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Greenaway: All of you are allowed, at the end, not to write a dissertation or talk but to make a film. So I am going to turn that around and I suppose fulfill a double opportunity, because I do make the films and I also get the opportunity to talk about them. Basically what I would really like to do tonight is show you a film which actually was shown to some of you during last year's session when I was still in the process of making it. I remember you were very enthusiastic about it and I was greatly heartened by your enthusiasm, and we went on to complete it. I'll say some things about it to begin with. I believe that opera cannot be filmed. There is something about the idea of one continuous long wide shot with no cuts, no interruptions in order, a particular experience. The whole phenomenon of watching an opera is one single long, wide shot. The frustration, from sitting in an old opera house, using little opera glasses, no close-ups, no changes of perspective. Of course, many, many films have been made about operas which I would say were a good transference of the operatic experience onto film - as soon as you make a cut, of course, you interrupt the continuity, you interrupt the attention span and you break the membrane of that particular relationship which the audience has with one continuous wide shot. About six years ago in Amsterdam I was commissioned to make an opera of my own choice with the national opera company. Amsterdam is not particularly well-endowed with a history of music. I am going to actually challenge anybody in this room to name me a famous Dutch composer. There is one gentleman from the 1780s, Michael Sweelinck, but he actually wrote most of his material in German. He was, however, the basis of contemporary Dutch ideas about a sense of Dutch musicianship. Currently the country is quite well-endowed by a gentlemen called Louis Andriessen who is regarded as Holland's most fully avant-garde composer. The BBC had commissioned at the time of Mozart's death the possibility of five European composers collaborating with directors of their choice to make some homages to Mozart. It wasn't about appreciating Mozart as much as approaching the notion of the Mozart industry and what he stood for. Even now I have forgotten who the other composers were, but Louis Andriessen and myself decided to make something which we called 'M is for Man Movement, Music and Mozart', which some of us watched a couple of days ago. As a result of that collaboration it was suggested that Louis Andriessen and I should work on something new. Much, much earlier, way back in the 1970s, I was deeply fascinated by the death of Anton Webern. It was a strange and mysterious death, during the final years of the American occupation of Austria. One snowy night, it seems Webern was celebrating the birthday of one of his grandchildren, when three shots suddenly rang out and the man lay dying in the snow. He was dead twenty-four hours afterwards. It was a most peculiar, tragic and totally apparently accidental death which killed off one of the major members of the trio of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern which brought forth so much exciting music in the beginning of 20th century. There are lots of theories about his death because nobody could actually believe that it was so peculiarly accidental. There are theories that he recently had converted from Judaism to Christianity and this was a reprisal by some very keen Zionists. There was a suggestion that departing Nazis had a particular antagonism to anybody who subverted the German tradition of music, so Webern's ideas about banality and so could very well have been on the agenda. There was also a suggestion that somehow he had become embroiled in some dubious associations with his son-in-law. There were also some extenuating circumstances surrounding his autopsy. There were many, many questions. I looked at this death from many, many angles and I wanted to make a documentary for the BBC about it, but I found that many other people had been there before, and that also there was too much fiction, too much apocrypha to make something factual. So I wanted to make something fictional. I began to examine the death and found that there are series of interesting clues, but this was also revised in my imagination in 1980. As those of you of my generation well know, 1980 was the year of John Lennon's murder outside the Dakota hotel in New York. I noticed that there were a remarkable number of clues present at the death of John Lennon, exactly the same clues that were present so much earlier at the death of Anton Webern. An examination of a whole series of other strange composers' deaths between 1945 and 1980 produced copycat murders with a strange set of circumstantial clues. At the end I discovered that there were ten identical circumstantial pieces of evidence which united the deaths of all ten of the composers. This obviously could not be an accident. There has to be a conspiracy here. Somebody was out to bump off composers. This became more and more entertaining, also because it has very much to do with the notion of music. The best way to portray this would be in a great piece of musical theater. I pushed and pulled this project around for a long time, and it grew and grew. In the end I didn't want to make one single piece of musical theater for about ten composers but to make ten pieces of musical theater about ten composers. I had so much information that I began to put it together into a very short novel form. This was particularly enthusiastically received by man called Pierre Audi who ran an opera house in Amsterdam. He suggested that it might be an idea to break the whole thing down into ten separate operas and that he would consider the possibility of putting one of these operas on. We finally ended up making an opera called 'Rosa' which was number 5 in a series. Rosa was a Uruguayan composer who died mysteriously in the desert while riding his horse. He had a very fulsome musical education in Europe and New York, but his main ambition in life was to write music for musical westerns. His career was quite successful and his work provoked the interest of other antagonistic and competitive composers… So there are a few people who might have been involved in this assassination. Also, Rosa's family was very much against the idea that he should disgrace his musical education by creating vulgar works to support Hollywood musical westerns. There are lot of theories that he was assassinated by members of his family. And he also had very sado-masochistic relationship with his fiancé…but I'm not going to say much more about it because I am going to present you with this as my talk for tonight. It is ninety minutes long and if I speak for ninety minutes you are going to be here for a long time.
(Greenaway shows Rosa)
Greenaway: So Louis and I worked extensively together beforehand and I think that he had found that the way I write lyrics was sympathetic to the particular way he writes music. I think that worked well with this particular sort of brittle text, it's all exclamation marks but you don't see them. It's made from quotations that you expect from a western situation, and there is I suppose some banality and deliberate vulgarity in the textual information. After he agreed to collaborate with me I gave him this two-hundred page novel which had all the material in it. I very much wanted him to use the lyrics that I deliberately had written but he was also free occasionally to take on other items and lines and phrases and sentences. When he had decided on the lyrics he wanted we would collaborate again. He went away for eighteen months and then came back with the piano score, which we discussed.
Audience: What is the significance of the woman at the end?
Greenaway: In opera there is always a high drama of intense blood, sweat, tears and whatever else is on stage, then you finish the whole thing in a tremendous climax and then the audience is going to go home. So we extracted all the major words from the text and turned them into a possibility. There was an American artist who spent long time in Paris and she was in Amsterdam at the time. Her name is Alison Armstrong and she put the end together. It was entirely up to her, we just gave her the text. Unfortunately she only had time to get to the letter B, and I wrote the whole text all the way from A to Z. What would have been particularly nice was if the audience had stayed and she could have worked all the way through the alphabet, which would have taken nearly thirty-five minutes. The opera house was very sympathetic, there were televisions all down the underground where people park their cars and check their coats, so you could still see it. Even more, we had a good relationship with the Dutch television company so the audience could see it when finally they got home half an hour later.
Audience: It seems like your main character really breaks with traditional notions of female sexuality in opera.
Greenaway: If you think of the history of 19th century opera, some of these females get literally and metaphorically abused, victimized, beaten up. Not necessarily in this graphic way but it is very much a part of that tradition. So here we created an archetype of the female central character who in some sense acknowledges her own sexuality because it is obviously very much to do with sadomasochism - here the notion is that she is enjoying this situation, the whole drama relies upon the sexual duality. Holland is the most naturally tolerant nation in Europe. Maybe we had our trouble but the curious thing is that we had a lot more trouble with the horse. We had a real horse that walked backwards and forward on stage, a nice, solid, fat sexy horse. But when we put the horse in a sling and brought it down, it was not a real horse in the sling. It was a substitute, a brilliantly made model. It was so well-manufactured and we did it in such a fashion to help the illusion. There were lot of people in the audience who were totally absolutely convinced that it was a real horse. So in Holland we had more trouble with the horse than we had with the woman.
Audience: Regarding the performance, I have heard it said that to sing opera you are really naked on stage, and so it is quite interesting to see the performers really naked up there. Were there any problems prior to the performance with regard to getting everyone into the spirit?
Greenaway: I think that they knew that this is going to be an opera directed by Greenaway, and that there were going to be certain experimentations. Nudity on the Amsterdam opera stage is not that uncommon anyway. There was a performance four years before us about Salome, and there was a huge amount of nudity in that. There are two singers who, I hope you would agree with me, are extraordinarily courageous. A female Australian singer called Mary Tanzant who gave quite a strong characterization that also I would like to believe is also part very much of the seriousness with which we dealt with the subject, because this is not necessarily a glamorous woman. So the notions of putting a 'real woman' on the stage I think added to the notion of its veritability.
Audience: One last question - will it be available on DVD?
Greenaway: We had a lot of interesting and rather sad problems. We made a film deliberately to be shown on television networks all around the world but unfortunately it was never properly cleared for theatrical rights in cinema. It has been seen on television all over the world but it's been almost impossible to get it any clearance. We showed it five or six times at the Venice film festival last year and I think that the possibility of now clearing it on the grounds that it already has a reputation, that the orchestra and everybody associated with it can hear the ring of registers, would be now be very slim because the musician's union is so strong and because it was made first as an opera. The last performance was about four years ago and the film was finished about eight months ago, so it would be very very difficult to show it on a big screen - I have to apologize for seeing it on VHS - all the reds go to hell and it's very, very dark. I assure you that it's absolutely brilliantly photographed, and that to see it on big screen is a much more exciting experience. We followed up with a second collaboration that was linked with a center in New York and the same television company is going to work with us to make the film there again, because we couldn't possibly afford to put the whole thing on just for the camera. Then I will probably do two performances afterwards without an audience and we will film it. It is about Vermeer - it has a different pose, it has a different perspective and I suppose the actual treatment needs very much to be treated in a different way, but I think that we have here a very interesting language which of course could be applied to all sorts of subjects, with true regard to the notion of finding a good rapport between the use of language and the content.
Schirmacher: I thought, what would Richard Wagner say about this kind of enterprise, in light of his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk? Obviously you know that this Gesamtkunstwerk is not based on theater but is spaced on a flat screen. Arthur Schopenhauer was quite pleased that Wagner liked him but he didn't like Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. His reason was that it would spoil music, it would spoil the only language which allows us to express the situation of the world, the suffering of the world directly without the brain interfering, without having to make up stories, you know, you feel the music and the love and hate and everything directly. So to get the feeling you did something like that in film. Why can film do it and the other languages can't?
Greenaway: Well first of all Wagner had some rather strange ideas about the eternal art work. I am quite convinced that it wasn't really eternal art work, it was all the other words for opera, but I think that also here there is a suggestion of focus. There is a way in which a synthesis is maybe possible, in ways which three-dimensional theater with all its artifacts and illusion-play might not be able to achieve. But your criticism is right and has been made by other people, mainly made by musicologists, regarding the primacy of music over the image. Messiaen, however, famously suggested that there are probably ten good operas which have ever been made, and the great problem about opera is finding the right circumstances with the right music. Often when the music is great the libretto and the scenario are rather pathetic and boring, and the opposite is true as well. So it was always a very, very difficult question, how you marry these three components. In a case like this there are more than three because we are communicating with text as well. I would certainly go to the opera house for a visual spectacle. I have found a lot of operatic work which was done in the 1910s and 1920s which tried to scale down and eradicate and somehow make the opera into chamber work, and this was somehow profoundly unsatisfying for me. It has to be a composite synthesis of sound and image, and I suppose ultimately according to your cultural baggage association with opera you must bring your own subjectivity to it to see if it has been successful or not.
Audience: I was thinking about the music from 'Writing to Vermeer' versus this, and it seems like that Andriessen's work in 'Writing To Vermeer' is much more like New Music while in this movie it seems there are a lot of references to other time periods. Is that the first time he's done that?
Greenaway: He was pushed into corners this time, maybe otherwise it would be boring, but I think that 'Einstein on the Beach' by Glass is a good sort of focal point for his background. He is in the business of making non-narrative operatic drama, but I think also with that background in music he is also a very, very keen Stravinsky fan. So I think all of those references are there as well. He is also a great academic with a huge knowledge of music, so he very very playfully fits in quotations from all over the place, but of course you know he's a populist as well and there are reference to film scores like 'The Magnificent Seven' - a lot of clip-clop clip-clop music.
Audience: The correspondence with the visuals was truly an unpredictable but successful synthesis…
Greenaway: If you were to listen to 'Writing to Vermeer' it is deliberately much more lyrical, much more romantic because we wanted to make a completely different sort of opera and this is why 'Writing to Vermeer' is based upon the paintings, in order make an opera about serenity and harmony. It's extraordinary difficult to do. Supposing that opera is about conflict, we wanted a conflict-less drama which of course is paradoxical and in the end probably another work. It's like trying to make an image of Christ. I think that maybe Pasolini is the only filmmaker that managed to do that. The notions of goodness and peace and harmony are extremely difficult to portray. After all, you know, heaven is eternal, but hell changes every afternoon. I think you will find just as many references and cross-references and quotations in Vermeer, but of a different nature. The central section is based on 'Seven Dances' by John Cage.
Audience: The screaming voice certainly made me think of Cage… You know how it's necessary to linger on the image to establish the relationship to sound, and it kept me more interested in the sound in a way that it might not have ordinarily.
Greenaway: Andriessen has a peculiar relationship with the whole notion of belkanto singing. You know he doesn't like big voices so he chose singers secondarily with me according to their ability to act on stage. They all have roughness, you know, I mean they are professionals singers and they have done a lot of work, but he admires that rough quality. I must say that there was a lot more belkanto singing in 'Vermeer' than this time.
Audience: I was wondering if there was an attempt to get some of Rosa's music, and also if going there was a feeling of being an archeologist.
Greenaway: I could go through the archive and give you a list if you are interested, it's possible to listen to it, but again there is this inevitable association with music and film which always puts the music in a secondary or supplementary position - I had always tried in my relationship with Michael Nyman to make tracks based on our enthusiasm for a film like 'Alexander Nevsky' by Prokofiev and Eisenstein, where apparently the musical and the visual apparatus worked out - I would certainly imagine that here one has to be careful, of course, because in Eisenstein's biography you get all the diagrams showing correspondences of the music and the image. We examined it, however, and it became a little apocryphal at the end. We wonder really what that collaboration was all about. That's a good example and I am sure you have your private list of good examples of music collaboration but by and large what happens is that the film has primacy. The editor virtually finishes and somebody, the producer, picks up the phone and the music worker comes along and basically embellishes and decorates something pre-existing in the structure, which I think is far, far down the line from a successful music-image collaboration.
Audience: You mentioned before about the need to 'let go of things' in your work process: while editing the opera is more of an experience of collecting something, the recording seems to be the opposite. You are letting go of things, you cannot really do exactly what you want, you cannot record everything that happens. How do you feel about that?
Greenaway: Real opera is unfilmable because of its own characteristics, and as soon you introduce the notion of the cut it is already an interruption in space and time. I think if you want to make some manufactured product which will involve the notion of music theater you have to find another way doing it. Opera itself is the wrong material, it is not suited to application for all those things which in some peculiar way are often desired in an opera, like close-ups or comprehensible lyrics. We have actually allowed those in a way which I believe is now legitimate because it is a flat screen film rather than a three-dimensional opera. Also, what I think is very important is that more or less every seat in the cinema is right in the middle, and in the theater every seat has a different perspective. The stage also has depth and width. You might have a view way over on the side there that can be particularly exciting. So Mrs. A's view over there is not saying the same as Mr. B's over there, and then all of a sudden there is a maneuvering in language as a result of the difference in potential, which you don't have in cinema because the viewpoint is singular.
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