A radical director reinvigorates opera

GIRL meets boy, they fall in love, girl dies: the morbid plots of many operas are an obvious target for feminist revisionism. A new production of “Carmen”, in Florence, duly ends with the exasperated heroine fatally shooting her jealous lover (instead of being stabbed to death herself). For Barrie Kosky, an Australian director whose own “Carmen” opens at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on February 6th, that approach is far too literal. “Opera is the ritualisation of emotion through the human voice,” he says, “which has nothing to do with realism.” He insists that “Carmen” is not merely a retrograde celebration of machismo. Rather, it is “a tango between Eros and Thanatos”; Carmen herself “wants to self-destruct, to meet her death”.

Mr Kosky sees opera as the art form that brings audiences closest to the theatre of the ancient Greeks—if it is presented with sufficient intensity and visual restraint. The stage for his “Carmen” will be stripped back to bare essentials: a huge staircase and just three props (a rope, a knife and some rose petals). “I love empty space,” he says, “because with singers the stage is never empty.” If his taste in sets is austere, however, in other respects it is exuberant. In his crazily stylised production of Handel’s “Saul”, soon to be revived at Glyndebourne, the biblical monarch emerged as a super-deranged King Lear.

Brought up in Melbourne, the son of Jewish immigrants, Mr Kosky has cultivated the image of (in his words) a “gay Jewish kangaroo”; as the intendant of Berlin’s Komische Oper he has an influential power base. Everything he directs is in some way extreme. His production of Rameau’s “Castor et Pollux” for the English National Opera (ENO) outraged purists. Its most abiding image involved a young woman lying on a dunghill and working herself to orgasm with the aid of a disembodied hand. He describes his production of Shostakovich’s surreal comedy, “The Nose”—to be revived in Sydney later this month—as “a phantasmagoria of paranoia and eroticism”. It featured a tap-dancing chorus-line of giant schnozzles.

Yet an acute political awareness underpins his pranks. In his view Vienna is “still full of unexorcised Nazi ghosts”. In Berlin he staged a version of “West Side Story” in which the star-crossed lovers were a German and a Turk. With his final show at the Komische Oper in 2022 he intends to realise a long-held ambition: “I want to do an operetta, in Yiddish, in Berlin.” When his contract expires he is likely to stay in Germany, which—with its generous subsidies and low seat prices—is opera’s utopia. “Going to the opera in Berlin can cost less than going to a film,” he notes. “That deals with the elitism charge in one fell swoop.”

In America, with its unfillable 4,000-seat houses, opera’s condition is “catastrophic”. In London, meanwhile, the ENO’s future is precarious. How can such struggling houses recover? “You have to be really radical,” Mr Kosky reckons. “Take things round the country in a big circus tent.” In his view only Philip Glass and Andrew Lloyd Webber have recently composed anything truly new in the genre. “I want a brilliant jazz composer to come to me and say he wants to do an opera,” Mr Kosky pleads.