Theatre Scene and Trends

Whoever knows opera, knows that it creates images. Images on the stage, images in music and by means of music, images in the heads of the spectators and listeners.

Without images, no opera could make do, and on this head nothing has changed since the time of Monteverdi, since the early flourishing of the genre. Images arise variously through music and through language, and they arise through the combination of music and language. To this extent it is not exaggerated to maintain that opera, even if naturally the far older art form, has learned from film. And especially for this reason it is no accident that film, personified by those who make it, took up at some point a place in the opera.

What probably only a few who know and love opera also know, is that it was the German film director Volker Schlöndorff who fostered this development and thus, so to say, carried out the pioneer work. In 1966 he made his first film Young Törless (Der junge Törless), after Robert Musil's novella Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (i.e., Young Törless). In the same year he was already working together for the first time on a project with the composer Hans Werner Henze. And even before his second big cinematic adventure, the filming of Heinrich Boll's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum) in 1975, Schlöndorff ventured into the darkness of the theatre and staged, in Frankfurt am Main, the opera Katja Kabanowa by Leos Janácek. A taboo had been broken.

The result of Schlöndorff's daring deed was that other film directors also found their way to music theatre. Legendary, for instance, was István Szabo's Tannhäuser experiment of 1984 in Paris: an aesthetic boundary experience. Not less remarkable were several works by Peter Greenaway, who succeeded in fusing both art forms with one another: opera as film; opera as film also in and about the opera. Greenaway has staged six works of music theatre; he is thus, next to Schlöndorff, whose speciality is the stage works of Janácek, the most experienced of the film directors who have devoted themselves to opera.

The most diverse approaches

But probably it is neither Greenaway nor Schlöndorff who has gained the greatest attention of the media. Nor even Robert Altman, the grand seigneur of film makers, who has staged two operas by the contemporary American composer William Bolcom, whose libretti he has also authored: most recently A Wedding last year, with enormous success. No, a women has stolen the show from the men in the man's domain of opera, and this with tremendous aplomb: almost an outcry went through the (German) press when it became known that the film-maker Doris Dörrie, for whom this encounter with the art form of opera was completely new territory, would be responsible for the direction of a work at the Berlin Staatsoper on Unter den Linden. There in 2001 Dörrie staged Mozart's Così fan tutte. Her in equal parts naive, vital and interdisciplinary approach, which also became evident in her second opera production (Turandot in Berlin) and especially in her third (Rigoletto in Munich), has since divided the public into admirers and sharp critics. The latter accuse the film director above all of a lacking fidelity to the produced works, indeed of lacking an understanding of them. The fans, on the other hand, who are recruited to no small degree from spectators for whom opera is terra incognito, invoke particularly the high entertainment value of the productions, their (in part unsettling) manifold of images.

Amidst all the controversy over the quality of the stagings and their musical understanding, one can perceive, as it were, ex negative that each film director's approach to opera is completely different, that it is subjective. There are no absolutely common elements from which one could infer that film directors stage opera in such a manner that could be expected only from film directors. Every film director has his or her own language, his or her own understanding of the nature and meaning of each opera. An example of this is the recent history of Wagner's Parsifal. In Bayreuth Christoph Schlingensief, who began as a film director, realised the opus summum et magnum; in Berlin, at the Staatsoper, Bernd Eichinger staged the same work. The artistic results diverged to such a degree that one could tell only by means of the music that both cases concerned Parsifal. Images are something with a great power of their own. In film. And in opera at all events.