Opera Thoughts #4

Shortly after the COVID-19 Pandemic brought the world to a sudden halt, I was invited by the German opera magazine Opernwelt to make a contribution to a feature on artists’ reflections on being ‘locked down’, called thoughts and feelings about being on an empty stage. This was published, in German translation, in their June 2020 edition.

Gedanken und Gefühle bei der Ankunft auf dem bühnenlosen Grund

Wie froh bin ich, daß ich weg bin! Bester Freund, was ist das Herz des Menschen!

(transl: how happy I am that I’m finally gone! Oh my dear friend, what a thing is the human heart!')

So writes the young Werther as he takes himself into happy self-isolation, 250 years before it became law. And yet – as we know – not even Werther could live happily alone. As he recites the words of the fictional Scots Gaelic poet Ossian to Charlotte – hier muß ich sitzen allein (I must sit here alone) – it is his closeness to her that reminds him how painful – and unbearable – his own loneliness truly is.

We are not made to be alone – human beings are social animals. And what is the theatre, if not the ultimate form of social expression? Organised, produced and performed by those who have spent their lives preparing themselves and their craft to present the great works of human accomplishment for a live audience that shares the same room, and breathes the same air; opera is the ultimate team effort, requiring focussed engagement onstage, in the orchestra pit and in the auditorium. And it is of course this very communal nature that has forced the theatres to close.

I am writing this from London where my choreographer partner and I are expecting our first child. We should both have been in rehearsal – and yet we are now in self-isolation, desperately hoping that by the time our baby arrives, the hospitals will still have some remaining semblance of calm normality to them. According to Operabase, I should be back in Bremerhaven, a small city theatre with a passionate and highly professional team, directing Massenet’s amazing Werther, featuring returning local hero and now rising star Mirko Roschkowski in his first performance of this notoriously challenging tenor role. But, hier muß ich sitzen allein.

Thanks to the development of digital technology, we have at our fingertips access to a bafflingly wide choice of opera, ballet and theatre performances from around the globe. This weekend I have watched Ivo van Hove’s Don Giovanni from the Paris Opéra and Kenneth Macmillan’s Mayerling from the Royal Ballet. There’s no need to go out to the opera house, when the opera house can come to you! And yet, despite this embarrassment of riches, which nobody could hope to watch all of in a lifetime, despite the amazing quality of video and sound, as well as the choice of subtitles in any language and the interview extras, the experience of watching a ‘traditional’ opera performance broadcast from a theatre on the television or computer at home is strangely empty. As Peter Brook said fifty years ago, A man walks across the empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. Without the audience watching, there is no act of theatre. Like church and the political rally, opera is inherently an act of communion. David Pountney put it to me another way: ‘opera onscreen is to live performance what pornography is to sex’.

What will the future hold? For sure, it cannot be business as usual once the pandemic is over – however long that will take. We cannot just resume our red velvet seats and drink champagne in the gilded foyers – the world has changed forever, there will always be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Art, the way we create it, and the way we consume it, will also need to change, and this will represent a huge opportunity for those who make the work, and those who commission it: to heal and re-invent the artform of opera, and to respond to these world-shattering events, to the terrible, painful loss that is bound to affect us all. We must radically exploit technology to find new ways of presenting opera online beyond the remote broadcast of theatre performances, and that must include new work created specifically for the digital experience. But in the meantime, it is crucial that artists are supported and nurtured. It is the freelance singers, musicians, designers and directors who will be most affected by the sudden and total shutdown of the opera economy. It is now an existential question – how will freelance artists pay their bills and feed their families when the employment has dried up overnight and those lucky enough to receive cancellation fees have spent them? In the UK, a package has been announced to support the self-employed as well as employees, but there are many here, and elsewhere, who will fall through the cracks.

All those amazing, magical theatres across the world, from the smallest studio to the largest opera house, are closed. In English, when a theatre is closed, we say that it is ‘dark’. But here, in the land of theatrical superstition, there is one tradition that I’m especially thinking of right now. For as long as anyone can remember, every theatre has left one light on when the house is closed, either a single bulb hanging above the stage, or a low-voltage emergency light on a stand. It’s called the ‘ghost light’, and it makes sure that the theatre can never go totally dark, because there is always some faint light burning, waiting for the artists and the audience to return.