Director Keith Warner makes his Wexford Festival Opera debut this month with Kurt Weill's The Silverlake. He tells Michael Dervanabout his musical approach.
The first thing Keith Warner mentions when I ask him what it takes to become an opera director is a love of music.
"I think you have to want to be a director and you have to love music, I mean classical music," he says. "I grew up in London in the 1960s, early 1970s, and as a school kid I would go to the National Theatre of a Friday and a Saturday. I would also go to Covent Garden or Sadler's Wells, or later into the Coliseum, to English National Opera. Obsessively. Two or three times a week, and a matinee and an evening every Saturday. Always theatre and opera. I suppose, in my mind I never divided the two."
Music, Warner says, is one thing he simply can't live without. We are meeting in Dresden, where he is working on a new production of Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust for the city's Semperoper. In his spare time in Dresden he has been listening to Sibelius, as "a kind of antidote to the richness of Berlioz and the madness of Berlioz. I love music and I think it is important if you're going to direct operas that you do, that you know about music a bit, that you care about it, that you nurse it a bit."
He's done an amount of teaching as a director, and he is experienced at fielding questions about the skills a director needs.
"For me, the answer has always been that you're somebody who can create an atmosphere in which other people can be creative," he says. "You've got to have some good ideas. You've got to have a certain amount of balls to push out boundaries, now and again. But you aren't the person who's on stage at the end of the day, and you're not the person who is in that sense an active performer.
"Today, we had two people running around, two big men doing a strange kind of dance into the abyss. And somebody fell over. That can very quickly feel foolish to a couple of grown men who are in their late 50s, with big careers behind them. But somehow one has made an atmosphere in the rehearsal where they'll do anything, they'll try anything. They've got lots of arguments for and against things, and stuff that's important to them which they want included. And yet, it's your job to find a way of making them happy, making them free, and getting your vision of the piece across without compromise at the same time."
I watch him at work, bouncing ideas off the singers and the conductor, and even running around the set himself, much as he is asking the singers to do. He's a heavy man, and he seems to be letting everyone know that he is fully aware of the physical demands he is making.
"Even elephants can dance," he grins to one of his assistants, when he has done his bit.
HE LIKES TOapproach the directing of an opera through the music.
"When I'm asked to do an opera - say it's an opera I don't know, I don't even know the story - I will certainly put on the music and just listen first, and see what the world of the music conjures up," he says. "Sometimes it's intriguing to open a libretto the next day and think, oh yeah, that's going to fit, but, actually, the music feels like this to me.
"I do an exercise sometimes in teaching, where I've developed a tape of eight rare moments from operas, very specific dramatic things, and I play them to people and say, 'now write down what you think is happening'. The most amazing thing about music is that nobody has ever got one right. That shows you how free music is, really.
"Secondly, very seldom have people ever shared the same idea. So how you freely associate with music, what music means, I guess, is just a very wondrous thing. It's very magical, mysterious, mystical and ever-elusive. But it has to be the start."
Free association, of course, is anything but the full picture. Composers identify the particular associations they intend. Warner seems to be suggesting an entirely independent validity for his own feelings.
"I think that one of the things you're paid for as an opera director is to have a kind of trained sense of validity about your ideas," he says. "You read, you experience many things, you work. So, it's not exactly as though you're sitting down in an armchair and responding. You have developed a sensibility towards these things over a period of years."
He recalls the words of one of his teachers: "She would say, look, the notes of this thing are written on a page. When I go and hear Fischer-Dieskau do Schubert, I really pay to hear his interpretation. I don't pay to communicate with Schubert. I want this man's communication, active in the room with me. It's his interpretation, obviously, of what Schubert laid down. But because Schubert's dead there's no way of knowing what he really wanted or thought. And you only have to work with a few composers to know that the things they write in the score have often got very little to do with what they want, really. Which is interesting. And how to interpret that, and how to work with that, is part of being a professional. You have developed the sense. I suppose I do have a heightened sense of my own importance in the field of imagining through music. And I think that's what people are buying a bit of."
What he's being hired to do, he says, is "to come up with some imaginative responses, rather than the straightforward response". The budget, he says, is an often underestimated factor steering the direction of a production. He contrasts the low budgets of Wexford with the "no budgets" of Bayreuth, where, when he directed Lohengrin, "you came up with whatever you wanted". He instances "all the grunge productions of English National Opera in the 1980s" as an aesthetic that was frequently budget-driven. Technology comes into it, too, and "computerised systems of both lighting and film allow you to do very extraordinary things very cheaply".
HE SEES THEdirector as the person who pulls the whole creative team together, "and at the same time be open to their ideas. They can often have better ideas than you. Sometimes you're pushed in a certain direction that's obviously a very strong vision of the piece coming from the designer or the lighting designer or the costume designer."
He moans about the tendency of certain high-flying conductors to absent themselves from the rehearsal process. He cites Covent Garden's Anthony Pappano as a shining exception. "For the Ringand Wozzeck, he was there every single day, three sessions a day. A certain quality of work develops out of that. A place like Wexford can often supply that kind of quality work, if they can't supply the money, necessarily. It's amazing how the standard of something is raised tenfold the moment the director and the conductor are doing it together. That pinging back and forth is really how to build a production."
And he's absolutely clear about what he wants to experience when he goes to the opera for standard repertoire. "That's easy. I know I want to see a La Bohèmeor CarmenI have never imagined. That's absolutely the reason I go to the theatre."
Lots of the productions he's never imagined, I suggest, are probably quite terrible. "Of course. There are terrible ones that are modern, avant-garde productions, and terrible ones that are traditional productions. I want to see something that is going to inform me about the piece, but more importantly than the piece or the composer is about living. That something in it is going to spark one good idea in me - 'oh, I never thought about that', or 'yes, I feel that now, I feel that suffering, that pain, that joy', whatever. That's the experience I want, the experience I haven't had before."
Warner's Wexford debut is, as you would expect, at the opposite end of the repertoire from La Bohèmeor Carmen. He's directing Kurt Weill's The Silverlake, which is actually more of a play with music than an actual opera, although it's the composer who gets top billing rather than the playwright, Georg Kaiser. "It will be about three hours, with about an hour of music. That's what appealed to me. What an extraordinary thing to be asked to do, crazily, in an opera festival." The story is "a huge moral tale, a beautiful fairy tale, really", and has been cast with a mixture of singers and actors. The work was premiered simultaneously in three cities - Leipzig, Erfurt and Magdeburg - on February 18th, 1933. But the political upheavals of the time caused it to be banned the following month, and its unusual nature has proved a major barrier to modern productions.
Wexford is using a newly commissioned translation by Rory Bremner, and the cast is headed by Nigel Richards and Simon Gleeson (playing the natural enemies who end up living in the same castle, only one of them knowing the score), and Anita Dobson, best-known as EastEnders'Angie Watts (as the scheming woman who plans their downfall). This is one production that shouldn't have any difficulty providing both cast and audience with new experiences.
Don't mention the 'tent': the one-off opera festival
The 2007 Wexford Festival Opera is what you might call a special edition. For a start, it's happening at an unusual time of the year, beginning in May rather than October. It's also taking place in a once-off venue, a "temporary theatre" attached to Johnstown Castle while the Theatre Royal is being redeveloped. And it includes some repertoire, such as Dvorák's Rusalka, that's exceptionally popular by the standard of a festival that normally celebrates rarities. There will also be a piece that you might have expected not to be on the Wexford radar at all, Kurt Weill's Silverlake(with Anita Dobson), which is not an opera in the normal meaning of the word, and has far more text to be spoken than sung.
Questions have been asked about the acoustic of the temporary theatre, its insulation from the sounds of the weather outside, and so on. The one word that's absolutely forbidden in festival circles is the word "tent". If you want to know what it's really like, you'll have to go there yourself. The good news is that the seating capacity of the venue is up on the now demolished Theatre Royal, so tickets shouldn't be quite as hard to get for a festival where it's become the norm for every available seat to be sold.
Kurt Weill'sThe Silverlake opens Wexford Festival Opera at Johnstown Castle on Thurs, May 31. The festival runs until Sun, June 17. Details: 053-9122144 or www.wexfordopera.com