KASPER HOLTEN
STAGE DIRECTOR
"Governments in Europe are struggling to balance budgets. My hope is that we will develop towards a healthy mix of different income streams: Public subsidy, philanthropy, box office and commercial."
London, 09. 02. 2013
A star that has undoubtedly risen and will shine brightly in the lives of opera lovers and singers alike for many years to come, Kasper Holten is a man who treats the traditional approach and the revolutionary approach with an equal amount of respect, yielding very engaging works of art, whether on stage or on screen. It must be noted that Kasper's success comes at a young age where most are still up and coming and yet it is clear that Kasper maintains a modesty towards his art, giving it its due respect and therefore proving time and again that there is none more deserving of the position that he holds and none better to be entrusted with the tasks at hand.
By @kassandra_dimopoulou_official
You were the youngest person to run a European Opera House. Of course, “young” is relative and it is a word that the previous generation wants to expand as much as possible, in order to feel for ever young themselves. Anyway, for this alone, you are a kind of hero for many young artists. How did this great responsibility affect your life and, most importantly and of interest for all young artists: So, how does one convince the older generation to trust us?
In general, I would be wary about putting too much importance on labels like ‘young’ or ‘old’. Sometimes, very experienced, mature artists can offer readings and insights that are very fresh and feel ‘young’, and sometimes the young can be the most conservative at heart. But having said that, there will always be a need for fresh ideas to be applied to the world and to the arts, and so we need the young to provoke us to move forward. I have always enjoyed a kind of special attention because I was very young, but sometimes that adds a lot of pressure also. And in any case, I feel that age is not always relevant. I felt 70 when I was 14. Who knows what I will feel like when I am 70. All you can try to do is to be honest, and meet any given piece with your own fears, hopes, instincts, invest yourself in a genuine meeting with the piece and try to express whatever comes out of that meeting. All else is really about vanity, when you start thinking about wanting to be young or not young or whatever. Honesty and courage is what matters, and then it must be for others to value the ideas or not. In many ways, I feel somehow there is even too much trust placed in youth these days. There is a tendency to forget the benefits of experience, and certainly I have learned a lot from working as assistant alongside experienced directors. We live in a time where we need to trust risk-taking and courage and fight routine, safetynets and unbridled commercialism, that is more important than young or old.
Why did you choose to be an opera stage director? How did this start and what was the turning point that made you decide it?
I loved opera since I was ten. I think it inspired me because it had a language for all the things in life I felt difficult to grasp or express myself about – emotions, fears, hopes – and I loved the combination of all the art forms into one. It was a dream for me to direct opera from very early in life, but I had not dared hope it would actually happen. I thought I would be a banker like most of my family. When I was 18, I started at University, but chose comparative literature rather than economics. And I decided to give my dream a try and started working as a volunteer and assistant for directors I admired. Having entered the incredible world of the opera house back stage, I never came out again. And I have been extremely lucky, to work with and learn from great people, and to be given chances from early on. If somebody had told me at 18 what would happen in the next 20 years, I would just have laughed in disbelief.
You come from Denmark. Is there a strong opera tradition? How is the opera world in your home land?
There is a strong tradition, especially for the German late romantic music, Wagner and Strauss, where we have produced many world-class singers, and also for contemporary music. Opera had a big boost in Denmark in the 90s when Elaine Padmore led the Royal Danish Opera, and I was lucky enough to be able to take over from her and further develop the art form in Denmark, when we were presented with the incredible gift of a brand new opera house. To have had the privilege of opening the opera house in Copenhagen in 2005 is something I will never forget.
Nowadays the opera world is facing a severe financial problems. As a business, opera has failed. Why did this happen in your opinion and is there a way to save it?
When opera was invented, it was invented as a luxury, nobody thought of cost/benefit. Opera has always been supported – by Royals, by wealthy individuals and sponsors, or by the state. In Europe the public support for opera has been extremely important for enabling risk-taking and innovation through the history of opera, but it is also clear that the financial model is changing as governments in Europe are struggling to balance budgets. My hope is that we will develop towards a healthy mix of different income streams: Public subsidy, philanthropy, box office and commercial. A mix gives the opera house a more solid model for the future, and it is healthy to have to consider different stakeholders. Without public subsidy the case for experimentation might come under pressure, but without considering the audience and private support, we would lose our raison d’etre. In many ways, we have already in London developed a business model that includes this mix, quite uniquely for the world, and this gives great value for the investment in opera, I think. I think the world will look to our business model in future years, and it is my hope that the British government will have the courage to maintain this model.
What is your personal process when you start working on a new opera?
Read, listen, think and feel. The important thing is not to apply pre-conceived ideas or to always apply the same style of work, but to meet the piece and be honest about why it fascinates you – and then choose your aesthetics, your concept etc. I have done productions in period costumes, others in modern costumes, and yet others in a timeless concept. It should not be about my style, but about the piece. What is important however is to try and really consider the piece. To avoid all the prejudices we might have about the work, and the tradition, and to search for what is really in the score and the libretto, and try to honestly meet and interpret that. I personally believe an interpretation must always be personal. Not because it should be about me, but because artistic enterprise is always about trying to express something personal. The big masterpieces can mean many different things, and you have to make choices and focus on some aspects – otherwise you just end up with nothing.
How do you make the singers understand a character? And if you see a character differently than your singer does, how do you find a way to deal with it, without changing the relationships between the characters in your version of the story?
Singers are different, and there is no uniform way. Some singers will be inspired by a lot of discussion, others by trying out things physically. I come with a basic framework for them to work within, but I want them to fill it with their presence, instincts and ideas. The interesting thing about opera is that it is teamwork, so I don’t try to force people – it wouldn’t produce very good results anyway – but to listen and let our ideas influence each other and develop something that is hopefully more than the sum of the two of us. But I do find that most singers are very curious and open and want to be inspired and stimulated. In most cases, it is what I love more than anything: Being in the rehearsal room, trying out things and finding something that feels honest and right for them and for me.
You are a stage director as well as a film director (latest film: “Juan”, based on Mozart's opera “Don Giovanni”). Is the challenge of directing different on stage and on set and how?
Very! For a stage production, you help the singers develop through a rehearsal period until a final result where you must let go and have built something they can take over. With film, you only do each scene for one single day, and you have to get as much material from the singers as possible on that day, so you have options in the editing room. And in the editing room is where you really create rythm, architecture and story. In a way, singers have to trust you much more in the filming process, because the real work happens after they have left. Both processes are extremely fascinating, but very different.
"Eugene Onegin" is your new production in ROH. What is your connecting point to this opera? Which character is the one that guides you?
It is very easy to like Tatyana. I wanted to make both Tatyana and Onegin more complex characters, as they are in Pushkin. And it was important for me that it is a real love story, a story of two soul mates who end up never being together. That is the tragedy of this wonderful piece. My other central starting point is the fact that both novel and score feel so melancholic, which in a way is surprising for an opera which is so much about youth. In Pushkin, this is because it is filtered through a third person narrator, who already knows that it will end tragically. In Tchaikovsky’s opera, the music adds the sense of melancholy and impending loss from the first bar. I took this as an inspiration to work with the idea of flashback: The mature Onegin and Tatyana meeting up and going back on a journey together through memories – or rather through their interpretation of what happened. I think it is a fundamental human thing that we try to understand ourselves and create identity through interpreting the narrative that we put together about our own lives in our minds, and I wanted this to be at the core of the production.
Often in opera, the characters and their thoughts are being revealed, not in their words, but in the composer's music. Like in life, thoughts and words, or words and actions, don't often match and people hear and understand different things. In EO, we see the 2 main characters (Tatyana and Eugene) and their doubles co-existing on stage. Was your idea to make the audience “hear”what you heard in Tschaikowsky's music? In “Juan”, I noticed the same approach, this time by changing the text and revealing the sub- text of the characters. Are you trying to reveal the secrets of the characters' souls, according to what you hear in them, or are you trying to translate the music, visually, in a world that people are too distracted to hear?
I guess you could say that, yes. I want to make physical what I hear in the music, and try to focus the attention of the audience on certain aspects of the piece – no production can ever embrace every aspect of a masterpiece, so I try to make the audience listen and look in a certain way to reveal certain aspects of the piece and create focus. And the inspiration for this almost always comes from the music, not the text. But it is also because I am fascinated with how opera gives us a language to describe our existence which is so much more complex than words alone. Often, we want to describe the world in ways that are rational, linear, with causality. But that is so often not how the world feels. I would love for my productions to try and describe a much more complex world, where you experience things on many levels.
The MET has performances all over the world “in a theatre near you”; RADA Film is producing big live broad castings on TV; new, exciting films based on operas are being born. Even live shows on TV are creating a very modern and virtual idea around opera. Opera is mixing up with different media and arts. I personally think, this is natural and great. And yet, going to the opera, in the theatre is always an experience that is unique and incomparable. Now, how do we (the insiders) make people know that? For many of them, opera can be just a click away, a free of charge push of a button, or a switch of a channel, whereas going to the theater is a complicated, expensive and often disappointing an experience?
I think opera in cinema is wonderful, as it makes people all over the world able to take part in world class performances by singers and conductors otherwise restricted to fewer people. And I hope that it will be easier for new audiences to take a chance on opera in the cinema. The biggest enemy for opera is – I think – the prejudice of people who have never actually seen it. But we should never forget to tell audiences that it can never replace the experience of hearing and seeing an opera live in the theatre. The physicality of a live opera is something that I think people would never want to miss, no matter how exciting and accessible opera in cinema is. But we should remember to always promote the live performances through the other channels, so people do not miss out on this incredible thing of experiencing an opera live.
Being a young director myself, before the premiere of my very first opera, I went terrified to a great Greek stage director and good friend of mine for advice. I asked him: “When does this unbearable insecurity go away”? He answered me: “Never. Welcome to the stage director's world”. Do you feel the same when you see your idea out of your head, on stage, in the hands of other people, or do you manage to have the control?
To be a director, I think you will always have to live with a certain mix of megalomania – and inferiority complex. You want to express something to the world, but it is so personal, you are so much at risk yourself, and the critics do not just write about your work, but really about a bit of your soul, a child of yours. It can feel very brutal to have an audience for a show for the first time – to move from the comfort of rehearsals where you can play and have fun and feel safe to people watching it and judging it. But on the other hand, the only thing you want is of course for people to see it, to share it with as many people as possible. I think the fear comes from working on something for which there are never any objective criteria. You can never know whether it is good enough – there is only taste, and people reacting to it in different ways. And so, you can, I think, never escape the feeling of being a bluff, because in a way you are a bluff – just doing something that you hope is convincing and moving, but without ever having definite answers. So I would join in: Welcome to a lifetime of insecurity – but also of having the best job in the world!
Freedom is a relative thing. Do you feel free to express yourself completely and as you wish through your art? Is it any different now that you are in a very important position in the opera world or has it always been the same for you?
Yes, I do feel free when I am in the rehearsal room, if the people I work with are skilled and open minded. You can of course as a director be limited in your work by a singer who does not have the technical skills to do what you want, or who for other reasons – vocal problems, nerves – does not deliver what you know he/she can do. But basically, I feel free to express my ideas. However, freedom cannot and should not exist on its own. It can only exist if we handle it as a big responsibility, and so if freedom is not paired with honesty but with vanity, it becomes arrogance. I hope I always remember that I do what I do not to impress people, but to move them and share some honest emotions and thoughts and fears with them. Real freedom is for me not to be independent of others, but precisely to co-exist with others in an open, courageous and honest manner.
People take less risks in life than before. This is true in music as well as in singing. Do you encourage your singers to take risks? To go further than the security of the thought: “what will people think”?
We must take risks, but I think the responsibility is more on the institutions and on the society around us than on the individual young singers. A young artist should of course be brave, but should also be careful in a world where talent sometimes gets celebrated much too much too soon and gets catapulted out of proportion only to then quickly be drawn down again. I would advise young artists to find people they trust to advise them. But as a society it would be great if we could encourage more risk-taking. We live in a time that focuses very much on short term success. Once, after a new commission, I read a critic writing: «This is not a successful opera, so why did they waste money on it.» That is not how it works. There are no definitive answers, and not to take risks is the biggest risk of all for us.
The audience mirrors everything and feels everything- in my opinion. Sometimes, artists that the audience adores, stay in the shadow, because some other people who don't sit in the audience stop them, for different reasons. This has always been a battle and it is getting worse and worse. What would you, being a very young and successful artist, advise a young artist, knowing this fact?
I am honored that you still call me young, when my 40th birthday is approaching. The problem of navigating in a world where many people will tell you different things is a very central one, not just for young artists, but maybe especially so for them. My only advice is to seek out advisors that you trust, find out whose advice makes sense to you, and then filter all the many, many other opinions that you will hear – otherwise you lose all sense of orientation and direction.
Art is...
... a way to express ourselves about the world and our existence in a way that truly mirrors and interprets life, much more than the seemingly rational, linear readings of the world that is so often expressed around us.
By @kassandra_dimopoulou_official
You were the youngest person to run a European Opera House. Of course, “young” is relative and it is a word that the previous generation wants to expand as much as possible, in order to feel for ever young themselves. Anyway, for this alone, you are a kind of hero for many young artists. How did this great responsibility affect your life and, most importantly and of interest for all young artists: So, how does one convince the older generation to trust us?
In general, I would be wary about putting too much importance on labels like ‘young’ or ‘old’. Sometimes, very experienced, mature artists can offer readings and insights that are very fresh and feel ‘young’, and sometimes the young can be the most conservative at heart. But having said that, there will always be a need for fresh ideas to be applied to the world and to the arts, and so we need the young to provoke us to move forward. I have always enjoyed a kind of special attention because I was very young, but sometimes that adds a lot of pressure also. And in any case, I feel that age is not always relevant. I felt 70 when I was 14. Who knows what I will feel like when I am 70. All you can try to do is to be honest, and meet any given piece with your own fears, hopes, instincts, invest yourself in a genuine meeting with the piece and try to express whatever comes out of that meeting. All else is really about vanity, when you start thinking about wanting to be young or not young or whatever. Honesty and courage is what matters, and then it must be for others to value the ideas or not. In many ways, I feel somehow there is even too much trust placed in youth these days. There is a tendency to forget the benefits of experience, and certainly I have learned a lot from working as assistant alongside experienced directors. We live in a time where we need to trust risk-taking and courage and fight routine, safetynets and unbridled commercialism, that is more important than young or old.
Why did you choose to be an opera stage director? How did this start and what was the turning point that made you decide it?
I loved opera since I was ten. I think it inspired me because it had a language for all the things in life I felt difficult to grasp or express myself about – emotions, fears, hopes – and I loved the combination of all the art forms into one. It was a dream for me to direct opera from very early in life, but I had not dared hope it would actually happen. I thought I would be a banker like most of my family. When I was 18, I started at University, but chose comparative literature rather than economics. And I decided to give my dream a try and started working as a volunteer and assistant for directors I admired. Having entered the incredible world of the opera house back stage, I never came out again. And I have been extremely lucky, to work with and learn from great people, and to be given chances from early on. If somebody had told me at 18 what would happen in the next 20 years, I would just have laughed in disbelief.
You come from Denmark. Is there a strong opera tradition? How is the opera world in your home land?
There is a strong tradition, especially for the German late romantic music, Wagner and Strauss, where we have produced many world-class singers, and also for contemporary music. Opera had a big boost in Denmark in the 90s when Elaine Padmore led the Royal Danish Opera, and I was lucky enough to be able to take over from her and further develop the art form in Denmark, when we were presented with the incredible gift of a brand new opera house. To have had the privilege of opening the opera house in Copenhagen in 2005 is something I will never forget.
Nowadays the opera world is facing a severe financial problems. As a business, opera has failed. Why did this happen in your opinion and is there a way to save it?
When opera was invented, it was invented as a luxury, nobody thought of cost/benefit. Opera has always been supported – by Royals, by wealthy individuals and sponsors, or by the state. In Europe the public support for opera has been extremely important for enabling risk-taking and innovation through the history of opera, but it is also clear that the financial model is changing as governments in Europe are struggling to balance budgets. My hope is that we will develop towards a healthy mix of different income streams: Public subsidy, philanthropy, box office and commercial. A mix gives the opera house a more solid model for the future, and it is healthy to have to consider different stakeholders. Without public subsidy the case for experimentation might come under pressure, but without considering the audience and private support, we would lose our raison d’etre. In many ways, we have already in London developed a business model that includes this mix, quite uniquely for the world, and this gives great value for the investment in opera, I think. I think the world will look to our business model in future years, and it is my hope that the British government will have the courage to maintain this model.
What is your personal process when you start working on a new opera?
Read, listen, think and feel. The important thing is not to apply pre-conceived ideas or to always apply the same style of work, but to meet the piece and be honest about why it fascinates you – and then choose your aesthetics, your concept etc. I have done productions in period costumes, others in modern costumes, and yet others in a timeless concept. It should not be about my style, but about the piece. What is important however is to try and really consider the piece. To avoid all the prejudices we might have about the work, and the tradition, and to search for what is really in the score and the libretto, and try to honestly meet and interpret that. I personally believe an interpretation must always be personal. Not because it should be about me, but because artistic enterprise is always about trying to express something personal. The big masterpieces can mean many different things, and you have to make choices and focus on some aspects – otherwise you just end up with nothing.
How do you make the singers understand a character? And if you see a character differently than your singer does, how do you find a way to deal with it, without changing the relationships between the characters in your version of the story?
Singers are different, and there is no uniform way. Some singers will be inspired by a lot of discussion, others by trying out things physically. I come with a basic framework for them to work within, but I want them to fill it with their presence, instincts and ideas. The interesting thing about opera is that it is teamwork, so I don’t try to force people – it wouldn’t produce very good results anyway – but to listen and let our ideas influence each other and develop something that is hopefully more than the sum of the two of us. But I do find that most singers are very curious and open and want to be inspired and stimulated. In most cases, it is what I love more than anything: Being in the rehearsal room, trying out things and finding something that feels honest and right for them and for me.
You are a stage director as well as a film director (latest film: “Juan”, based on Mozart's opera “Don Giovanni”). Is the challenge of directing different on stage and on set and how?
Very! For a stage production, you help the singers develop through a rehearsal period until a final result where you must let go and have built something they can take over. With film, you only do each scene for one single day, and you have to get as much material from the singers as possible on that day, so you have options in the editing room. And in the editing room is where you really create rythm, architecture and story. In a way, singers have to trust you much more in the filming process, because the real work happens after they have left. Both processes are extremely fascinating, but very different.
"Eugene Onegin" is your new production in ROH. What is your connecting point to this opera? Which character is the one that guides you?
It is very easy to like Tatyana. I wanted to make both Tatyana and Onegin more complex characters, as they are in Pushkin. And it was important for me that it is a real love story, a story of two soul mates who end up never being together. That is the tragedy of this wonderful piece. My other central starting point is the fact that both novel and score feel so melancholic, which in a way is surprising for an opera which is so much about youth. In Pushkin, this is because it is filtered through a third person narrator, who already knows that it will end tragically. In Tchaikovsky’s opera, the music adds the sense of melancholy and impending loss from the first bar. I took this as an inspiration to work with the idea of flashback: The mature Onegin and Tatyana meeting up and going back on a journey together through memories – or rather through their interpretation of what happened. I think it is a fundamental human thing that we try to understand ourselves and create identity through interpreting the narrative that we put together about our own lives in our minds, and I wanted this to be at the core of the production.
Often in opera, the characters and their thoughts are being revealed, not in their words, but in the composer's music. Like in life, thoughts and words, or words and actions, don't often match and people hear and understand different things. In EO, we see the 2 main characters (Tatyana and Eugene) and their doubles co-existing on stage. Was your idea to make the audience “hear”what you heard in Tschaikowsky's music? In “Juan”, I noticed the same approach, this time by changing the text and revealing the sub- text of the characters. Are you trying to reveal the secrets of the characters' souls, according to what you hear in them, or are you trying to translate the music, visually, in a world that people are too distracted to hear?
I guess you could say that, yes. I want to make physical what I hear in the music, and try to focus the attention of the audience on certain aspects of the piece – no production can ever embrace every aspect of a masterpiece, so I try to make the audience listen and look in a certain way to reveal certain aspects of the piece and create focus. And the inspiration for this almost always comes from the music, not the text. But it is also because I am fascinated with how opera gives us a language to describe our existence which is so much more complex than words alone. Often, we want to describe the world in ways that are rational, linear, with causality. But that is so often not how the world feels. I would love for my productions to try and describe a much more complex world, where you experience things on many levels.
The MET has performances all over the world “in a theatre near you”; RADA Film is producing big live broad castings on TV; new, exciting films based on operas are being born. Even live shows on TV are creating a very modern and virtual idea around opera. Opera is mixing up with different media and arts. I personally think, this is natural and great. And yet, going to the opera, in the theatre is always an experience that is unique and incomparable. Now, how do we (the insiders) make people know that? For many of them, opera can be just a click away, a free of charge push of a button, or a switch of a channel, whereas going to the theater is a complicated, expensive and often disappointing an experience?
I think opera in cinema is wonderful, as it makes people all over the world able to take part in world class performances by singers and conductors otherwise restricted to fewer people. And I hope that it will be easier for new audiences to take a chance on opera in the cinema. The biggest enemy for opera is – I think – the prejudice of people who have never actually seen it. But we should never forget to tell audiences that it can never replace the experience of hearing and seeing an opera live in the theatre. The physicality of a live opera is something that I think people would never want to miss, no matter how exciting and accessible opera in cinema is. But we should remember to always promote the live performances through the other channels, so people do not miss out on this incredible thing of experiencing an opera live.
Being a young director myself, before the premiere of my very first opera, I went terrified to a great Greek stage director and good friend of mine for advice. I asked him: “When does this unbearable insecurity go away”? He answered me: “Never. Welcome to the stage director's world”. Do you feel the same when you see your idea out of your head, on stage, in the hands of other people, or do you manage to have the control?
To be a director, I think you will always have to live with a certain mix of megalomania – and inferiority complex. You want to express something to the world, but it is so personal, you are so much at risk yourself, and the critics do not just write about your work, but really about a bit of your soul, a child of yours. It can feel very brutal to have an audience for a show for the first time – to move from the comfort of rehearsals where you can play and have fun and feel safe to people watching it and judging it. But on the other hand, the only thing you want is of course for people to see it, to share it with as many people as possible. I think the fear comes from working on something for which there are never any objective criteria. You can never know whether it is good enough – there is only taste, and people reacting to it in different ways. And so, you can, I think, never escape the feeling of being a bluff, because in a way you are a bluff – just doing something that you hope is convincing and moving, but without ever having definite answers. So I would join in: Welcome to a lifetime of insecurity – but also of having the best job in the world!
Freedom is a relative thing. Do you feel free to express yourself completely and as you wish through your art? Is it any different now that you are in a very important position in the opera world or has it always been the same for you?
Yes, I do feel free when I am in the rehearsal room, if the people I work with are skilled and open minded. You can of course as a director be limited in your work by a singer who does not have the technical skills to do what you want, or who for other reasons – vocal problems, nerves – does not deliver what you know he/she can do. But basically, I feel free to express my ideas. However, freedom cannot and should not exist on its own. It can only exist if we handle it as a big responsibility, and so if freedom is not paired with honesty but with vanity, it becomes arrogance. I hope I always remember that I do what I do not to impress people, but to move them and share some honest emotions and thoughts and fears with them. Real freedom is for me not to be independent of others, but precisely to co-exist with others in an open, courageous and honest manner.
People take less risks in life than before. This is true in music as well as in singing. Do you encourage your singers to take risks? To go further than the security of the thought: “what will people think”?
We must take risks, but I think the responsibility is more on the institutions and on the society around us than on the individual young singers. A young artist should of course be brave, but should also be careful in a world where talent sometimes gets celebrated much too much too soon and gets catapulted out of proportion only to then quickly be drawn down again. I would advise young artists to find people they trust to advise them. But as a society it would be great if we could encourage more risk-taking. We live in a time that focuses very much on short term success. Once, after a new commission, I read a critic writing: «This is not a successful opera, so why did they waste money on it.» That is not how it works. There are no definitive answers, and not to take risks is the biggest risk of all for us.
The audience mirrors everything and feels everything- in my opinion. Sometimes, artists that the audience adores, stay in the shadow, because some other people who don't sit in the audience stop them, for different reasons. This has always been a battle and it is getting worse and worse. What would you, being a very young and successful artist, advise a young artist, knowing this fact?
I am honored that you still call me young, when my 40th birthday is approaching. The problem of navigating in a world where many people will tell you different things is a very central one, not just for young artists, but maybe especially so for them. My only advice is to seek out advisors that you trust, find out whose advice makes sense to you, and then filter all the many, many other opinions that you will hear – otherwise you lose all sense of orientation and direction.
Art is...
... a way to express ourselves about the world and our existence in a way that truly mirrors and interprets life, much more than the seemingly rational, linear readings of the world that is so often expressed around us.
