Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  I discovered all this at Glyndebourne because the nature of the stage and auditorium made me understand that the whole of Mozart’s drama is based on the performer’s freedom to communicate straight to the audience. I have directed Mozart at Covent Garden, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in Geneva. But only at Glyndebourne was the scale of the theatre absolutely right for releasing these complex riches.

  But Mozart is not only infinitely subtle, he is also lewd and scatalogical. I sometimes think that the sly obscenities and double entendres in the libretti were slipped in by Da Ponte to make Mozart giggle as he composed. We can see from his letters that he enjoyed a bit of smut.

  Peter Shaffer recorded this provocatively in his play Amadeus which I directed at the National Theatre. At one performance, Mozart got me into a good deal of trouble. Margaret Thatcher came to see the play, and by the end of the evening she was clearly displeased. She berated me like a headmistress who has caught one of her pupils behaving badly. She couldn’t think it right, she declared, that the National Theatre of Great Britain should put on a play in which Mozart uttered disgusting four-letter words. I murmured that Mozart’s letters are exuberantly peppered with such words; he delighted, I said, in a bit of bawdry. The Prime Minister told me I was wrong – it was inconceivable that a genius who had written such elegant music would have used such inelegant language. She was quite cross with me for contradicting her. I said that I would send a copy of Mozart’s letters round to No. 10 the next morning, which I duly did, drawing attention in my covering note to one or two of the ruder passages. The reply thanking me, from the Prime Minister’s private secretary, avoided mentioning Mozart’s scatology. I think Mrs Thatcher would have sorted out Mozart with the same despatch as the Archbishop of Salzburg.

  In the spring of 1970, I was directing Cavalli’s La Calisto at Glyndebourne, with Janet Baker as Diana – the first time I had worked with this magnificent artist – and using Raymond Leppard’s edition of the score.

  Ray, an old friend from Cambridge and early Stratford days, was the first to bring the Baroque Venetian repertory back to mainstream opera. His editions of Monteverdi as well as of Cavalli, and the productions at Glyndebourne, made the pieces popular again after being long out of fashion.

  John Bury came with me to design Calisto and brought to the production the same revolutionary honesty he had shown in the theatre. Glyndebourne then was still thinking in terms of the designs of twenty years earlier – painted trompe-l’oeil fantasies of illusion, colour and light. But even a decade before 1970, theatre was changing all that. A gauze was no longer painted to look like an old, sun-drenched brick wall. Instead, there would be an actual wall of old bricks on the stage, splashed with strong sunlight. We revelled in the power and brilliance of our new lights and the beauty of texture that they could reveal.

  With La Calisto, and two years later with Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria in which Janet Baker was a lovely Penelope, John Bury and I set ourselves the task of making the Baroque stage live again – but with modern materials.

  In Ulisse, some twenty people – stage management, stage hands, prop-makers and two of Glyndebourne’s gardeners – gave cues, unseen of course by the house, which enabled Jupiter to fly towards the audience on his eagle and Neptune to rise from the deep while the seas parted and clouds filled the sky, covering the setting sun. All this was done with the utmost precision and grace. And it gave to the spectacle the metaphorical weight of the Baroque world, where the Gods live above in the flys, men walk on a stage which is the earth; and underneath, with access by trapdoor, are darkness and devils and the supernatural.

  Both Calisto and Ulisse were very ambitious technically. Because Glyndebourne is now unionised, it would not be possible to present them there today in the same way. Too many people would be involved. Today the technical work would be done by computer. But I would far rather have a man’s hand on a rope (and a man’s brain which is able to take account of the human variations below him) than use an automatic flying system which does no more – if you are lucky – than start precisely when it starts and stop precisely when it stops.

  The machinery used in our two productions gave us worrying moments. For example, at a dress rehearsal of Ulisse, the singer performing Human Destiny dropped suddenly from the clouds towards the stage. There was a safety device on the flying equipment, so she fell only four feet before an automatic brake was applied. She hung in the air, dangling like a trussed-up chicken, while below her the rehearsal continued, with singers performing busily as Ray Leppard conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I froze in panic. At my elbow I heard the voice of Geoffrey Gilbertson, the unflappable stage director. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed,’ he said, ‘but Human Destiny has fainted. We’ll just get to the end of the scene and then I’ll quietly ask everyone to take a coffee break while we cut her down.’ Meanwhile the orchestra went on playing. An orchestra is never stopped at an opera dress rehearsal: the time is too precious and the bill too expensive.

  The best Baroque theatre I know, where spectacle can work perfectly and have a meaning beyond decoration, is at Dröttningholm just outside Stockholm. This is an original eighteenth-century private theatre built for the entertainment of the King during his summer holidays. It is a Sleeping Beauty theatre: the door was shut on it in the early nineteenth century – much like a family who lock up an attic that is no longer useful – and not opened again for more than a hundred years. All the Baroque machinery is still there and much of the Baroque scenery.

  Dröttningholm is a theatre created out of the technology of sailing ships. By a miracle of pulleys and hemp lines, each moving piece is connected to a central capstan under the stage. When the capstan is turned the cloths go up, the sliding scenery slides, periactoids turn, the gods descend. The miracle is that everything not only moves silently, but starts and stops at precisely the same moment. Yet it all has a human rhythm, varied only by those who push. I love change and I love new ways of doing things. But we have lost something here.

  La Calisto deals with Jove’s passion for Calisto, one of the virgin attendants on Diana, goddess of chastity. He comes down to earth and, thinking it the craftiest disguise, transforms himself into Diana. Thus changed, he proceeds to seduce Calisto. Originally, Ray Leppard and I thought that the bass who played Jove would also be able to play the pretend Diana, singing falsetto, a register which many bass voices have no trouble achieving.

  After a week’s rehearsal I asked for something that is not usual in opera: a very rough run-through. I always work crudely (and speedily) in the first stages, leaving the detail for later. But it is useful to have a quick look early on to see how the whole show is shaping.

  This run-through was a particular blessing. It revealed that while the bass singing of Ugo Trama as Jove was splendid, his falsetto singing as Diana was absurd; nor, good actor though he was, could he have convinced Calisto that he was the real Diana. He looked and — more to the point – sounded nothing like Janet Baker.

  What was to be done? I had an inspiration. Why not, I said to Ray, ask Janet if she would sing Jove disguised as Diana as well as Diana herself? It would provide her with a wonderful double. Diana was chaste and Jove/Diana was lustful. One was spiritual, the other full of raunchy humour. The two Dianas could be costumed entirely the same, as befitted a credible transformation, but Jove as Diana should always sport a silver-headed walking stick, to give the signal the audience needed.

  Janet agreed and put herself through three weeks of extremely hard learning and rehearsing. In performance she was triumphantly funny and heartbreaking in both roles. And the opera, a shrewd analysis of the anguish of lust, was seen generally as an important rediscovery.

  We had strong support from Moran Caplat. A man of the theatre and at heart an actor who loved opera, he understood singers, and was always insistent that opera should never forget that it was theatre: otherwise it might as well be done at a concert. He was a keen yachtsman, and ran his
theatre like the captain of a ship. The twinkle in his eye always betrayed the buccaneer, and he was a quick politician. I was devoted to him. Moran gave me room to expand and work my way in opera. He suggested one production after another. He led me into doing the Mozart/Da Ponte operas, starting with Figaro and going on to Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. He persuaded me to do Britten’s Dream and Albert Herring, Gluck’s Orfeo, and Bizet’s Carmen. I owe him twenty years of happy work.

  Chapter Six

  Glyndebourne is where I met my third wife, Maria Ewing. She sang Dorabella in the Così fan tutte which I directed there in 1978. She was immediately noticeable in the cast: American, wide-eyed and with the absolute beauty that can come of mixed race.

  She was then twenty-seven years old, a rising opera star and the youngest of four daughters of a lower middle-class Detroit family. Her mother was Dutch. Her father, an engineer and much older than her mother, was dead. It seems he had African as well as Indian blood; indeed an aunt who was especially dark-skinned was not allowed to visit the girls in daylight. Maria had no hang-ups herself about any of this. She was proud of the racial cocktail that had produced her. But she had grown up with a deep anxiety about it in the family.

  She is a product of the appalling American public education system, but her brilliance has surmounted it. I remember her telling me that her set-book for senior English was Rosemary’s Baby. But she is one of those rare people to whom formal education is irrelevant; she taught herself. She has an astonishing ability to learn, and a photographic memory.

  She had been a good pianist as a girl, but did not discover she had a voice until her late teens. She then went to New York, trained, and started an operatic career. When she was in her early twenties, she was taken to Salzburg to sing Cherubino, and everything else followed.

  I thought her delightful, provocative and very, very attractive; formidable too, but wonderfully funny. We played piano duets and found that we both hated the dead conventions, the laziness and the silliness of much opera production.

  Truth in performance – dramatic truth – was overwhelmingly important to her; she had an actor’s instinct but was fiercely musical. I later watched her in admiration as she learnt a major operatic role in forty-eight hours by going without sleep and using her extraordinary memory.

  We worked together easily on Così, as if rehearsals with her had always been happening. She was reticent yet opinionated – a cat who walked very much alone. We had an early argument in a coffee break about the merits of New York. I said it was falling apart, violent and depressing. She championed it. She lived, apparently, thirty floors up in the Lincoln Plaza, overlooking Manhattan from her little eyrie, strengthened by her music and her solitude. I discovered that she shared my love of jazz. She could, she said, listen compulsively to jazz records all through the night.

  We became friendly at Glyndebourne. The intimacy forced on performers during a rehearsal period is always slightly unreal. It seemed likely that we would see each other again, because we would be bound to work together in the future. At first, it was no more than that.

  At the end of the run of Così, I shared a carriage with Maria on the train from Lewes to Waterloo. She was travelling with all her possessions crammed into one huge suitcase. It needed a helpful male like me to negotiate it to London. We talked opera and theatre all the way. She told me she planned to do Carmen within the next few years. I said that if she wanted me to direct it, I would love to.

  Many months afterwards, I was in New York and rang her. Improbably for a girl who was always whizzing round the world, an international opera singer, she was at home. We met for a drink. We went to the Met and saw a perfectly awful production of Don Pasquale which we hated so much we slipped away in the interval for dinner.

  We were together for ten years. They were years of passion, of highs and lows, excitements and despair. They also brought, in Rebecca, a beloved and talented daughter.

  I remain full of admiration for Maria. Many singers just sing the notes, squarely and accurately, and work from scores at their concerts. They do not give much of themselves. Maria learns even her concert programmes by heart, including extremely difficult modern pieces by Berg and Messiaen. She learns because she feels she has to recreate the piece in order to communicate it. Her whole being is about performing; and truthful performing. She can only work with complete commitment and honesty.

  If this sounds fearsome, it is. Her blazing integrity and refusal to compromise do not make her an easy person to live with. But her performances are incandescent. Even if you don’t like them you cannot ignore them.

  It follows that she is much criticised. Some people cannot take her highly personal approach; they say she pulls the music about, remaking it in her own image. This is not true; she is a meticulous musician. But her need to express leads her to emphasise and inflect outside the well-bred norm. She is a disturbing performer, a star, with so much temperament she can become terribly depressed. The mixture of our two volatile natures and our two careers – I was running the National Theatre; she was singing all over the world – made for a turbulent life, sometimes gloriously happy, sometimes acutely miserable.

  The richest times were when we were working together. The creations of Carmen, L’Incoronazione di Poppea and, above all, Salome were as vivid working experiences as I have had in my life. It has saddened me that I missed a long-planned production of Tosca with her, a part she was born to play. When it was due, though, we were in the middle of an ugly divorce. But I have a date with Maria and Puccini in the future, I hope.

  We are friends again, and have worked together since, the split. She is not a well-mannered artist and does not live her life calmly. I love her for that.

  Chapter Seven

  Georg Solti rang up one day in 1980 and asked if he could see me at once in my office at the National Theatre. It was urgent, he said – and very confidential. In this atmosphere of secrecy he arrived and rattled off his message. He had been asked to conduct the next production of The Ring at Bayreuth in 1983. The Jewish Hungarian outcast had at last been summoned to the holy of holies. Would I join him and direct Wagner’s marathon?

  My stomach turned over. I felt sick. Of course, I was flattered to be asked; of course I wanted to do The Ring and said so. What opera director worthy of his salt would not? Yet the sheer impossibility of the task appalled me. First of all, I was not a complete Wagnerian, and I knew it. True, no-one who loves music can fail to be overcome by his revolutionary talent, his massive architectural sense and his ability to create amazing erotic effects in what was one of the most stifled and puritanical centuries in history. But, at the same time, he drives me mad. He is long-winded and almost totally without humour.

  His politics and philosophy are often alarmingly self-serving and suspect, and though we cannot blame Wagner that Hitler adopted him as the official composer of the Third Reich, it would be hard to deny that there are definite Fascist tendencies in his work. And, great genius though he is, he was clearly one of the most odious individuals in the history of art.

  Solti and I tried to persuade Wolfgang Wagner – Wagner’s grandson, the director at Bayreuth – that the best course would be to stage in the first year of the festival only two of the cycle of four operas, with the other two in the following year. Wolfgang would not hear of it. His face, a disturbing blend of his grandfather and Liszt, was adamant, despite all the auguries. In 1876, when Wagner finished putting on the entire Ring himself for the first time, he said to Cosima, ‘I wish I were dead.’ Ever since, the historical progress of each production had been the same, with hardly any exceptions: it is a failure in its first year; accepted in its second; a success in its third; a definitive statement in its fourth; and mythologised in its fifth – when lamentations break out wondering why the production is to be replaced.

  We – Solti and I – had no wish to be part of this pattern. We knew that to try and put on four huge operas in one year was madness. There was a deadlock with Wol
fgang. Then, foolishly, we gave way to him, believing it would be better to fail than not to do it at all. We failed. But there was much to reward, fascinate and amuse us on the way.

  The superb Hildegard Behrens as Brunnehilde did with a will whatever we asked of her. At one point, after the Immolation scene, she had to hang upside down for fifteen minutes, some thirty feet in the air, strapped to the centre of a vast platform as it turned through 360 degrees. Wolfgang was most resistant to this, as he was to practically everything else we wanted to do. He first of all demanded that I myself take out a special insurance to cover Behrens: the festival would not be responsible. When I said no, and while Behrens went on urging him that she did not at all mind doing it, he had a mock-up constructed in the workshop so that we could have a full test. Hildegard was wired up and a doctor and attendant nurse monitored her blood pressure, heart rate and general well-being during the fifteen minutes of the 360-degree turn. To Wolfgang’s disappointment, there was not a flutter on the electrocardiogram.

  This episode was typical of many absurdities. We were known in the Festspielhaus as the makers of the British Ring, which was fairly ridiculous as we were led by a Hungarian. Dislike of us was evident from the beginning. Our designer was William Dudley, a brilliant and cheerful cockney who was not about to be pushed around. When the difficulties and animosity became unbearable, I had to warn him against muttering under his breath, ‘We won, y’know.’