic and mythical. In Janacek and Britten I find that they’re human beings - I don’t know them but I feel I‘d like to make some associations with them. It’s very hard to fall in love with Brunnhilde for example, or respect Wotan. They are great characters and it’s great theatre, but somehow, I’d always rather be doing Britten and Janacek in terms of human personality.
Which is not to say I don’t love doing Verdi, Wagner, Mozart...
...and Il barbiere?
(laughing) I’ve done Il barbiere several times. I enjoy doing it because the people in it are so vile, they’re all so horrid, I think they deserve what they get and I love to rip that opera apart. But it always survives. It’s fun. (laughing)
How about Benjamin Britten?
Britten is a genius to put up there with Verdi and Wagner for me. There is something so idiosyncratic about the sound of his music. Nobody writes like that. I think nobody’s ever written music that sounds so original, distinctive and personal. A huge range of output, which to be honest, Verdi and Wagner didn’t have. Britten writes brilliant choral music, great songs, great instrumental music. The violin concerto is extraordinary, the double concerto for viola and violin, piano concerto, the solo cello suites, the string quartet – and the operas. His range of output is far more extensive than Verdi and Wagner. And of course, Britten was a fabulous performer and conductor.
Didn’t Verdi do well, too?
Well, 27 operas. But look at Bach or Rossini, look at the number of notes you have to write out. Just in a Bach fugue? How did he ever have time to write that down? All those cantatas, suites, passions? And run a church choir, and play services every week? How about Haydn: just the amount of ink on paper…
You have directed a lot of Verdi - what is it about Verdi that fascinates you?
I love the music. I love the MAN: Verdi was a great human being. He was generous, mean, bad-tempered, good-tempered, he was everything. He wasn’t only a composer. He was a farmer. He was a great philanthropist. He loved the countryside, farming, he looked after his workers, he built a hospital for them near St Agata. There is something about Verdi that is complete: he was a musician, he had many interests, every aspect of his life was interesting. The music is always very honest, very fresh and very probing.
The man’s life is complete and fascinating. His children and his wife died when he was 29, it’s an extraordinary journey for him from then onwards, writing Nabucco, the big success coming slowly but steadily to him, work with Boito and great masterpieces follow, revising Boccanegra, writing Otello and Falstaff. It’s an extraordinary career. I’m fascinated by it. There’s something about his music which moves me. It’s very powerful, it’s dramatic, it’s very good for singers - if you can find people who can sing it… And he was a great guy.
How does that compare to your other favourite, Wagner?
Wagner is fascinating for all his deviousness, suffering, struggle and his artistry. I wouldn’t want to have a dinner with Wagner, but I would love to sit at the table with Verdi and hear him talk. But he probably wouldn’t talk at all, he would be very shy and assuming, I expect. They both knew what they wanted, but with Verdi there is the honesty and I think Wagner was devious. Brilliant, as well.
Wagner is another passion of mine. It’s hard to ignore Tristan. Endlessly fascinating music. One of those musical creations, like The Rites of Spring, which change the way everybody thinks about music, about harmony. Every time I sit down at the theatre and the first chords of Meistersingers start, I feel a huge sense of relaxation. I feel I’ve come home. The music makes you sigh with relief: "listen to this for then next five hours, we’re going to tell you the most amazing story – and it’s got a reasonable happy ending!" (laughing). There’s something about it, because the overture is in C-major - I feel like setting out on a wonderful golden road: you are going to be looked after, nursed along and entertained and caressed with fabulous music. That’s an extraordinary feeling.
No mention of Puccini?
Puccini writes brilliantly. Puccini is one of the great analysts of the human emotions. I don’t like doing Puccini very much because He is untouchable, he is perfect, it’s all there, he’s written absolutely every heart beat, and ‘all’ you have to do is be honest and expose that, and get to the heart of it. Then it works. The man had an extraordinary instinct. But Puccini is pretty much director-proof. Which is not to say I won’t be doing it. Next year I’m doing my first Il tabarro and Gianni Schicchi.
In Tabarro, they live such impoverished lives, their aspirations are so small. All Giorgetta wants is to live in the suburbs and to walk on a proper pavement. She is stuck on the boat going up and down on the Seine. They lost their child. Terrible, dark situation. And Puccini has nailed it.
Apparently, in his later life, he was always dissatisfied with Butterfly and Boheme. He didn’t like them anymore. By the time he gets to write Il trittico, in the middle of the First World War, he’s almost disowned his past. Tosca, he thought it was pretty rubbishy. He tries to write La rondine in a different style, but that wasn’t very successful. He was a restless man, it seems. Puccini was always unhappy with what he’d done up till now. Turandot is harmonically and orchestrally very, very advanced.It’s great writing.I think he is underestimated a lot. It’s fascinating how detailed and well crafted his stuff is – kind of makes me want to do Tosca…
We know that the great composers have a universal appeal, but how are they are really received in Japan, Singapore, America?
I approach it through the composer, but it’s true that people of different nationalities will listen to Verdi in different ways and will perform him differently. What’s essential about Verdi is that he’s Italian, and what I try to do is to help people find a way for them to interpret his Italianate quality and to perform him as he would want to be performed. San Francisco was a good example: Barbara Frittoli – Italian – singing Amelia; Dimitri Hvorostovsky – Russian – singing Boccanegra. For Barbara, it’s completely instinctive, it’s natural, her native composer. Dimitri works very differently, has to work quite hard and he vbrongs a different insight into an Italian character because he is Russian. He sees different aspects of Boccanegra which relate to his own quality as a Russian: maybe a sense of isolation, loneliness, coldness, maybe has to struggle to get his passion out in a different way. Whereas Barbara, who comes from the land of sunshine and red wine, brings a different thing to her interpretation; maybe she finds portraying aristocracy difficult. My job is to mould that together, so that we have a credible relationship of father and lost daughter between those two characters.
In the Far East it’s very different: people hear the music in a different way, because the music is not native to their own tradition. It can be stimulating or sometimes difficult to make them understand that these European composers wrote in a specific style that we need to respect and adhere to. And it is fascinating to help people from an Asian culture to get into the mindset of European theatre. It can be very rewarding. I did Falstaff in Tokyo this year with a Japanese cast.
In fact, two years ago I did Albert Herring in Tokyo with a Japanese cast. Now, can you imagine anything more alien to the Japanese than that? Surprisingly enough, it’s not that alien to them, because they told me that the concept in Japan of a boy who lives at home and cannot get away form his mother, hasn’t got any girlfriends, is sort of restricted by his family upbringing, living in a small village, not being able to break out and then finally discovers a way to rebel – apparently, this is very common in Japan and a lot of Japanese people identified immediately with what was going on in Albert Herring. And I was astonished! They knew exactly what the social structure was about: small town, a bossy man or woman like Lady Billows, the policeman, the vicar, the shopkeeper. There’s a hierarchy. They understood all that. They were rather happy that Albert, albeit with the aid of some vodka in his lemonade, finds a way to say, “ Sorry, Mum, I’m out of here!” and find his own personality. The Japanese found that a very identifiable, very liberating story. They loved it. They love Britten’s music. Britten loved the Far East, he toured there, he adored their musical tradition - Curley River is based on a Noh play. He was very influenced by the sound world of Japanese music.
I’ve done a lot of Britten in Tokyo and there’s something in the sound of his music that “works” over there, it fits into the Japanese sound world and culture.
It does differ where you do these things in the world and the great geniuses, the composers, have given us something to export in a variety of ways. I think productions should look different and sound different in California and in Tokyo, They shouldn’t sound the same. I think Verdi would have been be very disappointed if it was homogenised and everything was always exactly the same. Verdi always wanted his operas to be sung in the language if the audience. It was terribly important for him. That’s why The Sicilian Vespers are in French, and so is Don Carlos – they were performed the first time in Paris. He had Trovatore translated into French to be performed there. Otello was performed in French a year after it was premiered in la Scala. Verdi was a great internationalist in that sense. You can’t sing Western opera in Japanese though, the language won’t work, I’ve asked about it. Which is a shame, because I would love to hear La traviata sung in Japanese; Verdi would have been very excited by that too.
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What would you change in the world of opera?
I would have more diversity, more variety, both of performers and directors. The same old names come around rather frequently these days. Then, I’d encourage more honesty. I would encourage more young talent. And then, what if there was a button that would said “bullsh*t” and you could press it and all the bullsh*t exploded. (laughing)
I would set a cap of what you can spend on a production. I think that doing theatre with minimal resources is a lot better than spending half a million pounds on one Adriana Lecouvrer.
With the risk of becoming very unpopular, I will cite Richard Jones’s Ring Cycle in Covent Garden, on which I worked in 1997. Nicholas Payne allocated us 100,000 pounds, that’s per opera, so you got the entire Cycle for 400,000 pounds. Which at the time was ludicrously cheap. It was a very small amount of money – and yet, with the right team Richard Jones presented a refreshing, invigorating, revealing show.
They are allegedly spending, 16 million dollars on the Ring at the Met. In my opinion, it’s not going to deliver that much more insight or revelations about the piece. Of course, you cannot put on something of a very high standard for nothing, don’t get me wrong. But I think everyone should be challenged to spend less on production budgets in opera. Pay the singers, the musicians, pay all other people. They make theatre, they animate the stage. It’s not what you build on stage that’s most important. I want to stress that I don’t mean that with any disrespect to anyone. It can be done. One of the best things at ENO, David Alden’s Simon Boccanegra from 25-30 years ago, didn’t have much scenery, but it was a fantastic show.
What do you think about funding opera in the UK?
Compared to Germany, it's underfunded. I also I think the distrubution should be much more even. Big companies probably are getting too much and the small ones not enough, which is not fair because small companies feed big companies by training young opera makers for them.
What are you passions outside opera?
Running is a very favourite hobby of mine. Modern art is a huge passion. Wherever I go, I always look for art galleries and museums. It’s astonishing what you can find around the world in the most bizarre places. There always seems to be a Picasso somewhere (laughing). I go to a small gallery in California, or Tokyo, or in Singapore – and there’s a Picasso… How much work did this man produce? Everybody seems to have got one. I love Picasso, he is phenomenal, but the sheer output…
How do you cope with jetlag and other practicalities of working around the globe?
I like it. It’s always nice to come home, of course, but I enjoy travelling and being in different places. There’s a theory now about jetlag that you must not eat on the plane. Have a meal before you get on the plane. Then, when you arrive, you must eat the appropriate meal for the time of day. I’m going to try that when I go to Japan next time, see if it works. But really, jetlag is just a bit of tiredness and boredom; being stuck in a metal container for 12 hours is unnatural, isn’t it?
What I always try to do, I try to exercise when I get there. I try to go for a run. If possible, it’s good to arrive in the daytime. After a long-haul flight a good walk or a run helps me sleep.
What’s in your opinion the function of operatic cinema broadcasts?
It’s certainly helping de-mythologise the grandeur of opera: you can go and see Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and The Metropolitan Opera productions in your local cinema. Cinema broadcasts are helping to break down some prejudices about opera. They are ‘live’ but they are not really live, you cannot hear it like you hear it at the opera house.
There’s nothing like hearing opera ‘properly live’.
VIEW David Edwards’s page here.
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