In the first part of this interview, Kosky talked about his craft as an opera director. Now, he gives us the Intendant's view: the essence of opera and its audiences, why different houses have different problems, why he's optimistic about the future... and why he was kicked off the lawn at Glyndebourne!
You've said that one of your objectives is to make enough space for the audience to dream their own dreams. Tell us more…
I maintain a healthy optimism about the future of opera and theatre in a world of technology. There's something fundamentally human about the green space of theatre: the Ancient Greeks understood that very clearly, so did Shakespeare and Molière.
Opera, where virtually every single element of art is involved, is really very unique still. Music, text, literature, movement, dance, ballet, body, history, psychology, light, visual arts: it's the crossroads where every single street crosses into, it's the most extreme, the most real and emotionally powerfully form of performing arts. At the same time, it’s the most artificial. Through the artifice of storytelling through voice, which is about as non-real as you can get, comes the most real you can experience in emotions, because during those ten minutes that somebody is singing their death, you are most connected to death. That’s why I hate opera on film, and I hate this idea that to make opera more relevant is to actually make it more "real", because these words are meaningless.
I don't use the word "dream" lightly. Opera has to be this space where you are dreaming other people's dreams or asking people to come into this aural, visual performative dream. Without emotions, opera is dead: what draws 99% of audiences to opera is that it's a safe space where you can sit there and have an emotional frenzied experience. Unless we've had fabulous sex or had an incredibly extraordinary relationship with our partner, we're never really going to experience ecstasy like Tristan and Isolde do – but I'm happy to share their 40 minutes of it in Act 2.
My job is to enable that story to happen between the performers. Then, the audience are invited to experience that and also to project their own fantasy and their own dream onto it. Which is not to say it’s all very open: I'm very clear and very specific about what I want in a rehearsal. But I don't have to tell the audience all the time what that is, which can be frustrating for some audiences. And in an opera evening, your senses must be intoxicated. Otherwise, what's the point?
To enjoy opera, do people need a certain level of knowledge of the medium, a certain cultural background?
Yes and no. I like the idea that you don't have to read a single word in a programme or do any research to sit in any of my productions and go on the journey. You can come off the street and have no knowledge of whatever it is that you're going to experience, and from feedback for my productions, I know that's often the case. But you can’t deny that opera is a sophisticated structure, you can't just suddenly say "it's for everybody". Look at Tosca, for example, It's one of the most gruesome, sadomasochistic stories ever put on stage – what happens in that opera is XXX-rated, the radicalism of that piece is astonishing. But you rarely see or feel that in a performance of Tosca, because what you usually see is a watered down, easily consumed version.
No-one should be excluded from opera, and I want as many people as possible to come and experience it, through ticket prices, through open policy, through dialogue with an audience. But not everyone's going to get it: there are people who just don't like Japanese food, who don't want to eat raw fish. It doesn’t mean they’re vulgar: people shouldn't be forced to like opera.
Opera always works on two levels. It works on a very visceral emotional level: “Whoa, someone's singing at me, they're having these emotions”, that should appeal to anybody. On the other hand, opera is an incredibly sophisticated art form that’s developed over 500 years. So there's no one audience. If you want to just sit there without knowing anything about it and watch the pretty pictures with music at the centre, you are allowed to, great. If you want to do two years of research and study the programme and the libretto, great. And if you want to compare it to the 20 other productions that you've seen in the last five years, that’s great too.
But opera can't survive in the long term if the ticket prices are 300 or 400 pounds or euros, which is why it goes back to the thing about subsidies.
There are directors who have not brought their audiences with them, ENO in London being an example. Is there a secret of how to carry your audience on that journey?
People talk about the Pountney / Elder / Harewood / Jonas years, but you remember those years at the culmination, at the end of it all. They had to start somewhere, and it didn't start with a series of ten productions of chainsaws: it was a gradual process of taking the audience with them. If you're going to really try and do something different or new or expand the audience's ideas of what's possible, you have to seduce people by getting them to trust you, which means that first, you have to deliver. It’s the easiest thing in the world to design some crazy productions, to put some shocking images on stage. What's much harder is to seduce your audience in the best way which is to say "try this": they try it, they like it, then you say "come a step further". Now that can be done in different ways. Each country is unique, each city is unique: what works in Germany does not work in England. What works in America does not work in Russia.
So this idea that there's one generic way of doing opera is impossible. All those English directors, Richard [Jones], David [McVicar], Tim [Albery], they saw the East Germans, they got their juices going when they saw Kupfer, Friedrich, Berghaus, Joachim Herz; they took those ideas and worked them into a very, very English style – a brilliant English style. The problem that you always have to understand about an opera house is “What is your opera house? What is the point of it?”
I don't sit in La Scala in the same way I would sit in the audience at Oper Frankfurt, or here at the Komische Oper. At La Scala, I want to hear fabulous, big Italian voices singing fantastic Italian music and I would never in a million years expect it to be one of the most shattering theatrical experiences of my life, because apart from anything else, I know they're not going to have the rehearsal time. At La Scala, I want to hear Italian opera played by that fabulous orchestra and I want it to sound fabulous, and if I get that, I'm really happy, I've got my money's worth.
We have an incredibly complicated system here in Berlin of three enormous opera houses in a city of three and half million – Komische is the smallest and we're 450 people – but they're all full, it's not as if anyone's struggling to get audiences. And that's for two reasons, which aren’t the same in England. Firstly, there's an ownership of the art form. So for German audiences, it's not just a night out: it's our DNA on the stage, reflecting back at us, in all sorts of different ways. I mean the Germans think they invented opera, you have to always remind them that it was actually the Italians. I think there are only two cultures in Europe, Germany and Russia, where opera is so deeply embedded in the culture, in the exploration of national identity, good and bad.
The second thing is that government funding is there to reduce ticket prices. That allows us to have 12 Euro seats, which is cheaper than the cinema, so no-one's excluded. In England, people don't get the fact that you need subsidy to achieve that.
Read what Handel and his contemporaries write about Italian opera in England in the 18th century and you realise that the English have always had a very ambiguous relationship with opera. On the one hand, they sort of love it, but on the other hand there's that British sense of like, let's not go too far with the emotions, let's not make it too extravagant. This sort of ambiguity is being played out all the time, even though English singers and directors and conductors have been extraordinary in the last few hundred years. But in England, does your audience really feel that they're owning this? Or do they feel like Australian audiences, where they're watching it because it's something exotic and sort of delicious and they love it but it's not their roots. How far do those roots really go down into the cultural DNA, how far do they really go? In Australia, they don't go down at all.