Director  Elijah  Moshinsky

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie



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Elijah Moshinsky enjoyed a long and prolific career spanning more than forty years as a director of both opera and theatre. Renowned particularly for his interpretations of Verdi, his productions have been seen throughout the world and enjoy frequent revival. His work encompasses a large and diverse repertoire, with a focus on Mozart, Janáček, Britten, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Strauss, but also including Mussorgsky, Poulenc and Ligeti. He has three times been the winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Opera, for his productions of Lohengrin, Stiffelio and The Rake’s Progress.

Elijah Moshinsky developed ongoing relationships with opera houses throughout the world, including, in particular, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera, New York, for whom he has directed many celebrated productions. His first major opera production was Peter Grimes for the Royal Opera House in 1975, and subsequent work there includes Lohengrin, The Rake’s Progress, Macbeth, Samson et Dalila, Samson, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, Otello, Attila, Entführung aus dem Serail, Stiffelio, Aida, Simon Boccanegra, I Masnadieri and Il trovatore. His later work at ROH has included revival productions of Otello and Lohengrin, and Moshinsky returned to Covent Garden in 2013 for a further revival of his Simon Boccanegra, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano.

Later work at the Metropolitan Opera has included revival stagings of The Makropulos Case, Ariadne auf Naxos and Otello, whilst other productions in New York include Un ballo in maschera, Nabucco, Queen of Spades, Lohengrin, and Luisa Miller. Moshinsky has also enjoyed ongoing relationships with opera companies including Opera Australia (Boris Godunov, Il trovatore, Werther, La Traviata, Rigoletto, Les dialogues des Carmélites and Barber of Seville). Other houses include The Lyric Opera of Chicago, where he staged a critically acclaimed revival of his Simon Boccanegra in Autumn 2012, Houston Grand Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Welsh National Opera, English National Opera (including the British première of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre), Wiener Staatsoper, Grand Théâtre de Genève, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Adelaide and Holland Festivals.

Moshinsky directed a large range of theatre and TV productions. Among his West End productions are Troilus and Cressida and The Force of Habit for the National Theatre, Three Sisters (Albery), Shadowlands and Cyrano de Bergerac (Haymarket) and Much Ado About Nothing (Strand). For the BBC, his directing work includes Genghis Cohn, Brazen Hussies, Anorak of Fire, Mozart in Turkey, as well as an Omnibus documentary on divas.

Born in Shanghai, and raised in Melbourne Australia, Elijah Moshinsky graduated from the University of Melbourne and studied subsequently at St Anthony’s College Oxford. Whilst there, he directed a production of As You Like It for the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company, which resulted in him being offered a position as a staff producer at the Royal Opera House.

==  Biography above from the website of Opera Australia  
==  Below are a few more details from other sources  

Moshinsky's Russian Jewish parents had fled from Vladivostok to the French Concession of Shanghai, where Elijah was born on January 8, 1946. When he was five years old, the family moved to Melbourne. He attended Camberwell High School and then was an under-graduate resident at Ormond College, where in 1965 he was the set designer of a stage adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. Moshinsky supported himself as an undergraduate by playing the third flute at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. In 1969, he directed Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape with Max Gillies at the Alexander Theatre at Monash University. He graduated from the University of Melbourne and in 1973 won a scholarship to St Antony's College, Oxford, where he specialised in the study of Alexander Herzen.

While still at St Antony's, Moshinsky directed a production of As You Like It for the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company. When Sir John Tooley, the General Director at Covent Garden, saw the play, he offered Moshinsky a post as a staff producer for The Royal Opera.

In January 2021, Moshinsky had a fall at his London home, and was taken to hospital where he contracted COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. He died in London on January 14, 2021.



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In November of 1985, during the rehearsal period for Samson by Handel, I met with director Elijah Moshinsky at his hotel.  He was most gracious to spend about ninety minutes with me, and the discussion ranged from specific details to general observations.

Portions of the interview were used on WNIB, Classical 97 in subsequent years to promote other productions, and now [2025] I am pleased to present the entire chat.

As we were setting up, the director asked me where I had just been, so I explained . . . . .


Bruce Duffie:   On any night there’s a performance at Lyric, this restaurant has a special package.  They get dinner, and a little talk about that evening’s opera, plus free parking, and a bus to and from the opera house for a price, and tonight I was the talk!  Another restaurant has the same arrangement but just on the weekend nights.  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at right, see my interviews with Kiri Te Kanawa, Robin Leggate, and Sir Georg Solti.]

Elijah Moshinsky:   That’s a terrific idea because if you turn up to an opera without any preparation whatsoever, it really is hard to look at something like Handel’s Samson because it isn’t an opera.  It needs great patience to watch, and that’s rather worrisome.

BD:   How much preparation do you expect out of the audience?

Moshinsky:   I expect them, if not prepared, at least to be able to be patient to listen to it, rather than wait for the stage to succor to them every minute.  Something like Samson is a contemplative work, so you have to patient and watch it unfold.

BD:   How much patience can you expect?

Moshinsky:   To go slightly longer than you would between commercials on television.  That’s the problem.  [Both laugh]

BD:   Are we as a society getting bombarded with too much?

Moshinsky:   I don’t know.  This is a general issue.  It’s not just America, but also in England.  The problem is that communication is so packaged that methods of listening and reading are really becoming quite altered.  A certain degree of preparation makes it easier to watch something.  It’s like education for looking at a painting.  You have to learn to see.

BD:   Is there is any danger that opera will become packaged like that?

Moshinsky:   There’s a danger for opera productions to get too gimmicky in order to catch an audience’s attention.  There is a danger to go for sensationalism, moments just to pull an audience in like a two-million-dollar production.  It’s an attempt to actually take the responsibility off watching it.

BD:   Without naming names, are there productions that you feel are too gimmicky?

Moshinsky:   Yes, there are.  I’ve seen a few where you think that it’s just to grab the audience without doing anything for the opera.

BD:   Who is the most important person in the opera house?

Moshinsky:   It varies from opera to opera.  If you do an opera and it’s centered around the performance of a particular artist, that is the most important.  But if one had to generalize, I’d say the composer is the most important.  We’re there to do the operas of the composer, and every opera house has a different power structure. In any given opera house it could be the musical director, or the administrator, or a team, or the producer, or the singer who can swing all of the morale.  So it varies, but generally it should be the composer.  Whoever is in power to put something on, should be doing it for something in the opera!
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BD:   Too often do we lose sight of it?

Moshinsky:   You can lose sight of it because it can just be a vehicle for singing, or it could just be a vehicle for production, or it could be just a vehicle for expense.

BD:   That’s an option I had not thought of!

Moshinsky:   Yes, for grandeur.  In the history of opera houses, sometimes you realize the administration will rise and fall.  They over-spend because they want to prove that they’re the best opera house.

BD:   You, as a director, feel that too much money can be spent on a production?

Moshinsky:   Certainly!  Certainly, I do!

BD:   Have your productions had enough money, or too much, or not enough?  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at left, see my interviews with Deborah Voigt, Susanne Mentzer, John Del Carlo, and James Levine.]

Moshinsky:   The circumstances are varied.  My first opera production was Peter Grimes with Jon Vickers and Colin Davis in London fifteen years ago.  We did it in the style of Bertold Brecht, or Our Town by Thornton Wilder.  We did it virtually for no money, on an absolutely shoe-string because we didn’t need it.  I thought the thing to do was that the people would be the village.  It was an absolutely bare stage, and we just built it and evoked it, and it worked very, very well.  It’s a classic sort of production, and it’s revived all the time.

BD:   Is that’s the one that’s now on video disc?

Moshinsky:   That’s right.  [The cover of that video is shown farther down on this webpage.]

BD:   Are you pleased that it’s on video disc and it’s frozen that way?

Moshinsky:   Well, I don’t think they actually kept the best performance.  It’s good to have a record of it, certainly, but the thing is that the previous revival was better in terms of the cast.

BD:   Does opera which starts as a grand spectacle in a theater with 3,000 people belong on a television set that you watch?  This would be on a small box in your home.

Moshinsky:   As a record, yes.  I wished there were some sort of record of Maria Callas’s performances that you really could see properly.  I think it’s important to get a record of the performance.

BD:   Then you’re talking more about document, not an entertainment value.

Moshinsky:   That’s right.  I find the films of La Traviata and Carmen really rather ghastly.  [Remember, this interview was held in October of 1985, so there were only a few videos available at that time.  Today [2025], there are numerous versions to compare.]

BD:   Why?

Moshinsky:   I don’t know.  I just thought the opera didn’t work, and it wasn’t particularly well performed.  But I like watching interesting recordings of productions I would never have seen.  There must be important productions that should be disseminated.

BD:   Then you’re thinking of them in terms of intellectualizing for other professionals.  Should it not be just entertainment for people?

Moshinsky:   No, it’s like Laurence Olivier’s film of Richard III.  You see a great performance, and there has to be a translation.  I don’t know whether you can translate one out into another, so it’s not always better to make a film in order to popularize.  It’s better to keep it as what it is, and make it available.

BD:   A play is a play, and a film is a film, and television is television?

Moshinsky:   That’s right.

BD:   So opera on television is a bad compromise?

Moshinsky:   No, I think it’s a good compromise.  Television is the medium, and opera is what it’s conveying.

BD:   Would you have done the Peter Grimes differently if it had been just for the television?

Moshinsky:   I should imagine so, but one of the good things about the production on the television as we’ve done it is that you don’t have to worry about the nature of realism, how real the village is, and how real the sea is.  You are told that this was recorded at the Royal Opera House, and it’s what was available for the performance you’re putting on.  Whereas, if you did it for television — which they did do previously with Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten conducting — they took the whole crew to Aldeburgh, and the more realistic it was, the more ordinary the story became.  One of the strengths of Peter Grimes is the fact that it’s actually kind of semi-realistic, and rather poetical.  Everything needs to be alluded to, and it’s like the play Equus.  Once you start putting in real horses, as they did in the film, it loses.  So I think it gains from actually being taken away from its real setting.  If you do Aïda in Egypt at the Pyramids, I think it would become the most banal opera in the world!  [Both laugh]  There’s a theatrical tension between the subject matter because opera is not real.  It’s a symbolic act.

BD:   It is the suspension of disbelief.

Moshinsky:   Yes, and I’m sure if you filmed La Bohème in Paris, and you tried to make it look as if they actually were there, it would be much less exciting than using it as a theatrical form.  So, my own sense is that it’s better not to translate it [he doesn’t mean the language], because you lose some of it.

BD:   You’ve cleared the stage on the Peter Grimes.  Is that as far as you can go, or is there anything beyond that?

Moshinsky:   No, it was a more positive act than just clearing the stage.  It was a way of interpreting the opera.  It was actually saying that it isn’t only about a fisherman.  It’s about a whole series of poetical problems.  It comes from a poem, and the most important thing was an atmosphere of desolation.  We went to Aldeburgh and had a look, and it’s the most unbeautiful place in the world!  It’s just a shingle beach, with lots of stones, gray sky, and that’s it!  It’s absolutely flat and desolate.  So we thought we had to get that on stage.  We had little light houses, and the village, and cardboard English pubs and things like Mrs. Miniver!  We just stripped it in order to try to capture a bleak and desolate atmosphere, and threw all the interpretation onto the company of singers.  This ensemble gave a very dynamic feel to it, and made the issues come to life.

BD:   Is that what the gramophone record comes from, as well as the TV?

Moshinsky:   That’s right, but I was saying that the success was built on something that was essentially simple.  It was spectacular to look at because of its clarity, but it wasn’t overloaded with decoration.  Opera is sometimes overloaded with cardboard reality.
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BD:   So, you try to cut through to the heart of the drama?

Moshinsky:   That’s right, and sometimes you need all that money in order to project it.  I recently did a Sicilian Vespers in Geneva, and we reset it in the period of the Risorgimento [the Unification of Italy].  It made the politics very nineteenth-century and very modern.  Procida became Bakunin or an early Lenin.  But in order to get the background right, we actually did have to create quite realistic sets.  It looked like a film by Visconti, and every setting was enormous and realistic, as Verdi demanded.

BD:   [With a wink]  I trust you still had him sing O tu Palermo, not O tu Moscow.  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at right, see my interviews with Ferruccio Furlanetto, and Antonio Pappano.]

Moshinsky:   [Laughs]  No, no, no, that’s right!

BD:   Whenever I talk to a director, it’s always fascinating to see how they work, and why certain things come to the stage.  The public that comes to the theater just sees the finished product and has to accept it.  They don’t see the working-out that you have spent months or even years on.

Moshinsky:   The public should be production-conscious, and they should think about why it’s interpreted that way.  How it is interpreted is deliberate, and it isn’t just the tradition.
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   You’re a director.  Do you also design sets?

Moshinsky:   Occasionally I design sets, but usually I work with a group of designers, and we work things out together.

BD:   How much interplay is there between the director and the designer?

Moshinsky:   The way I like to work is that I generally create a production team, and we work very closely with the lighting person and the choreographer.  So there really is an interpretive line throughout.  Everything reflects the central conception, and then the idea is to slowly catch everybody into this spirit.

BD:   Where does the conductor come into this?

Moshinsky:   The conductor should be part of it right from the beginning.  The idea is to create so that when you get to the stage, it’s actually a complete entity, with a complete atmosphere and a line behind it.  It’s not just a tradition that’s followed with absolutely no questions.

BD:   Do you get that kind of relationship all the time, or are you occasionally plopped into existing productions where you have little choice?

Moshinsky:   I try not to accept that.  I don’t do a show unless I actually can originate it, because otherwise there’s nothing really for me to do.

BD:   You don’t just like manipulating people on the stage?

Moshinsky:   No, actually I’m not very good at manipulating people on the stage.  That’s actually the worst part of the job.

BD:   Is the best part of your job cerebral beforehand?

Moshinsky:   No, not cerebral beforehand.  The best part of the job is understanding the piece and bringing it to life.  Manipulation isn’t part of it.  It’s trying to get through to them so that everyone does it together.  I try to create it so that everyone’s going in the same direction, and that’s quite hard, because not everyone wants to go in the same direction!  [Both laugh]

BD:   How do you pull them or push them along?

Moshinsky:   Usually, if it’s founded in an understanding of the piece, they will come.  If it’s founded on something absolutely tangential to the piece, people usually just won’t go with you.  The bottom line is the work itself.  They have to go with it.

BD:   Is the bottom line the composer or the librettist?

Moshinsky:   It depends.  I don’t know.  Sometimes neither.

BD:   Does a piece like Peter Grimes go back to Crabbe?

Moshinsky:   It wasn’t going back to Crabbe.  Jon Vickers, Colin Davis and I came to the conclusion that Britten had composed something which had really been staged because he had controlled the way it was staged.  It was his idea of what the staging should be, the realism of it, and actually the ambiguous nature of Grimes was never probed.  So we thought that there was an opera that had to be revealed.  The composer, and the libretto, and the traditional way of staging didn’t specifically say it should be like that.  It was actually another opera there to be discovered.

BD:   I’ve often asked this of composers if they are the ideal conductors of their work, and usually they say no.

Moshinsky:   If they’ve created something, it often takes on a life of its own, and if it gives itself to that life of its own, you know it’s a classic.  You know that someone will do Grimes.  It’s like Lear.  It will be constantly redone, so you build up a profile which is very complex, and many-sided, whereas for ninety years there was only one way of doing Gilbert & Sullivan.  It just becomes a dead tradition, and didn’t take on a life of its own.  It’s the traditions which take the life.
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BD:   Then it’s like a straight-jacket?

Moshinsky:   That’s right.

BD:   Do you enjoy being a director?

Moshinsky:   Yes, but sometimes it’s terrible, I hasten to add.  [Both laugh]  Generally, of course I do, but sometimes it actually is a very tough and lonely job.  People think it’s a job about power, but it isn’t a job about power.  It’s a job about interpretation.  It’s a constant series of acts of interpretation, and the difficulty is that you’re actually dealing with other people’s talents.  You’re dealing with singers and musicians, or actors and cameramen.  You’re always drawing them together toward a conclusion, and the difficult part is how to communicate the ideas you have, and how to bring the work to life.

BD:   Generally, are you happy with the results you get?  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at left, see my interview with Nicolai Putilin.]

Moshinsky:   I don’t know.  It’s a bit of a search every time.  It’s a matter of constantly probing and seeing whether you could have gotten more out of it, and whether it’s deeper.  You can always do better.

BD:   [Surprised]  You’re never finished???

Moshinsky:   Never finished, no.  Peter Brook said to me, “The moment you stop rehearsing may be the day before you make the ultimate discovery in relation to something.”  It’s a constantly developing thing.  The Samson we’re doing in Chicago is after a series of performances in London, and we hope there are going to be more discoveries.

BD:   Can a piece get over-rehearsed?

Moshinsky:   It can get over-rehearsed, and it can go stale on you.  The singers can actually lose their inspiration, and they can go dead on you.  All those are the problems of directing.  Sometimes you hit this kind of brick wall, and things that have worked before don’t work again.  It isn’t like a constant logical process at all.

BD:   Here you took the production out of Covent Garden, but not the same cast.

Moshinsky:   The only one who came from London is Jon Vickers.  He’s the one constant, plus Julius Rudel [the conductor].  But Julius isn’t a singer, so it’s a different type of thing.  Julius has to re-rehearse his orchestra, re-rehearse the chorus, and re-rehearse the whole thing with different people.  So the opera becomes a slightly different thing.  It isn’t exactly the same.  It’s another side of it.  

BD:   Do you ever get in a position where they ask for effects that you don’t want, or are you the one who is asking for effects that other people don’t want?

Moshinsky:   It’s a long struggle, because sometimes you get asked to direct in a situation where people don’t want a director.  They want something more like a stage manager, just to work out the traffic.  Basically I’m interested in a creative act, so I try not to get involved in projects which I think are going to be fairly uninteresting.

BD:   How do you decide which operas you will accept and which you will not?  Is it just a case of each request either thumbs up or thumbs down?

Moshinsky:   I don’t only do opera.  I’m just a jobbing director.  I depend on people asking me, and luckily I haven’t had to be enormously political when going out to get work.  I’ve just been actually drifting on the basis of what people ask me to do.

BD:   How much lead time do you need?  What if someone says they need this production six months from now, or six weeks from now, or six days from now?

Moshinsky:   Usually in opera you get asked at least a year in advance, because they need it a year in advance to budget and plan how to make sets and costumes.  In theater and in television you get asked very, very quickly, because a project could be set up very quickly.

BD:   What is ‘very quickly’?

Moshinsky:   Six weeks I would consider quick, but it’s rare, unless there’s an emergency, that you should be asked to do something and prepare it that quickly.

BD:   Then they really need just the traffic manager.

Moshinsky:   Or if someone is ill, or has pulled out, or there’s a disaster.

BD:   Have you ever rescued a production?

Moshinsky:   [Smiles]  Actually, this Handel Samson was originally going to be directed by a man called Michael Elliott who died about eighteen months ago.

BD:   Did that give you a strange feeling?

Moshinsky:   It did first time round, to be quite honest, because it colored my idea of whether I should do it.  Then I had to think of whether I would do it despite that.  I had to work very hard with the design very quickly in order to come up with a conception which would suit three opera houses which are totally different, Covent Garden, Chicago, and the Met.

BD:   Are you conscious of the different audiences when you direct?

Moshinsky:   I don’t know if I’m conscious of them, but I’m conscious of whether it’s communicating.  With the difficulty of communicating this particular type of music, you have to try to create images, and you have to try to put the performing musician to the audience so that he can communicate with them.  He must communicate the piece.

BD:   It seems that the director works every day until the premiere, and then leaves.  Do you ever get a chance to really enjoy your work?

Moshinsky:   No, I enjoy it very much.

BD:   I mean can you enjoy the fruits of your labor?

Moshinsky:   I don’t know what it is that one enjoys.  We did a piano-dress rehearsal on Sunday, and it really was the best performance of Handel’s Samson I’ve seen.  It was just with piano and the concentration and clarity about it really was a discovery in itself.  Jon Vickers said to me, “That rehearsal was worth just coming to Chicago for.”  So, you do discover and work the things, so the enjoyment in doing the Handel is actually finding a way in which that music, which is so laden with emotion, finds the right emotion which is slightly detached, and slightly Olympian, like in a Greek tragedy.  You have to work at those repetitions to actually pull it together, and I find all that work quite exciting!

BD:   If the time of travel were insignificant, would you come back just to watch the fifth or eight performance?

Moshinsky:   Because I live in London, when I’m at Covent Garden I go to every performance if I can, because every performance is different.  It’s just fascinating about the difference of communication.
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BD:   Are there some nights that work better than others?

Moshinsky:   That’s undoubtedly so!

BD:   Whose fault is that?

Moshinsky:   You never can tell.  It’s a curious thing.  Sometimes you get a slow audience, meaning an audience that will not respond.  Especially if you’re doing a comedy, the audience will not go with you, and the actors have to work it a particular way for that audience.  It’s a fiction that singers or actors on stage are unaware of what happens in the audience.  That’s true of cinema, but in a live performance the aim is to work with the audience to show them the piece.  You don’t just present it as a complete polished thing.  That’s often a misconception here.  We’re not just polishing and then showing it to you.  We’re working with finding something through methods of presentation in order to work with the audience.  We’re working with the audience all the time.

BD:   Are we losing that with the cinema and with television?

Moshinsky:   That’s the thing about live performances.  Any live art is a kind of communication with the audience.  If it isn’t that, then we have failed.

BD:   Up until the advent of radio, all performances were live performances.

Moshinsky:   Yes.

BD:   With radio it becomes more aloof, and then with television it becomes almost celluloid.

Moshinsky:   That’s right!  Television communicates, but it just communicates in different ways.  The thing about a live performance is that you’re actually in the same room.  The artists can sense your presence, and it’s the degree to which you acknowledge that, and the degree to which you play with that.

BD:   Sometimes the audience is a little slow to react.  Is there ever a case where the audience is faster than the artists on the stage?

Moshinsky:   Yes, and they get bored.  The process is really quite complicated and fascinating, because sometimes you get a situation where they’re told what is being given to them is good, but it’s actually very mediocre.  The audience knows it’s mediocre, but they feel they ought to show it’s good.  They know there’s a lie going on, and that’s why sometimes you go to great cultural events and think you didn’t get much out of it because you know it’s a puffed-up occasion.  The aim is to really get through that, but the difficulty is if you’re too esoteric for the audience they don’t like it, and then if you’re too bland, the audience may have liked it.  It’s different in different countries in the sense that my taste may not travel here.  The taste of what we’re doing may be considered too esoteric, or English.

BD:   How does the public in London compare with the public in Chicago, or the public in New York?

Moshinsky:   I don’t know, but I believe great pieces of music and great performances, like Jon Vickers’, just communicate to everybody.  Peter Grimes went to Japan, and they didn’t really understand a word, but they were terribly struck by it, and it was a great hit.

BD:   Should opera ever be done in translation?

Moshinsky:   Yes, I’ve done opera in translations, and they’ve been quite successful.  I did The Mastersingers at the English National Opera...

BD:   With Goodall?

Moshinsky:   No, it was Mark Elder.  It was sort of like the next generation, and was very successful.  Because it was a comedy, and people needed to understand what was said, they enjoyed that ease of communication.

BD:   Is there more ease of communication when the lines are understood?

Moshinsky:   Oh, I think that’s true.  I think that’s undoubtedly true.

BD:   [Pursuing the point]  Even when they’re Wagnerians, and they know every line by heart, and can tell you week to week how someone stressed this syllable and that syllable?

Moshinsky:   Yes.  Opera, like ballet, is really all baseball.  It’s all fans, opera fans.  They know a lot about it, but you just have to present the piece and find the energy from the piece.  You can’t worry about what the opera fans think.

BD:   Will you be here long enough here to see Die Meistersinger [being presented later in the season]?

Moshinsky:   No, I won’t, I’m afraid.  I’ve been to see Otello [which opened the season, with Margaret Price, Domingo/Johns, Milnes, Redmon, McCauley/Kunde, Plishka, conducted by Bartoletti], and Madam Butterfly [which was next, with Tomowa-Sintow, Dvorský, Stilwell, Zilio, Andreolli, conducted by Gómez-Martínez, and directed by Harold Prince.  Samson followed as the third opera that season.]

BD:   Have you done both of those?

Moshinsky:   No, I haven’t done either.

BD:   Have you been to other productions of works that you have staged?

Moshinsky:   Oh, yes, of course.

BD:   Do you have pangs of things you wished you could do for those productions?

Moshinsky:   No, you cut yourself off, really.  You just go as an audience, and quite often the pieces are done better than I do them, and I think that’s good!
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BD:   Do you ever steal any ideas?

Moshinsky:   I try to be as original as I can each time.  That’s the most important thing, to reinvent each time.

BD:   I hope you don’t use originality for originality’s sake.

Moshinsky:   [Thinks a moment]  No.  One of the things I set myself with is to start with almost a blank page, and I ask what it is about, and what will bring it to life?  But I never think that I saw a bit in a Bergman movie which could be of use here.  [Both laugh]

BD:   Do you feel like you’re reinventing the wheel every day?  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at left, see my interviews with Renée Fleming, James Morris, Semyon Bychkov, and Donald Palumbo.]

Moshinsky:   I do.  That’s one of the problems, yes.  That’s one of the reasons why you can’t actually do new productions all the time.  You’d bleed yourself dry.  So the idea of doing a succession of Handel Samsons is a good way of going about it, which is slow development.

BD:   You wouldn’t do a completely new production for Chicago and then a new production for the Met?

Moshinsky:   It’s turning out a bit different.

BD:   Is it turning out different, or are you turning it out different?

Moshinsky:   [Laughs]  I don’t know!  I don’t quite know where the change is, but, for example, a lot of it is working much better, and I think it is because Julius and I have had more experience at it.  It’s coming together better than it has before.  I suspect the chorus is better.

BD:   That pleases you, of course?

Moshinsky:   Oh yes, of course, because you can do more with it.  The degree of talent here is quite phenomenal.

BD:   Enough so that if they asked you back you would immediately say yes?

Moshinsky:   Yes,  [laughs] but you don’t just go back to a place if they ask you.  They always ask you what, and when, and with whom.  Usually you know when things are working out, and your relationship with an opera house is good or not.  You can sense if it’s working, but when it doesn’t work it’s really quite dreadful.  That’s why when you asked what it’s like to be a director, sometimes you are in a fairly heartbreaking situation, and you wish you weren’t there.  But I won’t tell you when that has happened...  [Both laugh]
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   Let’s move on to Wagner.  You’ve done Mastersingers, and Tannhäuser...

Moshinsky:   ... and Lohengrin, and Tristan.  I did a Tristan with Jon Vickers in London.

BD:   Who was the Isolde?

Moshinsky:   The first one was Roberta Knie, and then it was Berit Lindholm.  Then they did a revival with Gwyneth Jones.

BD:   Those are three very different singers!

Moshinsky:   Yes, but all Wagnerian singers are different to each other, because they have to find their own way of getting through it.

BD:   Is that what Wagner is, just trying to get through it?

Moshinsky:   It’s a very big problem.

BD:   Does Wagner present more problems than anybody else?

Moshinsky:   No, he presents problems unique to Wagner.  I haven’t done Mozart or Puccini curiously enough, but I compare how people approach Verdi and how people approach Wagner.  There’s a big difference because Verdi is about catching the passion of the moment, and making it look as if someone passionately believes a moment of melodrama as if their lives depended on it, and making that work.  There’s a subtlety of character, whereas Wagner is often a question of sustaining an idea and raveling it, and having a big conception.  With Verdi, you have to have a series of strong dramatic moments.

BD:   Which is better?

Moshinsky:   I go from one to the other, and I don’t think it’s question of which is better.  A great performance of Tristan and Isolde is an unbeatable experience, and to be involved in it is quite amazing.  If you’re involved in it, and you’re open to it, you feel terribly churned up and opened.  It’s like undergoing analysis.  Odd things happen that never happen with Verdi.  You never feel completely opened up, but you feel excited.  I did a production of Verdi’s Macbeth at Covent Garden.  Recently there was a revival of it, and finally it actually really sprung to life.  Suddenly it was an enormous hit.  It had been good, but suddenly it really, really took off.  The casting was right, and the circumstances were right, and it was an enormous hit.  It was enormously exciting in a way nothing else has been.  Nothing is quite as exciting as doing that and watching it.  The Tristan with Jon Vickers and the Lohengrin I did are productions I’m very proud of.  They had this slow burn depth in them.  For me you slowly understood that you were in the middle of a very complex and interesting experience.

BD:   It’s more of a glow for you, rather than the heat and fire of passion?

Moshinsky:   Yes.  It’s a curious thing.  It’s got to do with the fact that Wagner unravels very slowly.

BD:   Is it too long?

Moshinsky:   No, but the aim is actually to make it appear too short.  The thing about Wagner is to unravel it with the tension, and the precision, and an intention that actually makes you want more of it.

BD:   You want a fourth act?

Moshinsky:   That’s right!  The Mastersingers can have that impact.  Curiously enough, it has this extraordinary impact of people never wanting to leave the theater because they live with it and they live through it.

BD:   Is it different when you know that the audience is going to be coming from a day’s work or a week’s work, rather than taking a day off or a week off just for that?

Moshinsky:   I don’t know.  All I remember is when I did do Mastersingers at the Coliseum, which was successful at the time, it started at five o’clock.  The audience rushed in from their offices, got in there, and the moment the overture began, I looked at the stalls and everyone was fast asleep!  They completely fell asleep during the overture.  It was just like that [snaps fingers]!  Then, when curtain would go up, they’d wake up.  You could see that people had rushed there from offices and work.  They just made their way, and actually get there on time.
 
BD:   They took the overture to take a nap, and then they watched the performance?
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Moshinsky:   That’s right.  It’s a twenty-minute overture, and when the curtain went up it’s very bright, and they all settled in to start.  It was really terribly amusing.  In the middle there would be a dinner interval, and by the last act they’ve got really going!  But they had a snooze at the beginning.

BD:   The Mastersingers works in English because it’s so talky.  Would Tristan work in English?
 
Moshinsky:   I’ve seen Tristan in English at the Coliseum, and I didn’t like it because it’s not that sort of text.  The text is illusive and alliterative.  It’s like e. e. cummings.  You gain nothing from seeing it in English.  Also, Goodall took it so slowly that the English you heard was distended.  They could be singing Sanskrit.  It really was to get the line he wanted, so it would actually be better to sing it in a language no one understood.  I thought it would be better in Greek or something...
 
BD:   Have you ever experienced these new supertitles?

Moshinsky:   I saw supertitles in Australia.

BD:   Is that the ideal compromise?

Moshinsky:   No... I mean I can’t remember.  It was during a performance of Rheingold, and people kept laughing at the supertitles because they’d got it a bit wrong.  It wasn’t ideal because where they put the titles was so far above the stage that you couldn’t actually see them and the stage.  If you got intrigued in the text, you couldn’t watch the stage clearly, and if you watched the stage, you couldn’t see the supertitles.  The ideal would be to be able to see it all in one, but actually just the way the auditorium works, you have to look down and then you have to look up.  It’s a funny auditorium in Sydney.  It’s very steeply raked, and the proscenium is the whole size of it.  So you actually can’t adjust.  The titles were often rather silly, but everyone swears it made it easier for them.  The audience loved it, and they got a very, very high attendance rate because of it.

BD:   Is the audience always the final judge of success?  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at right, see my interview with Kurt Moll.]

Moshinsky:   I don’t think there is a final judge.  It depends.  From my point of view, each show has a different atmosphere, and sometimes the atmosphere shows, given by the enjoyment a performer may have had in getting there.  When an audience doesn’t like it, usually that creates a very poor atmosphere, and usually you find that it feels like something hasn’t succeeded.  Even if it’s fifty-fifty communication, as it is when half the audience likes it and half doesn’t, at least it’s something.  But when you get something on your hand which doesn’t communicate at all, it usually makes for a terrible time.

BD:   Have any of your productions ever been booed?

Moshinsky:   No, they have never been booed, thank God, but I always expect the next one will be.

BD:   [Very surprised]  Really???

Moshinsky:   Yes.  I find it quite nerve-wracking.

BD:   Do they have to drag you out to take a curtain call on opening night?

Moshinsky:   Yes.  If I can ever persuade management that I won’t go, I wouldn’t take a curtain call.  I can’t bear it.  I find it terrifying, but not because of booing.  I actually suffer from a kind of stage fright.  In a traditional house, if I didn’t go out there it would be considered cowardly, and that I didn’t stand by the performers.  You go out there and thank God everything has worked out so far!  But it doesn’t matter.  Some opera houses don’t have the tradition of a producer going out.

BD:   Then the public never gets to see you at all?

Moshinsky:   No, and that’s wonderful.  I’m a great believer in invisible direction.

BD:   You don’t feel that’s working in isolation?

Moshinsky:   No.  They should feel the production from the actual production.  I don’t think it helps.  Usually you come on, and you can hear them asking who’s that?  [Laughs]

BD:   When you’re there for the opening night, do you go around in the lobby and intermission and hear what they’re saying?

Moshinsky:   Quite often I do, and quite often it’s not a good idea!  [Both laugh]  Sometimes you get really dispirited, and sometimes it’s really quite good.  Part of the excitement is actually to feel how it’s working, to see what’s coming backwards and forwards, and be part of the excitement of the evening.  Usually opening nights are always very exciting.  You get quite addicted to them.
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   You’ve also done straight plays?

Moshinsky:   Yes.

BD:   Are there some plays that you have done, or know about, that you feel would make wonderful operas?

Moshinsky:   [Thinks a moment]  I’ve always thought plays of Pinter would make wonderful operas, curiously enough.

BD:   Have any of them been done?

Moshinsky:   No, they haven’t because essentially they appear to be unmusical.  But with a modern composer, the particular dilemmas of the characters would actually make very interesting music theater.

BD:   Is modern music unmusical?

Moshinsky:   Sometimes it is.  Sometimes it’s fairly unlistenable, too, as a vocal line.  It can get so theoretical.

BD:   Where do we lose music in all of this?

Moshinsky:   With opera it’s got to do with the writing for voice.  However you invent it, you have to be able to sing it, or invent a way of singing it.  Someone like Britten wasn’t a pioneer in musical language, but he was absolutely marvelous at writing dramatic situations for the voices he knew.  Therefore, he wrote wonderful operas.

BD:   Was he the last to do so?

Moshinsky:   [Thinks again]  I did an opera by a Hungarian composer named György Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre, which actually worked very well.  But I would say Britten was the last major classical composer one can point to and say that this is a composer whose operas are classics, and they will be performed surely in fifty years’ time.  It will be interesting to see which ones become popular.
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BD:   You don’t think it will be Peter Grimes?

Moshinsky:   It will depend on the interpreters.  All operas depend on the interpreters.

BD:   When we lose Peter Pears and Jon Vickers, maybe Grimes will settle in and be something else?  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at left, see my interviews with Catherine Malfitano, and Gwynne Howell.]

Moshinsky:   It might.  It really might, and if there were a fantastic interpreter of Death in Venice, you might find it will stay, but the whole body of his work has something there to keep going like there was with Verdi.  They’ll always be discovered and rediscovered.

BD:   From your point of view, how are Britten’s operas different from Verdi’s operas or Wagner’s operas?

Moshinsky:   To begin with, they’re English, so they deal with a different temperament.  Usually the emotions in them have all to do with repression of feeling.

BD:   Is that an English thing?

Moshinsky:   It’s an English thing, that kind of tight-lipped tense structure that he creates.  But something like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a wonderful opera of Britten, is completely different to most musical language, or any music you can think of.  A lot of it has got to do with this clean English vocal line.

BD:   Are English singers the ideal interpreters of English operas?

Moshinsky:   There are not that many English operas to begin with.  Handel’s Samson is one of them.  Interestingly, on the radio this afternoon I heard ‘Total Eclipse’ come on.  I didn’t hear who it was, and it wasn’t Jon Vickers.  So I wondered who could this be?  It sounded like an old recording, and it was Jan Peerce.  He gave a most wonderful interpretation.  It was quite astonishing.  I don’t think Englishness is important for Handel, and I don’t think Englishness is important for Britten, but you have to be able to speak the language.  You need someone who knows their way around the English language to interpret them.  [In 1984, Moshinsky directed a TV Movie of A Midsummer Marriage by Tippett, with Lucy Shelton and Philip Langridge, conducted by David Atherton.]

BD:   Would you ever agree to do Handel’s Samson in Germany in German with a completely German cast?

Moshinsky:   Yes, because it’s basically an international work.  It doesn’t come from a national school of composing, and he was, in a sense, bi-national.  A lot of the Handel discovery in the twentieth century was German, so he’s as much theirs as ours.  But Samson is much better in English because of Milton.  It’s derived from Milton’s Samson Agonistes, and you can hear it in its imagery, and its concerns, and its structure where it’s essentially Milton’s idea of a Greek Tragedy.  It’s inside that, that the opera functions.

BD:   If you were running the opera house, would it be a good idea to put the Saint-Saëns and the Handel in the same season?

Moshinsky:   We did, actually, in London.  Not that I was running it, but we did the Handel Samson in a production I did with Jon Vickers, and then six weeks later there was a revival of Samson and Delilah with Plácido Domingo and Agnes Baltsa.  So the two came together.

BD:   Was that a good idea?  Did it work?

Moshinsky:   They don’t sell it on subscription, so it wasn’t necessarily done for the same public.  But I found it interesting!  [Both laugh]  The chorus who was in it became very educated round the myth and the story, so everyone involved in performing it got a lot out of it.  There are lots of interesting things...  One of them is the Samson in the Handel.  After he’s blinded, Delilah turns up, so it’s all about guilt, and regret, and finding God, whereas the Saint-Saëns opera is all about seduction and color.  So it’s different.
BD:   They should do the French one first and then the English.

Moshinsky:   Yes, to get the story in order!

BD:   Are there other pairs or sets of operas like that, such as the Iphigenia legend, or the Electra legend, and could those be done together?

Moshinsky:   I suppose so.  I don’t know whether they rate that much interest.  All the Greek myths I’m sure have spawned a whole series of operas.  You could do a kind of Trojan Wars cycle if you wanted to, but I don’t think necessarily you’d get a lot out of it.
*     *     *     *     *
 
BD:   How long have you have been directing operas?

Moshinsky:   The first thing I directed was Peter Grimes with Jon Vickers, which was in 1975.

BD:   So about ten years.

Moshinsky:   That’s right, ten years.  Time flies!

BD:   Have you worked with young singers as well as mature and experienced artists?

Moshinsky:   Oh yes, quite a lot.

BD:   Are they getting better or getting worse?

Moshinsky:   It varies.  I find every situation changes.  One of the things I had to deal with was understanding that when you start an opera production, you actually start as if you’ve never worked before.  Everyone always starts from when the singers come to the rehearsal room.  They are usually so nervous, and the conductor is nervous, and the director is nervous, and you actually always start from a blank page.  Every situation is a different one, and from your body of experience, the aim is somehow to have something which is similar to the situation you’re in now.  So there’s a sense of building on something you know.  But, when you first start out, there’s no training that will take you through it.  It can only be learned by experience.  So, in answer to the question of whether they are getting better or worse, tell me who the new Jon Vickers is.  Who is the person who can sing Siegmund, Grimes, Tristan, The Masked Ball, and Don José?  There isn’t one.

BD:   We don’t have any one singer who can sing that particular selection of roles, but we have another Don José, and we have other singers who can do each one you mentioned.

Moshinsky:   I suppose so, but it’s a big difference.  There was a problem after Maria Callas finished.  There was the myth, and everyone wanted to be the next Callas.  But then you got Joan Sutherland who could do part of Callas’s repertoire in her own way, and you realize that as he or she emerges, every singer redefines the vocal art by their repertoire.  When you ask who the young singers are, it depends on the level you work.  I don’t know who the new Callas is, and I don’t know who the new Jon Vickers will be.

BD:   But Jon Vickers wasn’t a new Lauritz Melchoir, and he wasn’t a new Ramón Vinay, and he wasn’t a new anybody.  He was his own man.

Moshinsky:   Every time a singer tries to put his stamp on a role, he actually tries to dethrone the singer before.

BD:   [With mock horror]  Then is opera a contest???
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Moshinsky:   No, it’s a tradition.  What I’m really saying is you can have various ways of singing Otello, for example.  It can be based in the Italian tradition, or a French way of doing it, or a German way of doing it.

BD:   This is what I was getting at about other young singers being better or worse today.  Are we continuing a tradition?  Occasionally, when I talk to a singer who is eighty years old, they say that the tradition is dead!  They used to do it in a certain way, and it can’t be done that way anymore.  It’s gone.  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at right, see my interviews with Norman Bailey, and John Tomlinson.]

Moshinsky:   I think that’s true.  Things keep changing.  The whole process of singing and performing is changing all the time, and most of the changes are recordings and jet travel.  Everyone says that, but actually the significance of it is vital.  Also the economics of it are vital in the sense that people now want to get rich quicker and earlier, rather than taking on a lot of roles and making a real career out of opera.  They tend to become stars greater than opera.  Opera becomes a springboard for their stardom, and it becomes greater than opera.

BD:   That’s back to my earlier question of who is the most important person in the house.

Moshinsky:   In the end, I always think that the most important person is the man who wrote it.  That doesn’t mean that I believe in fidelity to the text, because I don’t.  The real problem in opera is the lack of new operas.

BD:   How do we get more new operas written?

Moshinsky:   There are operas written, but the inspiration of a Benjamin Britten, or an Alban Berg, or Puccini, are rare as hens’ teeth.  When I went to Madam Butterfly, I was yet again knocked out by the score.  What an astonishing piece of writing, and you just wonder where it’s gone.  What happened in Italy?  What happened when Puccini stopped?  Did it become trashy?  Did they run out of ideas?

BD:   How much of this is dependent upon the public?  A hundred years ago the public always wanted something new.  Now they want something old, and if it’s new, they’re afraid of it.

Moshinsky:   It varies.  Opera has become almost entirely the vehicle for the performance, and rarely a vehicle for the composers.  It’s a question of inspiration really.  Often the inspiration to have the talent to write it in particular ways is just very rare, and very great when it arises.  You live through golden periods, and periods that are fallow.  Think of all those eighteenth-century operas before Mozart!
 
BD:   Is there any point in bringing back any of those early works?

Moshinsky:   I find even some of Mozart’s are difficult to bring back, until he hit the idea that the people and dramatic situations dominate the musical style.  Some of those earlier operas are actually difficult to see something in.

BD:   Are they second-rate operas, or even third-rate operas?

Moshinsky:   No, they’re operas of their time.  They don’t transcend their time.

BD:   Then is it a mistake to bring them back at all?

Moshinsky:   No, because we should know about how it all happened, and we should educate our tastes.

BD:   So, the big question becomes, is opera art or is opera entertainment?

Moshinsky:   It’s art and entertainment combined.

BD:   Where is the balance?

Moshinsky:   I don’t know how it balances, but it should be both.  I always think of it as an emotional thing.  If it hits you and you’re educated, and have made artistic decisions, you can be entertained at the same time because you’re getting a feeling within a structure of ideas.

BD:   Are there any poor operas that still get done?

Moshinsky:   Yes, but that’s a question of taste.  I find some of the bel canto repertoire is of no interest to me to listen to, and they get done because people like hearing the singers do the scales.

BD:   So, when Sutherland comes here to do Anna Bolena [the next opera after Samson, with Toczyska, Zilio, Merritt, Plishka, Doss, led by Bonynge and directed by Mansouri], then we’re just going to hear scales?

Moshinsky:   Possibly.  There are good things in Anna Bolena.  There are much worse bel canto operas than Anna Bolena.  [Both laugh]
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BD:   If you were asked to direct one of those, would you decline?

Moshinsky:   Yes, I have.  Not all operas, I believe, need a director.

BD:   [Mildly shocked]  You would just let the singers get out there and fend for themselves?

Moshinsky:   Yes, you can!  Sometimes that’s what an opera needs.  Opera needs a sympathetic man or woman who will sit in front and say when it’s your turn to come on, and that’s the center, and this is where the lights are.  Sometimes that’s all an opera needs to work, and not every opera is interesting enough for a director to do.

BD:   So that’s how you choose, by only doing operas that are interesting to do?

Moshinsky:   Yes, operas that are interesting to do.  One does make choices, but I don’t make choices on principal.  For example, I thought that I would never direct Il Trovatore, but I was asked to direct it, and it’s been one of the best things I’ve ever done.

BD:   [Being optimistic]  Maybe one of those bel canto things that you don’t like might turn out that way if you’d ever give it a chance.

Moshinsky:   It could be.  It’s a matter of education.   Perhaps if a conductor or a singer can bring you to it.  But at the moment, when you ask if there are operas which are worth doing, there are, yes.

BD:   What was it about Trovatore that was hiding, that you then discovered?

Moshinsky:   It was actually the compression of the story.  There had been so much emphasis on the fact that everyone kept telling me the story is so ridiculous.  Then when I looked at it, I realized the story was irrelevant.  It was just a situation between three people, and once you got it to that situation, and made the intensity work between the people, then the opera started to work, and every bar was relevant.  What was irrelevant was the plot line that you read in the program, about what had happened twenty years before.  What was important was to treat the opera that you saw as a visual poem which great singers were in.  Joan Sutherland was in it, and it was very pleasant experience.

BD:   Do operas always work better with great singers?

Moshinsky:   Operas always work better if the singers can sing them!  [Both laugh]  If the singers can’t sing them, you have a terrible time, and the audience has a terrible time, and the director has a terrible time, and the conductor has a terrible time, not to mention the singer who is struggling!

BD:   Are there cases where there are not great singers but good singers?

Moshinsky:   Oh, yes!

BD:   Do they ever do a better job than the great singers?

Moshinsky:   There are lots of different ways of singing Otello, but the exciting Otello performance is the one with the charisma, not necessarily the best-sung one.  Indeed, I believe that to be true about the Handel Samson.  It is an undeniable fact that Jon Vickers is not necessarily the most flexible singer of what would be considered now the ‘Handelian style’, but he’s undoubtedly the greatest interpreter of the role of Samson we will ever see.  So in that way it’s completely authentic.  The modern idea of authenticity is that it should be a light, eighteenth-century voice without any sort of character behind it.

BD:   But here you have this heroic voice.

Moshinsky:   Absolutely.  You feel the power of the man, and that brings charisma to it.

BD:   You say you think that he’s the greatest that we will ever see.  Suppose someone comes along and becomes even greater than Jon Vickers.

Moshinsky:   I look forward to working with them!  [Laughs]

BD:   It seems like we always say that this is as far as we can go, and yet next year we’ve gone a little further.

Moshinsky:   You can always go a little further, but from my point of view it’s as far as I can go.  We’re putting a lot into it, and I believe absolutely in what we’re doing.  So to me it’s inconceivable at the moment of another better way.

BD:   Do you ever put too much into your work?

Moshinsky:   Yes.  [Both laugh]  Sometimes it can be too demanding.  The business of directing is very demanding, not just in terms of getting through it, but it’s emotionally very demanding.

BD:   Do you rely on the conductor then to keep your ideas fresh each night as it goes along?

Moshinsky:   No, I rely on the whole situation to keep it fresh.  Curiously enough, what keeps a situation fresh is the audience, because their response is different every night.  The performers tend to go out there with an idea of how it should work, and then they have to struggle with the audience.  They will come along or not come along, and that keeps it fresh, curiously enough.  That’s where the freshness comes, the will to perform.
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BD:   When I interviewed him, Vickers said to me that you’re wrestling with it.  So are you wresting with the audience each night?
 
Moshinsky:   Or you could charm them like Plácido.  But you have to have a way of dealing with the audience.  You don’t have to always get them to think one way or the other.  There are lots of ways to an audience, as there are with any interpersonal relationship.  I believe it’s that relationship which keeps it fresh, and if you ignore that relationship, then the opera is dead, because it’s like behind glass.  You would be saying to them, “That’s it.  That’s the way it’s done.”
 
BD:   You don’t play the ‘fourth wall’?

Moshinsky:   No, I play to the audience.

BD:   What advice do you give to young directors?

Moshinsky:   I would say to direct!  Just start doing it.  If you actually do want to direct, the thing is you have to do it, because it’s only done by experience, and you have to get any experience possible.

BD:   How do you get a chance to do it?

Moshinsky:   I started in amateur theater.  I never wanted to be a professional director.  It’s a long circuitous route.  I’m always very suspicious of directing schools, or theater schools, and things like that.  The thing to do is to get involved with a group of people who want you to direct something at whatever level — even the most amateur group — and start directing, and getting a taste for it.  You will get a sense of what the problems are, and what it is you, as a director, need to do in any given situation.  That way you will build up experience.  I started in university theater and amateur groups, and went into it, but I knew I always wanted to direct.  I didn’t come to it as a singer or actor.

BD:   [With a wink]  You’re not a frustrated fiddle player or a frustrated counter tenor?  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at left, see my interviews with Samuel Ramey, and Wendy White.]

Moshinsky:   No, it’s because the whole idea is what interests me.  It’s the complete conception, not just performances.

BD:   Is it a mistake for a singer to think only of his or her part?

Moshinsky:   Yes, it is.  One of the problems I find is that the singer (or even the actor) comes up and knows only their part.  They don’t know the background to the role.  Often a singer doesn’t listen to what other singers are singing to that singer in dialogue.  They know their part, and they know the cues, and they don’t listen.  The chorus also has to listen.  They have to know the ethos of the whole thing.  They have to respond.  One of the biggest jobs is making sure everyone is feeling everyone else’s situation on stage, and then knowing where they come in.  For example, Delilah in Samson comes in only in the second act and does a ten-minute scene, but she must know where she comes from.  The whole thing must be drawn out, otherwise it would just be like a star-turn.  It’s vital to know all this, and the real the problem of singers not listening to a dramatic context.  The composer who suffers most from that is Verdi, because it is possible to perform Verdi by flying everyone in at the last minute.  Get the six greatest voices, and you will get a completely credible Trovatore, or Traviata.

BD:   All the pieces will be there, but they won’t intermesh?

Moshinsky:   All the pieces will fit because he’s such a great composer.  It will inter-mesh as long as it’s held together by a conductor.  A Verdi opera at a certain level will spring together very, very swiftly as long as everyone can sing it.  But whether they listen to each other in the second act of Traviata, and actually do a dialogue, is a question to be asked.

BD:   When you’re doing the second act of Traviata, should Violetta know that she is going to die, or should she go along assuming that she’s going to live to an old age rather than expiring next week?

Moshinsky:   It depends on who is performing it.  But there needs to be a constant sense of fatality, and of something absent, because the tragedy has got to do with the sense that the pleasure that she lives on as a courtesan is somehow absolutely overshadowed by something else, and that gives her a desperation.  I always think that she’d have to get a double feeling.  I am not too fond of Violettas who are just good-time girls.  I like to have that other dimension.

BD:   How much do you delve into the background of each character?

Moshinsky:   Sometimes a lot, but sometimes the best performances come if you just play what’s in front of you.  A singer might come on, and I will just tell them to play this moment.

BD:   When doing Traviata, you should know the Verdi, and you should know the libretto, but should you also know the Alexandre Dumas [La Dame aux Camélias]?

Moshinsky:   The thing that you aim for in performance is complete identification between the performer and the scene being performed, and that identification doesn’t mean that they just act.  They just are.  They have to get to the point of acting where they believe what they’re doing is for real.  With the will of imagination, any situation that’s dramatically feasible on stage does have an imaginative life which you can believe in.  As a director you have to get it so that the people on stage believe what they’re doing.  They don’t think it’s just opera and I sing the notes, and I don’t get involved.

BD:   There’s involvement and then there’s *involvement*.

Moshinsky:   The great interpretations are the ones where you think the performance you see is the personification of the character.  You say, “That’s Violetta,” even though there are other Violettas.  People say that Feodor Chaliapin had it when he did Boris Godunov.  There are these definitive performances.  Maria Callas had it when she did Norma and Violetta.  I never saw Callas, but the myth is the sense of complete identification, and this sense of identification is hard to find.  It’s not posturing.  It’s not just doing with feeling.  It’s actually coming to it, so if it helps you to get that identification by knowing the background, fine.

BD:   This is what Jon Vickers is as Samson?

Moshinsky:   Vickers is complete identification.  This is what he has come to.

BD:   Will someone looking at a tape of this Samson twenty, thirty or forty years from now get enough out of that tape, or will they be missing something because they were not in the theater?

Moshinsky:   I should think they will be missing something, because, as I said, my philosophy is that you play with the audience in front of you.
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BD:   That can’t be captured?

Moshinsky:   It can’t be captured if you’ve never seen it live.  I’ve seen tapes of Maria Callas, but it’s difficult to feel that shock, or the excitement that was actually felt by people seeing her.  But people who actually felt that firsthand can look at the tape, and it reminds them of it.  That’s one of the roles of recording operatic performances.  It acts as a reminder to performances you have seen.  When I’ve been to a performance that I’ve admired, I go and listen to the recording just to remind me of what it was like.  But you have to have felt it to fully get it again.  That’s why it’s worth collecting performances to open yourself to the experience of them.

BD:   Collecting performances?

Moshinsky:   Yes, to go to see as much as possible, so you actually can start feeling with it.

BD:   But should we always look back to the Maria Callas performances, or the Laurence Olivier performances?

Moshinsky:   No, not at all.  They’re just great memories.  The thing is you should hope that tomorrow you’re going to get that same experience, or something that’s exciting with someone new.

BD:   I take it that you’re optimistic about the future of opera?

Moshinsky:   It’s never been healthier in lots of ways.  [Remember, this was 1985!]  Attendances are up.  Its dissemination and popularization is greater than it has ever been.  The actual standard of singing and playing is generally improving, so in those terms, I should imagine it’s got a great future.  People want the emotions that opera generates.  They feel things are revealed to them.  I do!  I feel that!  I feel there’s truth there, and if you open yourself to it, you can feel it.
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BD:   What is next on the calendar for you?

Moshinsky:   I’m doing a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts for BBC television as soon as I finish this.

BD:   Will you stay around at all for a couple of performances of Samson before you leave?

Moshinsky:   No, I’m leaving after the first performance because I need to get back to London to rehearse.

BD:   Are you coming back to Chicago?

Moshinsky:   I don’t know.  It hasn’t been settled.  There’s something under discussion, but I don’t know when, and I don’t know whether it will happen.  In fact, you’d probably be able to tell me!  [Laughs]  Get your spies...

BD:   You do television, you do plays, and you do operas.  How do you divide it, or does it just divide itself?

Moshinsky:   I count.  I’ve been asked to do an opera in Vienna in 1991, so I say yes, I’d like to do that, but perhaps when I get closer to it, I will think I can’t face the prospect.  I wish I could plan my life, and then I’d have a regular life, and I’d have holidays with my children.

BD:   How far ahead are you booked?

Moshinsky:   There’s that opera in Vienna in 1991, but I’m not booked in 1990.  1990 is free!  It’s sort of spasmodic, and the worst thing in booking oneself, the logistics of it, is that if you commit yourself to something in 1986 or 1987, then perhaps you’re cutting yourself out from an interesting offer in the theater, which could happen later.  I often try to get projects going myself, and you don’t quite know how long it’s going to be to get something going.  For example, when I go back to London, I’ll be developing the script of a film of Twelfth Night with Robert Bolt.  I’ve been asked to do that by David Pountney.  It’s taken eighteen months to get to the development deal, and now that it is done, it may take another two years before it’s even feasible.  It’s a filmable thing, so you never know what’s going to happen.
bolt


Robert Bolt (Aug. 15, 1924, Sale, near Manchester, England - Feb. 20, 1995, near Petersfield, Hampshire) was an English screenwriter and dramatist noted for his epic screenplays.

Bolt began work in 1941 for an insurance company, attended Victoria University of Manchester in 1943, and then served in the Royal Air Force and the army during World War II. After earning a B.A. in history at Manchester University in 1949, he worked as a schoolteacher until 1958, when the success of his play Flowering Cherry (London, 1957), a Chekhovian study of failure and self-deception, enabled him to leave teaching. Bolt’s most successful play was A Man for All Seasons, a study of the fatal struggle between Henry VIII of England and his lord chancellor, Sir Thomas More, over issues of religion, power, and conscience. The play drew intense acclaim in productions at London (1960) and New York City (1961).

Bolt wrote the screenplays for director David Lean’s epic films Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) and then adapted A Man for All Seasons for director Fred Zinnemann’s motion-picture version of the play in 1966. His other screenplays included Ryan’s Daughter (1970), which was directed by Lean; Lady Caroline Lamb (1972), which Bolt himself directed; The Bounty (1984); and The Mission (1986).






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pountney


Sir David Willoughby Pountney CBE (born 10 September 1947) is a British-Polish theater and opera director and librettist internationally known for his productions of rarely performed operas and new productions of classic works. He has directed over ten world premières, including three by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for whom he wrote the librettos of The Doctor of Myddfai, Mr Emmet Takes a Walk and Kommilitonen!

Pountney was born in Oxford and was a chorister at St John's College, Cambridge (1956-61). He was then educated near Oxford at Radley College (1961-66), and then returned to St John's College, Cambridge to read his degree.

His first major breakthrough came in 1972 with his production of Káťa Kabanová for the Wexford Festival. From 1975 to 1980, he was the Director of Productions at Scottish Opera, and, from 1982 to 1993, Director of Productions at English National Opera, where he directed over twenty operas. From 1993 to 2004, he worked as a free-lance director at the Zurich Opera, the Vienna State Opera, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and other houses in America, Japan, and the United Kingdom. He has also directed at De Nederlandse Opera and Opera Australia. In December 2003 he became the Intendant of the Bregenz Festival, a post he held until 2014. In April 2011 he was named head of the Welsh National Opera with his appointment as chief executive and artistic director.

He has translated opera librettos into English from Russian, Czech, German, and Italian.

He wrote the libretto for and directed Elena Langer's opera Figaro Gets a Divorce, which was premiered at the Welsh National Opera in February 2016. To great critical acclaim he directed Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini at La Scala Opera House, Milan in 2018. Later that year at Strasbourg he directed works by Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg, Das Mahagonny Songspiel, Pierrot Lunaire and Die 7 Todsunden.




[Moshinsky continuing]:   The thing is not to double-book yourself.  The difficult thing is not to be at this very moment in two places at the same time.

BD:   [With a gentle nudge]  Don’t singers do that?

Moshinsky:   [Smiles]  The singers constantly do that.  It’s like an occupational hazard, and I understand it perfectly.  It comes out of insecurity.  It comes out of a desire to always be on the go.

BD:   What can you say to a singer who will do your production here, and also has something else going that meshes?

Moshinsky:   It depends on the singer.  Some singers actually can’t concentrate.  I’ve dealt with people who are unproducible because all they do is fly in at the last minute.  They can’t absorb the mood of a particular production, and the whole thing turns out to be a bit of a disaster.

BD:   Don’t they learn after three, or four, or five, or ten, or fifteen of these disasters?

Moshinsky:   No, not necessarily.  They would rather keep busy, and they think what is wrong is that you, the producer, were wrong for them.  The opera world is quite complicated because there is a series of intermeshing circuits that singers and producers do.  It’s quite possible for a well-known singer to do a full year of The Tales of Hoffmann.  You could go through about eight productions of it that are roughly the same.  The period may be the difference, whatever it is, but essentially the geography of it is the same, and they carry the seed of that production where they learned it first into every other production.  That’s one of the hazards of the profession.  There’s a kind of blandness of product, a kind of global pride, but each event is not special.
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BD:   Do you find yourself having to make singers unlearn how they did it the last time?

Moshinsky:   Sometimes you can’t.  Sometimes there’s only one way.  In the Tannhäuser I did, the singer of the title part had only one way of getting through that role in terms of where he put his feet, and where he looked, and the weight of the harp he could or could not hold to get through it.  We didn’t want a dreadful cutout harp, anyway.  But there was one way he discovered at the age of something like thirty-five, that he could sing Tannhäuser!  It’s a fine voice, a very fine voice, but the way he gets through the role is one way.  It’s not an unintelligent way, but it’s only the one way, because in order to last through the third act, he’s got to do it that way.

BD:   Has Wagner asked too much of his singers?  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at right, see my interviews with Judith Blegen, and William Wildermann (who sing Samuel).]

Moshinsky:   [Knowingly]  The singer who sang Tristan died after the first performance.  It’s very difficult to find performances of Wagner that are actually sung rather than going towards shouting or barking.  They’re very rare.

BD:   Is that Wagner’s fault?

Moshinsky:   I suspect it may well be!  You say it’s Wagner’s fault, but a lot of the hype of Wagner comes from how much he demands out of everyone.  The extremity of the singing is so high-pitched, unless you’re up to it imaginatively.  Some people can get the notes, but they don’t have the neurosis to carry it.  You have to have this particular kind of neurosis for Wagner to make it exciting.

BD:   Does it ever make some singers more successful if they’re a little bit neurotic themselves?
 
Moshinsky:   Absolutely!  It’s a terrible thing, and it depends on the Wagner opera.  In Mastersingers you can be quite healthy, which is an exception, and Lohengrin, curiously enough, doesn’t make the same demands.  Lohengrin has a mysterious even line to it, but once you get onto Tannhäuser and Tristan, the actual effort of performing it makes the performer undergo a kind of neurotic thing, unless they have a capacity for detachment and performing at the same time.  Only very experienced performers — like Birgit Nilsson, or Roberta Knie, or Jon Vickers who specialize in it — are able to get professionally neurotic and separate it.  They can become neurotic for the evening!  [Both laugh]

BD:   I’ve often asked singers how long it takes to get out of a character, and some singers say it’s ten minutes, and others admit it’s a day-and-a-half.

Moshinsky:   It’s astonishing.  One of the really great singing-actresses is Elisabeth Söderström.  She’s a great favorite in England and Europe, and her performances are just phenomenal, but they do take a lot out of her.  They’re legendary in that way.  I don’t think Joan Sutherland’s involvement in actually singing is less than Elisabeth Söderström’s but I don’t think she demands of herself a complete personal identification with the character.  She can only sing by that slight mental detachment, and that’s what gives it its particular beauty.  That’s why she’s had such a long career.  Of course, what made her career was singing ‘Let the Bright Seraphim’ in 1958 when Jon Vickers first sang the Handel Samson.  That was the turning point of her career, actually.  That was what brought the management to her, and the next year she was Lucia.  It may happen for June Anderson too, I suspect.  We’ll see.

BD:   She’s scheduled for two or three performances of Lucia here next year.

Moshinsky:   She’ll be phenomenal.
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BD   In America, how conscious do you think people are of directors?

Moshinsky:   It depends on whether you’re hitting them in the face with it.  If you go to the Zeffirelli Bohème at the Met, there’s this huge monstrous production.  I haven’t seen it, even on the television, but I’ve been told about it and I’ve seen photographs.  There’s this huge monstrous thing that dwarfs all the singers, even the main singers.  Then people say they’re going to Zeffirelli’s Bohème, and of course they remember Zeffirelli’s this, and Visconti’s that, and there’s a big hubbub about whether it should be that way.  

BD:   Should it be the director’s opera, or should it be the composer’s opera?

Moshinsky:   Ideally it should be together.  The director should be interpreting the composer.

BD:   Then we get the people who applaud the sets.

Moshinsky:   Yes, and this is a very American thing from my point of view.  I hadn’t come across it till I came to America.  That is where people want the tableau.  They have great enjoyment in tableaux and I think that’s fine, but...

BD:   A lot of it is the shock.  You go into the theater, and you hear the overture, and then with the first notes of the opening scene the curtain goes up, and here’s this mammoth beautiful color, and lights, and movement, and costumes, and everything.  It hits you in the face, and you applaud.
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Moshinsky:   That’s all right if you’re meant to enjoy it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s a signal that the audience is going with what’s going on, but if the level by which the sets are thrown at the audience is only to get the applause, then you’re in trouble if that’s all that’s going is the applause for the set.

BD:   For many years, even up into the 1950s, operatic stage settings were a table, and a tree, and a backdrop.  The next act was a different backdrop, a different table and maybe a fountain instead of the tree.  Now we’re getting huge solid sets.

Moshinsky:   It’s the movies really, isn’t it?  Also it’s a peculiar Met-Salzburg style, and it’s got to do with the fact that they’re huge stages, and those stages demand that you have all of Seville there.

BD:   But they’re so different.  The Salzburg stage is six miles wide, and the Met stage is six miles high!

Moshinsky:   [Laughs]  That’s right.  But the thing is that after the War, these big monstrous stages actually demanded that kind of production, which is a pity.

BD:   In America we have big houses.  [Vis-à-vis the video shown at left, see my interviews with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, and Carlo Rizzi.]

Moshinsky:   You do!

BD:   We don’t have the small houses that you have in Europe.

Moshinsky:   People say that Covent Garden is a small house, but in England it’s considered the grandest theater in London.

BD:   How many does it seat?

Moshinsky:   It’s about 2,300.

BD:   We’re almost twice that size [3,600 in Chicago, and 4,000 at the Met].

Moshinsky:   It’s considered sort of monumental.  I came to the Chicago Lyric Opera and thought, “My God!”  But the funny thing is that it’s a very well-designed theater, and the public who goes to it regularly doesn’t think it’s too big.  For them, it’s their frame of reference.  I should imagine when you go to another theater, you think it’s too small.

BD:   A lot of Europeans over-sing here.  They feel that they have to scream to fill the hall, because they look out there and see such a huge space to fill, but they don’t.

Moshinsky:   Is that one of the problems?  It’s a terrifying site from the stage.

BD:   This is something you, as the director, can tell them.  I don’t know if you’ll convince them, but you can tell them that they don’t have to scream.  The house is good acoustically.  Most of the singers I’ve talked to say that.

Moshinsky:   Yes, the acoustics are very good.  It’s very good pictorially, too.  I’ve been trying to work out what that is, because, for some reason, the way that the proscenium opening creates these wonderful pictures, and you really get a very good perspective on the picture.  Everything looks rather good on that stage.

BD:   I think partly it’s because you don’t have those side-boxes which most opera houses have.  [Photos of the interior of the Civic Opera House can be seen HERE.]

Moshinsky:   I think you’re right.

BD:   When you’re designing sets for a theater, do you design it for that specific theater, knowing full well that there’ll be some things that half the audience won’t see?

Moshinsky:   Oh, no!  When you design it for that theater, you work out what the sightlines are.  The first thing that happens on a design plan is that you get the height, and lines are drawn of where the sight-lines are, where the top balcony is, and where the sides are.  Usually you end up with a triangle in the middle of the stage where the central action can be.  The real thing at Covent Garden is to bring the action forward.  The further you bring the action forward, the audience surrounds it like a thrust stage.  The thing we did in the Grimes was to build the stage out over the orchestra pit so that it became a thrust.  The audience surrounded the action, and it got that kind of interplay.  But it’s different here.  You design for the picture.  The real problem here in terms of sight-line is the high part.  It’s so high that you can’t see the back of the stage.  What we’re doing with the Handel Samson is the pattern on the floor that is made as interesting as looking it on from front on.

BD:   From the balconies you don’t see ceiling and tops of things.

Moshinsky:   That’s right. You don’t see much at all, I’m afraid, but I’m told people are used to it.

BD:   They can see quite a bit.  But there are really no bad seats in that house.

Moshinsky:   No, everyone’s got a clear view.

BD:   Some places used to stamp the tickets ‘obstructed view’ or ‘restricted view’.

Moshinsky:   Yes, they do that at Covent Garden when you are sitting behind a pillar!

BD:   At the Met those side-boxes way up at the top have desks, and they give you the score to follow.

Moshinsky:   Yes!  It’s just a matter of devotion, and worshiping at the shrine of opera!  [Both laugh]

BD:   Do you worship at the shrine of opera?

Moshinsky:   No!  No, I don’t.

BD:   Do you worship at the shrine of television?

Moshinsky:   No, no, no.  I don’t take it so seriously.

BD:   What about plays?  Do you worship at the shrine of Olivier?

Moshinsky:   No, I don’t.  There are lots of great people with a great deal to offer, but you have to be able to step back.  One has to work very hard when you’re in the profession to remain fresh, and to actually see it as a person who is an enthusiast for it.  You’ve got to put yourself in that frame of mind, or else you get dull.

BD:   We hope that all your productions keep the enthusiasm.  I’m looking forward to the Samson very much.  I’ve heard good reports from my spies.

Moshinsky:   [Laughs]  Your spies, yes!  We haven’t done a full run-through yet.

BD:   Oh, I thought you had a piano-dress rehearsal.

Moshinsky:   We had a piano-dress on Sunday, but we had to stop and start in order to get it technically right.  So we haven’t really been able to just let it run.

BD:   Are you one of these who believes that bad rehearsal means a good performance?

Moshinsky:   No, I just think that if it’s a bad rehearsal, it’s a bad rehearsal.

BD:   Maybe something miraculously will happen and the performance will go well?

Moshinsky:   Yes, usually something.  Touch wood, the audience makes that happen, and there is that particular tension if the performers are seasoned and know how to handle it.  That’s what creates the thing.  A rehearsal is never like a performance, because a rehearsal is really for yourself.  The performance is for the public, so there’s a big difference.

BD:   Is it almost like you have a mirror there in the front, and then the mirror disappears?

Moshinsky:   No, you have people listening.  It’s like having a conversation.  It’s different being by yourself and being with people.  The presence of people is quite different.  Rehearsals are quite different in feel.  Even though people are doing identical things, it’s different because their aim isn’t communication.  Their aim is their own art.

BD:   Thank you so very much for all of your work, and for this conversation.

Moshinsky:   It was very interesting for me.  Thank you.


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See my interviews with Alexandru Agache, and Robert Lloyd



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© 1985 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on November 7, 1985.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1991, 1996, and 1997.  This transcription was made in 2025, and posted on this website at that time.  My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests.  He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago.  You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.