MAKING OPERA MAGIC
Peter Sellars stages Tristan und Isolde for COC,
His name is Peter Sellars, but it really ought to be Peter Pan.
The diminutive genius with the exclamation-point hairdo, the vivid purple shirt and the beaded necklace made out of giant frangipani seeds, looks like the boy who won’t grow up, even at the age of 55.
And in some ways, that’s a very good thing. The Canadian Opera Company has scored a major coup in bringing this world-renowned talent here to mount a new production of Wagner’s immense Tristan und Isolde, opening on Jan. 29. After talking to Sellars about it for an hour, it sounds like a Neverland that anyone who loves the arts would want to visit.
“There needs to be a space where you can talk about things that don’t fit on daytime television or into the world of predigested psychology that we live in,” he begins, eyes shining with passion. “That is why classical music still exists. There are a lot of things you have to go into deeply, like being with someone close to you in their final hours on earth.
“What we can offer with classical music is some sort of spiritual haven, a private space in this relentless public world, a space for your private imagining and yearning and searching your own thoughts. Asking, ‘What do I really feel?’ instead of allowing yourself to be told all the time.”
Faced with a five-hour opera that represents to many the Mount Everest of artistic experience, Sellars begins by helping us find a way inside of it. His wonderful gift is to demystify the arts while elevating them still further.
“Tristan is not an opera,” he begins. “It’s a life experience. Wagner was maddened by the limits of Victorian Christianity and searching for some other transcendent spiritual experience that recognized suffering but, at the same time, knew that there was redemption inside it.”
On its simplest level, the medieval legend that inspired the opera is the story of the classic romantic triangle: husband, wife and her lover. But Wagner found an immense psychological world inside the basic story that he filled in a breathtaking way.
“This happens all the time in opera,” laughs Sellars. “There’s a tension between the surface, which is opulent and tasty and almost too delicious, and what’s underneath, which is this really intense emotional and spiritual struggle that goes on.
“Wagner takes the surface of the world, but then insists on going deep, deep inside and not allowing anyone to remain on the surface.”
How does someone like Sellars come to such an almost instinctive appreciation of how to unlock the mysteries of a great work like this?
In his case, it all began with marionettes.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pa., on Sept. 27, 1957, he says, “I grew up in a supercharged world of artists. At the age of 10, I started apprenticing at the Lovelace Marionettes. They used music profoundly in every puppet show. Rumpelstiltskin was performed to Arabic music, Beauty and the Beast to Japanese themes, Jack and the Beanstalk to “The Night on Bald Mountain.”
“And we created every element of the production ourselves. I directed 40 shows in high school, constantly making new works with friends, all kinds of projects. We’d taste something new and find a way to make it work.”
His life took yet another turn when his mother suddenly decided to move the family to Paris right after high school. “We had no money, she didn’t speak French; she just said, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’”
It put Sellars in the city at an extraordinary time, when the worlds of dance, opera and theatre were all bursting with creativity.
“I became part of the effervescence of a generation that said, ‘We are here to make things happen’ and so we did.”
By the time he returned to America to attend Harvard, which he graduated from in 1981, he was on the unique path he never wavered from, making his name with a production of Antony and Cleopatra staged in the Harvard swimming pool.
Sellars has conducted experiments like that for all of his career, but he dismisses any charges of them being mere gimmicks.
“I don’t like to set works in their period, because the very fact that we’re doing them now means they’ve outlived the period in which they were created. They’re a torch that’s burning brightly in a very dark night.
“Wagner and Shakespeare give you shining moments that will gleam across the centuries, not across the weekend. Not for the next 10 minutes, but forever.”
Much of Sellars’ production of Tristan und Isolde rests with the genius of Bill Viola, one of the major video artists of our time. Sellars has
“Your entire life is now in the palm of your hand in your iPhone. We are living in a society that can create in one device the kind of psychic density that Wagner aspired to all of his life. He imagined this world, he just didn’t know it yet.”
been working on Tristan with Viola for more than eight years, trying out their ideas in various forms before they come to fruition in this COC production. “Bill took the devil’s instrument and created a spiritual path with it,” grins Sellars. “He can take Wagner’s spiritual yearnings and reach into the places that Wagner couldn’t actually touch. “People who have difficulty with my work want everything to be seconded in the music onstage. They don’t understand that music works in counterpoint. You’re opening into a poetic world where our deepest feelings are connected to these incredible polarities that are inside all of our beings. That’s where the power is, not in everything being doubled.” Sellars reaches out to the iPhone that’s recording our conversation. “Your entire life is now in the palm of your hand in your iPhone. Your past, your present, your future, your plans, your desires, your dreams. We are living in a society that can create in one device the kind of psychic density that Wagner aspired to all of his life. He imagined this world, he just didn’t know it yet.” All of Tristan builds to what we know as the “Liebestod,” the lovedeath of the title characters. This is where Sellars’ thoughts are the deepest. “In this life on Earth, beauty is so fleeting, so fragile. The things we care about are not industrial strength. At every moment, the things we care about the most deeply are being threatened by the world we live in and so we must keep caring for them. “It’s like your kids. You have to feed them three times a day. You can’t say, ‘Oh yeah, I fed them last week.’ You must stay with them and give them your all. And if there’s a day when you’re not giving your all, then that is the day you must watch out for.”
Sellars believes that Wagner’s work teaches us not just of the terror and beauty of love, but of how deeply that love must be rooted in something stronger than mere mortality. “You ultimately have to end up in a spiritual place if you want to maintain your equilibrium in a world where you see so much beauty being destroyed every day.
“You have to give everything and that giving is called sacrifice. We live in a culture now that doesn’t have much of a grasp of sacrifice. The act of love is giving everything, not keeping back a few things. Complete surrender, complete offering, the complete putting of every fibre of yourself into another being.”
Sellars admits that the pursuit of such grandeur in the arts is a dangerous journey, but he knows the risk.“If you ask the biggest questions, will you succeed? No. If success is your yardstick in life, then ask smaller questions.”