Francesca Zambello

Since her professional debut in 1984 directing Beethoven's Fidelio at Houston Grand Opera, Francesca Zambello has left a unique and lasting imprint on opera in the United States and around the world. Her productions are known for their emotional realism and honest sensuality, and she is unafraid of taking risks, particularly if that means delving deeper into the text and music to try to recreate the composer's intentions. She inspires those who work with her to a level of involvement not seen every day on the opera stage and has given new life to the standard repertory (Puccini's Madame Butterfly in Houston, San Diego, Geneva, and elsewhere, 1988; Verdi's La Traviata in Bordeaux, 1997) as well as the brand-new (Daniel Catán's Florencia en las Amazonas in Houston, Seattle, and Los Angeles, 1996; Tobias Picker's Emmeline in Santa Fe and New York, 1998).

During the coming season, Americans will have the opportunity to see Zambello's work in San Francisco, Washington, Dallas, Pittsburgh and Houston. Two particularly notable events will be her production of Carlisle Floyd's masterpiece, Of Mice and Men, which was a spectacular hit at the Bregenz (Austria) festival this past summer and will come to Washington Opera in October and Houston Grand Opera in February 2002, and the world premiere of Tobias Picker's third opera, Thérèse Raquin, opening in Dallas on November 30 and going on to L'Opéra de Montréal in April 2002 and San Diego Opera in March 2003.

What led Francesca to directing opera? "I suppose it was predestined. I knew I wanted to direct from a very early age. I was always a kid who was interested in the bigger picture and in storytelling. When I was growing up, we lived in many different countries, which was great as far as experiencing different cultures and viewpoints. Theater was very much a part of our world; my mother is an actress who is still working and my father started out as an actor and became a businessman who loves the theater. From a very early age, I was active in the theater - performing and working backstage. I began directing theater in high school, but as far as directing opera, that didn't come until later.

"The first opera I saw was Madame Butterfly at Covent Garden when I was five. My first impression, which I think is true for many young kids, was of a very large person making a very loud sound. I became very interested in opera later in my teens. I went to the opera a lot in Paris and Vienna, and later, I was a student in London for a year and went to ENO and that made quite an impression on me. I didn't go to the opera in America until my early '20s when I moved to New York and went to City Opera a lot, which was what I could afford.

"As soon as I became old enough to be aware of the stage direction of an opera I saw where the frontiers were. I realized that Europe was certainly where it was happening and that it was the place to be working. Seeing productions in Germany was what influenced me the most. Hand in hand with that, I have to say I owe a great debt of gratitude to the Skylight Opera Theater in Milwaukee, where I was co-artistic director with Stephen Wadsworth for about eight years, from my mid-20s to early 30s. That was where I learned a lot about being free and having my own aesthetic and not being stuck with something that was not me. It was a very free environment. We had a kind of ensemble company. We did six or seven shows per season plus one on tour, and I usually directed two of them. We did a lot of world premieres also. I never went through those 'instant' opera situations, which dominate a lot of American opera. I chose not to do that."

USOperaWeb asked Francesca to walk us through the process of creating a new production. "Usually, you're engaged a few years in advance and you begin to work with the general director and sometimes the conductor in terms of casting. For me, that is the first thing because if you can't get the right cast, you don't do it. That's a lesson I've learned. Then you choose your design team - your collaborators - and you meet frequently to discuss ideas and to develop the piece visually so you can create a world that the piece can live in. This process usually takes up to a year, at which point you get the set model and sketches, etc. Then you include the producer and the company, and the hard knocks of reality come at that point - what they can afford, how it will fit and play in the different theaters if it's a coproduction, and so forth. Once that all gets hammered out, you've done a substantial part of the job because you have conceptualized the piece. The rehearsal process can be from five to eight weeks and that is when I personally try to create as much of an ensemble feeling as possible. I'm most interested in people having a personal investment in a show. I'm not a person who says 'this is how it has to be.' I want the singers to give me something of themselves. I have a strong sense of how I want the work to look visually but I want to interpret the work and characters together and allow the relationships to evolve based on our mutual understanding of the text and music.

"Of course, there are certain operas where I have to work with a singer who is not physically what the composer created, but he or she happens to be the only person who can sing the role. So you have to create a world around that particular singer that will make the piece work. It's all about the context and the physical surroundings you create for the character to inhabit. Of course, it also depends on whether you are doing a completely naturalistic production or something more abstract or stylized, which allows a completely different freedom. Ultimately I don't do things that are completely realistic. For me, realism is generally problematic in opera. You have to have real emotions, but the music and drama usually demand something not realistic visually, so you can get away with more and carry people along on a different sea of emotions.

"You also need to create a piece that is right for a particular theater. I recently did two completely different productions of Dialogues of the Carmelites, one for the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan which went on to the Palais Garnier in Paris, and another production for Santa Fe. And in those instances, I was guided by the theaters, both in the physical production and in the way I interpreted a piece for those particular audiences."

Of Mice and Men

"It's wonderful when the composer is alive, because then he or she is included in this process. With Of Mice and Men, I met with Carlisle [Floyd] and discussed my thoughts and impressions of the piece and got as much information as I could from him about his feelings. Ultimately, he is the creator and we are the interpreters. But Carlisle is the kind of composer who says, 'whatever you think about the piece visually, go for it!' He's quite easy about that. Carlisle told me about a recent production of Susannah in Germany where they were all sitting around watching television. He had accepted it. I've found that most composers I've worked with are quite open to different interpretations of their work.

Of Mice and Men at Bregenz Festival.

"For Of Mice and Men, the set and costume designer is Richard Hudson, who is probably best know in the U.S. for designing The Lion King on Broadway. We just did Peter Grimes together in Amsterdam. He was originally from Zimbabwe and I thought it would be interesting to approach this piece, which has such an American feel and connotation, with someone who would bring a freshness to it, rather than bringing along all of our American Depression-era baggage. My credo for the piece was to make a world visually in which ugliness was beautiful, that would not be totally realistic but something much more primitive, coming from the characters' emotional worlds.

"We have created a very destitute world visually which personally I find it very beautiful. The first scene we set in a railyard, where the rail ties end, that is covered with power wires that create this lush prison mesh around the characters. I wanted something that conveyed the end of the line but that also had the oppressive feel of the industrial world. We wanted to use real materials that were completely rusted, so the setting is natural - piles of steel and tin. For the bunk house I didn't want wooden walls and bunk beds. So we made a rust-colored wall that looks as though it has been scratched and eaten away and has the history of all these men on it. I wanted to create the sense that the men had left their imprint over the space, but that the elements were impenetrable. In the second act, rather than a barn, there is a grouping of huge combine machines. It's very sculptural and takes on a menacing feeling. So the sets are realistic in some senses but abstract in others. It was important to me that the story could stand out against the sets and that we not get mired in trying to make it look exactly like Steinbeck's description of a ranch in the '30s.

"I'm primarily interested in the relationships of the characters. If the characters aren't right, nothing else will work. I come from an emotional core when I approach any piece of work. Of Mice and Men is about the relationship of Lennie and George - their peculiar, obsessive need for each other. Getting their relationship right is what makes the piece work or not work. One of the unusual things about this production is the fact that the man we cast as George, Gordon Hawkins, is black. Carlisle has never had a black singer in that role and we talked about that because, of course, it makes a big statement. How does George get into Lennie's life? That's a question you ask anyway, but in this case it takes on a larger meaning. It wasn't as though I sought out a black singer; I thought Gordon would be very interesting in the role and it happens that he is black and it adds a different layer to the piece.

"Frankly, I am shocked that operas like Susannah and Of Mice and Men are not standard repertory pieces. Of Mice and Men was extremely well received by both the audience and critics in Bregenz. It was an all-American cast and we were proud and honored to be there. Before we opened, we were all quite nervous because we thought they were going to be intellectual snobs - the fact that it was an American piece being presented at a prestigious European festival - that they were going to be looking down their noses at it. I told everyone that all we could do was our best and believe in the work as much as possible. And I confess that a week before it opened, ticket sales were okay, but not at high level.

"Opening night was full, of course, because it was the opening of the Festival. The audience looked so hard when they were coming in - it was a very 'tuxedo' audience, full of politicians. I thought, 'Oh, God, they'll probably fall asleep.' I was watching the performance from the side aisle and at the end practically the entire audience was in tears, and that made me so happy! They rose to their feet and cheered it. And that was actually the quietest reception the show got during the six performances. By the second performance the house was sold out and by the last performance there was a line of 400 people waiting to buy return tickets. This piece captivated the audience. I didn't read the reviews but I heard they were good. Most importantly, the audience spoke, and that was primarily a German and Austrian audience. It was extremely moving and gratifying for all of us. It was the first time I had ever done a show where I felt proud to be an American doing an American work in Europe that got that kind of a response.

"In Houston the cast will be pretty much the same as we had in Bregenz, except that Elizabeth Futral will be singing the role of Curly's wife. In Washington it will be almost entirely different, so of course it will change. My work, my way of working, comes from the people I am working with. We shape the characters and the piece together. And, as a director, you are always discovering things, even finding things you didn't understand completely the first time. And hopefully I can help the people I'm working with to see the characters and the opera better, not necessarily in my way, although that does help.

"Repeating a piece gives us a chance to continue to work on the production, to refine and continue to discover. There are infinite ways to interpret a piece of theater, an opera in particular. So if we have the opportunity to continue to examine the work it basically only gets better. I know already Of Mice and Men will be better the second and third times out. I did an interview with the BBC the other day for a series on La Traviata and I mentioned that it was a disaster at the first production (everybody knows that) but that the second production, which was only five months later, was a triumph. Would that every composer had that opportunity. It is evidence that we need to allow pieces to be worked on, to let life to be breathed into them. Often, a piece takes a time to mature. In the theater you will rehearse the piece longer and then you'll have previews. In opera, you rehearse for a few weeks and then you open almost cold. And because you are doing so few performances, the players don't have a chance to grow during a run, to play it in as they say.

"There are certain pieces I have done several times, Billy Budd and Madame Butterfly, for example, and War and Peace, which I did ten years ago in Seattle and then again last year at the Bastille in Paris. As you grow your work changes. When you do an opera, you are holding it up as a mirror to your society. You are taking your own world in as you do a piece and bringing it to the people. So as life changes inside and outside of me, I try to bring that to the work. With Street Scene, for example, we did it in Houston and then again in two different cities in Germany and then we made a video (which has just been released on DVD). So I got to work on it four times, and it kept maturing and deepening, which is good for a piece like that because the characters are so deep. They are everyday people in some regards, but you have to get inside their psychology."

Continued - Francesca Zambello talks about Thérèse Raquin in Dallas and future projects