Latest news with #Bieito
The Independent
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Calixto Bieito takes on Wagner's Ring Cycle, a quarter century after first shocking audiences
Calixto Bieito turned introspective as he sat in a cafe across from the Opéra Bastille, where his production of the first night Wagner's Ring Cycle was to premiere the following day. 'I am full of doubts, but I am convinced,' he said, equally brash, humble and apprehensive. Provoking boos 25 years ago for radical stagings saturated with sex and violence, Bieito has transformed at age 61 from European regietheater enfant terrible to prestigious patriarch. His production of 'Das Rheingold' that runs through Feb. 19 includes gold represented by cryptocurrency, a thicket of tangled cables and a zombie-like humanoid named Gisela created by Artificial Intelligence. Donner, the god of thunder, wore a Los Angeles Dodgers cap. Rhinemaidens were attired in blue-and-yellow scuba gear with oxygen tanks. The giant Fafner wore cowboy duds, and Freia, the goddess of love and beauty, smeared herself with oil hoping to be incinerated by Loge, the god of fire. Five television monitors were arranged in the shape of a crucifix in Nibelheim's subterranean chasm; the magic helmet Tarnhelm looked like a Basquiat image, and the ring large enough to fit around the neck like a noose. After Wotan entered Valhalla as smoke filled the auditorium at the Jan. 29 premiere, the cast and conductor Pablo Heras-Casado were met with applause but the director and his production team skipped the curtain call, leaving the audience response to him unanswered. Bieito won't take a bow until the full Ring is presented twice in November 2026, knowing he will make changes. A video recording won't take place until then. 'I start very human, not with myths,' Bieito said. 'I really believe we are living in a moment like when Caligula was saying, `I'm God.′ And then I'm going to build a new mythology.' Rise to fame — or infamy Bieito's 1999 staging of Bizet's 'Carmen' in Perelada, Spain, gained attention for an acgtor strung up a flagpole. His 2000 production of Verdi's 'Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball)' at Barcelona's Liceu opened with about a dozen men on toilets reading newspapers; a 2001 version of Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' featuring a coke-snorting Don Juan and was booed at the English National Opera on opening night. A 2004 staging of Mozart's 'Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio)' at Berlin's Komische Oper included Osmin, the pasha's overseer, seeming to slice off a woman's nipple and a prostitute drinking urine. 'When I did ` Carmen,′ people were hating me,' Bieito said. 'I had to leave some restaurants because people were shouting.' His works have since appeared in most major European houses. 'He comes in with a less-established concept and really develops much more in the room,' Paris Opéra general director Alexander Neef said. 'What he was initially planning on doing can change quite significantly.' A project that began a decade ago Bieito had gotten struck in Paris traffic, taking a car across town rather than the Métro because he is claustrophobic. In his usual black shirt, head shaven, shoulders slightly hunched, he explained the production's gestation. He was commissioned for Wagner's four-opera 'Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)' in 2015 and was in rehearsals for an April 2020 opening when the the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the house. Bieito changed many of his ideas by the time a new cast gathered last December, influenced by James Bridle's book 'New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.' The AI machines developed in 'Rheingold' will cause war in "Die Walküre," nature will rebel in 'Siegfried' and characters will gather in a Wagneria n-period living room as consciousness disappears into a black hole in 'Götterdämmerung.' He visited moors near Haworth in Britain, home of the Brontë family, to find his mood for the Ring. 'We are living in a moment where the gods, they don't exist anymore — I'm talking about Western society. The human beings, they believe they are gods,' he said. 'We are creating a machine ourselves. We are creating god.' Bieito, who was born in Miranda de Ebro, near Spain's Basque region, was influenced by a Jesuit education and lives in Basel, Switzerland, where he was artist in residence at Theater Basel from 2013-15. Stéphane Lissner, Neef's predecessor, hired Bieito for the Ring after seeing him direct Shakespeare's 'King Lear.' 'If I had to describe his work during rehearsals, the three words, they would be freedom, intensity and artistic personal responsibility,' said Bettina Auer, a dramaturg who has worked with Bieito since 2009. An influential mentor Lydia Steier, a American director who moved to Germany in 2002 as a Fulbright Scholar, first met Bieito when she was an assistant stage manager in Berlin during the infamous 'Abduction' production. She spoke decent Spanish, they bonded in part of what she termed his 'sort of potty humor' and Steier remained as an assistant when Bieito returned to Berlin for Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly' in 2005. She was promoted to his choreographer for Wagner's 'Die Fliegende Holländer' and Rameau's 'Platée' in Stuttgart. 'The reason that I decided to become a director and stay in Europe in general was `The Abduction from the Seraglio,'' Steier said. 'Without bending or breaking the music, he made it mean something completely different and incandescent and modern and necessary.' Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo said working with Bieito last winter in Thomas Ades' 'The Exterminating Angel' caused an epiphany 'He never comes in with a preordained plan, which I think is is part of his genius,' Costanzo said. 'He can see what works and see what doesn't work very well and he nudges you in one direction or the other.' Interpretations left open — even for the cast Even singers are left to ponder meanings. An image of a baby at the final notes could be Siegmund, Siegfried or Hagen. Brian Mulligan, the bass-baritone who portrays Alberich, asked Bieito whether the feet shown in the opening projection belong to his character. 'He laughed," Mulligan related, his voice rising in a sing-song, "and said, `Maybe they are.''
Associated Press
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Calixto Bieito takes on Wagner's Ring Cycle, a quarter century after first shocking audiences
PARIS (AP) — Calixto Bieito turned introspective as he sat in a cafe across from the Opéra Bastille, where his production of the first night Wagner's Ring Cycle was to premiere the following day. 'I am full of doubts, but I am convinced,' he said, equally brash, humble and apprehensive. Provoking boos 25 years ago for radical stagings saturated with sex and violence, Bieito has transformed at age 61 from European regietheater enfant terrible to prestigious patriarch. His production of 'Das Rheingold' that runs through Feb. 19 includes gold represented by cryptocurrency, a thicket of tangled cables and a zombie-like humanoid named Gisela created by Artificial Intelligence. Donner, the god of thunder, wore a Los Angeles Dodgers cap. Rhinemaidens were attired in blue-and-yellow scuba gear with oxygen tanks. The giant Fafner wore cowboy duds, and Freia, the goddess of love and beauty, smeared herself with oil hoping to be incinerated by Loge, the god of fire. Five television monitors were arranged in the shape of a crucifix in Nibelheim's subterranean chasm; the magic helmet Tarnhelm looked like a Basquiat image, and the ring large enough to fit around the neck like a noose. After Wotan entered Valhalla as smoke filled the auditorium at the Jan. 29 premiere, the cast and conductor Pablo Heras-Casado were met with applause but the director and his production team skipped the curtain call, leaving the audience response to him unanswered. Bieito won't take a bow until the full Ring is presented twice in November 2026, knowing he will make changes. A video recording won't take place until then. 'I start very human, not with myths,' Bieito said. 'I really believe we are living in a moment like when Caligula was saying, `I'm God.′ And then I'm going to build a new mythology.' Rise to fame — or infamy Bieito's 1999 staging of Bizet's 'Carmen' in Perelada, Spain, gained attention for an acgtor strung up a flagpole. His 2000 production of Verdi's 'Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball)' at Barcelona's Liceu opened with about a dozen men on toilets reading newspapers; a 2001 version of Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' featuring a coke-snorting Don Juan and was booed at the English National Opera on opening night. A 2004 staging of Mozart's 'Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio)' at Berlin's Komische Oper included Osmin, the pasha's overseer, seeming to slice off a woman's nipple and a prostitute drinking urine. 'When I did `Carmen,′ people were hating me,' Bieito said. 'I had to leave some restaurants because people were shouting.' His works have since appeared in most major European houses. 'He comes in with a less-established concept and really develops much more in the room,' Paris Opéra general director Alexander Neef said. 'What he was initially planning on doing can change quite significantly.' A project that began a decade ago Bieito had gotten struck in Paris traffic, taking a car across town rather than the Métro because he is claustrophobic. In his usual black shirt, head shaven, shoulders slightly hunched, he explained the production's gestation. He was commissioned for Wagner's four-opera 'Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)' in 2015 and was in rehearsals for an April 2020 opening when the the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the house. Bieito changed many of his ideas by the time a new cast gathered last December, influenced by James Bridle's book 'New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.' The AI machines developed in 'Rheingold' will cause war in 'Die Walküre,' nature will rebel in 'Siegfried' and characters will gather in a Wagnerian-period living room as consciousness disappears into a black hole in 'Götterdämmerung.' He visited moors near Haworth in Britain, home of the Brontë family, to find his mood for the Ring. 'We are living in a moment where the gods, they don't exist anymore — I'm talking about Western society. The human beings, they believe they are gods,' he said. 'We are creating a machine ourselves. We are creating god.' Bieito, who was born in Miranda de Ebro, near Spain's Basque region, was influenced by a Jesuit education and lives in Basel, Switzerland, where he was artist in residence at Theater Basel from 2013-15. Stéphane Lissner, Neef's predecessor, hired Bieito for the Ring after seeing him direct Shakespeare's 'King Lear.' 'If I had to describe his work during rehearsals, the three words, they would be freedom, intensity and artistic personal responsibility,' said Bettina Auer, a dramaturg who has worked with Bieito since 2009. An influential mentor Lydia Steier, a American director who moved to Germany in 2002 as a Fulbright Scholar, first met Bieito when she was an assistant stage manager in Berlin during the infamous 'Abduction' production. She spoke decent Spanish, they bonded in part of what she termed his 'sort of potty humor' and Steier remained as an assistant when Bieito returned to Berlin for Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly' in 2005. She was promoted to his choreographer for Wagner's 'Die Fliegende Holländer' and Rameau's 'Platée' in Stuttgart. 'The reason that I decided to become a director and stay in Europe in general was `The Abduction from the Seraglio,'' Steier said. 'Without bending or breaking the music, he made it mean something completely different and incandescent and modern and necessary.' Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo said working with Bieito last winter in Thomas Ades' 'The Exterminating Angel' caused an epiphany 'He never comes in with a preordained plan, which I think is is part of his genius,' Costanzo said. 'He can see what works and see what doesn't work very well and he nudges you in one direction or the other.' Interpretations left open — even for the cast Even singers are left to ponder meanings. An image of a baby at the final notes could be Siegmund, Siegfried or Hagen. Brian Mulligan, the bass-baritone who portrays Alberich, asked Bieito whether the feet shown in the opening projection belong to his character. 'He laughed,' Mulligan related, his voice rising in a sing-song, 'and said, `Maybe they are.''
New York Times
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Directors Mine the Gold at the Heart of Wagner's ‘Ring'
Is it oil? Is it youth? Is it tactile? Invisible? For Wagner, the magic gold that is stolen from the bottom of the Rhine at the start of his four-opera 'Ring' cycle, setting the plot in motion, was a tangible, shiny nugget. It is embedded in the riverbed, his libretto says, and its gleam fills the water until the dwarf Alberich, mesmerized by the powers it can unleash, rips it from the rock, to the despair of its guardians, the three Rhine Daughters. Shaped into a ring that circulates among different characters over the rest of the 15-hour cycle, the gold confers authority but also wreaks havoc, inspiring envy, betrayal and death. Over the past 50 years, directors — including Calixto Bieito, whose staging of 'Das Rheingold,' the first 'Ring' installment, opens at the Paris Opera today — have interpreted the gold not as an actual piece of metal, but as an embodiment of whatever is the most precious (and corrosive) resource in the world of a given production. In a free-associative 2013 staging at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, where Wagner first presented the 'Ring' in 1876, Frank Castorf suggested that the gold was the fossil fuels that flow through and degrade virtually every aspect of contemporary society. This is part of a decades-old trend toward treating Wagner with audacious freedom — viewing his librettos as allegorical starting points, and updating and transmuting his plots and props to highlight certain themes and steer well clear of the old horned-helmet-and-breastplate clichés. 'Lohengrin' might take place in a laboratory rather than medieval Antwerp; the title character of 'Parsifal' might be dressed like a Latter-day Saints missionary. Bieito said in an email that in his production, the gold is depicted, in part, as cryptocurrency, a component of his staging's allegory of the ever-continuing rise of Big Tech. Bieito's Paris 'Ring' takes its place among a burst of major productions of the cycle around Europe, some still unfolding. I spoke to the directors of cycles in London, Munich, Brussels and Bayreuth about their approaches to the almighty gold, illuminating some of the vast range of possibilities when it comes to staging the most influential epic in opera history. These are edited excerpts from the conversations. Barrie Kosky The gold comes from the earth, and it's a part of nature. But Wagner also makes it a bit outside nature: It's glistening in the water, it's not of the water. We chose to present it in the beginning as a kind of fluid that comes out of an old, burned-out tree. I wanted to give this sense that the gold is like fat from the tree, like the blood from the veins of the earth. I wanted it to have a very organic feel, a sort of gold goo, like gold blood. And we make very clear that this tree also reflects part of the body of Erda — Mother Earth — who guides us through our 'Ring.' In our production, Mother Earth is dreaming her dream, which is also our dream, so the gold comes from her body and flows out of her body and is stolen from her body. It's a metaphor of what we've done with precious metals for thousands of years. To extract metals from stones, pan gold from water, find diamonds, we've literally ripped these elements out of the earth's body. And of course they're beautiful, but they've also been instruments of greed and evil. Whether that evil is the gold mines or diamond mines in Africa, or whether it's what people have done for gold, what has happened to them — that's the brilliance of Wagner's metaphor, it's timeless. Especially with the 'Ring,' you have to find something that is both archaic and contemporary. That is the challenge of Wagner. Romeo Castellucci As a symbol, the gold means many, many things. But in my opinion, the main meaning is about desire. The gold, at least at the beginning of the 'Ring,' takes the place of sexual energy, sexual attraction, the sex drive. The first image in our production is the female body covered in gold: the Rhine Daughters, who are naked and painted in gold. There is a lot of water falling from the ceiling, and the water washes away the gold, which melts off the bodies and goes all over the floor. Alberich tries to hug the body of one of the women; he tries to embrace them, and makes himself dirty with the gold but can't really embrace it. You cannot touch this gold. It's everywhere, in a way — like desire. It's an idea, it's not an object. It drives you in a direction, but it's not an object. It comes from the water and it's still a kind of water, completely liquid. It changes shape; it's constantly in transition. The shape of the gold is the shape of yourself. It's kind of an energy — a dangerous one, because everyone who touches the gold dies, in a way; you cannot truly realize desire. I don't think it has anything to do with capitalism. It's much more profound, more symbolic. It's not so simple, in my opinion. Tobias Kratzer For me, the gold is not just a symbol for money, which is probably the most likely interpretation. I wanted to give it a more magical touch. For me, it's almost a source of magic that can't be controlled, not by the gods or the mortals. And everyone has to deal with it somehow. In the first scene of my 'Rheingold' — it's all set in an old church that's being renovated — the Rhine Daughters are teenagers, dressed kind of like in the Netflix series 'Stranger Things,' who have found something underneath the floor. A universal power, one might say. It gives them magic abilities; they can change into different shapes. One turns into an old woman, one turns into a goat, one turns into a young girl. I never show it as gold. It's more of a golden fog, but it can materialize as gold water, or an object. But it's more of an element — not the element of gold, exactly, but something that can be used. And it's a little tongue-in-cheek, how Alberich is catching this fog in kind of a plastic bag. It is then in a glass tube in the second scene, acting like something of a secret power. It's more of an ingredient: If you bring it into contact with other objects, it transforms them or gives them other qualities. But by the end, it can also be used to do the only thing that neither gods nor men can do: to change time, to reverse time, to fast-forward time. Valentin Schwarz The 'Ring' is not so much about a given prop, an object, but about the carrying of the thoughts and emotions of the characters who own these objects and who put their wishful projections onto them. The 'Ring' is about generational conflict, about putting trauma onto the next generation, and unresolved conflicts and questions. And it's about dominance and power and influence. So it was a kind of epiphany: We thought of the innocence of a child. After all, the ring itself is quite useless in 'Rheingold,' like a child. So we came up with this idea of the gold being a child, who is stolen in 'Das Rheingold' and over the course of the cycle gradually ages into the character of Hagen, who enters the plot in 'Götterdämmerung.' And at the end of that opera, our Hagen realizes that the child of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, who is not in Wagner's libretto but who we invented, is threatened with the same fate, the same abuse, that he experienced. A child can't speak at first, but develops feelings and grows. At a certain point, it was important that this child becomes a part of the cycle, develops consciousness, and becomes a character in his own right. But Hagen is not the end. With the child of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, these ideas and traumas perpetuate; they go on and on. There is no end to a 'Ring.'
