Esa-Pekka Salonen on Patrice Chéreau

The sudden death, in October, of the director and actor Patrice Chéreau sent waves of grief through multiple spheres of international culture. The film community mourned the maker of “Queen Margot,” “Intimacy,” and “L’Homme Blessé”; French theatregoers remembered a restless, multifaceted career that had begun in earnest when Chéreau was still in his teens. But the keenest sense of loss may have been felt in the opera world, where Chéreau had established himself not merely as a brilliant practitioner of opera direction but as a prime mover in the recent history of the art. Wagner titled his most ambitious prose work “Opera and Drama”: Chéreau erased the difference.

Chéreau’s operatic breakthrough was his production of the “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival, in 1976, with Pierre Boulez conducting. The director was only thirty-one, and old-school Wagnerians regarded him as a subversive French interloper. His decision to transplant the action of the “Ring” to nineteenth- and twentieth-century settings, in line with the leftist interpretation of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Perfect Wagnerite,” caused a legendary scandal; in “Das Rheingold,” the audience was confronted with the image not of the primordial Rhine but of a hulking hydroelectric dam. In time, though, the power of the conception conquered skepticism. At the final revival, in 1980, Chéreau and his collaborators received an ovation that went on for more than an hour. That “Ring,” shown on television in the nineteen-eighties, and now available on video, is widely seen as the classic Wagner staging of the modern era. What Chéreau perfected, in this and in subsequent productions, was a mode of abstracted realism in which every moment was charged and nothing was forced. Even the slightest gestures and the most marginal characters contributed to the unfolding of the drama.

Chéreau directed opera in New York only once, in 2009, when he brought his production of Janáček’s “From the House of the Dead” to the Met. It was the most cohesive, potent evening of theatre I have ever seen there. Last summer, Chéreau staged Strauss’s “Elektra” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival; unwilling to wait for a New York tour, I went to Aix and reviewed it for the magazine. The performance I attended was the last in the run, and I was struck by the almost frantic nature of the applause, and by the fervor of the hugs exchanged onstage. When I heard the news of Chéreau’s death, I recalled that scene and wondered what emotion lay behind it. Recently, I talked to the composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who collaborated with Chéreau on both “Elektra” and “From the House of the Dead.” He spoke lucidly and movingly about what it was like to work with Chéreau.

There is endless controversy over the role of the opera director. Every month, another scandal seems to erupt somewhere in Europe over a radical reinterpretation of a familiar work—Wagner set in death camps, and so on. Ideally, what should directors achieve, and why do they cause so much angst?

I sympathize with the directors, in a way, because they are in a difficult situation. In no other art form, certainly not in straight theatre or film, is everything so fixed in advance. The score cannot be changed in the slightest particular. Sometimes, I think that this idea of being absolutely true to the text has gone to an absurd point. There is total inflexibility. In fact, the opera composers of the past—these guys like Mozart, Weber, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, even Wagner—were practical theatre people. In Dresden once, I looked at Strauss’s score for “Salome,” and he had crossed out the brass at one point because they were too loud. I can’t do that. Meanwhile, the audience wants to see the same “Aida” it has seen many times. The directors react against these strictures, they get pissed off by bourgeois taste, and everything kind of deteriorates. Even Chéreau, who was so respectful of the text, sometimes felt constricted. He’d ask, “Wouldn’t it be great, Esa-Pekka, if we could move this scene over here?” And I would say, “Sure, Patrice, that would be great, but …” Yet he was never distracted by this politics of opera. He could find freedom within the boundaries.

When did you first become aware of Chéreau, and when did you meet him?

I saw the “Ring” on television, like so many others, and was in awe of it. I saw some of his early films also, and his “Hamlet” in Avignon. I first met him in the early nineties, in a rather odd and funny way. I had decided that I wanted him to recite the role of the Narrator for my recording of Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex.” I disliked the rather pretentious way the narration was usually done—the Cocteau style. Chéreau agreed to take it on, and so one day there he was, saying, “O.K., how do you want me to do it?” And I’m saying, “You are Patrice Chéreau! You should tell me the way to do it!” But he said, “I am here as an actor. I need instruction.” I became very embarrassed, getting red in the face and sweating. Finally I said, “All right, maybe it can be a sort of matter-of-fact approach, as if you were reading the news.” And he said, “O.K., that’s it,” and did it. This is something for my memoirs—the time I directed Patrice Chéreau.

Quite often, you meet people you have admired from afar, and they turn out to be not so nice. This happened to me many times in my youth. But Patrice was really remarkable as a human being. Very shy, very modest, very warm and thoughtful. I was always so impressed by the lack of fuss, the lack of grand gesturing, the lack of anything but focus and determination in his work. Whenever he suggested something, it was always with some overwhelmingly powerful argument behind it, and it was never about pecking order or power or any non artistic aspect—always about expression. And if I suggested something slightly different—maybe moving a singer to an acoustically better position—he would have no problem with that. I cannot recall one single moment of real disagreement or tension. In opera, this is a bit rare.

You jumped at the chance to work with Chéreau on “From the House of the Dead.”

Yes—Peter Gelb came to see me in Paris and asked me about taking over from Boulez when the production came to the Met. And I said, “Now we are talking.” On previous occasions, the Met had suggested less exciting opportunities. I went to see the production in Aix, and I must say that it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. And for me it was made more poignant by the fact that Boulez gave me his copy of the score, saying, “You should have this now.” He had corrected, like, a hundred and fifty misprints, so it was not only poignant but also useful.

Did Chéreau arrive with everything mapped out in advance, or was he more fluid and changeable?

Of course, he arrived with ideas. The concept for the set was worked out with Richard Peduzzi long in advance, and he knew generally how the action would interact with the set. And he prepared meticulously, through textual analysis and by studying the score. But, no, he didn’t have an inflexible, machinelike concept of the work. He had to meet with the performers and see what they could actually deliver. On “Elektra,” he spent a long time with Evelyn Herlitzius [who played the title role] before the rehearsals. Just the two of them, trying all kinds of things together—she is physically such a strong performer. With Peter Mattei, in “From the House of the Dead,” he realized that Peter is a very good, natural actor, and he kept adding layers upon layers, giving him more challenging material. Every day, he would arrive with a new thing for Peter to do. It was like building a cathedral brick by brick. And this is the real mastery: not for one second would you think these little gestures are happening because M. Chéreau has told the singers to do them. Rather, you think, This is the story. This is the way it has to go. That is the greatest praise you can get: the director has rubbed himself out of the picture.

If he was working with somebody less talented as an actor, through weeks of drilling and supporting he would create an actor where there hadn’t been one before. And rather than telling them what they should be thinking, he gives them—gave them—physical tools. He would say, “If you grab the chair with your right hand and hand the letter over with your left hand, then it works.” He also got them away from bad operatic gesticulating. It was very clever: instead of telling them not to do those silly gestures, he would assign specific tasks that stopped them from lapsing into old habits. He drilled people so well that even if the singer couldn’t identify completely with the part the expression would come through. In the end, the non-actors acted as well as the actors. For the chorus in “From the House of the Dead,” he didn’t treat them as a lump of people, moving them from point A to point B. Everybody was an individual, with a temperament and an imaginary narrative. Of course, to get to this point takes hundreds of hours of work. Not many directors are willing to do this. But the result is something very unlike other productions: everywhere you look, you are surrounded by stories.

It can’t have been easy to practice this method at big opera houses, with their set routines.

The sheer volume of what these houses like La Scala and the Met do, with fifteen or twenty pieces in the repertory, means that routines fall into place and things have to go a certain way. Professional people learn to operate within the parameters. Patrice would accept certain facts, but he would become very frustrated. Sometimes there are union rules that are so bizarre and so counterproductive and so Kafkaesque that there’s nothing to do but laugh or cry or get drunk or whatever. At La Scala, the chorus has a clause in their contract that states that they don’t have to sing during staging rehearsals. So they are running around silently miming their parts, and it is very hard to get the timing right when they are not actually singing. I remember a lunch we had after one of those days, where Patrice said, “I’m done with this fucking opera thing. I will not touch opera again in my life. That’s it.” And I said, “O.K., but there’s this one piece, and it has very little chorus by the way.” And he said, “What is that?” “ ‘Elektra,’ by Strauss.” “Maybe. I don’t know.” I am happy I made this argument.

“From the House of the Dead” began in an electrifying way. You went to the podium without the audience noticing, and then the houselights suddenly switched off, and the music began. “Elektra” began very differently, with several minutes of stage action amid silence: the maids of the House of Atreus sweep the stairs, carry water around, and so forth. How did Chéreau come up with this idea?

He said that it was very important for the audience to understand that this is a totally normal household. [Laughs] Of course, he laughed, too, but that was the idea: we begin with something totally mundane, with these household chores, and then Elektra is thrown in, and the opera starts, and you realize that it is not normal at all. I quite like that idea. Musically speaking, I like the silence before the noise. People are coming away from their cell phones and their cars and the bar before the show, entering into this silence. And then the maximum contrast: first, the sound of brushes, and then this huge, dark D-minor chord. If you don’t know the piece, it is a shock, and if you do know the piece it is still a shock, because you don’t know when it comes.

In Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s text, Elektra dances herself to death in an ecstatic dance. As Chéreau stages it, she stops and freezes while her brother Orestes walks all the way from the back of the stage to a door stage right. There is something incredibly chilling about the image—the long line created by his walk becomes the equivalent of a film camera pulling back, revealing an entire landscape. How did this come about?

He had trouble with the ending. I think we saw thirty different versions. Early on, he knew that Elektra should not die. He thought it would be even more tragic if she became an empty shell, all motivation gone now that the obsession with her mother’s crime has ended, but she is still alive. Then, about halfway through the rehearsals, he had this idea of Orestes walking, walking, walking, walking. It underlines the tragedy even more. There is no neat closure, no achieving of a goal with the deaths of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Nothing has changed; the circle of violence will go on and on.

You knew that he was undergoing treatment for cancer?

Yes, he was open about the seriousness of it all. But none of us knew quite how sick he was. Maybe he didn’t even know himself. He would go back to Paris every two weeks to have chemo and come straight back and go to rehearsals. We were rehearsing in Milan during a heat wave, and there was no air-conditioning, so it was something like a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit inside the hall. He would come in looking absolutely awful, and yet he would rehearse for six or eight hours straight. Finally, I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I said, “Patrice, what are you doing? You should take a day or two off. I can work on musical rehearsals or whatever.” And he said, “No, no, I have to work.” And now I understand: work kept him going, and if he had free time he might start to think, and in his condition, if you start to think … At one point, we talked about the future, and I mentioned doing something in 2017-18. He looked at me and just shrugged.

I sensed strong emotion onstage when you were taking your last bows together.

Yes, there was. We had spent a long time together, Patrice and I and the cast, and we all felt lucky to have been a part of this project. He, too, was happy with how it had gone, and he was smiling after the show, which was really great to see. Then we had dinner and a party. People tend to flip out a bit at these affairs, jump into fountains and so forth. And we said goodbye and agreed to have lunch in Paris in the fall, and he gave me a hug and held me very firmly. Of course, I wonder about this. It is pointless to speculate whether he knew we might not see each other again. [Pauses] But, anyway, a dear memory.

Did you learn something from Chéreau that you can apply to your future work?

I think about his ability to make actors out of singers. I realize that he was enabling them to go somewhere they wouldn’t normally go, giving them the confidence to do something that they weren’t even aware they could do. If I or anybody else could apply the same principle as successfully—say, to conducting an orchestra—that would be quite remarkable. Even more, I think about how everything seemed to go a certain way because it had to, not because someone had made a series of decisions. I would be on the podium watching in wonder as it all unfolded—and yet I knew how he got there. It’s as if you go see a magic show, and somebody tells you exactly how every trick is done, and you are still astonished. That is what it was like to work with Patrice Chéreau.

Above: Patrice Chéreau in Madrid, in 2006. Photograph: Pedro Armestre/AFP/Getty.