Directing opera
Notes from Company Director Anna Gregory
And now a new year … As we welcome-in 2025 so begins a new surge of energy. I spent the family’s traditional ‘Christmas recovery week’ in Austria at high altitude, alternately sliding with less than professional grace down the mountain and reading my score, which is now covered in pencil suggestions and notes. I listened to a few different recordings (of our next full production, La bohème) which were not my usual go-to choices. Alagna and Gheorghiu are my favourites, I wonder who you would choose? I read some critiques and some passages from the original source Scènes de la vie de bohème (Stories of the Bohemian Life) by Henri Murger. In some ways this is the part of directing an opera which I love, but also dread.
As the stage director you need to be aware that the opinions of the music director and the singers themselves hold great weight and may conflict with your own. I tend to work at sketching-out ideas and trying not to become wedded to anything, but also really learning the situation presented in each scene and looking for links and nuances which may flesh out the characters. Often, you may offer singers a small idea and see them run with it, or reject it, but in those cases the singer usually has a strong knowledge of the text and has done the work for you! I am the type of director who chooses to stick as closely to the text and music as is possible, leaving abstract references to people who understand the avant garde better than I.
Working with singers who prepare roles in detail is such a gift. Alison Kettlewell talked to me recently about her preparation for the character of La Frugola, the gentle cat lady in Puccini’s opera Il tabarro. She mentioned that (just as we both admit to really loving our dogs with rather slavish adoration), La Frugola regards her cat as a perfect, constant companion. A cat is a better option than a man, especially in Puccini’s operas―but that is another story! Alison decided that La Frugola’s affinity with her cat had leaked into her physicality and her own movements had become cat-like. Neat and contained, with self-comforting washing of the ear or face with a ‘paw’.
It is this sort of detail that elevates a performance in opera. The music reveals every part of these characters. Combining this with a physical characterisation which the audience can read from a distance, but unexaggerated so as not to read as unbelievable and subtle enough not to pull focus from other protagonists, is a fine art form. With the tucking of a stray hair behind the ear, a singing actor can suggest an emotional response to action appearing elsewhere on the stage. Such layers of detail, small steps towards a bigger picture, might mean that the final act of our next opera pulls your heart strings more than you expected.
Opera requires the same physicalisation of the music that ballet does, plus the expressive skills of a theatre actor and the musicality of a concert musician.
Opera singing uses every part of the physical, intellectual and emotional range of the singer when done well.
That’s why it makes its audience cry.