It has a production rate of at least five new opera productions per season, many of which are world premieres. The number soars with the reruns that his team raises in theaters around the world. The mere presence of Calixto Bieito in Barcelona already creates anticipation. Even more so when his vision of L’incoronazione di Poppea el Monteverdi, which opens on Monday at the Liceu (subscribers have a 15% discount when buying tickets here), has maestro Jordi Savall a little uncomfortable because of the violence and bloody scenes that will take place around him, so, on this occasion, the orchestra embeds itself on the stage.
But maybe Poppea isn’t a carnival of thirst for power and sex? That maybe the empress didn’t die from a kick in the stomach when she was pregnant by her husband Nero, totally drunk?
The desired theater director from Burgos, who was established in Barcelona for more than two decades and has been in Basel for another two, carries the label of provocateur at the age of 59. But in opera theaters and text theaters he is considered a pope of sensibility, bearer of a renewed expression in the face of repression. One of the most stimulating creators of our time, with a good range of records. He was one of the first to break the rules of opera. Sex, blood, violence… But there is no single Bieito formula in his review of the classics. It does not seek provocation per se.
How does the creative spark arise in your case?
I do what I feel, I share with the musical director, with the singers, with the text and, basically, with the music. We have a very strong complicity with the singers, we create a space of freedom in which everything is possible. I’m not afraid to make a fool of myself, it’s okay.
The ridicule in front of the artists? Because it shouldn’t be in front of the public…
It’s just that I can’t think about the public. I work in fifty different theaters and I have never thought about each of the audiences. That’s speculating, and I’m not speculating.
Not even when 30 years ago he directed the Lliure or the Romea?
No, I didn’t think “this is intended for the public of the Free”. What is the audience? I do not know. They told me that the TNC was very different from the Free. Well… People talk about culture and art… but they are different things. They are related, but art comes from dreams and fantasies, visions and what you feel. When a society makes it its own, it becomes culture, but I don’t make culture. I’m not a salesman, I make art.
What does Savall’s argument suggest that the musical beauty of the Baroque collides with the violence on stage in his production of Poppea?
It’s just that baroque music is not always beautiful. There is a lot of staccato that shows beastly violence. Poppea has a lot. They are works like Giulio Cesare, of intrigue, crimes, sex…, all combined. What happens is that the music gives it a more abstract and magical dimension, but it is great musical theatre. It is how people expressed themselves at the time: the great carnival. Producers wanted bigger sets, flashier magic effects: there were circus-like features. The big difference, now, is the work the singers do, which is deep, really authentic. I take very few classes, I command respect, but from time to time I do them in Basel, in Berlin…, and I try to convey this: that they are artists and must be free. Different composers have put their hands on Poppea, I’m not making anything up.
What is your secret to connecting deeply with these artists?
I do not know. Great directors come to see my rehearsals, I feel flattered, but they see it and don’t quite understand it. They say I work in a very different way. But you need authenticity to be able to sing with your whole being, metaphorically… I think it’s based on mutual trust. And most singers know that I don’t speculate, and if something isn’t right I’ll change it, but I’ll say the same thing.
Bring the Roman Empire into the present and use a sea of ??selfies. Low stove vanity?
It’s that today people explain their private life and private life. I am a friend of Karl Ove Knausgård, with whom I did a production about an Ibsen. He made showing his life fashionable again. I told him it was a total act of catharsis or monumental selfishness. Many writers tell the smallest details of their lives, and this is also a selfie. I’m a very discreet person, I don’t have Instagram or Facebook.
With Héctor Parra he has just premiered Orgia in Bilbao. He has been saying for years that you enlightened him on the more human side of music, more carnal, made of blood, skin and muscle…
That says, yes. In Orgia I saw a Parra that was much more lyrical and at the same time perhaps more staccato. The music is beautiful, has a wonderful sarabanda and uses parlato very well. The opera we did based on Jonathan Littell’s Las benévolas was too long, but in Orgia I wrote the libretto and it lasts 85 minutes. By the age of 16, he had already seen all of Pasolini’s films. Saló made me wear a protective layer, but I still periodically watch La pasión según san Mateo. And it was hard for me, the truth, to get back into Pasolini. Why?, Hector told me: if you are very close to his self-destructive world. Orgy is not just a statement of principles about diversity, I discovered that I don’t need to make a pamphlet about diversity. The play is talking about death and someone who has a conflict of diversity and sadomasochism, and that has to do with Pasolini himself.
