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      How a Production of Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin' Changed the Met Opera

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      Robert Wilson’s staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” opened to a wall of boos in 1998. But it brought new theatrical possibilities to the Met.Huge bars of light, floating down from the flies. Singers almost like statues, their gestures shifting at a glacial pace.When Robert Wilson’s slow, spare, luminous production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” opened at the Metropolitan Opera in 1998, it was a shocking break with the house’s prevailing aesthetic. While there had been some progressive stagings there, the elaborate, old-fashioned naturalism of Franco Zeffirelli and Otto Schenk reigned, particularly in the standard repertory.Wilson and his production, with its nearly nonexistent set and precisely calibrated, dreamlike movements, were greeted by a storm of boos on opening night. But this “Lohengrin,” so radical for the Met at the time, anticipated today’s broader range of directorial approaches there — like Willy Decker’s starkly symbolic “La Traviata” and Simon Stone’s contemporary-America “Lucia di Lammermoor.”On Feb. 26, the Met will introduce a new “Lohengrin,” directed by François Girard. The Wilson production, having not been revived since 2006, never quite got its due — or the kind of farewell justified by its impact on the company’s artistic trajectory. Here, interviews with some of the artists, technicians and administrators involved, excerpted and edited, tell the story of a watershed event.ROBERT WILSON In 1976, we had produced “Einstein on the Beach” at the Met on a night they were dark. It was a huge success, and the Met was interested because they got an audience they never had before. So they asked me, “Would you like to direct something?” They suggested “Aida” or “Madama Butterfly.” I said no, I want to do, with Ella Fitzgerald, the first jazz opera. So, the Met didn’t work out. Then, about 10 years later, Alexander Pereira became the director of the Zurich Opera, and he asked me to do “Lohengrin” as his opening production, and he got the Met on board.GREGORY KELLER (former Met staff director and one of Wilson’s assistants on the staging) In the ’80s, the voice was really king, especially at the Met. There was a lot of park-and-bark opera. Most directors were trying to bring in Stanislavski: “Who, what, when, where, why?” “What am I doing in this scene?” The questions a traditional director and actor talk about. And Bob completely breaks with that. He approaches things from an external point of view, with formal, classical, crystalline choreography. He’s fascinated by Eastern theatrical forms, Kabuki and Noh, and those formal, visual, artistic concerns were what he was bringing into the opera world.KIRT BURCROFF (then a new Met electrician) I’m not sure anyone, when we started, knew how we were going to pull it off. I’ve always thought the shows that look the simplest from out front are usually the hardest. And it was pretty sparse out there for “Lohengrin.”JOSEPH VOLPE (then the Met’s general manager) I was there for “Einstein”; I was on the Met’s technical staff at the time. And when I became general manager, there was always a desire to have Bob do something. I remember we had lunch, and he was so specific about every scene; on a napkin he could draw out every scene. He went through the entire opera over lunch. And everything that is called for in “Lohengrin” is there. It’s not there in the way most people would expect it. But it’s all there.WILSON I worked on it with Annette Michelson, the critic. And she said, “Read this.” It was Baudelaire, from after he saw Wagner’s “Tannhaüser”: “I’ve witnessed a spectacle of time, space and light that I have never experienced before.” So that was the key. Then I looked at the original pen-and-ink drawings, and actually, spatially, I did exactly what Wagner did. His first act had a big oak tree over here; I brought in a vertical bar of light that descended. It’s starting with a wider space and zooming into a marriage that doesn’t work, and then back out.The tenor Ben Heppner, who sang the title role in the production, with members of the men’s chorus (who wore stiff and heavy neck-to-ankle tunics) in the background.Metropolitan OperaKELLER I got to work with Bob on “The Magic Flute” at the Paris Opera in 1991. And one of the other Met assistants, Robin Guarino, had worked with him on “Hamletmachine” at N.Y.U. So we both knew the way he worked, and could shepherd him and get a product onstage he would be happy with. He had two of us he could trust.DEBORAH VOIGT (soprano who sang Elsa in the opening run) I had a bit of experience with Bob: I had covered Jessye Norman as Gluck’s Alceste at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1990. We covers were brought in for weeks before the principals. They lined us all on one side of the room and had us walk to the other side, telling us we had two minutes to do it — not a second longer or shorter. And we spent the next six weeks choreographing “Alceste,” and memorizing Bob’s style of movement. I learned what it was like to have his choreography imprinted on my body, and Debbie Voigt’s way of moving and using my body stripped away. That gave me a head start that some of my colleagues did not have.In September 1991, Wilson’s version of “Lohengrin” premiered in Zurich.BEN HEPPNER (tenor who sang the title role in the Met’s “Lohengrin”) I got a call from my Swiss agent, who asked me if I would be willing to jump in for “Lohengrin” in Zurich. I said OK, and if they can send me the video, I’ll try to learn the staging a bit. And my 7-year-old son was so bored; he had nothing else to do, and said: “Dad, I watched it and I’ll tell you what to do. First of all, there’s no sword fight in Act II” — he knew “Lohengrin” pretty well by this point — “and when you move, you’re like a robot, the way you move your arms. And oh yeah, Dad, when you walk, you have to walk like there’s something stuck in the crack of your bum.” With this in mind, I put on the tape, and, son of a gun, if he wasn’t right about everything.KELLER Giuseppe Frigoni, the one who really honed the movement vocabulary, had created all these different moves for the chorus in Zurich. They had someone offstage prompting the chorus for those gestures, and at the Met, we wanted to cue the chorus seamlessly and silently. So with Joe Clark, the technical director, we devised these machines, like in a bakery, the “now serving 98” machines. We put these two big number machines on the edge of the pit so the audience couldn’t see them. And we devised a numerical system to cue the men and an alphabetical system for the women.WILSON It wasn’t all the Met people’s cup of tea. But they had committed. And, actually, Joe Volpe didn’t really understand it, but he was a smart guy; he knew that some of the people who had supported “Einstein” were some of the wealthiest people around. And they said James Levine was going to conduct. I was a big admirer of Levine’s. He had a deep interior sense.RAYMOND HUGHES (then the Met’s chorus master) Wilson saw his artistic concept all the way through the piece. It was about light and darkness. It was not monotonous, but it was black and white.JANE KLAVITER (prompter for the original run) I remember he never raised his voice, and he was totally personable. But he didn’t joke at all; he was very austere. I remember him wearing black. I don’t remember him smiling much.HEPPNER Each character had a resting position. For Lohengrin, it was the arms to the sides but not relaxed straight down; the fingers were together and the thumbs pointed slightly forward. And each character had his or her own set of arm movements, I would say maybe five or six.VOIGT I have always used my body and moving it as the impetus to get air moving and as a means of support, and with Bob you are having to really stand still, and that’s really difficult. Then Elsa’s entrance is so static, and the music is so still, that it’s extra difficult. It’s musically challenging unto itself — and, by the way, don’t move. His style is “Kabuki Position No. 2” moving into “Kabuki Position No. 10,” and you have five minutes to do it.HEPPNER Your arms were never to be relaxed; he wanted isometric tension there. I said, “You understand, if I do that, that tension will climb into my chest and throat, and by the second act you’ll be looking for a new Lohengrin.” He sort of didn’t have an answer for that. He also asked that I not have any facial expression. I said, “If I don’t have an expression, it will sound expressionless.” That also wasn’t his favorite.VOIGT I remember one of the first rehearsals, and Bob said to Ben, “OK, I want you to sing that line to Debbie but look into the house.” And Ben said, “But Debbie’s behind me.” And Bob said, “Yes, I know, but I want you to look out there, and look at your hand when you do it.” His stylized way of expression took a long time to understand and to accept. I had to learn that I had to find meaning in it myself. He was not going to spoon-feed that to us.KELLER I know both Debbie and Ben struggled. Bob gives you the choreographic form, and it’s your job to fill in what I call the Stanislavski part. It was challenging, but eventually we got there. They understood they had an enormous amount of freedom to fill up that form.WILSON The singers were struggling, and it was not Jimmy’s cup of tea. But the mood was not negative.KELLER Everybody felt really committed. It was hard and intense, but it wasn’t fascistic or terrifying.HUGHES What I loved was that the chorus could just stand and sing. They had those numbers projected down by the prompter’s box. Like, 3 meant you hold your shield up; 2 meant you hold your sword up. This was an arrangement that made them sound fantastic. “Lohengrin” had not been done at the Met since 1986, and it’s one of the biggest chorus operas of all time. So we worked really hard.“His stylized way of expression took a long time to understand and to accept,” said Deborah Voigt (right, as Elsa, with Heppner). “I had to learn that I had to find meaning in it myself.”Metropolitan OperaVOIGT Bob did get it; he understood that it was difficult. He respected when you really put yourself into it. It was difficult, but I was also finding it very interesting.WILSON It was just another world for them. There’s no training for what I do.BURCROFF That show brought in the modern era of opera here. We still haven’t done anything like it. Because we’re a repertory theater, we use a lot of the same lights in every opera — especially in those days. But very little about that “Lohengrin” utilized any of our repertory equipment. All of it was custom built. And all those light boxes that flew in from the sides, and popped up from the floor, putting those up and taking them down every day was a monumental task because of the size. Some of the boxes were 60 feet long. The swan was our first foray into automation. It was literally driven by one of our stagehands with a joystick, sending it across the stage and hoping it wouldn’t go into the orchestra pit.KELLER On the back scrim there were constant minuscule lighting changes, so your brain was always getting stimulated.WILSON My problem with Levine was he was so inconsistent with timing. For the prelude, I had these light cues that are so complicated and they’re on a computer, and you can’t change them, but he would vary three or four minutes sometimes in the timing. But we had a good rapport; he had a dialogue with everybody.HUGHES The Kabuki influence, the very stylized acting that he coaxed out, was absolutely convincing, particularly at the beginning, when Lohengrin and Elsa are still rather one-dimensional characters. I found it riveting when she sang “Einsam in trüben Tagen” and she was slowly — very, very, very slowly — walking across the stage. It lent Elsa such a lonesome dignity.KLAVITER The challenge was that the singers couldn’t turn their heads; they weren’t supposed to move. That made it harder for them to see me in the prompter’s box. A lot of prompting is eye contact.KURT PHINNEY (Met chorus tenor) The costumes were rather rigid, I think with the idea of giving a kind of hardened look. They were difficult to bend or move in, but we weren’t permitted to do much of that anyway. I think one chorister wanted to put a portable chair under his costume so that he could sit unobserved, some mechanism that he could find a posture of rest somehow.HEPPNER You have to have fun with these things. If people I knew were coming, I told them to wait for a specific moment, and at that point I would slowly move my fingers into the Spock gesture from “Star Trek.” I didn’t take it as seriously as some people did.At the curtain calls on opening night, March 9, 1998, the cast was cheered. The production team, not so much.WILSON My god. Never in my entire life, 57 years working in the theater, have I had such a hostile reception. I was told the Wagner Society had organized it. And it was violent.HEPPNER The noise seemed like it actually moved the velvet curtain.MATTHEW POLENZANI (star tenor who back then played the tiny part of a noble) It’s the loudest noise I’ve ever heard.KELLER We were all really shocked at the provincial attitude of the New York audience.The reaction was much calmer when the staging was revived that fall. Levine once again conducted, and cast changes included a new Elsa: Karita Mattila.KELLER We were very happy it was going to come back. It was an expensive production. The light boxes, the remote-controlled pieces. In the men’s chorus, each singer had a neck-to-ankle tunic, and it was all boned, with hundreds of nylon bone inserts. I think we also made the enormous graphite spears.VOLPE It took the revival for people to fully understand the production. I think that the singers became much more comfortable with the stage direction, and I think Bob became much more comfortable with the singers.KARITA MATTILA It was the first time — I think the only time — that I have actually gone to the administration. I went to [the assistant general manager] Sally Billinghurst’s office and told her, “I’m not sure I can do this.” And she gave me a good talk, just encouraged me to try and make it work, don’t do anything yet, just give yourself a little time. And I needed some pantyhose, so I went to Saks Fifth Avenue, and I noticed that a man was following me. I went to the cashier, and I was really nervous; I felt he was quite close, and I turned. And before I said anything, he said, “Excuse me, are you Karita Mattila?” “Yes?” “Oh, me and my wife, we are so looking forward to seeing you in ‘Lohengrin.’” It was such a wonderful lesson for me, a reminder to never let down your audience for some personal reason. If it is a challenge to understand, take the challenge. And after that incident at Saks, I was back, with a different attitude. There was no way now that I would want to give up.KELLER By then, we knew how to rehearse it better, how much time everything would take. And we loosened up. We didn’t loosen up the vocabulary. But if Karita said, “I can’t do this gesture now, I’m singing,” we’d say, “OK, do it a bar later.” We were true to what Bob wanted, but we listened to what the singers had to do. And he loved it: “Do the gesture here, do the gesture there; I don’t care.”Karita Mattila, who took over the role of Elsa when the production was revived, told the Met’s administration, “I’m not sure I can do this.”Winnie Klotz/Metropolitan OperaMATTILA I thought I might be doing things differently than some others. And I wondered what Bob Wilson would say. I remember when he came to the first stage rehearsal, I felt a little bit defiant or defensive before he said anything to me. I was going to defend my changes. But to my surprise he was very, very encouraging: “You have understood this perfectly.” I actually felt quite good in the end with the production. I felt like a poet, not a senseless puppy.The production was brought back a final time in 2006, starring Mattila and Heppner, and with the tenor Klaus Florian Vogt making his Met debut as Lohengrin in the final two performances. It was Volpe’s swan song; Peter Gelb took over as general manager that summer.PETER GELB I don’t know if Bob was part of the rehearsals for the revival that season. I was told at the time that the singers were not necessarily embracing his stylized movement the way he planned it.WILSON I was supposed to do “Lohengrin” again. This was some years ago. I don’t know what happened. But Peter Gelb and I talked about doing it.KELLER Robin Guarino had left the Met; I was the last man standing from the old production. They asked me to build a schedule for how many chorus sessions it would require, and their eyes got quite wide. There were probably 10 people left in the chorus who had done the show, so it would have been a lot of time to teach them the gestures, and X amount of time rehearsing in the costumes. At that point, the administration determined it would be as expensive to do a new production.GELB I planned to bring it back, without having first checked on what condition it was in. And I discovered from our technical department that it was in very bad condition physically. All our scenery is packed into these shipping containers in a lot in Newark, and over the years the “Lohengrin” had suffered the ravages of time. Especially the large fluorescent light boxes; they had partially disintegrated. The production would have had to be completely rebuilt, and we didn’t have the time or the budget for that.Twenty-five years after the production’s premiere, it’s possible to see its effects on the company.VOLPE Bob brought the Met along; because of Bob, we were in a different place. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but for me it was a wonderful production. It was time for the Met, and it was time for me, to produce something forward-looking, something different. I believe in opera, in traditional opera. But in a way, this was traditional. Everything that was supposed to be there was there; it was just a different way of presenting it.KELLER For me it was a really seminal experience at the Met. It was kind of the intersection of what I wanted to do as a youth — wild, crazy avant-garde theater — and traditional opera. The Met was trying to be avant-garde, and I think they succeeded, and Bob really wanted to have a show at the Met. This production meant a lot to him, and it meant a lot to help him get his vision done on this grand scale, and have it come off so seamlessly. I think it was a crossroads for the Met, that yes, there’s an audience for this. I would take the 1 train home, and there would be people saying they loved it, people saying they hated it. How much of a reaction can you get out of an audience these days?BURCROFF We didn’t know at the time that it was a crystal ball into the future. You think of the Zeffirelli “Bohème” and “Turandot,” when we’re bringing wagons full of scenery on and offstage. “Lohengrin” was one static set. And that became more the norm for us. Rarely do we open the curtain on Act II and it’s a completely different set. “Lohengrin” was really about the lighting. Before that, at the Met, it was about great scenery. “Lohengrin” was about the singers and the lights, and that’s more the norm now.GELB In a period that was generally known for its theatrical blandness, Wilson, who has been one of the great theater directors, really stood out. His “Lohengrin” was an early indication of theatrical possibilities that the traditional, core Met audience had not experienced.WILSON If I go to the opera tonight, if I really want to hear the music, I close my eyes and I hear much better. So can I keep my eyes open, and what I see can help me hear the music better than when my eyes are closed? That’s simply it. My responsibility as a director is, can I create a space where I can hear music? More

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      in Music

      Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’ Uses the Word ‘Führer.’ Keep It There.

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      In some cases, the inflammatory, Nazi-associated term has been changed out of sensitivity. What do we lose when that happens?There are some 10,000 words in the libretto of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” which the Metropolitan Opera is presenting in a new production starting on Feb. 26. But the most inflammatory one comes at the end.The title character, a mystical knight who arrived in the first act to defend the honor of a woman accused of killing her brother, points to a handsome youth in shining silver armor who has magically appeared out of the water. He is the lost brother.“Here is the Duke of Brabant,” Lohengrin declares. “He shall be your leader.” In German, Wagner’s text is: “Zum Führer sei er euch ernannt.”Piotr Beczala will sing that line at the Met, as will tenors at the vast majority of other opera houses in the world when they put on “Lohengrin,” a repertory staple for over 170 years.But at a smattering of companies, particularly in Germany, and most prominently at the Bayreuth Festival — founded by Wagner and still run by one of his descendants — the text has quietly been changed because of the association of “Führer” with Hitler, who was a treasured guest at the festival.“Especially we in Bayreuth should be particularly sensitive there,” Katharina Wagner, the festival’s director and the composer’s great-granddaughter, said in a statement, “because we have a special political background and therefore also a special responsibility.”Wagner, who is also a stage director, added that she preferred to make the change — from “Führer” (“leader” or “commander”) to “Schützer” (“protector”) — in her productions of the opera.“Führer” is certainly arresting today. But when Wagner was writing the opera, in the 1840s, it was an unassuming, somewhat vague military title that referred, depending on the word to which it was connected in a compound, to varying degrees of operational command.The word got a new charge toward the end of the 19th century, when Georg Ritter von Schönerer, an Austrian antisemite who agitated for pan-Germanic nationalism and harbored fantasies of ancient Roman revival, took it on as the name his followers would address him by. (They also embraced “heil” and the rigidly outstretched, so-called Roman salute as a greeting.)Von Schönerer’s ideas and his gift for propaganda were inspirations for Hitler, who in the early 1920s began to use “Führer” as his title, along the lines of the success of Mussolini’s self-styling as “Il Duce.”As with Mussolini, the word became central to what was soon the fully cultlike worship of a charismatic would-be national savior, and “Führer” was the foundation of Hitler’s official title starting after the death of Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, in 1934. One of the Nazis’ omnipresent slogans was “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”: “One Nation, One Realm, One Leader.”Anja Harteros, front, and Piotr Beczala in Yuval Sharon’s staging of “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleSomewhat surprisingly for non-German speakers, the word is still found all over that language as part of compounds. A train conductor is a “Zugführer”; a driver’s license is a “Führerschein.” At Bayreuth, Katharina Wagner herself carries the title of “Geschäftsführer,” or managing director.But for the term to stand alone, especially as a military or political title, is basically verboten.And it’s not exactly neutral in the context of Wagner. Even if he wrote long before the rise of the Nazis, his works were tainted by his notorious antisemitism and, decades after his death, by Hitler’s enormous affection for his music and the dictator’s friendship with the Wagner family.Hence the “special political background” that Katharina Wagner referred to, the source of the sensitivities that she has worked to address. Some years ago, the festival unveiled a large display on its grounds about artists killed, imprisoned, exiled or otherwise affected by the Nazis. Several stagings — including Stefan Herheim’s “Parsifal” and Barrie Kosky’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” — have dealt explicitly with Wagner’s and the festival’s political legacy.The change of a single word seems like it could hardly be a subtler interpolation. At Bayreuth, which lacks supertitles, it is likely that almost no one would have noticed had there not been a small flurry of coverage of the issue last summer. And deference toward sensitivity might make sense, given the festival’s history.Yet the erasure of “Führer” is a missed opportunity. It also doesn’t quite make sense, with the unintended consequence of seeming not to take Wagner’s text and his careful word choices seriously. “Schützer” is used elsewhere in the libretto to describe Lohengrin’s role within the plot as a kind of transitional figure after Gottfried, the lost brother, has disappeared. The energizing question of the story is, in a leadership vacuum, what comes next? It’s therefore misleading, after Gottfried’s deus ex machina reappearance, to refer to him as “Schützer,” since he, unlike Lohengrin, is entitled to actually take political and military command.And if we’re rooting out Nazi associations in “Lohengrin,” why stop at “Führer”? Early in the opera, ominous reference is made to armed action against the German “Reich,” and stentorian choral “heils” proliferate, like something out of the propaganda film “Triumph of the Will.” In “Meistersinger,” why then preserve the ending, when the kindly cobbler Hans Sachs suddenly, grimly warns of foreign encroachments on the country and its “holy German art,” a call taken up with rally-style fervor by the crowd?Any of these changes might be made out of respect, but they also let us in the audience off the hook. Wagner’s works are as ambiguous and ambivalent as we are, pulled between the desire for freedom and the desire to be led and commanded. This should not be something to erase, but rather something to explore — for us watching and for the stage directors who shape Wagner’s vision for us.Yuval Sharon, who directed the latest Bayreuth “Lohengrin” but had no part in the decision to change the text, said in an interview: “I feel like it’s part of your responsibility every time you restage this opera, the same responsibility you have with any opera that has fraught language or fraught ideas. The visual aspect gives you an opportunity to offer a counterpoint to that original.”In other words, how should a staging represent Gottfried if we are to take in the nuances of what might be meant by him returning as Führer? Presumably, in 2023, it’s not as an unironically perfect Aryan boy in gleaming armor, an unquestioned savior. Sharon depicted him symbolically, as a verdant flowering of nature; Hans Neuenfels, whose “Lohengrin” preceded Sharon’s at Bayreuth, had an adult-size bloody newborn emerge imperiously from an egg.There are as many options as there are productions. But simply taking out “Führer,” with all its connotations, softens the complexity of the society depicted in the opera — a restive, angry one willing to submit to a leader who will quickly and easily solve its problems. The libretto’s medieval Antwerp is not so different from the Germany that blindly followed its own Führer.It is often said that we shouldn’t anachronistically import into Wagner’s works the ways in which they were heard and used long after his death. In the case of “Lohengrin,” later history actually illuminates this unsettling opera; changing a word out of an excess of sensitivity distorts it.“I think editing it feels a little bit like a whitewash,” Sharon said. “It can dull the edge of what makes the piece so potentially dangerous and disturbing. The opera carries in it the DNA of so many utopian visions, and simultaneously the very beginning of totalitarian thinking. Both coexist in his works, and you can’t have one without the other. Part of what’s amazing about Wagner is engaging with those impulses, in both directions.” More

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      in Theater

      Jürgen Flimm, Director of Festivals and Opera Houses, Dies at 81

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      He left his mark in Hamburg, Berlin, Salzburg and elsewhere. He also directed a memorable “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.Jürgen Flimm, who led some of Europe’s most important theaters, opera houses and performing arts festivals over the last 40 years, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Wischhafen, Germany, northeast of Hamburg. He was 81.His death was announced by the Berlin State Opera, where he had been general manager from 2010 to 2018. His wife, the film producer Susanne Ottersbach Flimm, said the cause was heart failure following pneumonia.Mr. Flimm’s Berlin appointment was his last in a long career that also included directorships at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. He also staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 2000.He directed acclaimed productions outside the German-speaking world as well, including at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.A dress rehearsal for Mr. Flimm’s 2000 production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” one critic wrote of the production, “but the shock was considerable.”Jürgen Flimm was born in Giessen, Germany, on July 17, 1941, to Werner and Ellen Flimm, who were both doctors. His family had fled there after bombs began falling on Cologne, where they had been living, and where they resettled after the war.In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mr. Flimm recalled his childhood. His father was a surgeon who, Mr. Flimm said, used the family’s apartment to see patients: “Every morning I put up my bed and our living room became a waiting room: patients everywhere.” His mother was a general practitioner, but like so many German women in the immediate postwar period, a time of general deprivation, she scrounged to bring home butter and meat. As a child, Jürgen sold old newspapers to fishmongers. While his older brother, Dieter, played drums in jazz bands around the city, Jürgen invented dialogue for his puppets in the attic. Dieter Flimm eventually founded an architecture studio and worked as a set designer and a musician. He died in 2002.Their father, who loved theater, would attend performances as a doctor on duty, and Jürgen often accompanied him. “I secretly hoped that an actor would get sick, so I’d be able to go backstage and see what went on there,” he said, although his father disapproved of his sons’ artistic proclivities and would have preferred for them to study medicine.Jürgen enrolled at the University of Cologne, where he studied theater, German literature and sociology. He abandoned his studies to become an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele theater in Munich, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. He received an acting degree from the Theater der Keller in Cologne.In 1969 Mr. Flimm married the actress Inge Jansen, a colleague at the Kammerspiele. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mr. Flimm remained close to Ms. Jansen’s five children from her previous marriage, four of whom are still living. Ms. Jansen died in 2017.Mr. Flimm married Susanne Ottersbach. The couple lived in a two-story thatched house built in 1648. She is his only immediate survivor.He directed his first production at a theater in Wuppertal in 1971 and held positions at theaters in Mannheim and Hamburg in the 1970s, while also building up his résumé as director in Zurich, Munich and Berlin.He directed his first opera in 1978, the German premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1975 “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” in Frankfurt. The work remained dear to Mr. Flimm’s heart: Decades later, he programmed it, in an acclaimed production by the British director Katie Mitchell, in both Salzburg and Berlin.In 1979, Mr. Flimm returned to Cologne to lead the city’s main theater, the Schauspiel Köln. During his six years as artistic director there, he programmed works by the influential choreographer Pina Bausch and the fanciful French-Argentine director Jérôme Savary.He moved to Hamburg in 1985 to lead the Thalia Theater, which he is widely credited with putting in the international spotlight by inviting avant-garde artists like the American director Robert Wilson.From left, the director Robert Wilson, the author William S. Burroughs and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits at the premiere of their work “The Black Rider” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. It was the most lauded production during Mr. Flimm’s tenure there.Frederika Hoffmann/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1990, Mr. Wilson’s “The Black Rider,” a collaboration with the singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the author William Burroughs, became the most lauded production of Mr. Flimm’s tenure in Hamburg. Despite some famously sour reviews (the German magazine Der Spiegel likened it to “a version of ‘Cats’ for intellectuals and snobs”), it was a hit and toured worldwide.Mr. Flimm left the Thalia in 2000. That summer, his “Ring” cycle had its premiere at Bayreuth.“It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, “but the shock was considerable.” While praising some aspects of the cycle, Mr. Ross concluded that it ultimately left a very mixed impression.“The production felt unfinished,” he wrote, “and the flurry of painted curtains during the ‘Götterdämmerung’ apocalypse suggested that in the end it had simply run out of money.”Mr. Flimm made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” that October. This time Mr. Ross raved, concluding his review by saying that “Flimm is a smart director, and the Met should give him anything he wants.” The production was revived three times between 2002 and 2017.Mr. Flimm’s follow-up at the Met, a 2004 production of “Salome” that was a vehicle for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, was more polarizing. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted that Mr. Flimm received some loud boos on opening night. But, he noted, “the bravos won out, and rightly so.”In 2005, Mr. Flimm became artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a multidisciplinary arts festival in the rust belt of Germany. He stayed an extra summer past his three-year contract after his designated successor, the German theater director Marie Zimmermann, took her life in April 2007.His time there dovetailed with the start of his artistic directorship at the Salzburg Festival, where he had previously served as head of drama from 2002 to 2004. During his first summer, he commissioned a new staging of “Jedermann,” the morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition, from the young Bavarian director Christian Stückl. The production was a hit and remained a festival mainstay for a dozen years.Mr. Flimm ascended to the festival’s leadership in 2007. It was a tumultuous time: Gerard Mortier had taken the festival in a radically new direction throughout the 1990s, and after his departure in 2001, it had struggled to hold on to an artistic director.The four seasons Mr. Flimm spent as Salzburg’s leader were regarded as successful artistically, but he made clear that he was not interested in staying for the long run. In 2008, he announced that he would step down at the end of his term to head the Berlin State Opera.In September 2010, shortly after Mr. Flimm arrived in Berlin, four steamers sailed down the river Spree, conveying 500 members of the opera company westward to the Schiller Theater, where it planned to spend three seasons during renovations to its historic home. Instead, the construction dragged on for seven years.Mr. Flimm imported a number of acclaimed productions to Berlin that had first been seen at Salzburg. One of his original productions in Berlin was a 2016 staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which featured an abstract set designed by Frank Gehry that reportedly cost 100,000 euros.In addition to his work in theater, Mr. Flimm taught at the University of Hamburg and was a guest lecturer at Harvard and New York University. Among his many honors was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German government’s highest, which he received in 2002. In a 2011 interview with the Bavarian radio station BR, Mr. Flimm was asked what accomplishments he was particularly proud of. Among those he mentioned was his 2000 “Fidelio.”“After the premiere,” he said, “I stood on the balcony of the Met, looked out into Manhattan and thought to myself, ‘Not bad, Jürgen!’” More

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      In Chicago, ‘Opera Can Be Hip-Hop, and Hip-Hop Can Be Opera’

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      The baritone Will Liverman was singing in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” about five years ago when he watched a documentary about Jonathan Larson and his musical “Rent.”“It talked about how ‘Rent’ came to be, and how this guy had the idea of taking ‘La Bohème’ and updating it,” Liverman said in an interview this month. “I was wondering why more classics aren’t updated — taking them for ourselves and spinning a new narrative that reclaims the story and tells something that’s meaningful for us.”Then he visited a Black barbershop, and an idea hit him: This could be the setting for a new take on the Rossini, like “La Bohème,” one of the most beloved operas in the repertory. “The thing is,” Liverman said, “I didn’t really take agency over writing anything because of feeling like I was just a singer. I was like, man, someone should do this.”The years since have proven that Liverman isn’t just a singer. An enterprising artist on the rise, he has not only become a fixture of contemporary works at the Metropolitan Opera, including a star turn in Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” last season, but also shepherded new commissions. And now, with his old friend DJ King Rico, he has taken on composing as well.Together they have updated “Barber,” loosely adapting its story into one about a barbershop on the South Side of Chicago and blending operatic writing with a kaleidoscope of styles like R&B, funk, hip-hop, gospel, rap and, of course, barbershop quartet. Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj joined them, collaborating on the show’s book and becoming its dramaturg and director. The result, “The Factotum” — its title recalls the famous Rossini aria “Largo al factotum” — opens Feb. 3 at Lyric Opera of Chicago.Liverman, 34, and DJ King Rico, 33, met as teenagers at the Governor’s School for the Arts in Virginia. There, they found a mentor in Robert Brown, a teacher with a gospel background who taught them, young Black men, what place they could have in a world like opera, and how free the art form could be.“We had someone to look up to that looked like us, that taught us what opera was but also could get on the keys and play the craziest rendition of anything you ever heard,” Liverman said. “That’s what really sparked it all, before we even knew what was inside of us. He instilled that.”On the bus, the pair would hold court, singing songs like Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz’s “Get Low” in classical voices. “The girls would go crazy,” DJ King Rico said; but more important, the playfulness taught him “that opera can be hip-hop, and hip-hop can be opera. It’s the same notes.”In a joint video interview, Liverman and DJ King Rico talked about writing “The Factotum,” and the place it might come to have in the opera world. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.“The possibilities just seemed endless,” Liverman said about composing an opera.Lawrence Agyei for The New York TimesComposing opera is new for both of you. How has it felt to be working in this mode?DJ KING RICO When Will hit me up about this, that was the farthest thing from my mind. I sang opera in high school; I did it for two years. That was really cool, but then I went the other route. So, when he came back, what immediately started playing in my mind was like, OK, we’re going to make this us. It’s going to be really, really authentic.WILL LIVERMAN The exciting thing was, the possibilities just seemed endless. There was a lot of trial and error — figuring out how the operatic voice can serve these styles we know and love. We were in the studio; we’d record something and listen back to it a bunch of times and really pinpoint what things were working and what things we could fix.DJ KING RICO For me, it’s been cool to play various roles. That’s what the factotum is — a jack-of-all-trades. Having to master a lot of different things throughout this process: writing the music, recording, engineering. Whatever helps the process move along, just removing the ego, and that has been transformational.There’s an added layer here, Will, of writing for yourself in the role of Mike.LIVERMAN It’s been a big discovery, because we’re also both the composers and librettists. I loved writing parodies back in the day; if TikTok was a thing in my 20s, I’d be all over that. But now, we noticed there are certain words that just sound so corny if you try to sing them operatically, like “That’s so dope.” And in these styles, you have to keep space for the operatic voice to feel natural.There were some things that I sing for my part that I had to rewrite because it’s like, Oh man, I need to actually breathe here, or do that. On the creating side, you also start thinking about vowels and certain words that speak better.Given how broad the range of styles is in this opera, how did you arrive at what sounded right for any given moment?DJ KING RICO I don’t think we ever arrived at what felt right completely until Rajendra came onboard. He helped complete the story line, and even now, in rehearsals we’re still fine-tuning. But as far as whether to use hip-hop or gospel or whatever — I think it’s more so the emotion that we want the audience to feel and what supports that.We used to play this Basquiat clip where he was like, “Black people are not represented in these spaces.” But we do exist here, and so we are being very intentional about being ourselves in this space. So, there’s this one song, “Conversation,” where it has all of the genres mixed up into one so you see all of the personalities of the different characters in the barbershop. We wanted it to feel a little bit chaotic, and authentic.About the barbershop. In Rajendra’s director’s note, he compares that space to the theater, as a gathering place. What did that idea open up for you in the opera’s story?LIVERMAN One of the cool things about going into a barbershop is, you never know who’s going to come in. Everybody needs to get their hair cut, from the gangster to the preacher to the teacher. It’s a safe space for us to really be and speak our truths. It’s so much more than a haircut. My hair was a mess about a month ago; I was looking like Moses in “The Ten Commandments.” But I go to my guy in Chicago, and I just listen in on the conversations — the openness, the honesty, the funny things, the joy. Then, at the end of it, I come out a new person. I feel like art has the power to do that.DJ KING RICO They definitely both provide community. And a work like this allows multiple people to come together. If you’ve seen the things in this story and been impacted by them, probably someone next to you has experienced the same thing. So, you can come together and feel joy in that.DJ King Rico at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. “Opera can be fun!” he said. “There’s room for everything.”Lawrence Agyei for The New York TimesThe Met Opera recently said, in something of a reversal, that contemporary works have become box office draws — including, Will, the sold-out run of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” that you were in. Not only were those seats full, but the audience was also visibly different. Do you see “The Factotum” aiming for something similar?DJ KING RICO Opera can be fun! There’s room for everything. And so if we’re going to put something like this on on a Friday, let’s make this a thing, a vibe. Let’s experience the art and then kick it after. There’s a renaissance that happening, and I’m just thankful that we’re a part of it. Because opera changed my life as a 14-year-old kid studying those scores. I feel like if we can continue to expand it and expand the audience, it can continue to do the same thing going forward for future generations.LIVERMAN I hope other artists look at this and see that anything’s possible. When you have a dream or that feeling, that inner voice saying “Do this,” do it. Like Rico said, one of the ways we think of the factotum is being a jack-of-all-trades. We put this together ourselves over a number of years, and I want it to be an inspiration for other artists to step outside a box that says “I have to just be in this one lane.”Then there are young kids of color. But there are also young kids period, and older people. I want this to be a story of humanity, like Rico said, coming together. You see so much of the sad mask in opera, but I think there’s something to be said, just as powerful, about joy and happiness. We need those stories, but we also need some of the things that make the heart feel good. More

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      Monica Bellucci Tries on the Dress, and Life, of Maria Callas

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      The film star embodies one of opera’s greatest divas in the solo show “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” coming to the Beacon Theater.There are opera stars, and then there is Maria Callas.Birgit Nilsson or Luciano Pavarotti may have been great, but they haven’t sung posthumously. Callas, on the other hand, has toured — as a hologram — decades after her death. Few have heard of the William Luce play “Bravo, Caruso!,” about that classic tenor, but Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” which revolves around Callas’s exacting methods as a teacher, won a Tony Award in 1996 and is regularly revived.This soprano’s fans — the fiercest of whom the critic Anthony Tommasini affectionately dubbed “Callas crazoids” — will be kept busy this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of her birth. Early out of the gate, in New York, is the actress Monica Bellucci, who is bringing her solo show, “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” to the Beacon Theater on Friday.Bellucci, 58, has been performing the piece, in which she reads selections from Callas’s writings, on and off since 2019. Yet she still finds it hard to explain the peculiar, enduring hold that the soprano often referred to as La Divina still has on the collective imagination.“She had an aura,” Bellucci said during a recent visit to New York.Bellucci herself was regally resplendent that day, projecting the kind of smoky-voiced elegance often associated with marquee names of Golden Age Hollywood. But her résumé is less predictable than that reference might suggest: She has leapfrogged from intimate dramas to the James Bond movie “Spectre,” from Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” to the victim of a brutal rape in the French “provoc-auteur” Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible.” Her reputation as a symbol of European glamour and sophistication is so firmly established that she made fun of it in an episode of the series “Call My Agent!” (One crucial difference from that guest appearance: “I never had a relationship with my agent,” she clarified with a laugh.)Maria Callas, one of the most storied sopranos in opera, greeting fans at Carnegie Hall in 1974.: Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesStill, as open to new adventures as Bellucci has been, she had steered clear of theater. Undaunted, the director, writer and photographer Tom Volf, who had made the 2018 documentary “Maria by Callas,” trekked to her apartment to pitch a project based on his book “Maria Callas: Lettres & Mémoires.”“I remember we were in the living room, and she opened the book randomly and started reading out loud,” Volf, 37, said in a video interview. “That’s when I really saw the alchemy right away. Suddenly her physique, her attitude, her emotion were matching the one that I sensed was Callas’s, especially in some specific letters where you can see the woman and not the artist or the public figure.“I call it an alchemy; I think it’s beyond resemblance,” he continued. “I believe in destiny, like Callas did.” (Whenever Callas comes up, quasi-spiritual references to “aura” and “destiny” have a way of seeping into the conversation.)Equally bowled over, Bellucci forgot her longstanding reservations about appearing onstage. “The sense of beauty I felt was stronger than being scared,” she said. “I wanted to share what I felt with other people. It was through theater that I could get into that.”It’s hard to deny that a Callas-Bellucci pairing feels like it was predestined. Bellucci even played a Callas-like Italian opera star nicknamed La Fiamma in Season 3 of the series “Mozart in the Jungle.” Beyond their physical resemblance, Bellucci, an Italian-born Parisian, has led a border-crossing, multilingual international career, just like Callas, a Greek, New York-born singer decades earlier.Both had to navigate the specific tests that greet famous female celebrities. “I think that Monica can very instinctively and strongly relate to Callas as a woman,” Volf said. “Perhaps because she understands the duality between trying to lead a life as a woman and an artist with worldwide fame, and all the difficulties and the challenges that come with it.”The Callas mystique, beyond her acting and singing talent, was fed by an agitated, to put it mildly, personal life. She was rumored to have bitter rivalries with colleagues; was crushed by a torrid and unhappy affair with the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis; and had a conflicted relationship with her body. (She lost a considerable amount of weight in a crash diet, which some blame for her eventual vocal issues.)“She’s someone who had the courage to follow her heart, so that’s why when people say she had a tragic life. …” Bellucci said, trailing off. “She had a brave life. She wanted to divorce in a moment when, in Italy, divorce was forbidden. She’s still inspiring today because she had everybody against her and she was a fighter.”Callas’s physical reinvention can be also be seen as a sign of autonomy rather than of weakness. “She created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business,” Bellucci said sympathetically. “Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle’: They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”At the Beacon, Bellucci’s instrument will be sheathed in one of Callas’s actual dresses, a black Saint Laurent number that Volf borrowed from a private collection in Milan. The couch that plays a central role, however, is only a replica of one Callas had at her apartment on Avenue Georges-Mandel in Paris.“The idea was a ghost of Callas is coming back to her house,” Bellucci said. “So I move to different places on the sofa, as if it represents this circuit of her life, from when she’s young, full of excitement, and then when she was more mature, finding a balance between work and private life. And then the end, when she was in her sadness and melancholy, but so elegant in that.”Because this is not a biographical show per se, but rather a peek into the singer’s more intimate side, in conversation Bellucci and Volf often differentiated between Callas and Maria, as a way to separate her public and private personas. They also pointed out that “Master Class,” for example, focused on a very specific element of her life: “This was the hard part of her,” Bellucci said. “People used to say that she had a temper. Actually, she was uncompromising and completely dedicated to her work with her soul, her heart.“But the more intimate part of her,” Bellucci continued, “the one that nobody knows, was so fragile and sensitive. And this sensitivity was also the base of her talent: She had the capacity to perceive things like a child. But nobody protected this child — not her mother, not her family. No men protected this child. So the child gets destroyed, and the artist as well.”As rich as her experience with “Letters & Memoirs” has been, Bellucci is not sure she will stick with theater. She said she had turned down, at least for now, an offer to play Medea — not coincidentally, perhaps, the role that gave Callas her sole movie experience, under the direction of Pier Paolo Pasolini.“I think maybe Callas did the one film, and I’m going to do one experience in theater,” Bellucci said. “I’m very thankful for the experience, and I’m going away like I came.” More

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      Benjamin Britten’s ‘Peter Grimes’ Arrives in Paris

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      Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” directed by Deborah Warner in her Paris Opera debut, reintroduces a 20th-century composer to French audiences.The bitter and bloodthirsty townspeople who make up the chorus in Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera “Peter Grimes” might feel like a sort of welcoming committee for the British director Deborah Warner, who is making her debut at the Paris Opera.She’s more than happy to be rejoining the cold and stern world of “Peter Grimes.” It was a privilege to bring Britten’s work “more into the French consciousness,” she said in an interview.This production, which she also directed in its debut at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2021 and at the Royal Opera in London last year, is for Ms. Warner the consummate example of a modern British opera still being discovered beyond Britain — and particularly across the English Channel in France, where Britten has intrigued many operagoers.“Peter Grimes” tells the story of an outcast fisherman in a seaside English village who is accused of drowning his apprentice but is embraced by the sympathetic Ellen, who later begins to suspect that he may indeed be a villain. The townspeople turn on Grimes as the opera spirals toward its tragic climax. The production, with Ms. Warner again at the helm, has a slightly different cast but with the tenor Allan Clayton in the title role as before. It plays a total of nine performances at the Palais Garnier, Jan. 26 through Feb. 24. “One of the things I love about an opera revival is that it’s a way of developing the piece, and to get it there and take it further,” she said by phone during rehearsals in Paris. “You might have 75 to 125 performances in the theater, but in opera you have far less.”Her sense of rediscovery with “Peter Grimes” is what drives her passion for opera, which she admittedly came to after years of directing theater, often collaborating with the actress Fiona Shaw in a famous “Richard II” in the 1990s (in which Ms. Shaw played the lead) and “Medea,” “Mother Courage and Her Children” and others in the 2000s and after.Deborah Warner, the director of “Peter Grimes,” said it was a privilege to bring Benjamin Britten’s work “more into the French consciousness.”E. Bauer/Onp“I was part of a big generation that were brought from the theater to opera, for me kicking and screaming,” said Ms. Warner, 63. “My parents didn’t listen to opera. I had no exposure to it.”Mystery could also be at the core of Britten’s history in France, a country long known for its love of romantic opera. Britten had a certain amount of early success in France, as he did across the continent and the world, with “Peter Grimes” and “Billy Budd,” written in 1951.But the French “didn’t quite understand Britten, and he didn’t quite understand them,” said Paul Kildea, the author of “Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century” and the artistic director of Musica Viva Australia, in a phone interview from Melbourne. “There was always something dangerous about France.”“He felt very trapped in England,” Mr. Kildea added.France became an early influence for Britten in a way that many opera fans may not realize, Mr. Kildea said. He had his own sense of discovery as he began his creative life.“He spoke French and went there in the early ’30s, and then later with his mother,” he said. “But the amazing moment for him was in 1937 after his mother dies and he goes to Paris and searches for Oscar Wilde’s grave, unsuccessfully and traumatically visits a brothel and tries to come to terms with who he is as an adult and a musician.”Despite the mixed reception in England and France of the original “Peter Grimes” and “Billy Budd,” about a handsome and beloved sailor and the master-of-arms aboard an 18th-century British naval vessel who is determined to destroy him, the French understood something a bit more subtle.“I think the French got a lot of the gay subtext of ‘Billy Budd’ long before the English started writing about it,” he said.The subtlety and obscurity of Britten’s work keep it interesting for Ms. Warner. She has never been as drawn to directing the grand Italian and French operas. Her first real exposure to the largely atonal opera style was Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” about a soldier’s degradation and demise.Britten outside the Sadler’s Wells Theater in London, with his script for “Peter Grimes.” The opera premiered there on June 7, 1945.Popperfoto, via Getty Images“I only liked ‘Wozzeck’ because I had worked on the [Georg] Büchner play of the same title, so I had heard the music and loved it,” she said. “Some of the more contemporary operas are the calling cards to woo the new generation, in my opinion, because they’re incredibly immediate and visceral.”Coincidentally, Ms. Warner finds parallels between “Wozzeck” (which she will direct in a new production for the Royal Opera in London starting in May) and “Peter Grimes” (she also directed “Billy Budd” at the Royal Opera and has staged other Britten operas, including “Death in Venice” and “Turn of the Screw” around the world). She sees the chorus as a central and important character, and a dangerous and mistreated one at that.“With Britten the dramatic mastery and the music mastery are equal, and he was searching for the same dark world that Berg was,” Ms. Warner said. “There is a remarkable similarity to the brutalized community that makes ‘Grimes’ work. The terrible behavior of this monstrous chorus has to come from somewhere.”And that ever-present chorus presents its own set of challenges with mostly French singers delivering English words in the harsh and accusatory tones that Britten wrote for the townspeople’s descent on Grimes.“The challenge of Britten in France is the language, but I don’t think the music is harmonically or rhythmically difficult,” said Ching-Lien Wu, chorus master for the Paris Opera, in a recent phone interview from Paris. “You have to not overreact to the music. If you sing a romantic Italian piece, you can do that. You can’t do that with Britten.”A scene from a 1945 production of “Peter Grimes.”Alex Bender/Picture Post/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesOver the decades, Mr. Kildea said, Britten’s contribution to opera has gradually become more a part of the repertory in French opera houses.“It’s partly an aesthetic thing, because when they first took ‘Turn of the Screw’ to Paris in 1956, for example, it was just too far removed from the concept of grand opera,” he said.“Britten wasn’t part of the French virtuoso. A lot of my French friends talk about stumbling upon Britten. They wouldn’t have had that exposure in school or on the radio.”Ms. Warner sees the premiere of “Peter Grimes” at the Sadler’s Wells Theater in London on June 7, 1945, as a seminal moment in opera history.“It’s a miracle that ‘Grimes’ is such a success,” she said. “This opera happened right at the end of the war. There we are with the grumpiest fisherman on the planet, and it’s a deeply uncomfortable and vicious and nasty story.“The right people must have been in the audience that night,” she added. “We owe a debt of gratitude to those 800 people who were at Sadler’s Wells that night.” More

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      A Decidedly French “Hamlet” Returns to Paris

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      Starting in March, Ambroise Thomas’s version of the Shakespearean tragedy will be revived at the Opéra Bastille for the first time since 1938.Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet” had all the elements to become a blockbuster at the Paris Opera in the 19th century. With a gripping plot that unfolds over five acts, a leading baritone in the title role and innovative orchestration deploying newly invented instruments, the work had an enduring hold at the box office after its 1868 premiere.Like so many “grands opéras” that were born and bred for the company, “Hamlet” fell out of repertoire around the turn of the 20th century. Only since the 1980s has the work received a revival on stages worldwide. From March 11 to April 9, Thomas’s Shakespearean adaptation will return to the Paris Opera for the first time since 1938, in a new production directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski and starring Ludovic Tézier at the Opéra Bastille (a pre-opening for viewers under 28 takes place on March 8. Thomas Hengelbrock conducts).The company’s general director, Alexander Neef, has made it a goal to create a more specific identity for the Paris Opera by commissioning research and programming the French grand opera that once flourished there. Having experienced and admired a production of “Hamlet” at the Metropolitan Opera some 20 years ago, Mr. Neef said that the work “came up rather naturally” after his appointment.Mr. Tézier, whom he considers “not only the leading French baritone but maybe the leading baritone in his repertoire,” was also a natural choice. The singer, who is particularly coveted in the music of Verdi, in turn suggested Mr. Warlikowski as director following their collaboration on a 2017 production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at Opéra Bastille.For both lead performer and director, the production provides an opportunity to deepen their interpretation of a work that has played an important role in their respective careers. Mr. Tézier made debuts in both Toulouse, France, and Turin, Italy, in the title of role of Thomas’s “Hamlet” about two decades ago, while Mr. Warlikowski staged the original play by Shakespeare in Avignon, France in 2000 (he had first learned the drama as an apprentice of the late director Peter Brook in Paris).The director Krzysztof Warlikowski, who staged the original play by Shakespeare in 2000 in Avignon, France. “For me, the essential thing that clinches the drama is of course the apparition of the specter,” he said.Louisa Marie Summer for The New York TimesThis operatic version of “Hamlet” takes an unexpected turn before the curtain falls: The protagonist survives and is crowned king. The liberties taken by Thomas’s librettists, Michel Carré and Jules Barbier, met with criticism after the premiere; a Covent Garden version of the opera first mounted in 1869 restores the work’s original, more tragic ending.For Mr. Warlikowski, Thomas’s protagonist shares a great deal in common with the mythological figure of Orestes. “He also rebels against hypocrisy and the ills of this world,” he explained on a video call.The director will also hone in on the scenes in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears. “For me, the essential thing that clinches the drama is of course the apparition of the specter,” he said.Mr. Tézier noted that Thomas deployed some of his most dramatically effective music for the ghost by knowing how to pare down the orchestra. The baritone drew a parallel to another Shakespearean opera, Verdi’s “Macbeth,” and the title character’s hallucination of a dagger.“Thomas creates an atmosphere that is favorable to the text and the emotion of the moment,” he said by phone.The composer was exploring orchestral colors with new instruments by the musician and inventor Adolphe Sax at the same time as the composer Hector Berlioz, who held Thomas in great esteem. For example, the second-act banquet scene in which Hamlet accuses Claudius of murdering his father features a solo for alto saxophone. Thomas also wrote for bass saxhorn and six-keyed trombones.An ardent defender of French music against Germanic influence (specifically that of Wagner), Thomas in 1877 stated that every country “should stay faithful to its style and maintain its distinct character,” rather than submit “to the caprices of the time.” In a sign of his patriotism, he volunteered for the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War before assuming the directorship of the Paris Conservatory in 1871.His “Hamlet” has been noted for its specifically French qualities. In addition to mitigating tragedy by allowing the protagonist to survive and avenge the death of his father, romantic intrigue and sensuous instrumentation often set the tone.Ludovic Tézier has a long history with Thomas’s “Hamlet,” having made debuts in Toulouse, France, and Turin, Italy in the title role. He noted that the work “allows the audience to spend a night in the opera in a state of suspense and meditation.”Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesParis was at the time the center of classical musical life, not just in Europe but worldwide. “Hamlet” premiered at Salle Le Peletier, the same theater that mounted such works as Giacomo Meyerbeer’s “Robert le Diable” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” before Palais Garnier opened in 1875.The baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, who was at the height of his fame, was captured in portrait as Hamlet by none other than Manet. The role of Ophélie, whose fourth-act mad scene helped ensure the work’s popularity, has also been an important role for sopranos from Christina Nilsson to Mary Garden (the new production stars Lisette Oropesa and, starting in April, Brenda Rae).But by 1891, Wagner’s “music of the future” became something of a game changer. “Lohengrin,” “Die Walküre” and “Tannhäuser” remained in repertoire at the Paris Opera through 1910, while of Meyerbeer’s four major operas, only “Les Huguenots” persisted.Mr. Warlikowski expressed his wish to champion “Hamlet” by “provoking questions and creating a spiritual journey through this timeless story.”Mr. Tézier emphasized that the work was not “second-rate.”“It most of all allows the audience to spend a night in the opera in a state of suspense and meditation,” he said.He compared the infrequent programming of such neglected classics to the unpredictable sightings of the Loch Ness monster: “There is no real explanation. But with each appearance of the monster, you have to see it because it’s a rarity. From the beginning to the end, something really happens in the music.” More

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      A Paris Opera House’s History and the Phantom

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      The architecture and location of the Palais Garnier are intertwined with the history of France and Paris (and a famous phantom).Showcasing more than 400 performances of opera, dance and music each year, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera, inaugurated in 1875, is a true cathedral of culture. A promenade through its rooms is a theatrical experience itself, revealing ornate marble columns, bronze statues, crystal chandeliers, and paintings and frescoes. But the Palais Garnier, as the building is known, also holds secrets, from design quirks to haunting tales. Here are some facts about the building.Charles Garnier, the architect, was the last one shortlisted for the project.  Emperor Napoleon III started a competition for an “Imperial Academy of Music and Dance” in December 1860. Five finalists were chosen from more than 170 proposals. They were ranked, and Garnier came in last. With little to lose, he changed his plans, creating a monumental structure layered with imposing arcades, colonnades and flanking pavilions, crowned with a dome and a pedimented tower. “He was using a classical language, but in an eclectic, much freer, and much more expressive way,” Christopher Mead, author of “Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism,” said in an interview. Garnier’s win shocked the establishment, Mr. Mead said, but worked with the emperor’s effort to cast himself as a reformer.Charles Garnier, second from right, circa 1865 with his partners during construction of the opera house, which became known as the Palais Garnier.adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty ImagesThere is a “lake” under the opera house.When digging the foundations, workers hit a hidden arm of the Seine, causing water to flood the site. It was impossible to remove all the water, so crews had to contain it with a massive concrete reservoir with a vaulted ceiling from which water is still pumped today. The so-called lake was dramatized by Gaston Leroux, author of “The Phantom of the Opera,” who made it the stomping grounds of the Phantom. Mr. Mead was mesmerized by a visit. “You can see why it inspired Leroux,” he said. “You could invent a whole world there.”The falling chandelier in “The Phantom of the Opera” was based on a real event.In 1896, during a performance of Étienne-Joseph Floquet’s opera “Hellé,” a short-circuit caused a counterweight from the chandelier to fall, killing a woman in the audience and injuring several more people. Reporting on the event was Leroux, then a journalist with a Paris newspaper. In “The Phantom of the Opera,” it is the Phantom who dislodges the chandelier from the ceiling. The current ceiling of the Palais Garnier, painted by Marc Chagall. The house’s chandelier, which was involved in a deadly accident in 1896, inspired a plot point in “The Phantom of the Opera.”Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSo was the Phantom (sort of).Leroux first published his novel as a serial in 1909 and 1910. In an interview, Isabelle Rachelle Casta, author of “The Work of ‘Obscure Clarity’ in ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ by Gaston Leroux,” said its characters and story were invented but drew from real-life elements in addition to the lake and the falling chandelier. The Phantom himself was inspired by a pianist who was disfigured after an 1873 fire at the Palais Garnier’s precursor, the Salle Le Peletier, and from an assistant to Garnier who disappeared during construction. “Leroux took all of these stories and he created one of the most important stories of the 20th century,” Ms. Casta said. An attack partly inspired the construction. In 1858, Napoleon III and his wife, Empress Eugènie, went to the Salle Le Peletier for a concert. As they arrived, three bomb blasts threw their carriage onto its side, hurled spectators into the street and blew out windows in the opera house and surrounding buildings. Eight people died, but the emperor and empress survived. The mastermind of the plot was Felice Orsini, an Italian revolutionary who had been critical of Napoleon III for not supporting his pro-republican cause. The emperor, already hoping to replace the Salle Le Peletier, decided to build a new opera house in a more open area with a secure entrance. But he never saw it completed: He died in 1873.Garnier requested that no trees be planted on the main road to the building.Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who oversaw Napoleon III’s transformation of Paris, lined all his Grands Boulevards with trees, except for one: the Avenue de l’Opéra, a half-mile stretch from the Louvre to the opera house. Garnier asked for this to maximize his building’s sense of monumentality and to not block views of it. “He wanted a building that announced itself to the public,” Mr. Mead said. “This was a building for them.” More