You seem to be having a busy period. Fidelio had its premiere in the Opera House with the first cast last Sunday, and it will show with the second cast next Saturday. The Budapest Autumn Festival is starting today and you are its artistic director. In the meantime, you teach at the Music Academy and you are the artistic director of the Opera House. You seem to be a bit overwhelmed.
Not really, but I can't stand it when one of your journalist colleagues calls me to ask whether I knew in advance that the audience would whistle and boo at Fidelio. No, I did not know and I cannot understand what gives it news value. At the Munich Opera, a young audience recently watched the main rehearsal for Macbeth and they admired it, but at the premiere director Martin Kusej was met with whistles. So what did that mean? I don't think that he failed or I failed, for that matter. This is the way it is in every country around the world.
Perhaps what's sensational is that the audience expressed emotions, which usually doesn't happen in Hungary. Everybody claps their hands, even if they slept through the performance and didn't understand anything or were upset by the whole thing.
Indeed, I don't mind that they finally dared to show emotion. The sad thing is that this is considered sensational in Hungary.
Were you happy with the premiere of the first cast? The singers were criticised but the conductor Ádám Fisher was lauded.
Premieres are never that great, but the production will mature by the third or fourth performance. I am satisfied with the production; I think it is inventive and refined but not especially modern. Ádám Fisher told me after the main rehearsal that this turned out to be a rather traditional performance. Hungarians seem to have an inclination to mix up words like traditional and conventional. This performance would not be traditional if, for example, I had had the singers dressed as UFOs, or perhaps if I had made Leonora move like a fish when she saves her husband, frees the prisoners and exposes the prison commander. These characters touch each other, talk to each other, make gestures and act in a completely traditional way. Convention means something else. If it were in a conventional way, then the caretaker's daughter Marzelline would be ironing and her love Jaquino would be chasing her around the well. Florestan would weigh 120 kilos and wear grey paint on his face and he would be tied up in chains in the depth of the prison. It would also be conventional if a female singer was expecting everyone to believe that because she is wearing a man's coat, nobody realises that she is a woman. It is a logical consequence that if we want to differ from the above, then everything must be different. This is why a male actor plays Leonora when she is wearing a disguise and a female singer is present in another dimension. But they both have traditional human gestures.
I guess this is not the only reason why the performance is played simultaneously on four "storeys".
I really appreciate the music of this opera, but I consider the action and the language rather weak, built on parallel monologues. It is very difficult to create realistic situations from these. So why force it? It is much more interesting if the story can be played out at the various levels and the thoughts of the characters can be shown boldly.
I think what the audience found too much was the Fidelio-Redeemer parallel.
Indeed, this is quite a complicated matter. A detailed analysis can reveal the pathetic naivety of the text and the effort to say big and important things. Beethoven rejected the libretto for Cosí or Don Giovanni, and he wanted to present noble and grand ideas. But we all know that it is impossible to create a dramatic work this way. It is only possible through real human lives. This is why Fidelio's text is flawed, because grand words and statements have a tendency to strike back. The heroine expresses her belief that she had a mission, she sings about the call of humanity, for which she is ready to make a sacrifice. Florestan's sufferings are citations from the Bible.
Is it because of naivety and pathos that you have used the religious kitsch symbols of village fairs? Fidelio for instance appears as Jesus with a lighting heart.
Pathos must not be handled with irony and this is not the case here, either. Let's not forget that those who buy Jesus figures with a glowing heart or a Virgin Mary enshrined in pink fog very deeply believe in them. It was not me who invented these forms of depiction. We can find them in shops selling objects of devotion, as well as in churches. If we call this irony then we must suppose that the church mocks itself.
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But irony is not an alien concept to you. At the press conference of the autumn festival, you asked: when will politicians recognise the importance of contemporary culture?
I am increasingly given to despair because I see that neither of the political sides have a concept for culture. They should know what kind of opera they want because that's the only way that they can relate to it: whether to leave everything as it is or adapt to it. It is not enough to say that it must be good, cheap and free of scandal. I do not even know what the criteria for appointing people are and that also applies to me. The only thing they can say: "because you are so good." Thanks, I really do - don't think that I don't. There are lots of helpful people around the autumn festival, which is wonderful. But there is no cultural concept defining the place of the biggest contemporary cultural festival. Bavaria knows and shows that the Bayreuth festival is very important. I don't know if this is true of the Budapest Autumn Festival.
Was there a risk that the Autumn Festival would be cancelled as a result of delays in subsidies?
Don't get me wrong. Subsidies have not been cancelled. The problem was not about the amount available. Of course, it is a very important matter, too. But what's most important is whether we manage to find out in time - around one year ahead in the case of such a festival - how much we would have access to. The way it happened was that we had to bluff until the very last minutes. This only worked with some performers. It usually doesn't work with internationally successful teams. They need guarantees a year in advance...
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This is why Christoph Marthaler's theatre performance had to be cancelled, despite coordination talks with the Swiss director going back as many as four years. Are you going to try again next year?
I do not dare for some time because I am ashamed. But I don't want to complain. I am happy about PLACCC2008, with performances presented at unique locations, in the street, in a shopping centre in the former party college. It is good that József Nagy is once again in the autumn festival programme. Over the past few years, we were unable to coordinate, or the productions were either too big and did not fit the budget. We try to bring genres to Hungary that are rarely seen here, because audiences do not have a concept either, and very few people travel abroad for culture.
Interviewer: Katalin Szemere / Photo: Máté Nándorfi
