RENAISSANCE INSTITUTE: TUESDAYS, SEPTEMBER 15 TO DECEMBER 8, 2026

VIDEO PREVIEW      ARTIST BIOS      SYLLABUS      CLASSES:  [1]  [2]  [3]  [4]  [5]  [6]  [7]  [8]  [9]  [10]  [11]  [12]

THE COURSE IN GENERAL

The image above shows different approaches to Puccini's La Bohème: the traditional Metropolitan Opera production by Franco Zeffirelli at the top, contrasted with three more radical European productions below: one stripped down to almost nothing, one set in outer space, and the third in a cancer ward. All of which probably raise a question something like this: "Why can't operas still be staged the way they are meant to be done?"

The immediate retort is surely "How do we know how they are meant to be done?" Puccini was more detailed in his stage directions than most earlier composers, but he still doesn't tell us everything. Someone must still decide how and when Mimì and Rodolfo first touch each other, how he hides her key, how she blows out the candle, and that person is the Stage Director, my own former profession. But how does he or she know? Firstly by what fits the music in a natural way; more importantly by what emerges from the personality of the two characters as embodied by their performers. In an opera as well-known as La Bohème, traditions arise about how such things are done—but a production that follows tradition without being propelled by the inner psychology of the characters will seem dead, as unfortunately a lot of routine Bohèmes often do.

Much of the course will remain on this level, which is where Stage Directors mainly work. But I must also acknowledge the multitude of radical approaches out there. Personally, I most like the stripped-down one by Barrie Kosky in Berlin at bottom left; it is all too easy to get trapped in the realistic trappings of a traditional production, so an approach that relies exclusively on the human story has a lot to be said for it. Neither the outer-space production (by Claus Guth in Paris) nor the cancer-ward one (by Stefan Herheim in Oslo) are approaches I would take myself, but both are by directors I greatly respect, and both lead to striking new insights. For audiences can fall into routine also; a fresh approach can shock them into a deeper understanding.

Also, today's concerns are very different from those of our ancestors. Opera, which should always be fresh, can seem stale or irrelevant. It is the Stage Director's job either to woo the audience back into the mindset of the period, or to emphasize aspects of the work that resonate with audiences today. He or she has many tools to work with: close collaboration with the singers, devising a staging that tells a story in a logical way, choice of decor, and—where appropriate—imagining a shift in period or setting that will open an old piece up and make it fresh, true, and relevant. We shall look at all of them.

The video preview above ends rather abruptly because it was originally made for an earlier course, but its examples will come up somewhere in this one. Scroll down for a more detailed syllabus of the present course.

LIST OF CLASSES

After an INTRODUCTION intended to spark discussion of the various tools at the Opera Director's disposal, the course will be divided into three major sections. First, we look at the Director's two principal functions: making the UNFAMILIAR familiar and keeping the FAMILIAR fresh. The last four classes examine some SPECIAL CASES that offer spectacular solutions to complex problems. Although the course is organized according to the Director's tools and technique, each class will contain at least half an hour of opera on video worth watching for its own sake.

The descriptions below give a general idea of each class, but I am keeping my options open while I prepare the course; the images may not match the productions I finally show in class, and I sometimes mention more operas than I can probably address in detail. Once each class is ready, the RESOURCES tab under its image will turn BLUE, directing you to a specific page for that class, with a printable handout and often other information as well. rb.

INTRODUCTION	September 15
The Magic Flute at the Met (below) and in the Kenneth Branagh film (above)	RESOURCES

1. Five Flutes

What does an opera stage director actually do? We look at five different productions of The Magic Flute,—in settings including a theater of Mozart's time, Japanese kabuki, and a WW1 battlefield—to discuss one of the director's primary functions: to devise a visual and period context within which the opera will make coherent sense to a modern audience. This is especially needed for operas of the 18th century and earlier, which rely on formal and literary assumptions that are now mostly forgotten; the first five classes all address works of this period. But The Magic Flute is also a fantasy, giving even greater scope for directorial information; we shall return to the handling of fantasy in the final class of the course.

UNFAMILIAR 1	September 22
Two baroque stagings: Lully's Atys and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice	RESOURCES

2. Baroque Stagecraft

Baroque opera: spectacular stage machinery, elaborate costumes, gods flying in from the heavens, a precise language of movement and gesture, and music that follows unfamiliar rules… these are all things that can make works of the period difficult for us today. But also fascinating. This class will consider one or more productions that, rather than update the staging to a more modern period, take a witty delight in the baroque artifice of the original—presenting it in quotes, so to speak, but always under the assumption that strangeness of style need never get in the way of emotional substance.

UNFAMILIAR 2	September 29
Believe it or not, the same scene in two French productions of Les Indes galantes	RESOURCES

3. Realizing Rameau

The operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) are not much heard outside France, but they have enjoyed something of a revival there. I have no less than five versions of Les Indes galantes (1735), his colonial fantasy about French dominions in other continents, and they are as different as could be imagined. I will probably focus on just one of them, by director-choreographer Laura Scozzi in Bordeaux (top right), who turns it into a series of very funny eco-parables, but Rameau's catchy music can support many other approaches—just so long as you stop thinking of the piece as too old to be interesting.

UNFAMILIAR 3	October 6
Two Handel couples: the lovers in Giulio Cesare (top) and Alcina (below)	RESOURCES

4. Handling Handel

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) was the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the London stage in the earlier 18th century, with over 40 operas to his credit, causing battles between competing stars and their respective coteries of fans. But he has much militating against modern revivals: obscure classical plots, a texture consisting almost entirely of solo arias, the convention that the music for those arias should be repeated almost exactly after a brief bridge passage—and, oh yes, casts dominated by the star singers of the day, the castrati, or men surgically altered before puberty, which is a practice we no longer perform. Nevertheless, Handel is hailed as one of the greatest musical dramatists of all time, and production after production in the last half-century has shown just why.

FAMILIAR 1	October 13
The two main couples in Sir David McVicar's London production of Le nozze di Figaro	RESOURCES

5. Bringing Mozart's Lovers to Life

Once again: what does an opera stage director actually do? Much less spectacular than the conceptual legerdemain we have been considering above (and in most of the remaining classes), is the director's function in helping the singers identify with the characters in terms of their own humanity. The Marriage of Figaro is the most straightforward of the operas written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) at his peak. It requires no spectacular updating, merely total honesty in the performers' portrayal of its two central couples: Figaro and Susanna on the brink of marriage, and the Count and Countess Almaviva going through a rocky patch in theirs. It is a deceptively difficult challenge, but Sir David McVicar rises to the task magnificently in his 2006 production at the Royal Opera House, London.

FAMILIAR 2	October 20
Productions of Lucia di Lammermoor by Mary Zimmerman (Met, top) and Katie Mitchell (London, below)	RESOURCES

6. A Private Lucia

The title role of Lucia di Lammermoor, the 1835 masterpiece of Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) after the novel by Walter Scott, is one of the defining roles for a dramatic coloratura soprano, not least for its 18-minute mad scene in which she returns to her wedding banquet covered in her new husband's blood. A great Lucia dominates every scene where she is onstage. But British director Katie Mitchell whose 2016 production in London we are going to sample, breaks new ground by imagining also what happens when she is offstage, adding a feminist take to one of the most original productions of a standard work that I have ever seen.

FAMILIAR 3	October 27
The glitzy 2018 Traviata by Michael Mayer at the Met, which replaced the austere 2010 one by Willy Decker	RESOURCES

7. Traviata Transformed

La traviata ("The Fallen Woman," although nobody ever translates it), the 1853 opera by Giuseppe Verdi (1913–1901), is the most often performed opera in the world today, and thus fatally prone to descending into cliché. Until recently, the Metropolitan Opera hosted one of the great opera productions in the world, a stunning reimagination by director Willy Decker, originally conceived for Salzburg in 2005. But apparently its austere style and strict black-white-and-scarlet color scheme were too much for Met patrons, so in 2018 they scrapped it for the current production by Michael Mayer, whose glitzy Kitsch is barely redeemed by the continued presence of major stars. But will will go back to Decker's original.

FAMILIAR 4	November 3
The classic Zeffirelli production of La bohème at the Met, and a stripped-down one by Barrie Kosky in Berlin	RESOURCES

8. The Heartbeat of Bohème

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was a master of realism (verismo in Italian), and for many people his La bohème (1894) is defined by the iconic production at the Met by Franco Zeffirelli, whose Act I garret is perched atop an entire Paris roofline, and whose spectacular Act II involves a two-tier set teeming with extras and a marching band to round it off. But the beating heart of the opera is not its spectacle but the tenderly-unfolding romance between its two young lovers. By opening his 2019 Berlin production on a set consisting only of an old stove and a wooden chair, Australian director Barrie Kosky puts the emphasis where it belongs, on the chemistry between the leading singers.

SPECIAL CASE 1	November 10
Laurent Pelly's production of Myerbeer's Robert le Diable in London	RESOURCES

9. Medieval Mayhem: Robert le Diable

German-born and Italian-trained Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) moved to Paris in 1826, and reigned from then on as the undisputed King of French Opera. He virtually invented the genre of grand opéra, and composers as different as Wagner and Verdi came to worship at his shrine. But even in France, tastes changed abruptly around 1900, so Myerbeer's masterpiece Robert le diable (1831) became little more than an amusing footnote for such things as its ballet of dead nuns who have forsaken their vows. How could composer of such historical importance yet so much at odds with present-day taste possibly be revived? This colorful London production of Robert by director Laurent Pelly suggests one possible approach, backed as it is by superb musical values.

SPECIAL CASE 2	November 17
Das Rheingold in Bayreuth: Wagner's 1876 original and Frank Castorf's 2013 version	RESOURCES

10. Embracing the Epic: Wagner's Ring

Der Ring des Nibelungen, the magnum opus of Richard Wagner (1813–83), premiered in 1876, but he began work on it in 1848. Beginning in the depths of the Rhine and ending with the flames consuming Valhalla, it required then-unknown feats of stage technology, a huge orchestra, singers of unusual power and stamina, and audiences prepared to sit through 18 hours of music split over four nights. All these problems were met and solved by Wagner himself in his custom-built theater at Bayreuth, and for most of a century productions the world over have followed a modified version of his prescriptions. But the past 50 years have seen a vast range of alternative approaches, to the extent that "What will he do with the Ring?" has become a defining question for international stage directors.

SPECIAL CASE 3	December 1
Willy Decker's 2009 production of Moses und Aron in the Ruhr	RESOURCES

11. Moses und Aron: the Voice of God

The inventor of Serialism, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), has a reputation as one of the most difficult composers for ordinary listeners to enjoy, and his one full-length (yet unfinished) opera, Moses und Aron, does not make it any easier by telling the story of the Exodus in often-abstruse theological language. Shortly after staging his Traviata, director Willy Decker mounted a production in an adapted industrial space in Bochum, Germany, that makes no attempt to update, simplify, or decorate the action, but that nonetheless involves the audience in an immersive experience where even the architecture of the space changes around them. I regard it as one of the great productions of all time.

SPECIAL CASE 4	December 8
Mary Zimmerman's 2017 production of Rusalka at the Met (above) and Robert Carsen's 2002 staging in Paris	RESOURCES

12. Reframing the Fairytale: Rusalka

I own seven complete videos of Rusalka, (1900), a Czech version of the Little Mermaid story by Antonin Dvorak (1841–1904). Why so many? Because a fairy tale defies literal interpretation, and offers almost unlimited opportunities for a Director to find new ways to tell it. In the course on Opera and Real Life that I am preparing at the same time, I will choose one of two productions that manage to tie it to contemporary headlines, but this course on production technique deserves the astounding juggling act with mirrors and broken symmetry created by Canadian director Robert Carsen for Paris in 2002.

 
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