Patrice Chéreau - personal memories

Patrice Chéreau  (1944-2013) died today, just weeks from his 69th birthday. He had cancer, but was working until a few weeks ago when he directed a highly acclaimed Strauss Elektra at the Aix Festival, which alas is not available in the UK, which must mean that someone's had the sense to record it for DVD. Please, someone outside UK, tell me about it (it's on medici.tv)

There's so much about him on the net that I don't need to write more, but HERE is a link to an article Patrice Chéreau, temps qu’à faire .And even more,  A Director genuinely devoted o his art. .

My personal memories of him go back to 1978 when I saw his Lulu, the first staging of the three act version of Berg's opera. I couldn't get my head round the third act then, but now have come to regard it as visionary. (read more  about that production here).

Chéreau's Wagner Das Ring des Nibelungen created for Bayreuth, Wolfgang Wagner and Pierre Boulez is the stuff of legend.  In 1976, DVD didn't exist, so it was years before we could catch up.  What a shock that must have been at the time! No wonder it caused a sensation. It's complete nonsense, as wikipedia says, that modern directors just transpose productions into different times. Wikipedia has been hijacked by trolls. Chéreau's  productions worked because they went to the heart of the drama, and were musically sensitive.

He was an actor, too, who understood how things worked from practical experience. In 2008, Daniel Barenboim persuaded him to take part in Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat at the BBC Proms. Guy Braunstein, no less, played the "fiddle". Boulez was watching from a box, and stood up at the front. Chéreau’s delivery was perfect, pungent and pointed. He was earthy enough to convey the “sense” of the peasant soldier, reinforcing the way Stravinsky writes into this music echoes of a raucous village band. The angular, quirky rhythms turn the steady trudge of footsteps into a bizarre, macabre dance of death. Chéreau is so attuned to the musical logic that his spoken lines take on the same, jerky staccato. These are not verité rhythms of speech., but presenting this in any language other than French spoils the cadences

One of the things I respected about Chéreau was that he did what he believed in rather than just doing things because they were there. He was primarily a man of the theatre, though he understood music and worked with only the best. Pierre Boulez persuaded him to return to opera with him in 2007, when he conducted Janacek's From the House of the Dead.  Everyone in the opera world seemed to be in the audience. It was outstanding“totally relevant for our time”, as Chéreau said later in his interview with Pierre Audi. Someone asked why he didn’t make it into a parable about Guantanamo Bay, for instance and he said “No, this is universal - orange jumpsuits would only mute the wider implications”. In an impish aside, Boulez quipped “and orange is the colour of Holland”. It’s a good point, because a single image can often have multiple meanings. 

This production was created with perceptive depth, with everything in it designed to amplify meaning. For example, the prisoners are engaged in pointless repetitive work – shipbuilding in Siberia, no less. Instead of a huge construction, which would dominate and distract, Chéreau explodes a bomb out of which cascade streams of waste paper, which the prisoners collect in bags. The explosion coincides with a huge, dramatic climax in the music, and the “gleaning” movements in the repetitive figures. This close integration between music and staging reflects the way Boulez and Chéreau work together. From the outset, Boulez and Chereau were both at rehearsals, so the ideas developed with an understanding of the full orchestral score. Actors were used to explore the body language and dynamic of the characters, so the singers had more to work with when developing their vocal approaches. “Coherence”, said Chéreau, "between ideas, music and drama, is the basis of the interpretation. The eagle, for example, is a critical symbol. It would be easy to go for a “happy ending” with the bird flying free, but it would be simplistic.

Janàček From The House of the Dead Chéreau

Janàček's From The House of The Dead opens in New York this week. How will it be received? This is a grim opera set in a Siberian prison in Tsarist times. Anyone expecting saccharine fairy tales is in for a shock. But Janàček, despite his love for folk idiom, isn't folksy. The cute picture postcard image of "tourist" Janàček is far from what the composer, and his music, is really like. Even The Cunning Little Vixen packs a lethal punch if you really think about it.

From the House of The Dead is in some ways Janàček's masterpiece even though it was unfinished on his sudden death. Always a late developer, in his 70s he seems to have been entering a new, wilder creative phase. Whether he saw Wozzeck or The Rite of Spring, I don't know but he would have heard about what was going on. A lifelong Russophile, he would probably also have had an idea how things in Stalinist Russia were turning out, too, by 1927.

Janàček's work was known in Britain fairly early: the Sinfonietta is dedicated to an English supporter and Rafael Kubelik who knew it conducted at the Royal Opera House after the war. Then the Iron Curtain came down. Even in Czechoslovakia, the authorities didn't give Janàček his due as one of the culture ministers was a foe of the composer. And since most operagoers don't speak Czech or Slovak, Janàček's operas have reached the public in English translation where the edgy, dissonant speech patterns of the language he loved so much were neutralized. So it's now time for a reassessment.

Pierre Boulez discovered Janàček in the 1960's from reading the score of The Diary of One Who Disappeared, which heralded Janàček's burst of new work in the 1920's, so he came to the composer with completely fresh ideas. In 2007 I went to Amsterdam to hear Boulez conduct From The House of The Dead after having heard glowing reports from the Salzburg premiere. It was fantastic - crackling with energy, intensely passionate, a statement so powerful it's not so surprising after all that this opera wasn't considered "popular". Now, thankfully, we can hear it without compromise.

“Janáček adapts the absence of conventional development in folk music”, said Boulez after the Amsterdam performance. He used "found sounds" like the clucking of chickens in his yard and uses idioms beyond the Austro-German core. The repetitive pulse varies through changes in rhythm, tone and direction. The refrains “Hou, hou, hou!“, and “Chi, chi, chi!” and even “Ach…ach….ach!” function as if they were abstract parts of the orchestration.

"This opera is “primitive, in the best sense”, said Boulez, “but also extremely strong”, like the paintings of Léger, where the “rudimentary character allows a very vigorous kind of expression”. Thus, there are “many cases where you cannot find the logic in how the rhythmic notation changes from one ostinato to the next….so you have to take a little freedom”.

Freedom matters in an opera about prison. Into the closed world of the camp, come two alien creatures, the political prisoner Gorjančikov and the wounded eagle, "The Tsar of the Skies". Both get away in the end, but it's luck, not logic, and we don't know if they will survive even when they're free. The world is irrational: the prisoners are engaged in mindless make-work, sorting scraps, building a ship (in landlocked Siberia). They put on plays in which they act out stories from societies in which they no longer belong.

In New York, they won't be getting the full Boulezian blast as Esa-Pekka Salonen will be conducting. Luckily, he's good and won't be quite so hard for conservative audiences to take on board. The New York soloists also aren't in the same league as the ones who sang in Europe. But they'll be getting the production by Patrice Chéreau.

Chéreau doesn't do decorative. From the outset, Boulez and Chéreau both attended rehearsals, so the ideas developed with an understanding of the full orchestral score. Actors were used to explore the body language and dynamic of the characters, so the singers had more to work with when developing their vocal approaches. “Coherence”, said Boulez "between ideas, music and drama, is the basis of the interpretation."

The production reflects the score intimately: each physical movement has its basis in something in the music, whether it's the "threshing" sounds as the prisoners work, or the stylized acting in the plays the prisoners enact. Ensemble blocking is very strong, for this is an opera where individuals act within wider groups, just as the prison is a microcosm of society.

Boulez chose a tenor to sing Aljeja : it's more logical than using a soprano, and makes better musical sense, too, because the male voices balance in a more subtle way. Perhaps the idea of a soprano stems from the sexual tension inherent in the narrative, which Chéreau doesn't fudge. Of course homosexual acts happen in prison, even if they reflect power struggles rather than love. Nowadays we're mature enough not to be prissy about such things. In any case I hardly noticed them until I saw the close-ups on the DVD. (Get it, it's the top recording now, leaving all others behind.)

Chéreau doesn't use a real eagle, because that would be cruel and in any case hard to stage. Instead, he uses an elaborate mechanical bird, which looks quite magnificent, certainly aspiring to more than the brutal existence the prisoners endure. The bird is also metaphor: like the prisoners, it's a toy of fate, and cannot really fly away. Still, it represents hope even if it may not come.

What New York audiences will make of From The House of The Dead and of Chéreau's no-nonsense approach, I don't know. It does confound the usual clichés about the composer and about foreign directors. But the whole point of performance is to hear what someone has to say, and in Janàček, there's a lot we don't already know. Read Iron Tongue of Midnight HERE, with links to the New York Times.

Berg Lulu – Chéreau stagecraft

At last, after all these years of knowing Berg’s Lulu from the acclaimed audio recording conducted by Pierre Boulez, I’ve managed to see the 1979 production on film. It was directed by Patrice Chéreau with whom Boulez created The Ring Cycle for Wieland Wagner which so transformed Bayreuth and Wagner performance practice. After 40 years, that Ring (readily available on DVD) isn’t shocking at all, but quite apposite to the music and symbolism.

Although I saw the original Chéreau Lulu first time out, I can’t remember much because I was so shaken by the plot and music. Nothing scary about the staging though, which seemed pretty conventional even for the time. Perhaps this was necessary as this was the first time the opera had been heard in its full three-act glory and it was a lot for audiences to take on board.

Teresa Stratas looks perfect for the role – frail and birdlike, her limbs darting in odd, angular jerks. She’s nimble, swaying her hips like the snake the Animal Trainer refers to. When she catches the Painter between her knees, she snares him like a boa constrictor. She’s so flat chested you can see her ribs, so fragile looking you think she’ll break when embraced. Physically she brings out the dark side of the plot, the danger, the child abuse and cruelty. No wonder Stratas is rated by many as a good Cho Cho San even if her voice isn’t lush enough for Puccini. As an actress, she’s fine, though no one can come near to the incomparable Christine Schäfer who haunts every frame of the Glyndebourne production.

Chéreau’s production of Lulu came in for flak because he moved the time from turn of the century Vienna to the 1930’s. Why this should have caused a fuss is incomprehensible, since Berg was writing in the 1930’s and wasn’t following Wedekind slavishly in any case. Moreover, nothing in the narrative actually references a particular period. There wasn’t a revolution in Paris in Wedekind’s time any more than in Berg’s : what counts is the sense of looming disaster, which a 1930’s setting expresses even better. They had a stock market crash for real! Had Berg lived, he and many close to him would have suffered under the Nazis, and he knew it. As for Jack the Ripper, in this opera he’s symbolic, not historical.

Sets and designs (Richard Peduzzi) are completely realistic. The Painter’s studio has paintings, not just of Lulu. One looks vaguely like a portrait of Dr Schön which is a subtle clue. Similarly, Chéreau and his team picked up on another fundamentally important detail. Schilgoch doesn’t feel safe in Lulu’s mansion, because the marbles is polished so perfectly that he’s afraid he’ll slip. Dark green marble dominates the set, at one shining and elegant yet vaguely sinister. Impenetrable hard surfaces, whose coolness can be treacherous. Schigolch, who knows Lulu so well, can recognise the implications. Christof Loy’s toughened glass wall is thus a descendant of Chéreau’s polished marble.

Not all stage directions carry the same density of meaning. Shining surfaces reflect (literally) the hard brightness of Lulu’s life when she’s rich and in control. It doesn’t matter much whether Dr Schön dies on a sofa or on the floor. In his anguish he could not care less. Falling on marble is perhaps more meaningful. And Lulu and Alwa don’t need a sofa to make out on. Wouldn’t the police have removed it for forensics, anyway? In a wealthy household, no one would keep an old bloodstained divan. As if Alwa didn’t know where his father died. What counts in this scene is the malevolent way Lulu announces the fact to the poor fellow.

It doesn’t make a jot of difference whether Lulu meets her end in an attic or in a cellar : all that matters is that she’s shown in degraded surroundings. Götz Friedrich at the Royal Opera House in the 80’s showed Schilgoch and Alwa peeing against a wall in the final scene. Why not? That’s what London streets are like. The men treat the wall with the same disregard as Lulu has been treated all her life. Indeed, it’s not so far from the way people casually dismiss complex imagery. Perhaps some like Schigolch and Alwa need “instant relief”.

In complete contrast to the abstract Christof Loy production, Chéreau filled his stage with people – waiters, maids, actors, theatre staff. This is risky because too much activity can distract from essentials. But that’s never been an objection in literal, conservative stagings where busy surroundings are often admired. Notice how carefully the extras are positioned. Between gaps of singing, the singers can take a glass, move about, smoke, hardly missing a beat in the music. Like the music itself, they circulate.
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In the theatre scene, the extra personnel in their bizarre costumes serve to highlight the contrast with “real” people. Who is in the circus after all ? At the very start of the film (not the performance) there's a shot of bejewelled and befurred climbing up the marble staircase . They don't know it yet, but they're just like the rich folk whose world keeps Lulu at bay.

Dr Schön’s fiancée appears fleetingly in the background, a glowing vision of blonde female glory, everything that Lulu isn’t. She doesn’t have to say a word, nor does Lulu. No wonder Lulu is so upset. What she wants is more than just Dr Schön. Even when she marries him she knows she’ll never have what the privileged Adelaïde took for granted. Knowing Berg’s obsession with symmetry, the presence of the fiancée makes complete sense. She’s a forerunner of Countess Geschwitz, the only person who can offer Lulu a degree of selfless comfort. Again, both Geschwitz and Adelaïde have background totally closed to Lulu. Perhaps that’s why the Countess talks of going back to Germany and to university ? What does that represent, since Geschwitz dies ? There’s something pivotal about the fiancée even if it’s not at all explicit. Berg’s cryptic puzzles are deeply embedded, often ignored.

In the Paris scene, the crowd is part of the meaning: people are milling about pretending to be powerful, but they’re all on the make. Like jungle animals pacing their cages, always watching each other. Previously, Lulu was alone, a solitary among larger groups with things to do. Now she’s one of a wider group all chasing unsavoury deals. Berg isn’t commenting on business and economics, even though he knew all about the Crash of 1929. Rather, he seems to see Lulu as part of a wider system that operates like a sinister clockwork that regulates society. This fits in with the way the music operates, its symmetries and patterns as neat as an accountant’s ledger. Indeed, the music seems to evolve on parallel levels, like multiple frames on a cinema screen. Berg’s “worlds within worlds” yet again.

Some of Chéreau’s other details I don’t yet understand from two viewings. One is the magnificent chandelier. Of course, mansions have chandeliers and you need light to lift all that dark marble, and cast strange shadows. But it serves a deeper purpose too, which I can’t yet figure. Does it relate to the little fairy-figure seen only at the beginning ? He’s astride a glittering ball of light. He’s also dressed in pale shades reminiscent of Lulu’s silks. But that is the joy of complex images. You don’t “have” to get them immediately or even all the time. Like Berg’s music, clues are elusive and what you get equates to what you put in.

There was a lot of animosity at the time the production was premiered, partly from long festering resentment of the Bayreuth Ring and the end of the Cosima mentality. Furthermore, the mystery of the Third Act caught the popular imagination. Lulu was the first modern opera to get that massive publicity in the English speraking world. A lot was hanging on who got the contracts for completion and production, financially and in terms of reputation. Fortunately after 30 years the dust has settled and most people actually know the opera well enough to make more measured assessments. Quite frankly, there's nothing shocking in Chéreau's production, and even a few insights. Along comes Christof Loy who does the opposite and draws fire too. Perhaps it's time to heed what Berg himself said apropos to Wozzeck. He was a composer not a stage director and acknowledged how things change in art and life. "I write for the future".

Please read my other posts on Lulu and on the Royal Opera House production - click on label "Berg" at right. There's lots and even a movie download.

Janacek - From The House of the Dead DVD

Last June I went to Amsterdam to the great, lively Holland Festival and heard Janacek's From the House of the Dead conducted by Pierre Boulez, directed by Patrice Chéreau. It was fantastic, brilliant, vibrant orchestrally, making Janacek vivid and intense. You can scroll down to see what I wrote then (under tabs for Janacek). Now, you can watch the DVD which has extras, which are just as good. Here's a review of the new DVD ! Recordings are few - Mackerras and Jilek (good) but none come even close to this.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classRev/2008/Apr08/Janacek_DG%20004400734426.htm

Prom 39 Stravinsky L'Histoire du Soldat

Because L’Histoire du Soldat contains spoken words, it’s easy to assume that a conventional reading will suffice. Hence some of the elaborate performances which attempt to inject exaggerated “realism” into the words, overwhelming the music. Yet the music is paramount, the spoken parts mimicking its rhythms, not the other way round. This is music, above all. The words serve the musical line, like a new kind of instrument. Most actors aren’t musically acute enough to appreciate this, which is why performances without the vocal parts are valid, and so often far more successful as a result. As Patrice Chéreau said on the BBC broadcast, this is “pure theatre”, artifice, not naturalism, we don’t need to be lulled by false realism. Parallels with The Rake’s Progress are apt. In both, men make pacts with the Devil. Stravinsky deliberately uses spartan forms, so the stark moral dilemmas are not softened or compromised.

Chéreau famously helped Boulez create the seminal Bayreuth Ring decades ago, which might have earned him easy laurels solely in opera. Instead, he made his career in theatre. Then, last year, he and Boulez created a remarkable new approach to Janáček in a new production of From The House of the Dead. For an actor, Chéreau is unusually “musical”, perhaps because his work isn’t mainstream theatre but sensitive to wider influences. If anyone could do justice to L’Histoire, it would be someone like Chéreau, who understands how words and music integrate. He got exactly the right balance. By holding the script in his hands, even though he was clearly reciting from memory, he gave visual expression of Stravinsky’s concept of theatre/music as art, not faux reality. It’s also a reference to the mysterious book in the text which the devil gave the soldier (who didn’t read it).

Chéreau narrated all three “parts”, the soldier, the devil and the narrator. The princess is represented, silently, by a ballerina in some performances. This is perceptive, as the parts aren’t “characters” as such but symbolic. Chéreau’s delivery was perfect, pungent and pointed. He was earthy enough to convey the “sense” of the peasant soldier, reinforcing the way Stravinsky writes into this music echoes of a raucous village band. The angular, quirky rhythms turn the steady trudge of footsteps into a bizarre, macabre dance of death. Chéreau is so attuned to the musical logic that his spoken lines take on the same, jerky staccato. These are not verité rhythms of speech., but presenting this in any language other than French spoils the cadences. In non-vocal performances, the violin part is predominant, for many reasons. The devil, for example is often portrayed as a fiddler. This violinist was excellent – no surprise then to find it was Guy Braunstein, concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmoniker, no less. Barenboim brought out the internal relationships well, violin and voice, bassoon and clarinet, violin and double bass. The programme notes translate L’Histoire as “March” but it’s a manic, sardonic dance as well, so these inner relationships do count. They are not unisons so much as tense little duels, like the card game in the story (and in The Rake’s Progress!).

I went to this Prom for Chéreau, for he is a huge draw and rarely heard. The ensemble comprised members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. This is an extremely good orchestra, far better than the label “youth orchestra” might imply. If anything, the circumstances in which they work together intensify the commitment of their playing. It’s full spirited, yet well integrated : these musicians really know why it’s important to listen to each other, even if they don’t agree. In a small ensemble these values come through even more strongly. The most accomplished players here naturally shone, but all pulled together. At one point during L’Histoire, the percussionist instinctively started to dance. It showed how completely “involved” he was. I loved it.

Boulez’s Mémoriale (…explosante-fixe originel) is demanding but came over well because the ensemble understood how its muted dignity comes about through relationships, not star turns, even though the flute part is exquisite. Boulez was as young as these musicians when he met Stravinsky. The two composers hit it off immediately. There are accounts of them sitting together deep in earnest conversation. What might have happened had their friendship developed ? We’ll never know, but Mémoriale is a sincere and very moving tribute to Stravinsky, and, in this revision, also to a flautist prominent in IRCAM. This background is worth bearing in mind as there was an invisible thread in this Prom. Just as Boulez learned from Stravinsky, Boulez, Barenboim and Chéreau (and Braunstein), have worked together for years, and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has significance in human as well as music terms. After Mémoriale, Boulez briskly bounced onto the platform, shaking Guy Eshed’s hand warmly. The flautist’s face lit up. It wasn’t a moment he will easily forget.

Part of this Prom was being filmed. What they probabaly won't show, though, was Boulez, standing in a box over the stage, listening to L'Histoire - another moving, intimate moment for me. BTW the picture shows the cover 0f the Chicago Pro Musica recording of L'Histoire (non-vocal) on Reference Recordings. It's one of the best, proving how good this piece is even without narration. Better none than bad : all the more to value narration as idiomatic as Chéreau's.

Proms Boulez Janacek

On Friday Pierre Boulez is conducting Janáček's Glagolitic Mass at the Proms. This will be a must as he hasn't officially recorded Janáček, but in the real world musicians do a lot more than what filters down the commercial system. His Janacek Sinfonietta is a wonder to behold, totally making a case for Janáček as a seriously original and ground breaking composer. Last year I was in Amsterdam to hear Boulez conduct From the House of the Dead. This isn't one of the cutesy operas like Cunning Vixen (which could I think benefit from a more incisive approach than it usually gets). In his last years, the composer was entering new territory musically. Who knows where he'd have gone had he lived longer ? Remember, Janáček was the guy who notated chickens in his yard and whose experiments with non western sounds in some ways lean closer to Bartók than Dvórak. Boulez's From the House of the Dead is a revelation! The director was Patrice Chéreau, with whom Boulez created the Wagner Ring that transformed Bayreuth a generation ago. Fantastic experience ! There's a link to the Amsterdam performance below. It's now out on DVD with extras, so GRAB IT.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/sandh/2007/Jan-Jun07/janacek3105.htm

Glagolitic Mass has always been a poser to me, because it's huge and sprawling, and that sort of thing tends to bring out extreme syrup from most conductors. But Boulez doesn't conduct music he hasn't thought carefully about, so I don't think he will serve up stodge.