With her new production of “Der Rosenkavalier” at Zurich Opera House, director Lydia Steier revisits a work that once challenged and provoked her. In conversation with Kathrin Brunner, she speaks about her long fascination with Gottfried Helnwein’s imagery, her own ambivalent relationship with Strauss’s opera, and the delicate balance between comedy, cruelty, and existential emptiness that runs through the piece.
Lydia Steier, a few years ago you already staged a Rosenkavalier at the Lucerne Theater, and now you are revisiting it anew for Zurich. How did this come about?
The Rosenkavalier in Lucerne was my serious attempt to make friends with this piece. I didn’t like the opera at first; I struggled with all its puffed-up and sugar-coated aspects. In Lucerne, what emerged was a nasty, sardonic interpretation, a study of polite brutalities. The production was quite successful, which of course made me happy. But this time, I want to look at the piece more lovingly, to fall in love with it. Back in 2007, I saw a production of Rosenkavalier in Los Angeles with stage designs by Gottfried Helnwein, when I was working as an assistant director for Achim Freyer’s Ring des Nibelungen. I knew there were many problems with that Rosenkavalier. Ever since, I’ve had the vision of continuing that production with Helnwein’s brilliant, slightly dark, grotesque perspective in my own work. After 18 years, it’s finally happening, and I’m excited to present the result of this fusion to the Zurich audience.
In the concept meeting, you said you were almost obsessed with this Rosenkavalier.
That’s true – just as I’ve been obsessed with Helnwein’s work in general. Back then, as a 27-year-old assistant director, I begged the Los Angeles Opera’s general director, Christopher Koelsch, to arrange a visit to Helnwein’s studio for me. Helnwein was a luminary in Los Angeles; his studio was legendary. In America, he was especially known for his connection with Marilyn Manson, whose image he had strongly influenced. And indeed, the studio visit worked out. Later, I also visited him at his castle in Ireland in the context of another project.
What fascinates you so much about Helnwein’s art?
It’s this incredible friction between childlike, almost naïve fantasy and violence. All of that collides in his art in a perfect way. Irony, humor, and playfulness merge with a layer of sadness. His aesthetic has had a huge impact on my entire artistic career. In my work too, fear and festivity meet; there’s this up-and-down of emotions that creates an existential anxiety and sometimes leads to ecstasy. Where friction exists, tension begins.
With this project you’re taking a journey into your own past, re-writing an artwork. I find that exciting as a process, and it fits with the time travel and virtuoso play with layers of time that Strauss and his librettist Hofmannsthal created in the Rosenkavalier.
This Zurich production is really significant for me, because Los Angeles was a formative experience for me as a director and artist. I’ve known Rosenkavalier since childhood. I was obsessed with Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess in Figaro, so I bought a CD of her as the Marschallin, because the costumes on the cover reminded me of that. But as I said, I didn’t like the music at first. I studied singing and kept trying to make friends with this music, which to me seemed perfumed. I only came to truly appreciate Richard Strauss much later, especially in connection with the stage: his operas only make sense to me when they also have a visual counterpart.
If one knows your work, one can guess that we shouldn’t expect too cutesy a Rosenkavalier from you.
It will certainly look beautiful, but there will also be very sad or violent moments. The comedy must be sharp, direct, and well-shaped. And that is enormously labor-intensive. It’s a completely different kind of directing than with Wagner and his dimensions of time, where characters can simply stand still for a while. In Rosenkavalier, everything must be dynamic, with lightning-fast, playful moments and reactions. Strauss and Hofmannsthal were theater people and had very precise ideas about staging. I don’t know of another score with so many, highly detailed stage directions. Just the so-called pantomime in the third act! One either has to do exactly what is written there or come up with an excellent alternative idea. In any case, one cannot simply ignore these instructions, because they are closely tied to the musical structure – similar to Puccini. I have enormous respect for that.
In rehearsal you once gave the instruction for a scene not to be played “Viennese,” but like in a Tarantino film…
Sometimes you need a contrast to the musical language. Sometimes there is actually more brutality and harshness in the music than one might assume. And the same goes for certain actions of the characters or their motivations. Take the famous rose presentation, for instance – it is somewhat different with us than usual, but justified by the content and also audible in the music: here is this boy, Octavian, who has just been cast off by his lover, the Marschallin. He is hurt, his heart broken, and now he has to play the messenger. Like a lackey, the Marschallin has sent him to Sophie. After everything that has happened so far, he will hardly float in like a proud knight… In our version, there are many such special moments, which are also inspired by our magnificent cast.
Why does the Marschallin push Octavian away at the end of the first act? Is it really only because she suddenly feels old, because of the age difference?
When I walk through the streets here and see these women who are puffed up by plastic surgery, bleached, tanned, and with plumped lips, I’m sure there must come a moment in their lives when they look in the mirror and think: I’ve made myself absurd. The Marschallin is, of course, rich and elegant and has everything she needs. But then she suddenly discovers within herself an inescapable emptiness and falls into a deep hole. And this “band-aid” of a young lover is not enough to console her over the abyss. The piece as a whole is a perfect image of the fear of one’s own nothingness. What happens when I am no longer loved? When I no longer have any value? When I am no longer beautiful – or, like Faninal, when I fear losing my social status? The characters talk and talk, but essentially they are only preoccupied with themselves and alone. In the duets they never sing the same text. They all experience existential loneliness, separation, and loss of identity.
And yet, as the title page says, the opera is a “Comedy for Music.” There is, for example, Ochs, this pompous Jupiter…
In a good comedy every character must have lovable traits. One can turn Ochs into a pure predator, a groper monster, a feminist mega-villain, but that doesn’t interest me. That would be too flat for me. With Günther Groissböck we have the enormous fortune of an actor who can evoke great sympathy in the audience with this role. He has an insane talent for comic ideas and playful precision. He can play the conceited rooster, and yet the audience will like him.
The music, despite Ochs’s amoral behavior, is quite friendly towards him. In the end, however, Ochs is horribly humiliated and, like Verdi’s Falstaff, punished for his audacity.
In the third act, everything turns into a nightmare for Ochs. You definitely feel with him in this macabre staging by Octavian, who deceives him thoroughly. “Da und da und da, da!”– that’s all the otherwise eloquent Ochs can get out. He is completely exposed. That has something unintentionally modern about it: today it’s all about how you present yourself publicly and how you are seen. And conversely, to take revenge on someone, you attack their value as a public figure. But in the piece, the whole thing is immediately downplayed: it’s just a Viennese farce – nothing more, says the Marschallin. For the staging, this means the farcical elements must be so perfectly executed that the depth becomes visible within them. If everything comes across as a little too mannered and benevolent, there are no highs or lows. Working out that contrast – the cheerfulness and the yawning emptiness behind it – is our crucial task here.
You have family ties to Vienna and probably know this Viennese culture all too well, the “Schmäh,” the morbid streak that runs through the piece…
The Viennese have this incredible talent for mourning the past while simultaneously experiencing it. You feel that constantly in Rosenkavalier. The present here is a thoughtful, grieving state. That’s something different from nostalgia – it’s perhaps a kind of lived nostalgia. There’s this poem by Hofmannsthal about transience, where he describes that his ancestors are even in his hair. That’s almost something physical.
How would you describe the world of your Rosenkavalier more closely?
I believe in entertainment, in great spectacle, in the overwhelming power of costumes. The work is a brilliant play, a comedy with profound, heartbreaking moments – not just a conversation piece, but also with big Hollywood moments. Helnwein’s imagery is a clearly structured, coherent world of color. But the eras in the costumes are mixed almost throughout. It’s garish, full of poetry. Through this strong aesthetic framing, we are not in our own world and not mirrored in it, but rather we have built a fantasy world with its own rules, with the logic of a dream – a dream world with absurd elements like a man with a rabbit’s head or a nightmare figure on stilts… We embark on a time journey, beginning in a Helnwein-like but still clearly late-Rococo world of Maria Theresa. In the second act we leap into a somewhat plainer, post-Napoleonic world of the Faninal nouveau riche. In the third act, there is quite a wild mix of modern and Rococo. Timeless, however, is love – an old one dies at the end, and a new one begins.
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The interview was conducted by Kathrin Brunner.
