This year the greater part of our university's opera production will be Maurice Ravel and Colette's 1925 opera L'enfant et les sortilèges. As part of their coursework, the students in the cast have to write a journal documenting their experiences with preparation, rehearsals, and performance, and in the spirit of solidarity I am going to do the same as I prepare to direct the opera.
My directing experience heretofore has consisted of two productions of opera scenes and a few short one-off projects. This is the first full-length (albeit only 50 minutes), fully-staged opera I will have directed, and it is not a nice and easy one with which to start. Here is an opera that, in addition to being quite musically challenging, is full of various kinds of phantasmagoria and built-in staging demands. The opera's plot is deceptively simple: a young child disobeys his mother, and the furniture proceeds to come to life and animals begin to sing, punishing him for his misdeeds. He is thrust out of his bedroom into the garden, where the animals revolt and attack him. A squirrel is wounded in the melée and the child binds its paw, his first truly unselfish act. The animals sing a hymn to the child and his mother comes back to embrace him.
What is a director to do with living furniture, humanised animals, and a magical garden? On a big budget in a big theatre the opera is a great opportunity for creative stage and costume designers to pull out all the stops. Since its premiere it has attracted big names in design, perhaps most impressively a 1981 production designed by David Hockney for the Metropolitan Opera. A quick trawl through YouTube will show huge set pieces, elaborate animations, full choruses and corps de ballet, and extravagant costumes. Suffice it to say that our budget is not very close to that of the Met, and our Music Theatre isn't quite as big (150 seats vs. 3800). So how to manage this spectacle without all of these trappings? Is it even desirable or possible? Why not choose an easier opera? Each opera will have its own challenges, so L'Enfant is not particularly unusual in that respect, and it is one of the few operas with a large cast (and many female roles, always a challenge at opera schools). A major advantage of having to strip away all of the extravagant accoutrements is that the music and the text can come through more clearly. Ravel's score (and Colette's libretto) is a model of musical and theatrical economy; they stuff more into these 50 minutes than seems possible, yet every moment rings true and no character or event feels short-changed. This also makes it an ideal opera for a fairly large group of young singers: everyone gets something fun and challenging to do, without overtaxing any particular singer. A staging needs to be found that will add visual interest while not overwhelming the music. I see my duties as a university opera director as more than just visual, however. As part of a teaching institution, a production needs to be a learning experience for all involved. It needs to shed some new light on the work, or make the audience and performers understand it in a different way. Our 2015 production set a variety of opera scenes in 1940s Hollywood, a concept I used to demonstrate how close the genres of opera and cinema are, especially in the age of the 'studio system'. By the 1940s cinema had taken the place within society that opera had held until the early twentieth century, and I hoped to show that opera could and should be entertaining and enlightening in the same way as films of this period were. Last year I set our scenes in a 1950s diner, to bring out the community aspect of opera: many operas feature meeting-places that hold similar roles to that of the diner in the 1950s. Choosing a specific time was also a way to bind very disparate scenes together, and afforded some tongue-in-cheek connections to be made (I think the idea I'm most proud of was to stage the Brindisi from La Traviata as a 1950s Coca-Cola commercial).
But producing a full opera requires a somewhat different approach from doing scenes. If the scenes are to come together as a coherent evening, some general unifying concept needs to be imposed on them from above. Otherwise you have a meaningless variety show (I should say that many opera schools do just this, and successfully, but it seems to me that the grab-bag approach is too performer-directed rather than audience-directed; even in a university opera is a public art form that needs to earn its audience, so any director has a duty to present something cohesive and not just an academic exercise). For a single opera, the concept needs to come from within, otherwise you end up with the worst kind of Regietheater, where the opera is subjugated to the whim of a director's personality. Even with scenes I start by asking, 'what does this opera say to me?', not 'how do I use this opera to convey my ideas about XYZ?'
I'll now try to take you through my thought process of how I got to the central concept of the production I'm planning for L'Enfant. First comes the question, what does L'Enfant say to me? I see a very dark, mysterious work, not at all a 'safe' fairy tale. Even though the ending is happy (the child reunited with his mother) and there are moments of humour along the way, the general mood is of unease and danger. This starts right from the very beginning, as Ravel writes an undulating sequence of parallel fourths and fifths underlined by a dissonant bass line. There is little sense of solid tonality here. There are analogues to be found in early Disney movies: the scary forest escape and transformation of the Queen in Snow White, the transformation of the boys into donkeys in Pinocchio, the pink elephants in Dumbo, the death of the mother in Bambi, the mad libidinousness of The Three Caballeros. The Disney artists of the late 1930s-early 1940s were much more willing to look at the dark dimensions of childhood than their latter-day analogues. This opera is a trip into a child's nightmare, not a (whether it is literally a nightmare or some sort of objective reality is a question I will return to in a subsequent entry).
So it's going to be dark. But that doesn't really get me very far. Next I think about the time in which the opera was written (this is the musicologist talking: we always look at texts historically and culturally). It premiered in 1925, and Colette first sent Ravel the libretto around 1917. Generally speaking, we're in post-First World War France. This is an extremely exciting period, and it makes sense that the production could be set during it. The music is full of references to other types of music of the time, including music-hall numbers and fox-trots. There is nothing at all original about setting an opera in the time it was written, and one of my favourite directors and major inspirations, Robert Carsen, often takes this route. But any kind of textbook approach to the early 1920s would be misguided as this is definitely not a 'realist' opera, full as it is of living furniture and talking animals. What is the opposite of realism but surrealism, and when was surrealism being developed? The early 1920s! Taking a surrealist approach does not mean that I think Ravel and Colette wrote a surrealist opera: neither showed much interest in the surrealist movement (or the Dada movement out of which it came), and the goal of this opera is not to 'épater les bourgeois' but rather to bring them enjoyment. But the temporal proximity is too good to pass up, and had the early surrealists been less snobbish about such bourgeois entertainment as opera they would have found a lot to like: living inanimate objects of course, but also a general interest in dreams, made-up cat language, and incorporations of wildly different musical and poetic styles.
How then to translate the language of 1920s surrealism onto our limited stage, in a way that makes sense to an audience and that doesn't overwhelm the text? Another project led me (somewhat roundaboutly) to a way in: I've been slowly chipping away at a book idea about 1950s film music and acting, and my studies of film led me into photography of that decade (Richard Avedon in particular, with his brilliant capturing of actors), which piqued my interest and led me further back in time. I latched on to 1920s photography, especially by Man Ray and André Kertesz, as a visual way in, and thought that using photographs as scenic elements would be a creative and cost-effective way to avoid a big cumbersome set (much as I liked our diner set last year, it was rather cumbersome and I wanted to avoid that this year). What attracted me to Ray and Kertesz is that they both take familiar objects and defamiliarise them through use of unusual angles or even modifications of the photographic process. Ravel and Colette do something similar in the opera, showing us hitherto unexplored dimensions of teacups, wallpaper, cats, insects, etc. I still need to continue developing the visual aspect, but I plan to have a large frame centre stage on which to project the photographs, and possibly two smaller frames on either side. Costumes are to be simple, with basic 1920s forms that can be accented with elements that reference the things/animals the singers represent.
With the basic structure in place, we can soon finalise casting of the opera and I can work on developing it further. Because I already know the singers involved, it will be easier to plan the specific aspects of the production around them. It will help knowing who is singing which role, as this will allow me to more effectively visualise the production before we begin rehearsals. The next idea to work out is an important and difficult one: are the events of the opera happening in the child's dream, or do they have an objective reality? This is the question I will return to in the next entry.
