A Landscape for a Saint
By Robert Marx
["A Landscape for a Saint" was
originally published in a French translation by F. Maurin under the
title "Paysage pour un saint": Maurin, Frédéric
(ed.). Peter Sellars. Paris: CNRS Éditions, coll. Arts
du spectacle/ Les voies de la création théâtrale,
vol. 22, 2003, pp. 62-7. (Link: <http:www.cnrseditions.fr> and
<http:www.artsduspectacle.cnrs.fr>) This original English language
version of the essay appears here by permission of the publisher.]
Throughout most of the 1990s, Peter Sellars was a leading stage
director at the Salzburg Festival. That plain statement of fact is remarkable
from an American perspective. In the USA, Sellars is still known mostly
for his early work, especially an unorthodox cycle of Mozart and Handel
operas. How did Sellars jump from Americanized Mozart to central Europe's
conservative Salzburg Festival? And how did he come to begin work there
with Olivier Messiaen's Saint Francois d'Assise -- a supremely
difficult, monumental, and obscure twentieth century opera of faith
that had been left unstaged since its world premiere in 1983? The answer
lies in events surrounding Salzburg's greatest artistic upheaval since
World War II--the seismic change of power there that followed the death
of conductor Herbert von Karajan.
No modern artist personified Austria's tradition of authoritarian cultural
rule as did von Karajan. His simultaneous leadership of European orchestras
and opera companies created an omnipotent mid-century Vienna-Berlin
axis in classical music, one that reached at times to London and Paris,
as well. Karajan's business empire was so pervasive that he had an even
greater impact on international recording and broadcast media than on
live performance.
The Berlin Philharmonic was Karajan's main artistic and economic base,
but his most important annex was the Salzburg Festival. This legendary
Austrian summer festival (founded in the 1920's by stage director Max
Reinhardt, poet Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and composer Richard Strauss),
was a mid-career acquisition in Karajan's international portfolio. He
controlled it for over three decades as an absolute personal fiefdom
and conservative bastion. In the process, Karajan restored the Festival
as one of post-war Austria's most prominent national cultural institutions.
Under Karajan, Salzburg became, to an unprecedented degree, starry,
chic, classical, international, expensive, often brilliant, and a total
reflection of one man's taste. Karajan, who was born in Salzburg, ruled.
But even in conservative Salzburg there can be shifting winds in art
and politics. Native son von Karajan died in the summer of 1989. Once
gone, his cultural empire broke apart and for the first time in decades
the opportunity arose to create a new approach for the institutions
previously under his total control. In Salzburg, a long-whispered need
to open the Festival to a wider roster of artists and repertory could
be acted upon at last. A delicate post-Karajan era began, despite the
reluctance of Salzburg's influential tourist industry (and its corporate
patrons in multi-national media and recording companies) to admit that
the Great Man was no longer among them.
To lead Salzburg across this rainbow bridge, the Festival's governing
board turned to a newsworthy foreigner with no previous connection to
Austria -- the Flemish producer Gerard Mortier, who was then director
of Brussels' Theatre Royal de Monnaie. This was an unexpected left turn
on the part of the Salzburg Festival's board, a decision taken in such
contrast to Karajan's legacy that in hindsight it seems almost defiant.
During the 1980's, Mortier transformed the Monnaie into one of Europe's
most progressive opera houses. He was as devoted to new visual interpretations
of opera, and the dominance of stage directors, as Karajan was towards
German cultural tradition and the dominance of star conductors. Mortier
was also interested in American artists and wanted to give them major
production opportunities in Europe. His greatest coup in this regard
came in 1988. With grand self-confidence, Mortier ended the Monnaie
residency of the venerated Belgian choreographer Maurice Bejart's Ballet
Of The 20th Century, replacing it with the then little-known modern
dance troupe of American choreographer Mark Morris.
Morris' controversial appointment in Belgium became Mortier's calling
card. Bejart was a Belgian institution unto himself, and his dismissal
from the Monnaie was denounced by local press and audiences. But for
Mortier this was a newsworthy and provocative move that defined his
taste, his production preferences, and the kind of risk-taking talent
he felt should lead an opera house in the late 20th century. The Mark
Morris Dance Group's residency in Brussels created an international
sensation for the Monnaie and its management. Some initial outrage over
Morris' (and Mortier's) personal styles soon faded as a series of exceptional
new dance works (many still performed) were created by the young man
who would soon be acclaimed as the finest modern dance choreographer
of his generation. Seemingly overnight, Brussels' royal opera house
ascended to the list of important international theatres.
MORTIER AND SELLARS
The idea of bringing Mark Morris to the Monnaie originated with Peter
Sellars. Mortier was among the first to present this American director's
work in Europe, including productions of Sophocles' Ajax in
1987, Handel's Giulio Cesare in 1988 and the 1991 world premiere
of John Adams' opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. He bonded with
Sellars, appreciated the young director's ideas, and greatly valued
his advice. Once Mortier accepted the offer from Salzburg and prepared
to leave Brussels, Sellars was among the most essential artists he hoped
to bring along. In a move typical of both men's boldness, the defining
work they scheduled for Mortier's first Salzburg season (1992) was a
new production of what was probably the previous decade's most challenging
musical composition: Olivier Messiaen's only opera, Saint Francois
d'Assise.
An audacious contemporary choice, Saint Francois was put forward
as the symbolic centerpiece of Mortier's artistic program --a work meant
to push the Salzburg Festival beyond its core, central-European focus
on Mozart and Richard Strauss. A profoundly spiritual and Catholic opera
by a then-living French composer, it would be staged by this much-debated
American director in the Festival's most indigenous venue--the Felsenreitschule,
a former Salzburg royal riding academy carved out of a rocky mountainside.
This was a typically provocative Mortier move, and the risks were considerable
for his new administration. The city of Salzburg is an historic Catholic
seat not known through the centuries for its ecumenical outreach. A
radical Saint Francois (which might be expected from the director
who set Handel's Giulio Cesare in the Cairo Hilton) had the
potential to challenge conservative associations in the realm of religion,
as well as stage art. Even more concerned was Salzburg's politically
influential tourist industry, which did not look upon Sellars or Messiaen
as a major draw for its expensive hotels, shops and restaurants. Nearby
businesses were further outraged when Mortier actually lowered the Festival's
ticket prices a bit from their astronomically high levels under Karajan,
setting off the fear of a domino effect that could reduce local profits.
Aside from the social and economic issues surrounding Mortier's choice
of Saint Francois, the planned production also threatened one
of the Festival's most profound, practical, and familiar traditions:
Salzburg's resident orchestra, the august Vienna Philharmonic (Austria's
potent international symbol of musical superiority) would not be in
the pit for Saint Francois d'Assise. Appearing instead would
be the upstart Los Angeles Philharmonic. This American orchestra would
play concerts as well as Messiaen's opera as part of an unprecedented
month-long Salzburg engagement. The L.A. Philharmonic's music director,
Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, would conduct.
Guest orchestras from Europe and abroad had long been part of Salzburg's
summer schedule, but as brief visitors only. Never before had an orchestra
from the USA or anywhere challenged the Vienna Philharmonic's home-team
supremacy by playing a combined opera and concert season at the Salzburg
Festival. The results backstage were predictable. Amid an increasingly
suspicious, highly charged and typically Viennese political atmosphere,
Saint Francois d'Assise became the top symbolic and public
offense against Karajan's Festival Legacy. Before the opera even went
into rehearsal, elected officials, local hoteliers, and Vienna Philharmonic
musicians were opposed. This political breach grew only worse over the
decade of Mortier's aggressive artistic leadership.
For Peter Sellars, this rare opportunity for an American director upon
one of Europe's most famous stages brought him easy controversy, but
instant status. Now he was an unexpected star in the rarefied world
of international opera. Until then, Sellars was known primarily for
directing classic plays and only a few operas in the United States --
in Boston and Washington, at regional theatres, but especially at the
Pepsico SummerFare Festival in Purchase, New York. His "radical"
versions of the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas, presented in repertory
at Pepsico and revived over many summers, became his best-known productions.
These idiosyncratic and remarkably accomplished stagings of Cosi
fan Tutte, Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, performed
by a cast of young Americans who could act as well as they sang, were
a revelation for what might be achieved in the USA by producing opera
outside the working conditions of its opera houses. A considerable theatrical
event in a small setting, these energetic, deeply American productions
were rehearsed over many weeks, revived and revised each summer at Pepsico
with few cast changes, and honed to an extremely high level of ensemble.
They would have been impossible to create within the limited time allotted
to rehearsals at any conventional opera house in the USA.
Sellars' work was unsettling to some critics and many musicians, primarily
(and simplistically) for his transposition of Mozart's operas to American
locales. (Cosi fan Tutte's stage set was a remarkably realistic
New England roadside diner designed by one of Sellars' longtime collaborators,
Adrianne Lobel, who also created a high-rise luxury apartment setting
for Le Nozze di Figaro. George Tsypin designed a New York slum
environment for Don Giovanni.) While Sellars' stage
images were far from literal interpretations of the operas' libretti,
the contemporary characters and expansive emotions in these performances
were exceptionally true to the music and made for a compelling operatic
experience.
Along with predictable criticism, Sellars also had articulate champions,
most notably The New Yorker's prominent music critic, Andrew
Porter, whose influential reviews hailed Sellars as a major new artist
and potentially one of the most important opera directors of his time.
Porter's enthusiasm, coming as it did from America's leading music critic,
gave Sellars a serious reputation relatively early in his professional
life.
Because the Mozart productions were performed by mostly Boston-based
singers who were not yet in the grip of international careers, it was
possible to tour Sellars' Mozart repertory as a unit. When first seen
on stage in Europe (including Vienna in 1989) and later on television,
these US stagings abroad established Sellars as an unusual American
talent whose work could resonate on the international scene. Here was
a director with perhaps some idiosyncratic ideas, but obvious technique,
musical sensitivity, vision, intelligence and passion.
The attention given Saint Francois d'Assise when it opened
the 1992 Salzburg Festival (where it was reviewed by 280 critics) brought
Sellars even more opportunities in Europe, and soon the general momentum
of his career reversed. By the mid-1990's, he was better-known for work
created outside the United States, and almost nothing of his originated
in America -- a situation not unlike that of Robert Wilson in the 1970's
and early 1980's. Sellars' "exile" in Europe became a great
loss for American opera. The artistic promise and sophisticated production
process of his Mozart trilogy have yet to be repeated or fulfilled at
theatres in the USA.
MESSIAEN AND SAINT FRANCOIS D'ASSISE
Olivier Messiaen, along with Mortier and Sellars, hoped that the new
Salzburg staging of Saint Francois would give his opera a second
chance. The only previous stage production had been its unsuccessful
world premiere at the Paris Opéra on November 28, 1983. On that
occasion, the composer's stage directions and somewhat naive visual
conception were followed exactly. The opera was given as a sequence
of literal bible illustrations from the life of Saint Francis, with
set and costume designs derived from paintings by Fra Angelico and Matthias
Grunewald. The production was created by Italian director Sandro Sequi,
with set and costume designs by Giuseppe Criolin-Malatesta. The conductor
was Seiji Ozawa, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and
the outstanding Belgian bass-baritone, Jose van Dam, created the marathon
role of St. Francois. In general, Messiaen's opera was poorly received.
It seemed too theatrically passive, too introspective, too uncomfortably
religious for all but a specialist audience, and in certain key sequences
the opera's music composed for an oversized orchestra and chorus was
extraordinarily difficult.
Despite the Paris premiere's failure, Ozawa remained loyal to the work,
and in 1986 he performed excerpts from Saint Francois d'Assise
in concert with the Boston Symphony. Three of the opera's eight scenes
were given: #3 ("The Kissing of the Leper"), #7 ("The
Stigmata"), and #8 ("Death and the New Life"). Peter
Sellars attended one of these performances, which, as in Paris, included
the indispensable Jose van Dam as St. Francois. From these concert performances
came Sellars' desire to stage the full opera.
By experience and instinct as much as personal taste, Sellars had to
take a far more metaphoric approach than that of the premiere production
team, and Messiaen had the self-awareness to know that the Paris production's
literal style should not be repeated at Salzburg. He gave Sellars the
authority to work more simply, with abstraction, devising a bold and
extremely theatrical intersection of light, video and fragmented architecture,
all to be placed within the massive permanent structure of the Felsenreitschule's
tiered stone arcades and outer walls.
Plans for the production moved forward, but the authenticity defined
by the composer's participation changed suddenly. Only a few months
before the first performance, in the spring of 1992, Messiaen died.
He had met with Sellars to prepare the staging, but was gone before
rehearsals began. Now the Salzburg production would become more than
an authorized new approach and second chance for Messiaen's opera. It
would be, unavoidably, an international memorial to a great composer.
Saint Francois d'Assise was commissioned in 1976 by composer/impresario
Rolf Lieberman, then director of the Paris Opéra. Messiaen was
67 years old, and revered as France's greatest living composer and teacher
of composition (Pierre Boulez was his student). But he had never written
for the theatre and had not composed vocal music in over thirty years.
Messiaen resisted Lieberman's offer at first, believing that "there
was no way forward for opera after Berg's Wozzeck." But
Lieberman was persistent, and Messiaen, a deeply religious man, came
to see the commission as a potential new way to express his bedrock
Catholic faith in music.
Throughout his long life (which for decades included weekly service
as organist at the Church of the Trinity in Paris), Messiaen composed
music upon two fundamental themes: Catholicism and ornithology. He notated
and used thousands of bird songs from around the world. For him, what
more logical subject for an opera could there be than Saint Francis?
In his preface to Saint Francois, Messiaen wrote, "I have
always admired St. Francis. First, because he is the saint who most
resembles Christ, and also for a more personal reason: he spoke to the
birds, and I am an ornithologist."
Saint Francois is massive in all senses. It is scored for
an orchestra of 119, a chorus of 150, and contains over 4 hours of music.
As inspiration and operatic precedent, Messiaen may have been influenced
by four related operas of historic importance to French composers: the
supremely epic Les Troyens of Berlioz, Wagner's musically massive,
sonically transparent, and very Christian Parsifal, the inwardly
passionate Pelléas et Mélisande of Debussy, and
Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, with its non-linear narrative.
Messiaen wrote his own libretto, basing it primarily upon scripture
and 14th century Franciscan accounts. The text's eight "Franciscan
Scenes," in three acts, suggest the "progress of grace"
within the Saint's life. It is a work of unquestioned spiritual and
historical acceptance, in which irony, psychological character, and
commonplace action are wholly absent. ("I included no adultery
or crimes in my opera.") Each scene portrays a pivotal interior
moment of personal faith and self-revelation. They are separate offerings
of transitional moments in St. Francis' growing awareness and transformation
into sainthood: his fearful cure of a leper; his ecstatic sermon to
the birds; his stigmata. Somewhat fragmentary in structure, and without
formal arias or conventional operatic form, the work is closer to oratorio
than opera. In a review of Sellars' production, Paul Griffiths (Andrew
Porter's successor as music critic at The New Yorker) wrote
that Saint Francois "presents characters who are at the
service of the work, as priests and acolytes are at the service of the
drama they commemorate in a liturgy."
In the best sense, Saint Francois d'Assise is a "consecrational
festival play" (as Wagner called his Parsifal) that is
unsuited to repertory presentations, rushed rehearsals, or quick consumption
by an audience. Messiaen referred to it as his "densest" composition
-- a vast summary of his musical style, personal belief, and joy in
nature. The opera's long orchestral passages convey a sense of sustained
eternity through faith. Inherent spirituality, physical scope, and complex
technical difficulties in Saint Francois (both on stage and in the music)
made it a perfect opera for Peter Sellars, whose spiritual interests
and outlook on his world in many ways resemble Messiaen's.
FINDING A NEW APPROACH TO SAINT FRANCOIS D'ASSISE
Sellars has referred to the life of St. Francis as a "benediction
and challenge," using words similar to those of the composer to
evoke ultimate joy in life through sacrifice. Both artists approached
their subject from similar vantages, avoiding any sense of the tragic,
rejoicing in the transformation of suffering into hope, and reveling
in the expression of their private beliefs in public forms, despite
the risk of rejection by audiences. Sellars is himself religious, and
especially in the years since he first staged Saint Francois,
many of his productions seem driven by a quest for public communion,
conjuring in modern terms an ancient aura of performance as ritual.
(In this regard, Sellars is not unlike such modern predecessors as Peter
Brook.)
With hindsight, one can see Sellars' staging of Saint Francois
d'Assise (at Salzburg in the summer of 1992, then revived in Paris
at the Opéra de la Bastille in December 1992, and again at Salzburg
in 1998), as the first work in a quintet of related Sellars opera productions
about faith, self-sacrifice and rebirth. These include a double bill
of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms
(Salzburg, 1994), Handel's Theodora (Glyndebourne, 1996), a
mixed program entitled Stravinsky Biblical Pieces ("The
Flood" and "Abraham and Isaac," among other short pieces;
Netherlands Opera, 1999) and John Adams' El Niño (based
upon nativity themes; Opéra, Paris, 2000).
Sellars described the libretto's scenes as "objects of contemplation,"
but theatre requires ongoing stage action -- or at least an audience's
perception of thematic forward movement. How can a stage director bring
life to an already static and visually minimal narrative of four hour's
duration? How can interior faith become explicit to an audience without
falling back upon the cliched biblical "tableaux vivantes"
approach of Saint Francois d'Assise's failed world premiere?
The solution grew from the contrast of a spacious, extravagant, and
very modernist stage setting with the unadorned and humble acts of faith
played upon it. The costumes (by Dunya Ramicova) for Saint Francis and
the Franciscan brothers were plain to the point of being drab. They
wore simple, brown hooded robes. The Singing Angel was not an imposing
Renaissance winged being (as in the original Paris production), but
was costumed as a modest and modern religious supplicant with a backpack
-- perhaps a sacrificial hospice attendant who would be lost in a crowd
if not for a crystalline singing voice. (The program suggested a connection
to Dorothy Day and her Catholic Workers Movement in the United States,
which, through social service and publications, addressed issues of
poverty and destitution.) The human imagery of these characters was
utterly modest. But they were surrounded by a stage setting of rare
magnificence; summits of natural, constructed and technological worlds
that were literally open to the night sky (the theatre's roof is retractable)
and framed by the massive rock arcades of the Felsenreitschule.
George Tsypin's towering set consisted of two immense structures that
filled the theatre's entire 130' stage width, but were divided by a
vast, vertical grid of fluorescent lights. On stage left loomed a beautiful
multi-story edifice that looked like the outline of an unfinished cathedral.
The chorus was most often seen on high platforms inside this transparent
symbol of human worship, one whose bleached wooden design was divided
into ledges and stairways reminiscent of a Max Escher painting. Extending
from the cathedral towards stage right was a wide platform that grew
in parabolic form into a steep rake. (Tsypin described his set as built
of "...simple materials; organic, like flesh; real, naked, pure.")
Above the ramp, which served as the main playing area, was the massive
square light grid with over 600 colored fluorescent glass tubes placed
in vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines. Messiaen said that there
were relationships between his music and color; that he imagined different
colors while he composed. The light grid, which made its ever-changing
electric shades and shapes insistently visible, gave tangible form to
the music's emotions and rhythms. James F. Ingalls' lighting design
was inventively sensitive to the ebb and flow of the score, literally
illuminating and emotionally supporting the most dominant element of
Messiaen's opera: his orchestra.
Threading across and above the stage, hanging in the air and moved
around the acting areas in different configurations before each scene,
was another singular design element: forty video monitors, each 35"
across. During the opera, these showed continuous video clips of natural
vistas, flowers, a monk in pilgrimage, and (of course) birds. The video
used during the production, shot by Sellars, became the production's
most questionable, and criticized, element.
SELLARS' LANDSCAPE
As integrated by this superbly unified stage design, the production
seemed like a theatrical "landscape" inspired by a very different
opera of faith: Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints
in Three Acts. Written in 1927-28, this opera's mix of Stein's
distinctive verse with Thomson's faux-naive melodies has more wit than
formal religion in it, and has long been an iconic work for America's
theatrical avant-garde. The continuing fascination of Four Saints
has much to do with its historic production on Broadway in 1934, with
an African-American cast directed by John Houseman, choreographed by
Frederick Ashton, and sets by painter Florine Stettheimer that were
made of cellophane. Sellars considered reviving Four Saints
for American television in the early 1980's. Although this was never
produced, Four Saints had a continuing interest for him. In
a Salzburg program note, he mentioned "the spiritually transcendent
dramas of Gertrude Stein" as a predecessor to Saint Francois.
Stein intended that all the elements of movement suggested in her Four
Saints libretto be perceived simultaneously -- like a cubist painting.
The physical and musical were to be one: "telling what happened,
without telling stories," as she explained in an essay about writing
for the stage. And like a Stein libretto that explores relationships,
not situations, Sellars' staging of Saint Francois, unable
to rely upon conventional narrative, reveled in a Steinian "complete,
actual present" of simultaneous images and sounds of faith spread
across the cathedral, ramp, video monitors and light grid.
Perhaps also influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The
Seven Deadly Sins, whose lead is played by both a singer and a
dancer (or again Four Saints, where the central part of Saint
Teresa is split between two singers), Sellars' divided Messiaen's Angel
into two contrasting roles: a Singing Angel (Dawn Upshaw) and a Dancing
Angel (Sara Rudner). Rudner, once a principal dancer in Twyla Tharp's
company, was costumed in the bright red robes and cut-out wings of a
Sunday school pageant -- a notable exception and contrast to the subdued
clothes of all the other characters. Her oversized wings would have
been at home in the innocent fantasy of Four Saints. The divided
character of The Seven Deadly Sins must have been on Sellars'
mind during his preparation of Saint Francois. Only months
after the Salzburg premiere, in early 1993, Sellars created a television
version of the Brecht-Weill opera/ballet with Teresa Stratas in the
singing lead.
Sellars wrote in his Salzburg program note that "The lives of
the saints never go out of date. Their lives remain as touchstones for
every generation. Saints live again in our thoughts and our hearts,
but most importantly in our actions." This mingling of interior
faith with external action became Sellars' directorial proof that Messiaen's
religious vision was neither maudlin in a public context, nor incompatible
with inventive theatricality. Sellars' controlled use of his cast and
design team was the fulfillment of all his stage experience, knowing
when to be bold, when to revel in mass effects, and when to sustain
intimacy. His refined stage vocabulary of hand and arm gestures was
used to great effect. At no point did these characters of the Catholic
Church conventionally cross themselves or genuflect. Instead, their
choreographed hand movements revealed impulses of the heart and mind--most
movingly when the Singing Angel suddenly appeared before a seemingly
hopeless Leper and with simple outstretched arms suggested the peace
and salvation of an unquestioned and inevitable world to come.
Sellars may have underused Tyspin's soaring cathedral in relation to
its overall scale and visual dominance, particularly a long downstage
staircase upon which no one set foot throughout the opera. Why was it
there? Perhaps this visual imbalance was the result of limited stage
rehearsal time with Vienna's Arnold Schoenberg Choir, which remained
mostly stationary in the transparent cathedral structure, but sang the
choral parts throughout with remarkable dynamic shading and vitality.
George Tsypin takes a different view. He sees the unused staircase
as an artistic asset -- an example of Sellars' directorial discipline
and mystery. ("In Saint Francois... I had a complex structure
of an unbuilt cathedral and stairs shooting through the whole thing
and going into the sky. The stair was so prominent you could not avoid
thinking that somebody would come walking down or up at some point.
But Peter just ignored the stair and made it so beautiful.... Having
somebody on the stair would have just made it be part of the usual scenery.")
Tsypin makes an eloquent defense, but when an audience wonders about
the use of unused space or scenery on stage, it loses focus on the work
being performed. The design takes on an aspect of extraneous beauty
for its own sake.
Before his sudden death, Messiaen hoped to be in Salzburg to "prevent
wrong notes in the music, but also .... in the lighting." Given
the massive variations in color and geometrical patterns made possible
by the fluorescent grid, its use was remarkably consistent and restrained,
often displaying just a few white or red beams merely to outline a cross
of light or emphasize with massed color a particular sound coming from
the pit. Only in the opera's immense finale for full chorus and orchestra,
marking St. Francis' transcendence after death, did the entire light
grid show all its combinations in simultaneous grandeur. Messiaen had
noted that Christ's Resurrection should be "like an atom bomb exploding"--an
image the fully lit grid certainly matched for Saint Francois. During
his transfiguration in the opera's final moments, every possible pattern
of light and color came into view on the grid as a fireworks display
of pure light, matching the orchestra's repeated sunbursts of sound.
Unlike the subtle fluorescent light grid, Sellars' perpetual motion
machine of forty video monitors was a failed experiment. Originally,
he hoped to include an oversized, outdoor Sony Jumbotron in the production,
but when rental and installation costs proved excessive, the design
was changed to deploy many smaller video units, most of which were suspended
above the stage at various random heights.
Upon first sight, the hung monitors' artful, asymmetrical placement
over the vast Felsenreitschule stage was startling, and the projected
videotape added extra color to the overall design. But the multiple
images of flora and fauna soon became decorative and sometimes irritating,
with constant video flickering due to short takes and busy editing.
Only in Saint Francois' death scene did the cross-cutting video stop.
The overall effect undermined the rigorous atmosphere of an otherwise
disciplined production. Video and live performers rarely mix on stage.
However conceptually interesting, the results here were distracting.
Like an awkwardly positioned supertitle system, the video installation
pulled focus from the live stage action and too often looked like home
movies played on a continuous loop.
Somewhat more successful and integral to the actual performance of
each tableau was the placement of a dozen or so movable video monitors
on the stage floor. Piled on top of each other, or threading in a line
across the wide stage, these monitors (reconfigured before every scene
by stagehands) became beds or walls, and defined precise spaces, such
as the window through which the Angel arrives. Although they showed
the same simultaneous video clips as the monitors hung above the stage,
the floor monitors seemed to be involved with the action and became
less distracting than those floating on high.
In interviews, Sellars explained his reasons for using continuous video
in Saint Francois: That the monitors would evoke traditional
stained glass in contemporary form, functioning like cathedral windows
to provide narrative imagery above and behind a performed "service";
also, that it would create a generalized "hypnotic and intense"
effect. Sellars had managed to film all but four of the birds whose
songs are cited by Messiaen in the score, and through video brought
them onstage in convincing form, respecting Messiaen's ornithological
passion. But Sellars--despite his fascination with film and video--is
not a distinguished artist behind a camera. His powerful understanding
of theatre and his commanding stage technique have not yet translated
into a similar command of media. Up to now, Peter Sellars the stage
director and Peter Sellars the film director have been incompatible.
There was also a mechanical disadvantage to the video installation.
Long pauses were necessary between scenes while the stagehands in street
clothes unplugged, repositioned, and replugged the video units placed
on the stage floor. At both performances I saw during the production's
1998 revival in Salzburg, many audience members assumed that a technical
problem caused the production to stop in its tracks while the cables
and monitors were reset. Only when the electrical crew reappeared after
each scene did it become clear that this was intentional. Given the
break in emotional momentum and mood caused by those awkward, lengthy
pauses, the video design's mechanical challenge became an emotional
liability.
The one exception came in Messiaen's 45-minute tableau of St. Francis'
sermon to the birds. Here the video installation truly enhanced the
opera as Saint Francis wandered among monitors scattered about the steep
ramp like rocky outcroppings in a lush field. The quickly alternating
video images, on stage and above, were timed perfectly to the score,
handsomely and sweetly showing the birds to whom St. Francois preached.
At last, the video fulfilled Sellars' artistic goal. Through media,
he created an electronic aviary to bring Messiaen's rich colony of birds
onstage. Sellars tends to be at his best when directing an opera's most
challenging scenes. (This was certainly true in his production of
Le Nozze di Figaro, where the opera's fourth act, a theatrically
difficult sequence of five arias with no intervening ensembles before
the finale, was compelling and far better staged than some of that opera's
more conventional passages.) Saint Francois' static, but impassioned
and very long sermon to the birds contains the opera's most complex
and extended music. It seemed unplayable at the Paris world premiere.
At Salzburg, it was a musical and dramatic highpoint.
From "The Sermon to the Birds" (number six of Messiaen's
eight tableaux) the production moved to its purest and most emotional
sequence, and also one of its simplest: the stigmata scene, where Sellars'
minimal staging again gave life to the raw power, ecstasy and conviction
of Messiaen's score. Stretched prostrate upon the ramp's highest point,
Saint Francis was "pierced" by five light beams projected
not from a massive cross, as Messiaen wrote in his stage directions,
but from small hand lamps held by the Franciscan brothers: four beams
touched the end of each of the Saint's limbs, while a fifth "pierced"
his side. Across the Saint's hands and feet the Dancing Angel gently
poured liquid that dripped in a red line over his body and then straight
down the steeply raked stage. This simple image of white light and flowing
red liquid (all in straight lines that grew in time to Messiaen's expansive
music) made the Saint's sacrifice to his faith emotionally magisterial
and physically beautiful.
At the 1998 Salzburg Festival, the cast was exact and revelatory, particularly
Jose van Dam, who repeated his remarkable performance from both the
Paris world premiere and the 1992 Salzburg season. Van Dam performed
this marathon part with profound dignity, beauty of tone, and clear
diction, along with dramatically convincing religious fervor, seeming
to project St. Francis' self-doubt and faith towards a place beyond
himself. His characterization was at once restrained and magnificent.
American soprano Dawn Upshaw (also returning from the 1992 Salzburg
cast) showed yet again how different and more complete an artist she
is when she works with Sellars. Angels are meant to be ethereal, and
Upshaw was, while also utterly believable in her down-to-earth service
towards all who came before her.
Both these performances showed the rich possibilities for opera when
otherwise "conventional" singers (albeit important musicians)
work with Peter Sellars. He is underappreciated as a teacher and coach.
Opera stars, as much as the young cast of Sellars' Mozart cycle, transform
themselves with his guidance.
SALZBURG AND BEYOND
Predictably, the 1992 opening night Salzburg Festival audience applauded
the singers and musicians, then booed Sellars and his production team.
(The Los Angeles Times' review carried this headline, "The Verdict:
Salonen Ja, Sellars, Nein.") Much the same happened at Salzburg's
1998 revival, conducted this time by Kent Nagano with his Halle Orchestra
from England replacing the L. A. Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
(Like Jose van Dam, Nagano had a long association with Messiaen's score.
He assisted Ozawa at the world premiere, conducted one performance during
the original Paris run, and led concert performances of Saint Francois
in Europe and America during the 1980's.) The boos came mostly from
Salzburg claques that were still opposed politically to this singular
production--the most symbolic offering of Mortier's nouveau regime,
now brought back for a second season. The claque departed after a raucous
first curtain call, while the large audience that remained in the Felsenreitschule
gave a long ovation to everyone onstage.
Peter Sellars' audiences--as much as Sellars himself--need the opportunity
to experience his productions on a regular basis. His repertory should
be repeated and revised over years, as his Mozart trilogy was both at
Pepsico SummerFare and on tour. Mortier showed great courage by reviving
Saint Francois d'Assise in 1998. Announced revivals in Paris
after the production's 1992 transfer from Salzburg were undone by a
change in management at the Opéra de la Bastille. Although there
were discussions about recreating the production in Los Angeles and
New York, nothing came of those plans. Eventually, the US stage rights
to Saint Francois d'Assise were obtained by the San Francisco
Opera, and the American premiere took place there in September 2002.
This was the centerpiece of American producer Pamela Rosenberg's first
season as the San Francisco company's General Director, but she chose
to give Messiaen's opera in an entirely new production created by German
artists.
Although unseen in the USA, the Salzburg staging of Saint Francois
established Sellars on the international scene and led to new assignments
in London, Paris, Amsterdam and other cities. The next summer at Salzburg,
in 1993, Sellars directed Aeschylus' The Persians as part of
the Festival's revitalized drama program (led, at Mortier's invitation,
by German director Peter Stein). Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and
Symphony of Psalms followed in 1994, and Ligeti's Le Grand
Macabre in 1997.
Saint Francois d'Assise also led to an unanticipated new collaboration
for Sellars: Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho saw Saint Francois
during the 1998 revival and was inspired to write her own opera, a form
that (like Messiaen before Saint Francois) she had not considered
previously. Commissioned by Mortier for Salzburg, Saariaho's L'Amour
de Loin, staged by Sellers with sets and lights by Tsypin and Ingalls,
was a major success at the 2000 Salzburg Festival, and in November 2001
the production was brought to the Châtelet in Paris.
L'Amour de Loin was Peter Sellars' final work at Salzburg
before Mortier resigned from the Festival in the summer of 2001. There
had been too many years of growing political intrigue, hostile criticism
and antagonism with the board and audiences. After a decade of Mortier's
fractious leadership (which even included a courageous public airing
of the Festival's past Nazi associations), Salzburg wanted a rest--and
at least a partial restoration of Karajan's profitable tradition, glamour
and comfort.
Peter Sellars is not expected to return to Salzburg soon, but L'Amour
de Loin has become the vehicle for reintroducing him as an opera
director in the USA. In the summer of 2002, he revived Saariaho's opera
at the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico. Santa Fe's quasi-outdoor stage
required the redesign and simplification of George Tsypin's set, but
when Sellars' production comes to the Metropolitan Opera House as part
of New York's Lincoln Center Festival in July 2004, it will be seen
in the set Tsypin created for the Châtelet in Paris. In this version,
Tsypin's Islamic-inspired designs (which required flooding the entire
Felsenreitschule stage) are translated with remarkable beauty to the
conventional proscenium, fly space and stage depth of a classic opera
house. Perhaps, with these American engagements for L'Amour de Loin
and also John Adams' El Niño (Los Angeles and New York,
2003), Sellars will at last have production opportunities in the United
States that match the scale and importance of those he has had abroad.
In his Salzburg Festival program notes, Sellars wrote that "St.
Francis, by refusing to engage in oppositional politics, transformed
the Catholic Church -- not by attacking it, but simply by living differently
and letting people notice for themselves what the difference could mean."
That comment might serve as a description of Sellars' own career in
opera. An itinerant artist without a home theatre, he has "lived
differently"--working repeatedly in many countries and theatres
with the same designers, performers, and production staff as opportunities
arise. (Sellars' longtime stage manager, Keri Muir, has learned to "call"
his productions in four languages so that she can supervise his tours
and revivals with stage crews from different nations.) These colleagues,
an ensemble whose careers and lives keep intersecting due to Sellars,
form what one might informally call the world's most prestigious touring
opera company.
While hardly any of this ensemble's work of the past decade has been
seen in the USA, nearly all the collaborators are American. How thankless
and odd, but exciting and ironic, that at Austria's conservative Salzburg
Festival a pre-eminent American director, American designers, an American
stage manager, an American production staff and a largely American cast
could so brilliantly realize an impossibly challenging contemporary
French opera that they would never have the opportunity to perform in
America.
[Robert Marx is a New York foundation director, essayist and
theatre producer who has collaborated with Anne Bogart, Robert Woodruff,
Peter Hall and Richard Nelson. A past director of the Theatre Program
at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., as well
as executive director of Lincoln Center's New York Public Library for
the Performing Arts, he is heard regularly on the intermission programs
of the Metropolitan Opera's weekly live radio broadcasts.]