One Thing and Another

ROSENTHAL: I think we ought to start by knowing what it was that attracted you to the world of opera.

MILLER: I think almost the invitation to do one. I don’t think I ever thought in the first place of opera. I was involved in directing plays and I suppose I began to get an idea that it would be nice simply to extend myself into another area of drama, and when someone invited me to come and do an opera it seemed like a nice idea.

ROSENTHAL: What was the first opera you were asked to do then?

MILLER: Britten’s Noye’s Fludde which I did at the Roundhouse, with an enormous number of children.²⁰⁵ Then I was asked by the New Opera Company to do Sandy Goehr’s Arden Must Die²⁰⁶ and I enjoyed it so much that I felt, wouldn’t it be nice to go on and do some more of it. It was very much the same way in which I drifted into the theatre.

ROSENTHAL: The world of opera and the world of theatre are so different – both artificial in their way, but is not one more artificial than the other?

MILLER: Well, I don’t think so. I think that people overstress the differences between the drama and the opera drama. They are both artificial forms of representation, and of course music is what the opera is about, but they are musical dramas – they are plays which use, and are expressed through, music. And that of course makes very special conditions which you ignore at your peril. But, finally, what you are doing is making human situations through the medium of either speech or song.

ROSENTHAL: Is it not more difficult to realize the situations through a singer who, as well as having to act, must have a second part of himself thinking about the vocal side?

MILLER: I think that in great works of musical theatre, the singing is a spontaneous expression of the drama and it’s almost inseparable. You don’t experience a separate feeling that you have to first of all take care of the singing and then to take care of the acting. The acting and the singing are one and the same thing, and if you pay attention to what is dramatic in the music you will automatically take care of what is musical in the drama.

ROSENTHAL: So you do not subscribe to the rather commonly held idea that singers, on the whole, are rather stupid people who have been blessed with a voice and have been put onto a stage to do things that actors could do rather better.

MILLER: No, I think that singers are actors with a very special talent. I think there are certain institutional conditions of the opera which have, perhaps, stupefied singers; long practice of a particular form of opera may have stupefied their dramatic abilities. But if you have young, talented singers, they are, in fact, singing-actors.

ROSENTHAL: Have you never had a situation where a singer has said ‘Look, you are asking me to do something impossible at this moment, because I can’t breathe or I can’t produce a tone that the score demands’?

MILLER: That has never happened to me. It is physiological common sense really. I mean, one doesn’t hang people upside down to sing things; you don’t tell them to sing while bent double, but, apart from that, common sense dictates what they must be doing. There are very few situations where a good singer can’t sing. He’ll tell you soon enough if he can’t – and it’s a matter for negotiation.

ROSENTHAL: How different is it for you, as a director in the straight theatre, to plan an opera production? Are the mechanics the same if you are doing a play at the Royal Shakespeare or the Aldwych?

MILLER: I think the mechanics of opera production are indistinguishable from the mechanics of a theatrical production. There is no difference at all – absolutely none. There are occasional awkwardnesses, perhaps, arising from the fact that the orchestra pit has got to be lit, and there may be moments in fact when you need a blackout and the leak of light that you get upsets the lighting balance on the stage. I suppose there are occasional awkwardnesses about being able to see the conductor, but I’ve never really found that that has got in the way of the drama.

ROSENTHAL: What about the time element? Is there much difference in the length of time needed to put on a new play or a new opera?

MILLER: I think that the time element is the same in each. The only thing that sometimes makes an opera production perhaps a little more lengthy than a straight theatre production is that you often have large choruses, and the organization and man-management of a large chorus is time-consuming. But otherwise it’s the same, and there is a sense in which there’s a tremendous release as a result of the music, because the music dictates stage directions so often that you might otherwise spend weeks trying to find out for a play. You know how many bars you’ve got to get someone across a stage or out of the room and so forth, and that actually is a tremendous relief.

ROSENTHAL: When you are planning a production of an opera, if there is a recording do you plan it having played the records or listened with the score?

MILLER: Yes, I plan always from records. I have to do that – I don’t read music, and I don’t think I ever will. I can see roughly what’s happening by looking at the score but I certainly can’t read the music, so therefore I’m at a disadvantage when it comes to a new opera which hasn’t been recorded and I have to have it played through and sung at me for a while before I know what’s going on. I think people again vastly overstress the advantages of being able to read music. There are certain drawbacks from time to time when I can’t identify for a singer, when I’m talking to them, where it is that I want them to do something; it means that I haven’t got a notation for referring to that moment in the music, but I can usually sing the bit I’m referring to and show them then. People say if you don’t read music then you’re not understanding the expression. Well, if that was the case then all human expression before writing came in would have been incoherent and this is simply not true. Music is like any human utterance and is designed to be heard, and the very fact that there happens to be a notation on paper is, in a sense, incidental. You learn what the expression or the utterance is by listening to it, and being musical is not really a matter of being familiar with the grammar of tonality or whatever; nor do I think it’s easy to specify what musical sensitivity is – you can’t print out the recipe for it. I think that I’m sensitive to what’s going on in a piece of music; what it expresses is really, again, a matter for negotiation, and since there is a great deal of disagreement about what music expresses amongst those who can read music, I don’t think my claims to say what it expresses are any the less valid than someone who actually reads the notes on the stave.

ROSENTHAL: The arrival in the world of opera of the man of the theatre probably dates from Max Reinhardt’s being invited by Strauss to come and salvage Der Rosenkavalier at Dresden for the premiere; and the idea of a theatre director coming into the opera house began in pre-World-War-One Germany in 1911 or 1912, and then became established in Germany more than in any other country.

MILLER: Yes. Of course, that is not in fact much later than the advent of the director into the theatre. In the 1870s the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen introduced the idea of the director as a controller of the Gesamtkunstwerk; this in fact was an innovation.207 Things were done much more haphazardly by stage managers and the leading actor, who controlled what was going to happen, and I think probably the same thing happened very much in opera. It’s just simply a little bit later in opera. It’s been held up in this country for reasons that are very hard to elucidate.

ROSENTHAL: The first time it really happened consciously in this country was in 1934 at Glyndebourne when Ebert and Busch between them came and established the Gesamtkunstwerk, as far as Mozart was concerned, and this was something entirely new; that, plus the visit of the Dresden State Opera to Covent Garden in 1936, opened everybody’s eyes to the fact that opera was rather more than just a concert in costume.

MILLER: It is Gesamtkunstwerk or it’s nothing; and what one has to do is act as some kind of chairman bringing together all the imaginative currents that make great opera into a dramatic experience, and that means, in fact, very close and subtle and humble cooperation with a composer if he’s alive – and if he is not, with a conductor – and an ability to feed the currents from the visual arts and from other branches of literature as well, until finally, in addition to being music, opera is literature.

ROSENTHAL: The reason why any great work of art survives is because it’s valid at any time for many people. So when you produce an opera, or direct an opera, do you feel that you must look at it from the viewpoint of the 1970s, or do you try to put it in its chronological context?

MILLER: I think one has to do the two things at the same time. All great works of the past which have an afterlife survive through renewal. There’s no such thing as survival in its original form. All performing arts, all works of reproductive art, have to be reproduced anew every time. There is absolutely no way in which you can simply forge the original version; and even when you do try to forge it, you unconsciously introduce ideas and interests of your own time. We see this in the visual arts in the history of forgery; each forgery of a given picture introduces another layer of interpretation, even when someone is trying to reproduce the original work. So therefore what you get in fact is a very subtle and complicated compound of the context in which the work was produced, which you have to honour and investigate, plus the ideas which interest you at this particular moment in that work. It has got to grab the imagination of an audience living today. Now, that does not mean that you have to frogmarch the work out of its context into the twentieth century and make it relevant. ‘Relevance’ is one of the most ghastly words which ever comes up in the arts. All great works are bound to be relevant because they deal with fundamental and inextinguishable human situations which are the same in any period, but nevertheless you have got to refer to and honour the tone of the historical period in which it was created. But at the same time you have to animate the work in such a way that it is accessible and interesting, dramatic and engaging for a modern audience.

ROSENTHAL: Criticism is often levelled at opera directors today that they are apt to ignore the instructions written by the composer or librettist in the score. I myself do not feel very strongly about this. I think it is perfectly valid to ignore certain instructions and to introduce things yourself, if you feel that they are going to work into your concept and are valid for the piece in hand. What is your feeling about that?

MILLER: I think it’s a most complicated problem. Again, there is no rule of thumb that you can apply. I think if you say that you must obey all the instructions, you do that at your peril; to say ignore all the instructions is equally perilous. What I think you have to do is to rely on your own discretion, and tact, and trust that your imagination will be nourished by the interesting things that the composer or librettist has said; one must also be confident in your belief that there may be things that could make the work more interesting now than it might have been if we simply obeyed what was written then. But you cannot write out a formal prescription for what you must do about the instructions written in a libretto. Very often the instructions are not actually written down – very often the instructions are implied in the score. If you listen to what Mozart is actually saying – not in what he (or his librettist) writes in the score as stage directions, but what he actually writes in the notes – you can generally tell when someone must turn, when someone must enter, when someone must embrace. There are phrases which melt, phrases which restrain, phrases which are themselves stage instructions; it may well be that the composer is wiser in his musical instructions than he is in his stage instructions, and who’s to say which, in fact, one is to attend to? I think in the end you simply have to say, ‘I’m going to attend to all the instructions that are written and I will make my choice about which ones are going to be most profitable.’

ROSENTHAL: As someone who says they are not a musician – you say you do not read music – I think that is one of the most musically satisfying answers I’ve heard from an opera producer.

MILLER: Great music is, in some strange and obscure way, expressive. I say obscure because it is very hard to say what it expresses and exactly what it specifies. But it quite clearly does indicate something, and there are moments, in fact, when there is a compulsion in the music and you ignore that, really, at your peril. It isn’t just simply a question of the music going faster or that it’s in a minor key at a certain point. There are moments when cadences resolve in certain ways and they tell you how to resolve a phrase of movement as much as the phrase of sound – and all human movement is phrased as much as music is. I often tell singers this when I’m working with them, and when they sometimes resist what they think of as dance movements, I say, ‘Well, look, regard your body and your vocal cords as part of one muscle: this is the system which you use for expressing yourself.’ If you can sing expressively you’re bound to be able to move expressively, and when you’re moving and not singing, that movement is as much a musical expression as the moment when you’re singing, and it’s a way of extending the musicality, in a sense, rather than restricting it. Everything one does with one’s body is capable of musical expression, and if there’s musical expression eloquently put down in the score, there must be things which the body must do in response to it.

*****

ROSENTHAL: I suppose you’ve been lucky in the half-dozen or so operas that you’ve directed so far, because they span the operatic spectrum from Monteverdi (Orfeo),208 through Mozart (Così fan Tutte)²⁰⁹ via Verdi (Rigoletto)²¹⁰ to the moderns – to Janáček,²¹¹ and to a gifted young contemporary composer in Alexander Goehr²¹²…taking in Sullivan, by the way!

MILLER: I’ve been very fortunate in that way – it was partly by calculation. I do think that there are certain salient great works which it’s worth working on. You feel yourself transfigured by having the privilege of working with such pieces. I don’t know how I’d react to an opera which didn’t produce this sense of transfiguration in me, and so far I have been very fortunate.

ROSENTHAL: In your approaches to all these pieces we have mentioned and to other pieces that you might well do in the future, the literary and artistic background of the period obviously plays a very important part in the way you plan your productions.

MILLER: This, in a sense, is what I feel as a neurologist, if you like. The human brain organizes and integrates the channels of the senses. What comes from the eye and the ear and the understanding are brought together in one common sense, and if you allow one to dominate, you’re lost. What we are as human creatures are organisms that express and receive the world in toto. It’s a seamless whole and I think to emphasize one at the expense of the other is actually almost a blasphemy. I think all works of any size or complexity reproduce the tones, the interest, the preoccupations of a period. Certain emphases are stronger at one time than they are at another, but I think that when the moral teaching becomes explicit then what you have is dull; but there is a sense, of course, in which all great art recommends certain conduct. Orfeo, after all, recommends restraint and submission as opposed to the unleashing of the passions, but it does it in such a subtle and complex way that you can’t say that it is, as it were, a moral rearmament treatise on chastity; and who would wish to say that La Traviata was advice to a girl to behave well? Obviously there are complex recommendations written into the work – one doesn’t come away from it feeling that one has been given a pamphlet in the street.

ROSENTHAL: Do you think that Dumas and Verdi would have produced La Dame aux Camélias and Traviata if the social conditions and conventions of that period hadn’t existed?

MILLER: No, I think that each work tells you what people thought was commendable at any given time and what we think is commendable or despicable, obviously, is different from what they did. Their recommendations may be slightly different to ours, but nevertheless in the great works of art the part played by explicit recommendation is very small and it is subtly incorporated into the expression itself. One doesn’t ever come away from a great work of art thinking that one has been given a series of precepts about how to behave.

ROSENTHAL: Returning for a moment to Traviata – obviously a production of that opera, especially in Victorian England, would have stressed the morality of Germont père’s case, whereas today our sympathies are all for Violetta; and so in producing a piece like Traviata, or other works of that genre, one is obviously conditioned by the morals and climate of ‘today.’

MILLER: Yes, one’s emphasis falls upon the motives of Germont père. One begins to say, ‘Well, what did this man actually want? Does he want what he appears to want? Is it simply a relationship based on wishing that the girl would refrain from pestering his son, or is he, in fact, falling in love with the girl himself?’ It’s just that we have become slightly subtler about our view of human motives. We perhaps take human behaviour slightly less at its face value than they would have done in the nineteenth century, where they had slightly oversimplified and often very sentimental views of human motive. Now, you could well say that by introducing this idea of Germont possibly having designs upon her, or falling in love with her, you would be violating Verdi’s original intention. Well, it might well be that Verdi had got these intentions without explicitly knowing them; and in a great work of art there are dark undertones, there are shadows, there are ambiguities, there are complexities which are perhaps not often on the surface. I use the musical metaphor of overtones, in that in addition to the tonic there are all sorts of other notes being played, and when you produce the work you may in fact – as a conductor does – bring up the instrument which is playing those other harmonics. They have to be there for you to bring them out, but if you impose them from without you do so at your peril. Anyone who is sensitive to the complexities of moral situations invariably finds in a great work of art that there are ambiguities and other things at work over and above what appears on the surface.

ROSENTHAL: I’m longing for your Traviata production, whenever that may be.213 The operas that you’ve so far chosen to produce might almost be described as domestic pieces; but what is your attitude to the larger-than-life operas – the big, so-called ‘grand’ operas: Aida; the historical dramas like Don Carlos; or, on the next scale, Wagner and the Gods?

MILLER: I think that, as in the dramas, operas divide themselves fairly distinctly into two groups. I perhaps wouldn’t use the word ‘domestic’ to describe operas which work on a comparatively small scale; I would say that they are directly and recognisably moral and that they deal with recognizable and realistic individuals and, although they are sometimes painted on a large historical canvas as in Don Carlos, nevertheless – as in Shakespare – you can recognize definite man-sized individuals who are in conflict with one another. For example, in King Lear the thing is apparently painted on an enormous scale, but really what impresses you is – to use your own word – the domesticity of the relationship. These are about fathers and daughters, and husbands and wives, and lovers, and that is the human scale. Then there are the works which produce mythical stereotypes, where the people on the stage are not necessarily to be seen as individuals but represent forces, parts of people; they represent certain aspects of a personality rather than a personality. When you are dealing with that, a different idiom of production and direction has to take over. The Magic Flute, for example, is not like The Marriage of Figaro. The Magic Flute has a series of extremely elaborate symbolic relationships about parts of the human personality in relationship to a tradition drawn from alchemy, and from the Hermetic mysteries, and from the Rosicrucian movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. You cannot hope to present The Magic Flute as a story of real people, whereas that is the only way in which one can represent the story of The Marriage of Figaro. The Marriage of Figaro is domestic in the true sense – not in the sense that it is ‘kitchen sink,’ but it takes place in a household and is the conflict of people who are the same size as all of us. Mozart makes them larger than us because he magnifies them through his art, but nevertheless they are still on the human scale. The figures that take part in The Magic Flute and, of course, in Wagner, are in fact mythical stereotypes. They represent either gigantic forces in nature or the personification of aspects of human behaviour – lust, power, avarice, self-sacrifice and so forth.

ROSENTHAL: From what we have talked about, it would seem that opera – because of its very complexity, embracing as it does theatre, music, the visual arts – is, in its way, more demanding on an audience than the straight theatre. I often feel that and I wonder whether opera audiences are more reactionary, if you know what I mean, because very often they are so unsophisticated.

MILLER: I think they are no less sophisticated than the average visitor to the National Gallery or the Louvre. If you stand in the National Gallery of an afternoon and watch the tourists hastening past the great works, they are looking at them often for illustration, pretty colours, or familiar images. They go to see the famous painting, or they go to see nice colours, or a pretty scene; and this, in a sense, is to diminish what the work is. So I don’t think that opera, in particular, is abused in this way. The arts in general are very often abused in that people think that they are things that can be casually visited. I think that one can no more casually visit a great work of art than one can drop in on the communion service. You actually have to take the blood and body of the artist and experience, if you like, the transubstantiation that takes place in great art. It is an act of the Eucharist, really.

ROSENTHAL: In that case, do you not feel that the most important function a critic can perform is to help educate the public (i.e. the audience) to know what a work of art is about, rather than criticize minutely what a performer is doing on stage?

MILLER: Absolutely. I think that the critic stands in relationship to the work in almost the same way that the director does. The director’s work is an act of creative criticism – it’s an act of interpretation. The critic by presenting his piece is really doing a production without a performance – or he should be; and therefore he should bring as much imagination from as many sources to bear on his act of criticism as the director brings to bear on the actual production. The act of criticism is as much a Gesamtkunstwerk as the act of production, and therefore it is his job to interpret, demonstrate the sources – show, in fact, what is at work in what he has seen and heard.

ROSENTHAL: In other words, the opera critic ought to be something much more than just a music critic; a music critic doesn’t always make a good opera critic. An opera critic ought to be informed about and keep pace with the developments in the theatre; know something about the visual arts.

MILLER: It isn’t simply knowing about it. He has also to be as responsive and conscious of what a picture means, so that he can respond to what he sees on a stage as much as to what a piece of music means. It’s no good just simply saying, ‘Oh, I recognized a picture by Fragonard.’ You have to say why the picture by Fragonard is actually relevant in this particular case – and why Fragonard rather than Boucher, for example, and whether or not it might have been better to have used Claude rather than Poussin. I don’t think critics bring as much subtlety and discrimination to their visual statements as they do to their musical statements.

ROSENTHAL: Do you think it might be a good idea for a drama critic, who at least is not tone deaf and enjoys music, as well as a music critic to be invited to review an opera?

MILLER: In fact, I find on the few occasions when musically sensitive drama critics have talked about productions of mine, that I’ve got much more value from what they’ve said – even when they have disagreed. For example I had a piece written by John Morgan in the New Statesman on the Così fan Tutte that I did. He expressed certain disagreements, but they were interesting and informed and rather muscular disagreements based on his response to the literature of Così fan Tutte, the music of Così fan Tutte, and also the appearance of the production. I think there is a sort of stunning parochiality about musical criticism and opera criticism; some critics still write about opera performances as if the singers on stage were accidentally dressed up in costumes, and they were really listening to a lot of canaries.

ROSENTHAL: And not only critics, but lots of the audience! I think there are two kinds of opera audiences: the audience that goes to Covent Garden on smart nights, dressed up to the nines, and wants to hear A, B and C sing their top notes; the other audience, that will go to Covent Garden for Jenůfa, or The Ice Break, or to the English National Opera on most nights – they go to see a work, not just to hear A, B or C sing.

MILLER: This is exactly the same as you get in the great cathedrals; there are the dutiful gentry who appear in the great boxes at the front in order to be seen at an act of prayer, and there are the genuinely and enthusiastically pious who in fact recognize the Eucharist for what it is. Now it may be very pompous to say that art, and the participation in art, is in the nature of a sacrament, but I feel that in the end one has either to acknowledge that it is a sacrament or it’s simply Olympic Games.

ROSENTHAL: Despite all these questioning statements and your feelings, you’ll still go on, working if you can, in this amazing world of opera?

MILLER: Oh yes, I would like to go on as long as I’ve got breath in my body. It’s a totally fulfilling occupation and, of course, finally, a thing which I don’t think people understand enough. It’s in a way a very trivial thing, and being allowed to produce an opera is really like being licensed to go on playing with one’s toys until one’s an old man.