by Peter Hall
Bill had a wonderful idea for the Rhinemaidens: they floated in a big, shallow pool on stage, and their image was reflected to the audience by means of a huge mirror standing at a forty-five-degree angle. The device worked brilliantly: the only Rhinemaidens I have ever seen who looked as if they were truly swimming – because they were. Their appearance, their sound, and the whole nature of the scene exactly matched the music: it shimmered. To achieve this was monumentally difficult. First Wolfgang told us we couldn’t put that amount of water on the stage because it wouldn’t bear the weight; then that the water would be too cold for the singers and to heat it would cost too much; and then that no Rhine maidens could sing and swim at the same time. But the biggest problem was my wish that they should be naked.
Asking singers to be naked at Bayreuth was unheard of. It was suggested, instead, that the Rhinemaidens should have doubles: three strong girls from the Bayreuth Swimming Club. No Bayreuth young lady, however, would appear at the Festspielhaus unclothed. So it went on … and on … But in the end our Rhinemaidens sang, swam, and looked beautiful in their nakedness, like Cranachs come to life, only a little more fleshly. Well before this happy outcome, though, a hearty Teutonic joke had been played upon us. We returned from supper to a technical rehearsal to discover a nude female figure bobbing up and down in the Rhine with her legs in the air. She turned out to be a life-size inflatable doll from the Bayreuth sex shop.
Doing The Ring was an endurance test. Rehearsals began at the end of April for this near fifteen-hour epic, which was due to open at the end of July. There wasn’t time to do more than shape each scene and return to it perhaps twice more. My usual method of working is to ask questions, not only of myself but of the cast, and so try to worry the text into yielding its secrets. This was just not possible. I had to have ready answers; there was no time for questions.
Ironically, the weeks allowed for rehearsal added up to less for each Ring opera than a director would have for an isolated, normal length opera. Also, three of the four are incredibly long. And Wagnerian singers are scarce, which means they are able to stipulate how much rehearsal time they are prepared to give – and it was never enough.
I did my best, and tried not to be daunted as each vast scene was rehearsed and the next one reared its massive head over the horizon. Before we came to Bayreuth I had made desperate attempts to brush up my German, and for a year had early-morning lessons in my office at the National. But I never had time to concentrate on the homework. I also failed to break through my everlasting difficulty with languages. The Germans thought my stumbling attempts to speak their tongue were odd, and I don’t blame them. I would have thought it strange to find a German director who spoke little English doing Henry V at Stratford.
By the time I directed The Ring I had been running the National for nearly ten years, so the Board agreed I could have time off to go to Bayreuth as a sabbatical three months; and while I was away Christopher Morahan took charge on the South Bank. He was an extremely able second-in-command, but I seemed to spend a good deal of my Bavarian summer on the phone to London explaining to puzzled dramatists and directors why I was not there. Soon, the British press began to write about the absentee director of the National Theatre.
Another situation was also not too happy. Maria had originally agreed to sing Gutrune in The Ring – not a very big part, but one that can be marvellously effective, and has to be very sexy. At the last moment she pulled out and spent the summer with our small daughter Rebecca, just over a year old, in a hideous little house outside Bayreuth. Domestically, life was hardly blissful, though Rebecca was an enchantment.
Meanwhile, all my energies were concentrated on trying to present a Ring which looked like the music: which returned the piece to nature, to the flicker of light on water and the sway of leaves in the forest. I wanted to do a romantic Ring which took the myth back to its fairy-tale origins.
Bill Dudley helped me wonderfully in this. His designs were lush and naive while being very advanced technically, and the movement of the vast circular platform on which most of the action took place often achieved a poetry which supported Wagner’s extraordinary score. Siegfried’s Death March was one of the profoundest visual moments I have seen in the theatre. He was borne away by his captains through huge trees. The stage tracked into the distance, growing ever higher and higher until the funeral party and forest vanished among the clouds.
However, we makers of the British Ring got heartily booed for our pains as we stepped on to the stage after the opening. This didn’t bother me too much; booing at Bayreuth is an essential part of the blood sport of going to the opera. But many of the notices were terrible, especially in the German papers – though the English contingent were generally enthusiastic, particularly Bernard Levin and John Higgins. I do not want to excuse the shortcomings that were seen in my production. It is a fact, nonetheless, and an interesting one, that I had done it at a time when most German offerings of this great work were heavily politicised; when a director was expected to have a social concept – an unswerving theory of the piece – and force everything to that end. For example, Chéreau’s Ring – which preceded mine at Bayreuth – seemed to me to be based on a simple reading of Bernard Shaw. I enjoyed it. But I think of The Ring as being more complex than that. And if Wagner had seen the Rhinemaidens as sequinned tarts in a hydroelectric power station, as Chéreau did, he would surely have written very different music.
I was clear about my concept. It was to try to reveal the corruption of power and of wealth, and the purity of regeneration, with natural forces as the important corrective to human faults. But this was considered altogether too contradictory and ambiguous. What did I mean? the critics cried. But the public, I’m happy to say, increasingly responded to what we had done. The production was revived in 1984 and 1985 and, by its last appearance, had become a considerable success. And my sore feelings were salved by a big mail from supporters.
I would certainly like to do The Ring again. Having spent so long learning it, and having experienced it on the pulse, I reckon I am ready to have another go. But it will never happen, for no opera house could give me the sort of rehearsal time that I would want.
The wonder of Bayreuth is the theatre itself. During the nineteenth century orchestras became larger and louder, and the sheer volume of sound unleashed by Wagner was enough to swamp most human voices. So he invented a miraculous opera house where the singer, not the orchestra, is in the foreground and where the sound of his or her voice is paramount. Famously, he did this by placing the orchestra under the stage, where it is invisible. It still sounds full blooded and resonant, yet slightly, very slightly, distant. This is aurally magnificent. Visually it works wonderfully too because there is no distraction to the audience from the orchestra, or from the conductor waving his arms. They can be seen only by the singers.
Bayreuth is unquestionably the best opera house in the world. It has the finest acoustics; the most sensitive relationship between auditorium and stage. Why has it never been copied in any of the hundreds of opera houses built since? I suspect this is due to conductors: they don’t like being invisible.
Chapter Eight
During the Seventies and early Eighties, I received more praise for my opera work at Glyndebourne than I did for my theatre work at the National. This was partly because the paradox of the situation made good copy: the theatre director only did good work when he turned to opera on his summer holidays. I exaggerate, but the feeling was there. The truth is also that my opera productions then were to an extent revolutionary. I was trying to do with them what I had done with Shakespeare at the RSC in the Sixties: to discover the world the characters lived in and the underlying reasons for their actions. And just as there used to be a tradition for actors to declaim Shakespeare, so in opera many singers merely stood and sang. I tried to get the Susannas and the Fiordiligis to reveal their humanity, to become real girls whose hearts were both longing and sad.
I worked with Bernard Ha
itink at Glyndebourne on some nine productions, and these were the most subtle and intricate collaborations I have experienced with a conductor. He is a man of great charm and warmth, yet of infinite shyness. He seems only to find himself in music. In life he is hesitant, diffident and, if off-colour, suspicious. But he is always generous and benevolent, with much humour behind the reserve. There are black shadows inside him, I am sure, otherwise he couldn’t express so sensitively such an extraordinary range of music. What a production looks like and the way the characters behave fundamentally affects his music-making. For a theatre director, he is the ideal partner.
My original production of Don Giovanni was with John Pritchard, and his music was very elegant and ambiguous. But when Bernard took it over for its revival, he reacted intensely to the production, and the music expressed the ferocious passions and the darkness of the Don, as he stands there challenging the very existence of God. This rare aptitude of Bernard’s was an inspiration to me through many productions, from the broad humanity of Falstaff to the subtle, poker-faced absurdity of Albert Herring.
In 1984 I became artistic director of Glyndebourne with Bernard as music director. For three years it was a wonderful partnership. But then he moved to the same position at Covent Garden. I think he knew it could turn out to be a poisoned chalice, but felt that it was a risk he had to take: it gave him the opportunity to conduct Wagner.
Much else was changing on the Sussex Downs. Brian Dickie, who in 1981 had taken over from Moran, left to run the Toronto Opera. And George Christie became more and more the chief executive as well as the chairman.
George’s prowess with sponsors has led the way in Britain. True, there is a ready market among company directors, their wives and guests, for a stylish summer evening in a beautiful country house setting with a little music thrown in. But it is George who has revitalised Glyndebourne’s sponsorship from business – and it is huge. The finances of the opera house are also enormously helped by the comparatively low fees paid to the artists. It is a tradition that you work at Glyndebourne because you want to, not to earn money – leading singers getting a tenth of their normal fee. They go there because the working conditions are superb and it is a good place for a young artist to develop or for a mature artist to learn a new role. But they pay for it. Glyndebourne has always been subsidised by its casts.
This may change with the new, bigger opera house: George Christie’s dream come true. What was planned looked at first fairly modest – extending the existing building, modernising it, and improving the acoustics which were badly in need of attention. But gradually the ideas became more and more radical. Now, a theatre that for sixty years has enchanted its audience is no more, without a peep from the guardians of our heritage.
I am all for change, particularly in the arts where there is a tendency to stay with what works rather than risk something new. But I am very torn over the new Glyndebourne. I look forward to it, while at the same time being desperately sad that an historic opera house, born so much of its time, and out of the obsessions of John Christie, should be totally destroyed.
Chapter Nine
Few pleasures are greater than directing the same opera again and again if it is a masterpiece. There are new emphases because there are new performers; and different circumstances and audiences make a different communication necessary. The journey of discovery is never over – especially with Mozart. I have done Figaro in Glyndebourne, Chicago, Geneva and Los Angeles; Così in Glyndebourne, Chicago and Los Angeles; and The Magic Flute in Los Angeles. Each time I worked with fresh delight and excitement.
Opera has taken me round the world – not always so happily. At the Metropolitan Opera I directed a production of Verdi’s Macbeth and attempted to take it back to nineteenth-century melodrama which, rather more than Shakespeare, is at its heart. An engraving of Macready in the play, wearing a kilt with a feathered tam-o’-shanter on his head, has more than a touch of Walter Scott in it, and I think that is a good image for Verdi’s opera. It is an early work, and though he has a very modern psychological fascination with the woman’s domination of the man, the piece seems to me close to the world of the Gothic novel.
This was not the view of many New Yorkers. Met audiences had become accustomed to a very heavily cut and Shakespeareanised version of the opera, deliberately short on fantasy. So what we presented, which included warlocks, sprites, goblins, flying witches and a full ballet – all the romantic vocabulary – affronted them. They thought we were mocking Verdi. At the first night, there were not only catcalls; fights broke out in the audience between those who approved and those who did not. Peter Shaffer got thumped on the head with somebody’s programme when he loudly voiced his enthusiasm.
The Metropolitan Opera is an amazingly impersonal place. When I arrived in New York to do Macbeth, I found a rehearsal call awaiting me at the hotel: I was to report to level C at ten-thirty on Monday morning. I happened to know where level C was because I had collected Maria from the rehearsal room there the previous year.
I duly reported at the time mentioned and was introduced to the stage management and cast. The only person I knew was my assistant. I asked if the conductor, James Levine, was coming and was told that this morning he had a dress rehearsal of tomorrow night’s opera. We would not be seeing him for some days. I showed the model of the designs in scene one to the singers and began staging it. An hour later we took a coffee break. As we came into the canteen, a voice rang out from a man sitting at a table – ‘Peter! What are you doing here? I didn’t know you were in New York …’ It was the general administrator of the Metropolitan Opera, Anthony Bliss.
Later, again at the Met, I re-directed Maria’s Carmen. This had only a limited success, despite her spellbinding performance. Perhaps the use of the full dialogue and the attempt to create a genuine opera comique style, which had worked so well at Glyndebourne and on video, could not function in the elephantine interior of the New York house.
I first directed Maria in Salome in America – and, with this, success was immediate. The production, which started in Los Angeles, was also seen in Washington, Chicago and San Francisco, given twice at Covent Garden, and on television and video. John Bury was the designer and we staged the piece as a Klimt-inspired nightmare, with sumptuous projections. John seldom does what is expected, and here he produced something far outside his usual style. I intended to take the decadence of the opera to its limits. Maria, at the end of the dance before Herod, was totally naked. Salome sings to the head of John the Baptist, ‘The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death …’ Oscar Wilde created extraordinary, sick tenderness, and Strauss responded.
In Houston I did the premiere of Michael Tippett’s opera New Year. Some years before, Tippett had called on me at the National Theatre and shared his worries about this piece. He wasn’t sure whether it was opera or drama. And he wasn’t sure what he could ask of actors or of singers. He wanted a set which changed its scale – sometimes vast and threatening, sometimes small and claustrophobic. Above all, he wanted dance. He wondered what was possible. He talked and talked and I watched, fascinated. Here was a musical genius of our age wrestling once again with the age-old problem of opera. Words first? Music first? How important is the acting if they can sing? How important is the dancing if they can act?
I made the only comment interpreters can offer to creators. I advised him to follow his imagination. It was up to people like me to realise his fantasies; there should be no prior constraints.
When we eventually came to the premiere, Alison Chitty’s designs succeeded in making all Tippett’s eclectic imaginings coherent. The dancers, too, vividly expressed the diversity of modern city life, chiefly because Bill T. Jones, the choreographer, is in love with the individuality of people and wants their quirkiness rather than trained uniformity. His group contained tall dancers, small dancers, thin dancers and alarmingly fat dancers. Throughout the rehearsals Tippett had been a model of grace and charm. His advice was always cle
ar and precise. Though old in wisdom, he has the clarity and energy of someone whose eyes are just opening on the world.
New Year had been technically difficult to get on the stage. None of us had energy left for the Houston opening, which turned out to be a heavy business in itself: long dresses, dinner jackets, charm for our sponsors, and a great deal of jewellery – more trappings even than at Glyndebourne, where the production was later revived. Michael walked through all the Texan nobs apparently oblivious, though cannily picking up every absurdity. They were slightly nonplussed by his appearance: he wore a green and white striped blazer, a bow tie and large, new pink sneakers. He looked like a naughty adolescent, rather than the Grand Old Man of English music.
A couple of years before I left the National Theatre, I went with Brian Dickie, then still Glyndebourne’s general administrator, to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to hear a concert performance of Idomeneo. Simon Rattle was conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and it was his first use of original instruments in a Mozart opera. The result was a revelation. The clear sound, the brisk muscular tempi and, above all, the perfect balance between singer and orchestra made a completely new experience. The words were totally audible, and the singers could inflect them subtly because the orchestra was not too loud. Yet because the actual instruments were quieter, they were played without inhibition. There was no holding back so as not to drown the singers. The drama in Mozart is always in the orchestra, and this liberated playing was amazingly intense.
I was already set to direct a second cycle of the Da Ponte/Mozart operas at Glyndebourne. It seemed to me and to Brian that we simply had to persuade Simon and this orchestra to do the performances. Glyndebourne was the perfect – indeed the only – opera house in England of the right size for such an undertaking. After a great deal of debate and rearrangement, this was agreed, with the wholehearted endorsement of George Christie and Bernard Haitink.
