Last night Peter Sellars, in town directing Tristan und Isolde at the COC, made an appearance at the Toronto Reference Library. It was billed as an interview with The Star‘s Richard Ouzounian but bar a couple of questions at the end and a brief set up by Ouzounian it was pretty much a 75 minute monologue by Sellars. Like the man himself it was fascinating but very hard to pin down.
Peter Sellars at the Four Seasons Centre last week (CBC)
He started off by comparing his experiences directing Richard Cassilly in Tannhäuser many years ago with his current experience with Ben Heppner now. How only a singer at a certain stage of his career can truly deal with the process of dying. That it may not be about beautiful sound but rather “that sound that is filtered through pain”. This led on to a more general discursion on the process and art of directing; “shut up and listen”…”ask a few questions that haven’t been asked”.
Then he talked about an experience directing The Children of Herakles; a piece about refugees from Euripides. He talked about staging it with real refugees and how art is “a protected zone where the truth is possible” and how it is possible to present the reality of e.g. torture in a way that is not titillating à la Hollywood; of having “the courage not to go there” citing Zero Dark Thirty as an example of the opposite of honesty.
By this point, to be frank, I was in overload and was pretty much reduced to capturing a few key phrases from his description of his approach to Tristan.
- “[Tristan] is not an opera but a sacred ritual”
- “sex is sacred”
- “the erotic is a path to the sacred”
- “how do you watch someone have an inner journey?”
- “a masterpiece means more than its author ever realised”
There was a longish digression on how he likes to get away from the theatre and spend time in places like Mali and eastern Congo to get back in touch with something, maybe reality. Part of me was rather mean spiritedly thinking that it’s easy to talk about reality and transformation in a place like Mali from a position of safety and privilege but I don’t think Sellars was talking about a sort of crass “conflict tourism” but rather of something he needs to do as part of his creative process that he even he can’t really articulate.
It was perhaps as well that there was only time for a couple of questions because one of them was basically the hoary old chestnut that parses as “Why can’t we have our old crinolines and cleavage productions back?” There’s always one!
Bar that, it was a fascinating evening (and a real challenge to document!). I’d tell you all to go see Tristan because it is going to be an event but at last check there were only about 140 tickets left for the whole run. If you don’t have one, the man is back next year to explore PTSD and homecoming in Handel’s Hercules at COC.
operaramblings 
That Tannhaueser was supposed to come to the Met. Oh well.
Based on Peter’s description I can see why it didn’t. If the current Tosca is considered too explicit for Metropolitan tastes the Tannhauser would have induced apoplexy.
I regret I was not there last night. The quote that “art is ‘a protected zone where the truth is possible” resonates with me with particular depth of meaning. Practicing law over the last few decades and in different continents and legal systems, I found myself in need of art as a kind of ontological nourishment lacking in specially designated places for the truth to emerge. For those who assert that judicial process is a game and that litigation is a marketplace where salesmanship is the key skill, I probably sound like one of those silly, if not pathetic, incarnations of Don Quixote. And as a high court judge once told me in the open court, this may get me in trouble. Thank you for sharing the evening with Sellars.
I have had similar experiences! It’s really hard to convey the essence of what Sellars is saying. It’s so dense and on multiple levels at once. Direct quotes sometimes seem the only option.
“how do you watch someone have an inner journey?”
One of the great questions of good opera staging (not limited to Tristan)
I guess I’ll find out in a few hours time. I cracked and bought a stehplatz ticket for tonight.