Unlocking the Essence of Opera

"I have nothing to guide me but the music. The music leads you across a no man's land of what can be right or wrong on the stage." That could be any stage director making the usual bow to opera in general and the fraternal order of composers in particular.

But Italy's Giorgio Strehler, who was responsible for the opening productions of both La Scala and the Paris Opera, is no ordinary director. When he says the music comes first, he means it. When he uses the phrase no man's land, he means that too; contrasting cases in point are the failure of his Macbeth and the success of his Figaro.

Strehler's directorial premise is so old-fashioned that it seems new. The most important thing he does for singers is to make sure they are placed where they can sing best. If the dramatic situation demands it, he will not flinch from asking Macbeth to sing lying down or Lady Macbeth to sleepwalk across a ledge. But he is never gratuitous about imposing feats of physical endurance. Says Francesco Sicilian!, La Scala's artistic consultant: "He never betrays his material in order to make an audience burst into applause at his daring." Strehler would go along with that. "I believe in clarity," he says. "Any kind of theater is an encounter between human beings who look each other in the face and communicate--whether they talk or sing."

He is, of course, not talking about bringing back the good old days when a Caruso would stride forward, plant his feet squarely behind the prompter's box and, as it were, deliver his aria in person. When Strehler puts a soprano at her ease, or when he positions a chorus so that it does not have to shuffle around the stage while performing, he does it with logic and a convincing illusion of action. At his best, he preserves and freshens the essence of an older work. Says he: "That point of contact between past and present is fleeting. Often a 150-year-old opera is like a little flask of perfume. When you pull out the stopper, the risk is that the scent will vanish."

Strehler, 55, is one of Europe's best-known stage directors, a co-founder with Paolo Grassi of Milan's prestigious Piccolo Teatro. But, unlike his countrymen Franco Zeffirelli and the late Luchino Visconti, he has not yet worked in movies, and so is almost unknown in the U.S. A native of Trieste, he comes from a musical family; his mother played violin in a professional string quartet. "I grew up reading music," says Strehler. Since then he has hankered to be a conductor. "It's a pity that I'm not qualified to conduct an orchestra, because ideally an opera should be under the control of a single person." -

He began working in the theater while in his early twenties. After World War II he settled in Milan and, at 26, was invited by La Scala to stage La Traviata. Since then he has directed several operas there. Collaborating with Conductor Claudio Abbado has been satisfying, in part because both men thrive on lengthy discussion and painstaking rehearsal. Speaking of their Boccanegra production, Strehler comments: "Directing the opera is like writing an essay on it --an effort to unlock the essence."

Yet most of Strehler's career has been spent in the theater. When he was rehearsing Bertolt Brecht's The Three penny Opera at the Piccolo Teatro in 1955, the playwright showed up, hung around after opening night and finally handed Strehler a message typed on an envelope. It asked Strehler to be the artistic custodian of Brecht's works, not just in Italy but in all of Europe. Brecht died the next year, and Strehler has carried on. His timeless, yet utterly contemporary staging of The Life of Galileo is considered a classic, used as guidance even by the famed Berliner Ensemble.

At work, Strehler is a one-man lesson in the arts of persuasion. Divas and leading ladies alike find him enormously difficult to refuse--on stage and off. Vibrant and eloquent, a handsome bachelor (he was divorced some years ago) who has a crown of wavy silver hair, Strehler is a familiar figure in Italian gossip magazines because of his stormy love affairs. Not that he has all that much time to himself. Last week, while La Scala and the Paris Opera were proudly introducing his work to U.S. audiences, Strehler was in Paris rehearsing Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. He was too busy to come.

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