In a full University Theatre on Tuesday 6 October, Pierre Audi gave a master class for young singers, dramaturgs and directors. Three scenes had been prepared by the students and were then expertly filleted by Audi.
"Sorella, que dici?.... Prenderò quel brunettino", from Mozart's Così fan tutte began as a scene of two punk girls gripped by consumerism. The director and trainee dramatists explained that their idea was to translate desire into lust for buying, which corrupted the young girls. Opera as a critique of capitalism. It sounds very logical, now that everyone is mouthing off about the bad smell of neoliberalism. But Audi left no stone unturned. He asked about motives, psychology, action. All things he did not see reflected in the short staging. Because that was his first lesson:
Lesson 1: complexity matters.
Flat characters bore after just one minute. Social criticism without internalisation is nothing. Even in a short scene, you need six to seven colours in the psychological palette of the singers. You need to turn them into believable, real people.
Lesson 2: No one is interested in an idea. People are interested in people.
Think of the audience as a room full of directors; they connect all the parts. Make sure all the characters' actions are motivated. Assume the composer knows what he is doing and that all the parts are needed. But think about it yourself.
Lesson 3: have the courage to bend the opera to your will.
What is logical is not necessarily also what is necessary. If you start using automatisms, you are lost. Everything, everything, everything has to have a meaning. Break up your material into all the little pieces so that the structure becomes clearer.
The end of the first act of Wagner's Die Walküre was the final scene in the master class. Sieglinde falls in love with the stranger in her house, who turns out to be her long-lost twin brother. The singers sit at a table, singing beautifully but obediently to each other. The idea that Sieglinde dominates Siegmund does not come across. Audi moves the table and makes Siegliende sit on top of it. That's domination! Siegfried has to be on his stomach on the floor. A minor intervention, which immediately raises the tension between the two singers. And that is immediately the maestro's most important lesson:
Lesson 4: It's all about the singers.
You can have set, music and the spectacle for each other, but in the end it's all about what happens in and with the singers. Make sure the singers don't mirror each other. That's not interesting, that doesn't create dramatic tension. Know where they are coming from, analyse your scenes. Thus spoke the maestro.
It seems so simple and logical, the way he brings scenes to life with a table, two chairs and a few pieces of cloth. But where students, who obviously do not have his thirty-five years of experience, get bogged down in ideas and theories, with him it becomes pure magic.
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