David Alden
Stage Director
“A leading light … Alden is no less a force in international opera today.”
Andrew Clark, The Financial Times
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David Alden (credit: Brian Tarr) |
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The dilemmas of opera’s heroines
By Andrew Clark (Financial Times)
Illicit sex. Betrayal of trust. Heart-searching. Guilt. A public confession.
Tiger Woods on TV? No, Katya Kabanova in Janácek’s opera of the same name. In Woods’ case, going public risked leading to professional suicide. With Katya, suicide is not a risk – it’s a necessary exit strategy.
In the context of English National Opera’s forthcoming production of Katya Kabanova, directed by David Alden, it seems legitimate to ask why we end up sympathising with Katya the adulteress but not with Woods the adulterer. Is it because she is portrayed as a victim, while he still has everything to play for?
No, says Alden, sweeping aside my question at the start of his lunch-less lunch break at ENO’s rehearsal rooms. “In Katya Kabanova it’s not Katya who is false but the morality of those who condemn her – especially her mother-in-law. The mother-in-law sees herself as a pillar of society but she is ruthlessly exposed [by Janácek] as a hypocrite and sadist. Katya is true to her own honest brand of morality. She is on the verge of psychosis from the start.”
Psychosis? The word could have been coined for Alden’s productions. A leading light of ENO’s Powerhouse era 25 years ago, Alden is no less a force in international opera today. All his recent ENO productions – Jenufa, Peter Grimes, Lucia di Lammermoor – have featured psychotic characters. And won a slew of awards.
Now, as in the 1980s, his aim is to challenge audience assumptions. “My way has always been to encourage people to hear the music and listen to the words in a different way. Part of theatre for me is surprise and confrontation. Especially the theatre of opera: it’s an extreme art form to begin with.”
That credo was forged in the 1970s when the young Manhattanite – the son of a playwright father and dancer mother – fell under the spell of such giants of German Regietheater as Ruth Berghaus and Harry Kupfer, who were sweeping European opera at the time. His early productions set out to shock. The mature Alden, by contrast, carries audiences with him. No longer the brash New Yorker determined to upset convention, he seems better attuned to the work’s internal logic.
In some respects, though, Alden, now 60, hasn’t changed. Watch him in rehearsal, and you see a man with a boyish build, whose energy still outstrips everyone around him. He remains unmarried: his closest relationship – other than with his identical twin brother Chris, also a successful stage director – seems to be with his work. The peripatetic opera circuit so dominates his life that he still has no fixed abode: on visits to New York, for example, he uses his brother’s apartment.
But Alden’s apparently hermetic lifestyle has never stopped him unravelling the emotional complexities and dilemmas of opera’s great role models. In conversation he is a fount of insights and inspirational ideas. So what is it about Janácek’s treatment of Katya, I ask, that compels us to sympathise with her?
“The whole thing is wish-fulfilment on his part,” says Alden, referring to the Czech composer’s well-documented infatuation with a young married woman, Kamila Stösslová. But Alden agrees that the opera offers no utopian escape. “That’s what is so heartbreaking about it. It’s Janácek’s Tristan – pure romantic fantasy, psyching himself into what he wanted in his own life.”
In so doing, Janácek created one of opera’s tortured souls. When I tell Alden that he has become a specialist in such archetypes, he spurns the compliment, wary of being typecast. “I’m very good in comedy,” he ripostes, referring to his Munich staging of Cavalli’s La Calisto, a sex romp that came to Covent Garden in 2008. “The attitude to sex in the 17th and 18th centuries was less neurotic. With Monteverdi or Handel, even though the structure is so much more rigid and codified, there’s amusement and intelligence as well as tragedy. I find that refreshing. It’s non-judgmental.”
Unlike the morally censorious 19th century? Alden has done his share of Wagner and Puccini, and finds it “exhausting”. “There’s something about the taboos and euphemisms of that period that make them fabulously intense – but infuriating too, because it’s much harder to stage. In Wagner there are always two things going on at the same time: a public ideal and, underneath, so many secrets and realities. The music alone talks about that, not the words. Unlike Monteverdi and Cavalli, Wagner is not enjoying the problems of being human – he’s tying himself up in an attempt to negate his own sexuality. That’s why his operas are so preoccupied with the virgin/whore dichotomy.”
Alden has clearly done his homework on the female protagonists of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Parsifal. So what about Puccini’s heroines? Alden believes they, too, behave like tools of the composer’s fantasy. “Puccini conforms to the 19th-century formula of torturing a beautiful, vulnerable woman for the audience’s delectation. That was the basic modus operandi of French and Italian composers of the period. A woman transgresses and is publicly punished.”
Alden’s understanding of opera seems so complete, so grounded in the music, that you wonder why opera house managements increasingly favour film and theatre directors with no previous experience of opera. The Metropolitan Opera’s Peter Gelb was recently quoted in the FT as saying that “opera directors do not necessarily make the greatest opera directors.” Alden read the piece. Did he take it personally?
His response is measured: he reveals that, after a 30-year hiatus with the Met, he has been invited back to direct Un ballo in maschera in 2012. “The excitement of having a sexy [director’s] name from another discipline is a fantastic PR thing. But inviting a movie director to do his or her first opera involves a high level of risk. From my experience it takes 10 or 20 years just to figure out how to begin to direct an opera, pulling all the strands together and balancing them.”
It’s just as well, then, that the opera world continues to recognise Alden’s skill: he is booked up for the next four years. “I’m trying to do everything by Handel, Verdi, Janácek, Cavalli, Wagner and more before I die,” he says. “ It’s quite loony; maybe it’s building a fortress against death, but that’s ultimately what drives us.”
Click here to watch an interview with David Alden and Mark Wigglesworth.