Can you tell us about your role with OHP this year?
I am directing The Flying Dutchman (Der fliegende Holländer). It’s a great joy to be back at Opera Holland Park for the third time, after L’amico Fritz and Eugene Onegin. OHP hasn’t done a Wagner yet — it’s exciting that they’ve chosen to do one, and to be one of the people who get to bring it to the stage.
What entices you most about The Flying Dutchman?
It’s a question as deep and wide as the ocean, and we can probably talk about it for the next seven years. Wagner’s pieces, because of the musical quality and structure, as well as his fascination with certain themes that recur throughout all his operas, I think are an interesting playground for a director and for musicians because they combine lots of different things. They combine a larger than life sense with great humanity in the characters.
For instance, the Dutchman and Senta. Both of them have what all good characters on stage have. They have conflict, they have fears, they have vulnerability, they have longing, they have desires. Wagner is all about the internal landscapes and that is reflected in the music. The world is a fascinating place, but the internal world might even be more fascinating.
The Flying Dutchman has been described as an entry-level Wagner opera before; do you agree with this?
I don’t think about it in that way, because humans, audiences, everybody is so different, so different things work for different people. It’s shorter — that’s for sure. It’s big, and actually just listening to the music (let alone the drama), it takes you. It takes you somewhere. I’d say the Flying Dutchman is as entry-level as anything else. Give it a go, you might like it, you might not.
Wagner’s operas are often known for their larger-than-life scale, yet Opera Holland Park offers a more intimate performance space, with a unique proximity to the elements as a canopied outdoor theatre. What opportunities do you see in adapting such a grand opera to this unusual setting?
It’s about the world of the imagination being big, and not necessarily the spaces having to be big. The cave of a dragon could be a cardboard box in a tiny theatre, and a ship can be made of paper. We did The Rhinegold of the Ring Cycle in a very small space at the Arcola, and that proved all of that.
At Opera Holland Park, you are also much closer to the singers than you would be at a classic opera house or big theatre. In my experience, people love being close up to performers because you are just closer to the action, and you’re closer to seeing what happens in their faces and what happens in their bodies – you just feel a little bit more involved. So, on the whole, those sort of performances capture people’s imagination quite well because of that. Opera Holland Park provides that. So that’s very exciting.
Senta’s obsession with the Dutchman is often interpreted as a means of escape from her own life, but it can also be seen as an act of defiance. How do you view Senta’s character, and what interpretations of her do you hope to bring out through your direction?
In the musical structure of it, it’s not insignificant that the overture is actually the same music as Senta’s ballad. So, in Senta’s ballad is the narration of the Dutchman. Everything is intertwined. She is fantastically significant because she thinks about this man every day. I think it’s more interesting if the ghost is something that lives within her imagination, and is created from the need for escapism from a daily routine that isolates her. She’s lonely! She doesn’t have any friends there. Her dad’s not around, he’s always away. The local girls think she’s crazy. She has created, with this fascination about the Dutchman, a possible get-out clause, something that could rescue her from this life.
Of course, I think we need to remember that it is a ghost story, and there’s darkness in this. It’s not normal that a healthy, happy girl would come up with this sort of thing. She knows what’s at stake, the ballad says it — she wants to be the one that redeems him, and it might entail death. It’s not a happy love story. So, is it an act of defiance? In a way, yes, but I think it’s more a coping mechanism to handle her daily life and to get out.
You worked with Peter Selwyn on the Hackney Ring Cycle, and he will be joining you at Opera Holland Park again this summer. Can you tell us more about establishing a working relationship with Selwyn in the Wagner repertoire?
The two of us go way back. We’ve done a whole bunch of shows together and especially a lot of Wagner together. Peter’s a very knowledgeable Wagner conductor, and we just thought nobody is doing small-scale yet ambitious productions of Wagner, so let’s start doing it, right? I’m German and I’ve done a lot of Wagner, he knows Wagner…it’s a wonderful collaboration. We give each other room, it’s lovely to have him because everything is so intricate and detailed. Doing opera is great teamwork between the conductor and the director and everybody else and that’s something that I really like about it. Everybody gets to contribute.
In his own writings, Wagner reflects on The Flying Dutchman as the beginning of his understanding of music drama as a cohesive and unified art form, the “gesamtkunstwerk”; you have spoken before about your directing focusing on how the body, the music and the words intersect. With this similarity in mind, do you find you approach Wagner differently to other repertoire?
Yes and no. You need to, in a way, decode what the music means – but you always have to do that with opera because it’s music and theatre and the body and the text and the mind. Everything has to be in relation to the music, but Wagner is very illustrative and very particular. It’s a very psychologically crafted musical drama, and I really like that.
It’s not harder or easier, it’s just different. So I’d say, yes, it’s slightly different because of the musical structure. I know some directors who would never touch a Wagner and they can’t bear it and others just love it. I like it, what can I say? I still like a Rossini or a Handel where it is the same word repeated for seven minutes, which is a different kind of challenge. There are different things to pull out of each piece.
At Opera Holland Park you have directed works across languages such as Italian (L’amico Fritz), Russian (Eugene Onegin) and now German (The Flying Dutchman). Does the language of an opera influence your directing approach/style?
I like directing opera in its original language, because I think the original language always gives it a very particular flair that is significant for the piece. So obviously, this one’s German, I speak German, so that’s easier for me. But Italian has a different flair that is very particular to that language, and brings a different note to it. You know what I mean? So I think different languages in different styles of opera bring a different attitude, colour to it.
You have an impressively varied career, having previously worked at the United Nations in Paris. What made you decide to return to London to focus fully on a directing career?
I remember working at UNESCO in Paris, and I thought, God, it’s a lot of talk where you don’t see the results. What’s really nice about directing is that you see the results very quickly. The whole thing from idea, planning to execution. You can build things together very quickly, and you have an outcome.That’s always a beautiful thing that can happen with collective efforts and of course, imagination and ideas. I wasn’t bad at the work before, but I decided not to pursue it. I was still very young and felt like there’s still time to give directing a go.
What, do you find, is a misconception about opera that you’d like to see debunked?
I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that you need to have a lot of education to enjoy it. I think that is entirely untrue. It’s actually much less complicated than everybody thinks. It’s music theatre, it’s storytelling. As long as you’re human and respond to all the human triggers that we all respond to, you can come along. You turn up, you give it a go, you may like it, you may not like it. I don’t like all operas that I see. Nobody gives up on cinema or films just because they disliked one film.
To be able to perform it, play it, direct it, for that you need a certain amount of education and training or experience to do it. But to consume it, you do not. Turn up. Give it a chance.
What is one piece of advice you would give to young directors starting out in the industry?
For the young directors out there, it is important to know that there is not one path. Unusual routes might lead to other things. Trust your instincts and always surround yourself with nice people that nurture you, that are there for you, that you can learn from, this is really important. If directing is really scary, then maybe it’s not the right thing. But, if directing feels like home, then don’t give up too soon.
The Flying Dutchman runs at Opera Holland Park from 27 May – 14 June 2025.
Interview by Holly Bancroft.
