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In 2013, a new production of I Puritani, directed by Laurent Pelly, entered the Paris Opera’s repertoire. To mark the revival of the production at the Opéra Bastille this season, discover the interview that Laurent Pelly gave to the Opera’s magazine. He reveals his fascination for Bellini’s last work, the scenographic challenges he was confronted with and the use of video as a dramatic tool. 

As a theatre and opera director you are a faithful habitué of the 19^th century. Where would you place I Puritani in your personal geography of that period?

Laurent Pelly: Between romantic opera and bel canto. I think what I find most fascinating in Bellini’s final opera is the singing. It’s true I’ve focused a lot on the 19^th century, but generally on works from the second half. I’ve never really tackled bel canto be it Rossini or Verdi—except for La Traviata which I directed in Santa Fe. But then, La Traviata is no longer bel canto: it’s theatre. I remember when I did L’elisir d’amore at the Opéra Bastille—my first Donizetti—I asked myself a lot of questions. Of course, it was a very theatrical comedy. It certainly wasn’t Handel’s aria da capo... Nevertheless, I found myself confronted with a style new to me, a style comprised of repetitions and variants far removed from sung dialogue. But as a director, I’m most interested in making use of the form to tell a story. With “L’elisir”, using the energy of the singers I was gradually able to get to grips with those stylistic codes to bring them alive, to give meaning to the merest note, to never let the music flow by gratuitously. Today, I’m at exactly the same point with I Puritani: how to build something theatrical from this new musical material? That’s the question I try to answer with the conductor and the performers. My greatest pleasure is working as closely as possible with the singers and chorus to draw on their performance to lend form to my production.

In a work such as I Puritani, do you find the singing—more than the libretto—the true challenge when it comes to the staging?

Yes. I assume that the music predominates because the plot narrative is constructed in a rather odd way. It is serious without really being so. At the start of the opera, how else do we explain the fact that the inhabitants of the jubilant fortress announce the marriage of Elvira to a man from the opposing camp without the young woman being aware of the union herself? How else do we explain that she tries out her nuptial veil on a prisoner whom she doesn’t even know and who turns out to be the Queen who in turn runs off with Arturo. To me, all of that seems to be more fantasy than reality. This was the reasoning behind our decision to tell the story through the subjective eyes of Elvira. Approaching it from that angle enabled us to construct a dramatic narrative that constantly referred to the music even if it meant moving away from historical reality. Furthermore, it seemed to me that the historical narrative was always more of a pretext than a major pillar of the drama. Unlike Victor Hugo who, when he wrote his Cromwell, sourced a significant corpus of literature and fervently questioned his relationship to the Napoleonic myth and his own era through the figure of the Lord Protector, I don’t think that Bellini and his librettist Pepoli were really passionate about 17^th century England or the conflict between the Royalists and Puritans...

The approach of recounting a story through the eyes of a character seems to be more in line with the writing style of a novel or a film screenplay than theatre...

Those are art forms that inspire me greatly. Especially cinema. I often perceive the stage—and the process of developing a scenography—through the movements of an imaginary camera. In shot, reverse-angle shot, travelling shot, wide-angle shots and closeups... In the theatre, I ask myself how can I transpose those cinematographic techniques? How can I obtain the rhythm of an edited film?

For I Puritani, how do you translate the idea of a “subjective camera” with things that are quintessentially theatrical such as scenography, costumes...?

The idea was to use the era—by performing in costumes and historical sets—while at the same time re-examining it: to create a mental world as perceived in the mind of a dreamer. With my stage designer Chantal Thomas, we developed a rather unconventional scenographic object that is both minimalistic and highly complex. The set represents a 17^th century-inspired English castle, albeit one reduced to its angles and lines: it’s an immense cage on a revolving stage that encloses the character in a harsh, austere world, at once historical yet unreal. The same goes for the costumes. I worked from the lines of the era, but I pared them down to make them purer and I used fabrics that were anything but realistic. We present the chorus for example in a highly graphic way. They appear like a set of pawns on a giant chessboard with extremely rigid silhouettes. It is the world as seen through the eyes of an Elvira plagued by madness.

Is the use of video projection—something rather rare in your productions—also part of this process?

Yes, and it’s interesting because the use of such a medium is new for me. It’s an additional experiment that I’m attempting with this I Puritani. At certain times during the performance we project black and white images of close-ups of the characters, which make us lose our spatial bearings and contribute to the nightmarish atmosphere of being confined in the mental space that is Elvira’s mind. By extension, that dramatic concept also allowed me to grapple with the theme of the sacrificial female character which is so pervasive in all—or almost all—of the works from the 19^th century.

Is the question of the condition of women in the 19^th century something that particularly moves you?

Not the condition of women per se, but rather, the jubilation with which the 19^th century theatregoer watched the great heroines suffer and often die as they were served up as sacrifices to bourgeois morality. I did a production of La Traviata this summer... Manon is in the same bracket, Carmen too... Because these women are seeking freedom and fall outside the realms of accepted norms, it causes a scandal, but also a reactionary gratification in seeing them pay with their life for their yearning for emancipation. To be sure, in I Puritani, Elvira survives, however, she still has to experience madness. And since she lives in a male-dominated world at war with itself in which she strives to experience her own desires, I think it makes sense to imagine the work through her eyes.

In addition to your prolific career at the opera, you also work regularly in the theatre. What do you gain from the constant back-and-forth between drama and opera?

Although the two are related, and although I get the impression that I’m doing the same job, working at the opera has greatly enriched the man of the theatre that I was. What I find most interesting in opera is the “absolute convention”: as soon as a character sings, you have to invent solutions to be able to maintain the dream. And since I like to create oneiric dramas this particular “constraint” suits me perfectly. Opera has also taught me to appreciate large spaces: it’s extremely rare for us to work on stages that big in a theatre. And then, the vagaries of programming have meant that I’ve dealt a great deal with works from the 19^th century repertoire at the opera. Meanwhile, at the theatre, I recently staged two plays by Victor Hugo. So inevitably, the two worlds begin to interact—the eras, the styles, the ways of envisaging a production...

You make many references to Victor Hugo, whose plays, in fact, you have often directed. You said jokingly that you could live extremely well in the theatre by just staging the works of Shakespeare and Hugo. In what particular way do those two playwrights nurture and sustain your vision of theatre?

Hugo and Shakespeare—who was a great source of inspiration to the former—are for me two great masters because their theatre closely intertwines human tragedy and comedy. Recently, I directed Macbeth: it’s a fearsome, violent, blood-soaked play, yet it is also one in which I couldn’t help but see a farcical dimension—a dimension that Jarry also appreciated in “Ubu Roi”: murdering everybody to seize and retain power, only to become isolated in one’s own madness... The way that Shakespeare and Hugo have the ability to constantly oscillate between profoundness and the light-hearted or ribald helps me to understand the works that I am directing, including this production of I Puritani: This gigantic, transparent castle-prison, this pathetic murderous war...

Compared to other directors whose aesthetics are immediately identifiable, your productions follow on one after another, yet none are alike—even when you work regularly with the same stage designer. Is it a constant concern for you to renew and invent without reproducing what has come before?

I don’t look at the problem quite in that way. Let’s just say that I believe that the work must assert its aesthetic. That’s why the staging for I Puritani doesn’t resemble Giulio Cesare or L’elisir d’amore, or Platée. With Chantal Thomas my scenographer, we have no formula. We always like to start with a blank slate. Of course, I have my obsessions and my way of telling a story can be influenced as a result: I’m fascinated by theatrical illusion and that fascination can manifest itself in any given production. But what interests me most is to be completely absorbed in a work. Sometimes, I feel the need to transpose the work; to change the era or deconstruct it, because we no longer have the cultural references to understand it. Yet for others, I completely avoid doing so. I just restaged L’Enfant et les sortilèges in Japan for example. When I direct a masterpiece that is so complex in terms of dramaturgy and scenography, my role is, above all, to do everything I can to ensure that it “functions”. If I start to deconstruct it, I risk killing it...

Whilst in the midst of writing the libretto of Das Rheingold, Wagner stated that he was “one of those people for whom the very idea of capital associated with dividends is a perfectly immoral phenomenon” (letter to Julie Ritter, 9/12/1851). In accordance with this, his artistic oeuvre did not remain indifferent to either the phenomena of rampant industrialisation in the second half of the 19th century, or the rising tide of the capitalist system. Although the scenario of the Ring draws on ancient Germanic and Scandinavian myths, Wagner brings them up to date in a rather spectacular manner, and stages a veritable allegory of the 19th century world, placing much emphasis on the questioning of power relationships and the place of man and nature in modern society.

Qualified by his contemporaries as a “modern romantic realist” (Eduard Krüger), and even as the “Courbet of music” (François-Joseph Fétis), in the Ring, Wagner offers us moments that illustrate in striking manner, both realist and poetic, the world of industry. In the scene of the Nibelheim in particular, he paints a truly sombre picture of a universe in which the proletariat is ruthlessly exploited by the new dominant class, embodied by Alberich. Everything is there: the deafening racket of the forges, the columns of vapour and the stench of sulphur, the foggy half-light interrupted by showers of sparks, not forgetting the piercing cries of the Nibelungen people enslaved by a tyrannical and megalomaniac master.

The composer himself suggests a parallel between the forges of the Nibelheim and the industrial sites that sprang up throughout Europe in the second half of the 19th century. During a trip to London in 1877, he lingered over the spectacle of the industrial and commercial activity spreading over the banks of the Thames and exclaimed: “It is here that Alberich’s dream has been accomplished. Nibelheim, world domination, activity, labour, everywhere one perceives the pressure of steam and fog” (Cosima Wagner’s Journal).

References to economic relations in the modern capitalist world are not, however, limited to a few isolated tableaux, however spectacular they may be; they underpin the entire Cycle and are articulated around an important symbol, the ring. It is around the latter that cupidity, egotism and the desire for power in all its forms, are crystallised. In one of his last essays, Know Thyself (1881), the composer qualifies gold as the “demon strangling manhood’s innocence” and compares the ring of the Nibelung to a “stockmarket portfolio”. The ring is a symbol, and as such presents two facets: it is a visible object that attracts the eye (the material dimension is essential to any symbol), but it also refers to something abstract, which allows it to crystallise any number of fantasies, in particular the desire for possession and power. In a paraphrase of Karl Marx in Das Kapital, one could argue that Alberich’s ring, a seemingly simple object, is in fact a sort of fetish, “a highly complex thing, full of metaphysical subtleties”. In Wagner, the particularity of this symbol resides in its fluidity, in its capacity for constant circulation, passing rapidly from hand to hand – a quality it shares with money and shares. 

Contrary to the theories of the laws of modern economics, the circulation of the ring does not take place within a framework of freely consented exchanges, but in a violent manner, through brutal dispossession and even through murder. Taking up Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous formula, “Property is theft”, in the Ring, Wagner shows that gold cannot be owned if it has been stolen from others. After the original crime, Alberich’s theft of the gold, it is Wotan who steals the ring from the Nibelung; under constraint, the master of the gods is forced to give up the treasure he has stolen from Alberich to the giants in order to pay the debt he owes them; Fafner then slaughters Fasolt to become sole possessor of the ring; Siegfried then kills Fafner, takes the ring and offers it to Brünnhilde, before wrenching it out of her hands in a scene of unprecedented violence, akin to rape. Finally, Gunther and Hagen make a vain attempt to take possession of the ring over Siegfried’s corpse, thus precipitating their own downfall.

In Wagner, the theory of free competition characteristic of modern capitalism takes on the hideous face of relationships of pitiless rivalry, constructed out of wickedness, hatred, violence and attempts at destabilisation, whether between Alberich and his brother Mime or his son Hagen, between Fafner and his brother Fasolt, between Siegfried and Mime, his adoptive father, or between Wotan and Alberich. To these damaged relationships, to this alienation of people in relation to others must be added the self-alienation of the individual: during the two final days of the Ring, Alberich, the all-powerful master of the Nibelungen, is no more than a miserable vagabond devoured by desire and rancour; Wotan, for his part, is transformed into a ghost-like voyager, the powerless spectator of his own, ineluctable downfall; in Götterdämmerung, Siegfried, the incarnation of innocence and spontaneity, becomes a party to (and consenting victim of) the sordid intrigues contrived by Hagen. But the most spectacular metamorphosis is that of Fafner, the giant, transformed, after having taken possession of the ring, into a hideous dragon and reduced to a somnolent existence. Indeed, the phrase he utters when Wotan and Alberich come to awaken him has become emblematic of the attitude of the capitalist slumped over his accumulated wealth: “I lie here and I possess. Let me sleep.”

The ring’s victims are victims first and foremost of their own cupidity and have no more than a spectral existence, as if the ring has emptied them of their vital substance in order to feed itself. One is reminded here of Karl Marx’s famous analysis (an author that Wagner had not read but with whose theories he was, to all evidence, familiar): “...all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment.” (1844 Manuscripts). Without using irony with the same skill as Marx, in an essay published in 1848, Wagner affirmed that the “emancipation of the human species” could not be accomplished until the “demoniac notion of money” had faded like a bad dream provoked by “an evil nocturnal gnome”.