Filip Lech: Do you remember your first experience with the music of Karol Szymanowski and his Król Roger?
Kasper Holten: I think the first time that I heard Król Roger was when the Adam Mickiewicz Institute sent me a DVD while I was artistic director at Royal Danish Opera. The opera had been staged in Bregenz and Paris in 2009 and there was suddenly a lot of interest around Król Roger. I listened to the opera and I was completely taken with it. I thought the music was incredible, and the language so personal and different from anything I knew – and yet completely in the tradition of the part of the repertoire where I have always felt the most at home: Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die tote Stadt, the early 20th century, these fantastic experimentations with how to use the operatic medium, far beyond naturalism, to express something about the human soul.
I was very interested by it, but by then, in 2009 when I got the DVD, I had already planned my last seasons in Copenhagen, so I couldn’t program it there. When I came to London in 2011, one of the first things Tony Pappano [editor's note: Music Director of the Royal Opera House] and I discussed was what our first project would be together, and the first possible time slot was in May 2015. I suggested Król Roger. Tony also looked at it and he agreed that it would be the perfect first collaboration for us. It was, actually, one of the first decisions I made when I was appointed to my position at the Royal Opera House.
When you are directing opera by Mozart you don’t have to introduce him and his works to the audience. What advantages and disadvantages does working on an opera written by an unknown composer bring?
It’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. The disadvantage is of course that the audience (or at least most of them) have no idea what they are going to see. Some people know Król Roger of course, but a large part of the audience will never have seen it or even heard it, so you have to be relatively clear, I think, in telling the story, in making what the piece is about come across. This is a particular challenge with Król Roger, because it’s quite short -– it's an hour and half of music. And it clearly has a lot of very existential themes that need to go beyond the narrative, beyond naturalism and be explored in a more symbolic and metaphoric way. So, you have on the one hand to tell the story and be clear; and on the other hand you have to demonstrate that this work will almost be ‘a landscape of the soul'’, which is clearly what the piece is, and that's a tricky balance to strike.
But the advantage is that when you do Don Giovanni or Der Ring des Nibelungen, all the audiences come with this very strong perception of how they like it, how they think that it should be, how they've seen it before with many other productions. They have sometimes fixed ideas about the way the piece should be staged, and sometimes even how they think about a character, or how they perceive the piece. This can prevent them from understanding what you are suggesting or on occasion stop them being open to new ideas. So it’s wonderful to work with an opera where people don’t have preconceptions, where you can explore it in a fresh way, and express yourself – you can surprise the audience, in a way that you can't do with the better-known repertory.
For instance, I find the character of the Shepherd really interesting. Just as in Euripides’ The Bacchae (one of the inspirations for Iwaszkiewicz and Szymanowski), the god of pleasure turns out in the end to be a terrible, vengeful, dangerous god. At the beginning of the opera we can almost see the Shepherd as resembling Jesus Christ in front of Pontius Pilate, and our sympathy is with him; but in the third act, he practically turns into a dictator, someone who wants complete submission, someone who wants to take over everything. This is an extraordinary journey for a character in a piece. The audience maybe isn’t so familiar with this character, so you can surprise them in a way you would never be able to do with, say, Don Giovanni, or Tannhäuser.
Do you know of any operas that could be compared to Król Roger?
Yes and no. It’s obviously impossible, especially because Król Roger is very personal, a very personal thing for Szymanowski, so that even Iwaszkiewicz was not allowed to finish it in terms of libretto. As a stage director, it reminds me of works such as Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, which also has a story that looks on the surface to be a fairytale, with a strange story that it is hard to make sense of. However, when you look at it in a psychological, emotional, deeper way, an abstract way, it makes a lot of sense. You have to dig deep into these weird, fantastic themes to bring out the real theatricality. On the surface these operas are not very theatrical, but they are if you stage them in certain ways.
It also reminds me, maybe, of works such as Duke Bluebeard's Castle or Pelléas et Mélisande. These are both works that might have had inspired Szymanowski to some degree in Król Roger and explore similar themes: a search within the human soul, how to express something about spiritual matters, a search for identity. How Duke Bluebeard has the seven rooms inside him reminds me in Król Roger about how in a way, Edrisi, Roxana and the Shepherd, are all characters inside King Roger’s mind, even inside his body – all aspects of him. The opera also reminds me of Pelléas as it has a poetic, elusive story, where you can’t quite grasp the main character – but that’s exactly what makes it so human and so interesting.
What makes it fun, but difficult, to stage Król Roger compared to any of the pieces I just mentioned, except for Bluebeard, is that it's so short! I mean, in Die Frau ohne Schatten you have four hours to fill and in Król Roger you have to be quite precise. Because you blink and you missed it. The first act is 25 minutes, and by then you need to have set up the whole drama. The pressure on the King from the church, the Shepherd arriving, Roger’s relationship with Roxana, the fact that he is indecisive and changes his mind several times. I mean, there's so much information that the audience needs to get in the first act, and that's just 25 minutes. And in the second act, bang! You’re in the middle of the substance – what other composers would build up to over several hours. So it's quite quick, and that’s a challenge for a director, to really be very economical.
And in addition you have a libretto written in a strange Slavic language.
It’s difficult for me, of course, as I don’t speak Polish. In the beginning, I thought that it sounded a bit like Russian, but I soon realized that it doesn’t at all. Because you have the ‘ą’, and the nasal sounds, it sounds sometimes to me like Chinese, for lack of a better description. The more I work with it, the more I think it’s a beautiful language and very expressive. It has both these soft nasal sounds and these strong consonants. I'm really liking it, but of course it’s a challenge for some of the singers – I mean Mariusz Kwiecień and Agnes Zwierko obviously have no problem, and it's a great luxury to have them in the cast – but for most of the other singers, of course it’s a challenge to pronounce it well, and to understand.
For me, the main challenge has been that I have studied many times what each word means, and I have written down in my score what each word means, but still, when you sit there and watch it you have to remind yourself what each character is saying. There is not a direct connection with the words. I’m starting now to get individual words here and there that I recognize – what ‘łaska’' means, or '’skąd idziesz’, ‘szczęście'’ or whatever.
You were talking about the inspirations of Szymanowski and Iwaszkiewicz. Do you have your own inspirations in your production?
I think the most important thing when you do a production of any piece is of course to study the libretto, and think about what the composer wanted to say. In the end you have to open yourself to the piece. The main thing for me has been to sit down with the score, to listen to the music, to try and read the text, discuss with my designer, with our dramaturg, to work out what the work means, what it means to us today. I hope that's going to be the interesting aspect. Of course if a Polish director were to do Król Roger it would be a part of your tradition, and a piece that you could relate to. For us, we come to it as a completely new thing, a blank canvas, and can maybe thus look at it in a different way. We don’t know what the tradition is, and what is expected of us, so I hope that we can bring something new and fresh to the piece.
I think the main inspiration for me has been to say that the opera is not simply about homosexuality: although it’s very personal for Szymanowski, and it’s clear that his repressed homosexuality is a big aspect of the story. I think it’s a universal story – otherwise Roxana doesn’t fit. It’s a universal story about anybody, any of us who have repressed desires. About the fight in all of us between head, heart and body; between being man and being animal; between culture and nature. How we repress things and lose ourselves, but also how if we let go and live out all our desires, we can lose our identity. I think the important thing for me was to look at it as a universal story.
I also love the fact that it’s an inner story, a psychological story about Roger – about how it's all really, in a way, something that happens inside his mind – but at the same time it’s also quite a political story, about a society that gives into pleasure. When we look around today, there is so much temptation, there's so much pleasure, so much entertainment, and if we give in as a society to indulgence, to pleasure, to Dionysus, do we forget Apollo? Do we forget culture, do we forget critical thinking? It’s an important question, and for me the Shepherd in the third act becomes a warning for us about where giving in to pleasure and indulgence may lead us.
I have a feeling that your way of working is quite democratic, that you talk with all members of your team, that you discuss important decisions regarding the play.
Yes and no. I think that is quite important when you do anything artistic that you try to do something personal and that you have courage. That means that somebody needs to take the responsibility, somebody needs to say ‘we’re going in this direction’. Yesterday we had a scene where Mariusz Kwiecień [King Roger] and Saimir Pirgu, who sings the Shepherd, and me, we didn’t agree about something. In the end they said, ‘you’re the director, you can tell us what works and what can't, you can see it from outside, you can see the big picture’. So of course I need to make the decisions, and of course, I come to rehearsals with ideas, and also a lot of preparation and thought. So in a way I'm a dictator (!), and I need to be, because in the arts, if you have to vote about everything, it all gets blurred.
But having said that, I am nobody if I can’t make the ideas work for my cast; after all, I’m not on stage on the opening night. So I need to put my ideas as a little seed inside the designer, inside the singers, inside the cast, and everybody who is part of it. And then I can take back what they give me, which is wonderful. Because if I try to do it all it will only become about me; if I use what they come to rehearsal with, we can all together make something more, something new, something that grows. So, I am quite democratic, and I like people to be involved in the rehearsal process. I like the singers to feel that they’ve created the production too. That it's their journey, it's their project, that they own their character – I think that’s extremely important. So it’s a balance you have to strike, being making all the decisions and at the same time being a very open-minded democrat.
You've been working on Król Roger for four years, when did your project begin to take its final shape?
We started quite early: almost four years ago I had the first conversations with the designer, with the dramaturg and with the conductor. It was a long, long journey of searching, where we discussed all kinds of themes. Some of the ideas that are in the production today were there right from the beginning, from the first listening to the piece. Particularly important were ideas about how a society can protect itself against the animalistic instincts, can protect itself against Dionysus, and whether it can; the idea that we might be more free if we lived as animals, but how total freedom can also destroy us. That was something that I was interested in from the beginning, whereas the more personal, internal aspects of the piece were something I had to explore, to find a language for. And some of that has only even found its shape in rehearsals. For instance, we have the dancers, who are the followers of the Shepherd – but for us they really represent the way that Roger has repressed his desires, his demons, his subconscious. To find a language for that: how this representation merges with what the singers are doing, how that connects to the singers, how much, how little, how that should be expressed, is something that you can only do in the rehearsal room, so while the building blocks were there from quite early, it was only actually yesterday that some of the work fell into place.
It’s a mix of knowing something from four years ago, and still discovering things. I’m sure when I go down there in 10 minutes today, I will find out more new things.