Opera’s performance tradition is a masculine one

Tatjana, how much male hegemony is there in our opera repertoire?
A great deal, of course. Most of the works we perform were written by male librettists, set to music by male composers and, until not so long ago, performed almost exclusively by male directors and male conductors. This has given rise to a performance tradition of these works that has become ingrained in the minds of the audience. There is a collective imprint: people think they know how the work should sound and look on stage, in whatever current production they are seeing and hearing it. As a director, I also feel this in myself. When I re-read a piece, I sometimes do so with a filter that does not come from me, but is shaped by the performance tradition. And this performance tradition has, of course, a male stamp on it, for example, in its view of female characters. I try to switch off this filter when I prepare a new production. Karl Kraus once said that in art it's not so much about what you bring in, as what you bring to an end. There is some truth in that sentence, especially when it comes to directing. It is always a question of getting rid of visual habits in one's own head and approaching a musical text as candidly as possible.

Recently, the opera world has been increasingly confronted with an unease that the stories told in the works no longer have enough to do with our lives in the 21st century. Do you also feel this unease, for example with regard to the images of women that opera presents?
I feel it not only about images of women. There are also many other aspects, such as the role of the crowd in opera. After all, we live in a completely different society today, one that is more characterised by total isolation. It is not only with the image of women where you can get the feeling that it is out of date. But for me, that doesn't mean that you can't say anything exciting about our times with these historical stories. Nevertheless, we also urgently need new pieces for the opera repertoire. That cannot be said often enough. With them and through them, we can then also look more impartially at old works again.

«I don't think it's a feminist attitude, complaining that the poor women are always just victims»

There's a book by the French writer and feminist Catherine Clément from the 1990s, in which the image of women in opera was perhaps first critically addressed...
Oh God, that book. I was very annoyed by it. I found it completely pseudo-feminist when it accusingly claimed: we all go to the opera just to see women die, and we get pleasure out of it. I don't think it's a feminist attitude, complaining that poor women are always just victims. It's not true either, it's far too one-sided. You do neither women nor the world any good if you think in black-and-white terms, criminalise men in general and label women victims as a matter of course. Especially with regard to opera, the victim argument falls far short. There are more than just works where women die. And not all women's deaths look the same. Lucia di Lammermoor, for example, does not simply die. She goes mad beforehand, and is more powerful in her famous mad aria than all the other characters put together; with her coloratura, she takes space and reclaims her freedom. She also becomes a perpetrator, just like Tosca. So many women who simply die unhappy and lonely in operas don't even appear in the opera repertoire. I once did an evening together with some colleagues called «The Beautiful Death». In it we staged exclusively female death arias. Beforehand, I made a big table with all the female deaths in operas, and I had to admit that my own image was quite skewed. For example, I thought there were many female characters who die of consumption. But there are actually only two, namely Mimì in Bohème and Violetta in La traviata, nothing more. You have to look at the individual stories in detail before generalising. I also think that the problem is much more acute elsewhere: I can't stand Tatort anymore, for example. I don't like watching a beautiful female corpse every Sunday evening anymore. It annoys me intensely. Also how women are categorised: there's the image of the young, usually loving woman, who's sexy and becomes a victim, and that's contrasted with the joyless, disillusioned, usually already menopausal, intelligent detective. Tatort urgently needs a critical review of female stereotypes.

I mentioned the Clément book because I wanted to ask you about an image that the author creates in it, namely that the opera is a men's house, meant in an ethnological, tribalistic sense. Clément is a student of the great French ethnologist Claude Lévi Strauss.
I find it strange that she writes it that way. After all, there has always been a female audience that has enjoyed going to the opera. It was perhaps even one of the few places in past centuries where it was natural for women to appear in public - in the auditorium and on stage! The stories concern men and women equally and are absolutely not written just for men's enjoyment. This is why it's all the more important that there are increasing numbers of female directors. The old stories must also be told by women, not least because of the male performance tradition. But - I'll say it again - we also urgently need new, more contemporary role models in opera.

You say that women have to tell the stories. Is there such a thing as the so-called «female gaze» on operatic works? And do you represent it in your directing?
I always somewhat resist being reduced to that. I am many other things than just a woman, after all. But of course I am also female, and that certainly contributes to my view of the works - but it is not the only factor.

What does the female gaze make of a character such as Cio-Cio San in Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly?
I find that a difficult example, because I think the concept of the toxic really does apply to Madama Butterfly. I've already had two offers of directing the opera, but turned it down each time because I don't have an answer to the question of how to deal with this material. For me, Madama Butterfly is not only about the image of the passive woman, always waiting and completely fixated on a man. There is also this exotic Japan, threatened by colonialism, which creates an inequality on several levels to which this very young woman completely surrenders herself. She sacrifices everything just for this completely misguided love. It's just awful. It's also hard to get past all the Asian clichés. I have no idea how to make something exciting out of it. It's a very unpleasant story.

In the case of the composer Puccini, there is also the fact that in real life he was not exactly sympathetic to women, and sometimes you can't shake the feeling that he is living out his private male fantasies in the operas. Is that a problem?
You have to disregard the composers' lives, otherwise you can't stage any opera at all. Wagner was also unsympathetic.

Do you think Madama Butterfly should be cancelled and taken out of the repertoire altogether?
Just because I can't do anything with it doesn't mean that nobody else can come up with a great idea for it. But if I were the artistic director, a directing team would have to come up with a convincing concept before I would put it on the programme.

Can the female gaze save a character like Richard Strauss' Arabella? She longs for the one man of her dreams, destined for her, for «Mr Right», who then actually appears in the person of Mandryka. «And he will look at me and I at him,» she sings, «and blessed, blessed will I be and obedient as a child.» At such a gesture of female submission, surely every modern woman must hit the roof in indignation.
In this opera, the modern woman hits the roof even before that. That's why I think the piece is so great. It tells the whole story of how the two sisters, Arabella and Zdenka, try to escape from their parents, who, in a turbo-capitalist way, are trying to sell off their daughters to the highest bidder. The opera speaks of the tragedy of human beings in a purely mercenary world. Arabella wants something else from life than what her parents have exemplified for her. She wants something simpler and more natural.

And that is the idea of the husband as über-figure and miracle worker, and the wife on her knees in front of him? You staged the opera. Can this reactionary image of a couple's relationship be reinterpreted and saved?
No, and you don't have to. But you can show that Arabella's dream is all too naïve, and that life will not be as rosy as she might have thought. You just can't tell the story as an all-out happy ending. The music doesn't suggest that either. It is curiously fragile at the end. As if on ice. In my production, the happiness of Mandryka and Arabella freezes in a kind of motionlessness. Arabella appears in a black dress with this glass of water that Hoffmannsthal wrote into the libretto. From now on, only water is drunk - I think that's quite a statement. And beyond that, we don't know how happily the two of them are living together now, and whether their relationship concept is working.

So the image of women suggested by the plot is one thing, but the staging is another.
I am fundamentally convinced that interpretation is everything in opera. The works only exist when we realise them. The score is not the work, but the performance material that we have to read and interpret and bring to the stage.

Isn't there a lot of pressure on the direction team, constantly having to work against outdatedness and stereotypes in the material when staging a piece?
Of course there is a lot of pressure on us directors. Not only because we have to deal with each piece in such a way as to make it relevant to us today, but especially because our repertoire is so small, and we therefore usually already know ten other interpretations of the piece. You have to ask yourself critically every time: Does this work have to be performed? And if so, why do I want to present it? It may be that I already know an interpretation which I am convinced says everything about the piece and gets to the heart of the matter. If you don't feel a strong inner impulse to retell an opera, it's better not to do it. I've become quite good at saying no. We can't just spit out the pieces as if on a conveyor belt. Then it's no longer art, but just workmanship and routine. And the audience can very clearly tell whether something has a sense of urgency.

In the meantime, isn't it also a problem that the directorial tricks by which, for example, a female role stereotype can be turned on its head, run the risk of solidifying into stereotypes themselves?
Of course. You can quickly see what strong directors with distinctive signatures have done, or would have done, with a scene in the past. You have to free yourself from this kind of influence. It has always been the case that artists first have to dig themselves out of a tradition in order to get a clear view. It must have been the same with the painters of the Renaissance.

«I don't like watching a beautiful female corpse every Sunday evening anymore. It annoys me intensely»

Should we have more courage in opera to rewrite, reassemble or interweave the works with others in order to escape the problem of outdatedness?
In the end, a successful evening of theatre justifies everything. That is the test. If it is excitingly conceived and grips and touches me, everything is permissible. But in opera it is much more difficult to intervene in the material than in theatre. You need compositional expertise and strong justifications for changing the musical text. I think that in today's opera repertoire there has to be everything - old pieces, new pieces and the option to deal with old pieces differently.

How do opera houses compare with theatres?
We all know that the theatres are often closer to the present. They perform more new plays and are much more open in form. Although you sense a certain need for new dramatic material there as well. At the moment there is a tendency to immediately adapt any halfway popular novel for the stage.

Is there an outdated way of thinking, with regard to images of women, for example, not only in the works but also in the management of opera houses?
To be honest, I sense a certain imbalance at the moment. The theatres and opera houses are debating contemporary female role models, male dominance, diversity, gender openness and cultural appropriation with great passion, because it is part of their self-image to fundamentally think about and question themselves. They are in focus at the moment. But the issues must of course also be discussed and dealt with in all other areas of society. Outdated thinking is embedded not only in the repertoire of opera houses, but also in banks, universities, television stations, hospitals and supermarkets. Everywhere.

The interview was conducted by Claus Spahn.

This article was published in MAG 97, November 2022. You can subscribe to MAG here.