{"id":67187,"date":"2020-02-29T15:57:37","date_gmt":"2020-02-29T20:57:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/?p=67187"},"modified":"2020-02-29T15:57:37","modified_gmt":"2020-02-29T20:57:37","slug":"feature-francois-girard-tells-us-about-his-vision-behind-the-flying-dutchman-for-met-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2020\/02\/29\/feature-francois-girard-tells-us-about-his-vision-behind-the-flying-dutchman-for-met-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"INTERVIEW | Fran\u00e7ois Girard Tells Us About His Unique Brand Of ‘Flying Dutchman’ For The Met Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"

We met director Fran\u00e7ois Girard in New York, to talk about the Met Opera’s production of Wagner’s Die Fliegende Holl\u00e4nder, and the comparisons between film and opera.<\/h4>\n
\"Fran\u00e7ois
Fran\u00e7ois Girard (Photo: Lise Breton)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

N<\/span>EW YORK \u2014 It\u2019s high noon when Fran\u00e7ois Girard turns himself into a ghost. It makes sense, despite the early hour. It\u2019s a good look for this wispy figure with sharp eyes peeping out beneath his head\u2019s nest of thick, greying hair. (Imagine Scrooge \u2014 Alistair Sim \u2014 Lite.) The occasion is the midday break in rehearsals for the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Die Fliegende Holl\u00e4nder (The Flying Dutchman)<\/em> for its March 2 opening. (It closes March 27). And when Girard darts up on the Lincoln Centre stage checking on this or that, he materializes in and out of the made-to-order Baltic mists that creep across John Macfarlane\u2019s slate grey set.<\/p>\n

Lincoln Centre itself feels a touch haunted these days. For starters, Sir Bryn Terfel, all set to sail again through his signature Dutchman role, cancelled his return to the company after an almost eight-year absence due to a fall, breaking an ankle in three places, and requiring surgery. His replacement. Evgeny Nikitin is the Russian bass-baritone and heavy-metal aficionado who, in disclaiming that his multiple tattoos suggested a swastika, withdrew from the 2012 Bayreuth Festival to put the issue to rest. (Nikitin, who had his Met debut in 2002, sang the Dutchman in the Canadian Opera Company\u2019s 2010 production.) Questions of political correctness are rarely distant from anything Wagnerian. And Girard is particularly ungiving about this. \u201cIn my travels, I\u2019ve been very well aware of the far right-wing rising,\u201d says the 57-year-old Montr\u00e9al-based director. \u201cBut I think you deal with what Wagner wrote.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then of course, there is the ghostly blob projected by some sort of new tech magic which mimics the Dutchman\u2019s every move, conjuring up a spectre which might be scary to some, but to others might border on the Grand Guignol. Nicknamed \u201cthe shadow,\u201d it\u2019s not quite as creepy sounding as the Lamont Cranston \u201cShadow\u201d on the Blue Coal Mystery Show <\/em>on radio the \u201830s and \u201840s. To Girard\u2019s mind though, the Dutchman himself is spectral, with one foot in reality, the other in the netherworld.<\/p>\n

Girard himself is very real to Met management following his much-praised Parsifal <\/em>of 2013 (a co-production with Op\u00e9ra de Lyon), revived in 2018 for the Met. Even more fundamental is his long-standing relationship with Met director, Peter Gelb. During his days as head honcho at Sony Records, Gelb helped ensure the 1993 success of the Girard-directed Twenty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould. <\/em>In 1998, Gelb was behind The Red Violin, <\/em>which earned composer John Corigliano a Best Original Score Oscar<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my travels, I\u2019ve been very well aware of the far right-wing rising. But I think you deal with what Wagner wrote.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gelb, an endlessly controversial figure in New York, was most recently pilloried for siding for too long with the disgraced Placido Domingo following accusations from 20 women of the singer\u2019s predatory sexual transgressions. Gelb has also locked horns with the Met\u2019s many unions while trimming staff. But, with the 2019-2020 season an unqualified hit \u2014 the Met\u2019s run of its Porgy and Bess<\/em> being extended \u2014 and Gelb\u2019s contract re-upped to 2027, he will no doubt continue running the company as if it were the New York Yankees, with the rest of opera acting as its farm teams. \u201cThe Met is a repertory company,\u201d Gelb told me a while back. \u201cWe had the (Festival d\u2019op\u00e9ra de Qu\u00e9bec) as the test kitchen for the production (of the Dutchman<\/em>, in the summer of 2019, for Girard\u2019s first directed opera in Qu\u00e9bec.) We have to make sure, as a new production, it can play with other productions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The
A scene from Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holl\u00e4nder<\/em>. (Photo: Ken Howard \/ Met Opera)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gelb to World. This is the Met where even back, back rooms have star power like the alcove I came across dedicated to Sara and Richard Tucker, the beloved New York tenor, \u201cby their sons.\u201d Nikitin knows all about this. As soon as he got the call that Terfel was out, he dropped four appearances at St. Petersburg\u2019s Mariinsky Theatre, and a pair of concert vision of Dutchman<\/em>, one in Moscow, to free up time for the Met.<\/p>\n

Speaking of the unreal, did I mention the pay telephone, a real deal, money-taking pay telephone, located just through the sequence of stage doors leading backstage passed the security guard, which Girard rushes past when he needs to go outside to have a smoke? It gives one pause, this blast-from-the past payphone with its beautiful, battered, chrome face, its spirit of critics using it to bellow at long-suffering night editors on the culture desk that they\u2019re going to be filing late because, hey, with Wagner you\u2019re always going to be filing late. Lincoln is all arch modern on the outside, but inside has a wonderfully worn feeling, like that payphone.<\/p>\n

Die Fliegende Holl\u00e4nder<\/em> is where Wagner discovered what it meant to be Wagner, clarifying \u2014 in his compositional practice and thinking \u2014 the concept of the leitmotif.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Die Fliegende Holl\u00e4nder<\/em> is where Wagner discovered what it meant to be Wagner, clarifying \u2014 in his compositional practice and thinking \u2014 the concept of the leitmotif. Hardcore Wagnerians treat the work a bit like a wannabe, though. Oh, they allow Dutchman <\/em>its place in the Wagner canon but grudgingly only, and then only because it can be taken as a prelude to the real guts and glory of Wagnerian-to-come: Der Ring Des Nibelungen (The Ring <\/em>Cycle). (Girard directed Siegfried<\/em>, the Ring\u2019s third part, for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto in 2005.)<\/p>\n

The Dutchman<\/em> is the earliest of all Wagner work to be \u2014 allowed to be? \u2014 performed at Bayreuth. In his many letters to Liszt, the composer \u2014 when not asking the pianist to get the German police off his trail \u2014 alluded to the weakness of German theatre in general, and its fixation on Carl Maria von Weber in particular. But Dutchman<\/em> itself is saturated with Weberian High Romanticism German-style. Weber\u2019s biggest hit, Der Freisch\u00fctz <\/em>helped make Dutchman<\/em> possible, with Wagnerian storm-tossed seas replacing Weber\u2019s forests rife with fat quail and Deutscher M\u00e4del. It was fun to watch veteran Russian conductor Valery Gergiev work the horn section in the Met orchestra hard, stopping and starting to get just the right sort of Weber oomph-pa in their playing.<\/p>\n

\"The
Evgeny Nikitin as the Dutchman in Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holl\u00e4nder<\/em>. (Photo: Ken Howard \/ Met Opera)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Girard might be described as a post-Wagnerian, unwilling to get lured into the socio\/theoretical murk fogging the Wagnerian zeitgeist, yet revelling in the freedom allowed by the composer\u2019s inherently theatrical thinking. Girard\u2019s own background in art and pop video \u2014 he directed Peter Gabriel: Secret World Live<\/em> tour in 1994 \u2014 sharpens his realization of the key moments in his narratives. (Actually, video\u2019s on-the-fly shooting style deceives. Anything done on-the-fly is trimmed into solid, cogent narrative in the video editing suite).<\/p>\n

Speaking of ghosts, the Dutchman is a spectral spaceman in Girard\u2019s thinking; the oceans he travels are the cosmos. Macfarlane\u2019s sets hints strongly at J.M.W. Turner. Macfarlane himself is an accomplished painter. For Wagner, it was supposedly a gut-wrenching sea voyage to England off the coast of Norway that provided the genesis of the idea. David Finn\u2019s lighting design can\u2019t swirl enough as the massive made-for-the-Met boat stealthily eases its bulk on stage. Yet in Girard\u2019s hands, this mid-19th century nightmare is projected into the 21st century; the edged-in-gloom look might well come from contemporary French bande dessin\u00e9e. <\/em>\u201cIt\u2019s in the stories and legends Wagner used,\u201d the director tells me some days before the Met rehearsals have begun. \u201cThe Dutchman <\/em>is a simple and bold story, full of a kind of youthful flamboyance. It comes from a Wagner who was flashy; it has this energy, this almost violent energy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Dutchman <\/em>is a simple and bold story, full of a kind of youthful flamboyance. It comes from a Wagner who was flashy; it has this energy, this almost violent energy.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My perspective on Wagner is this: Yes, you can treat his pieces any way you want. But I am against the kidnapping of any opera when a creative individual expressed himself through it. With Flying Dutchman,<\/em> you are already exposed to deeper elements. I am here to merely have a reading of them. You do what Wagner wrote and to serve any other cause is wrong. Yes, the question of anti-Semitism is always present in Wagner\u2019s case. But people have to put it in context. If Wagner was guilty then a lot of Europe was the same at the time, But from a dramaturgical point of view, from a staging point of view, his work remains the brightest and the purest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Girard\u2019s theatrical background, not his film, was the determining factor for his Met association. \u201cI knew of his theatre and opera work, including his part in the Canadian Opera Company\u2019s Ring Cycle<\/em> (in 2005, where Girard directed Siegfried,<\/em>)\u201d says Gelb. \u201cThe leap from film to opera is not an easy one. One of the greatest challenges is what to do with chorus, with moving 70 or 80 people on and off stage. In film, scenes can be created in the cutting room. I opera you have to create transitions live. You have to deal with that space in opera..\u201d<\/p>\n

Girard: \u201cThe question is why is Wagner so alive today? That\u2019s a whole debate. Opera is the parent of film. There are parallels between film and opera of the 19th Century, But when film took over from opera, when Charlie Chaplin and all the others came along, it was the end of the operatic experience in a way. So we have had to reinvent the experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The
Anja Kampe as Senta in a scene from Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holl\u00e4nder<\/em>. (Photo: Ken Howard \/ Met Opera)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But why do we keeping going to the theatre?\u201d Girard asks rhetorically. \u201cI\u2019ll tell you why. It\u2019s because when you leave it, you know you\u2019ve just walked out of something that\u2019s not available in any other form. Look. We all have computers and cell phones. We are completely trapped by the present and I am not excepting myself when I say that. If I were to tap \u201cAristotle\u201d on my computer, it would be all there, everything about Aristotle. Never has knowledge been more accessible. But if we don\u2019t listen to the wise old poets of the past, we limit ourselves. That\u2019s why I was interested in Glenn Gould. He was engaged in modern technology, but he used it to reach Bach. He may have been trapped in the present, but he was interested in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Girard bristles a bit at being described just as a film director who happens to do opera \u2014 the list of his peers in this regard is long for sure \u2014 or conversely as specialist in music-based film, such as The Song of Names, <\/em>last year\u2019s below-Hollywood-radar film based on Montr\u00e9al music critic Norman Lebrecht\u2019s novel. It\u2019s considerable sprawl over time and geography touches on an opera\u2019s worth of interconnected themes, from growing up in bombed-out London in World War II, to the early life of a genius-level violinist, to a mystery disappearance, to a Jewish feeling of survivor\u2019s guilt.<\/p>\n

Yet, \u201cit\u2019s actually a very intimate film,\u201d Girard insists. Indeed, at its core is a single work of Jewish liturgical chant \u2014 names of Nazi victims memorialized only through cantorial singing \u2014 composed by Howard Shore, the veteran Canadian film composer.<\/p>\n

Maybe dreamed up is a better description. \u201cIt took me a while to do the research to write a piece that\u2019s a true expression from my heart,\u201d says Shore from his New York studio. \u201cTo do that, you have to have a great collaboration with someone who knows music, like Fran\u00e7ois. (Martin) Scorsese is someone else who is very knowledgeable musically. The cantorial piece is a piece set in 1951, when my father was bringing me to synagogue. There were lots of discussions\u201d \u2014 with Girard \u2014 \u201cto bring it to life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to understand,\u201d says The Song of Names<\/a> <\/em>producer Robert Lantos. \u201cThere is<\/em> no song of names. On the page, the music doesn\u2019t exist. Yet it\u2019s the emotional core of the work, this revelation through music. So when I read (Lebrecht\u2019s) novel I knew that I needed a director equally at home in the languages of film and music. Is there a director who handles music better? I knew Fran\u00e7ois from opera and from his (2011) work with Cirque de Soleil, so I asked him to read it. He himself could be a composer; he plays piano that well. He\u2019s a genius, you know. I don\u2019t think he knows it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last moments of my talk with Girard turned to earlier directors\u2019 productions of Dutchman, <\/em>knowing he\u2019s already into planning a Lohengrin,<\/em> produced for the Bolshoi and the Met. I mention Joseph Keilberth\u2019s 1955 Bayreuth version of the Dutchman,<\/em> as good as any I know, not being an eclectic Wagnerian. There\u2019s one by Van Karajan, I add.<\/p>\n

Okay. He\u2019ll look out for them, Girard says. \u201cMy music research is not as thorough as my theatrical research. I must listen. When I get time.\u201d<\/p>\n

++++<\/p>\n

Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holl\u00e4nder<\/em> (The Flying Dutchman) runs Mar 2 \u2013 27, 2020<\/a> at the Met Opera in New York City. For Met Live in HD broadcasts, see theatre listing at Cineplex Events<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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