Introducing Julien Chavaz

As we welcome director Julian Chavaz to our roster, we ask him about his creative background and thoughts about directing opera

What was your first experience of opera?

I went to see The Soldier’s Tale at Opéra de Lausanne when I was five. I still remember the devil entering in an old-fashioned car. I was scared, but fascinated. At kindergarten the next day, I told my teacher I’d been to see an opera the night before and she was full of admiration. Her feedback about how important my experience was amplified my feelings – I realised I’d touched on something very special. That was my first experience of opera.

My great luck in life is that my parents have always been intense consumers of the arts. There was always a spare ticket for me, and it was never for children’s productions – always regular operas and concerts. During my teenage years, I stepped away from opera, not abandoning it but letting it hibernate, quietly waiting to resurface. When I came back to it as a young adult, it felt like my mother tongue – deeply familiar, never forgotten. I also grew up with an Italian grandmother who used to watch opera extravaganzas on RAI TV, with glamorous stars in big arenas. She would explain them to me in Italian, which connected me with both the language and the glamour of opera.

When did you decide to pursue opera as a career?

It was quite late, at the age of 27. I did a lot of theatre during my childhood and teenage years, directing my friends. I also wrote plays and always included music, without realising that it was the music I was most attracted to. I studied as an agricultural engineer and worked in that for a couple of years before I had a revelation. A conductor friend asked me to direct a small-scale Offenbach opera, and I did it without any knowledge, but a lot of passion. At the premiere, I realised that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I started my independent opera company, Opéra Louise, in Fribourg. We did crazy, remarkable projects on the fringe side of the opera, and many of them got attention from the press and public. I also decided to embark on the journey of assistant directing, which gave me an education and allowed me to work in major houses. It developed my technical skills and also my soft skills – how to deal with the singers, chorus and conductor. 

What are the skills that you need as a director? 

When you direct an opera, your first mission is a ‘charm offensive’ with the singers. Five weeks’ rehearsal is very short and intense, so you have to reach a point of mutual respect and trust in the first few days. You have not only to be able to share your vision, but also to convince the people who are responsible for implementing that vision on stage. They need to understand that you will let them have their say, find their place and express their personality. That’s how you build trust in a very short period. 

As director, you control the level of energy on stage. You have to engage physically, which is different to directing theatre, where you can sit at the table, giving verbal feedback or discussing psychology. Singers are busy with a difficult score and the technicalities of singing, so they need inspiration about how to use their bodies correctly. The best way to do that is not to tell them but to show them – to dance in front of them. That’s why I spend a large proportion of my professional time gesticulating and moving around in front of lots of people. I do it with great passion. It’s a moment where I feel alive – I forget about my phone and my problems and am totally concentrated. 

What is your process from the point you begin a production?

It’s very piece specific, but in general, I first get obsessed with listening to the music. It will be in my headphones on every plane or train journey. Sometimes I love it; sometimes it resists me. But I need to obsess so that two years later, when I’m in the rehearsal space, it’s under my skin. 

For me, opera is all about the music: 99 per cent of what I implement on stage comes from what I see and dream when I listen to it. I won’t spend three weeks discussing the psychology of a character or relationship: the emotions, intentions and relationships come primarily from the music. Of course, the text is important and gives structure, but for me, it’s more important to start with the music. Once the bodies on stage move with shape, tension and clarity, you can talk about psychology and dramaturgical finesse.

Then I create an aesthetic world, which has its own logic, codes, colours and textures. I try not to reproduce a specific place or time, but to embrace different inspirations and aesthetics. I want to create a world that resembles nothing you’ve seen before. I’m not interested in setting an opera in Italy in 1942, for example. That doesn’t mean it’s completely crazy, but it must have its own character, and not to try to replicate anything. 

After that, I look for what I call a ‘poetic layer’, especially with comedies. The solution is often to have a lonely soul on stage – it might be a small role that I promote, or an extra actor or dancer. They are looking at what’s happening on stage with sensible, elegiac or nostalgic eyes. It’s a counterpoint, to help the audience experience piece with more sensitivity than if you represent the plot literally. Theatre works because the characters have no time – they have to rush around, especially in comedies – and having this outsider offers a sensible filter to the plot, without losing any of the comedy.

How has your work has changed across your career?

My repertoire has evolved considerably. In the last ten years, I’ve developed a huge fascination for new music. Sometimes directors are afraid of contemporary music. It can be very abstract, complex or unclear; or derive from an aesthetic point of view and have a poor storyline; or the music doesn’t charm. Working with composers like Péter Eötvös, Gerald Barry or Thomas Adès, whose music is sophisticated and complex, I have been attracted to telling simple stories, rather than competing with them by saying, ‘my style of direction will be even more complex than your music’. I wanted to tell stories with their music. It was amazing to see the audience understanding music that they had thought was too brutalist, intellectual or complex. Through these experiences, I have developed a huge passion for and dedication to contemporary music. 

I have also opened my eyes to different comedy repertoire. I’ve always thought that theatre is primarily there to make us laugh, and about half my work is with comedy, but working in Germany, I’ve discovered the comedy of music theatre. In Germany, we do Rodgers and Hammerstein or Sondheim every year, whereas you might only do it occasionally in France. With operetta, too, in France or Switzerland, we do Offenbach, Johann Strauss and a few other famous Viennese pieces, but German operetta repertoire is much broader than that. There is ‘Berlin operetta’ from between the wars, as well as repertoire of the 60s and 70s, and GDR operetta. People are excited to revisit these works, and I have been involved with them over the last ten years of my career. 

I would like to continue exploring contemporary music and 20th century comedies, operas and musicals. I directed Korngold’s Die tote Stadt at Korea National Opera two years ago, which was an amazing experience, and I would like to work on other major 20th-century titles: Shostakovich’s The Nose, Berg’s Lulu and Wozzeck, and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, for instance.

What does your position as Generalintendant at Theater Magdeburg involve?

I oversee an immense boat. We have 440 employees and a budget of €40m, and give 30 premieres every year. I am head of large workshops, an excellent technical team and strong production capacities. It’s a dream to be able to put new ideas together with this huge, efficient machine. It’s also a great responsibility, because it’s a public institution, so I have to ensure the best use of taxpayer money and that the city is happy. It also offers the possibility of international co-productions and partnerships with other houses, which we often do, so it requires an entrepreneur’s intuition.

How is the role of Intendant similar to that of opera director?

You have to inspire people – to have a strong vision and take people on a journey with you. If they are not convinced, nothing will happen. Sometimes you have to deal with conflicting interests and you are responsible for the solution, which also happens as a director. In both roles, you have to make difficult choices and arbitrage many different things. For me, it is all one thing, though. I don’t separate my life. I wake up in the morning and my only goal is to create shows – either to direct them or to be at the head of the house that produces them. It feels like two sides of the same intention. It is my fuel for living.

What are your fears and hopes for opera?

The polarisation of world discourse and politics will make it more difficult for the arts, because some forces will use cultural policy to make their new vision visible. We see internationally the development of a discourse that is against progressivism, where the arts are to be seen as a museum, something to preserve rather than looking to the future.

More positively, and specific to opera, is that we are dealing with a new generation of artists. Twenty or 30 years ago, singers were formed as singers and were put on stage to perform an aria. Today’s young artists see themselves as multifaceted performers. They have a stronger background in acting and dancing, and a clearer perception of their contribution. As directors and intendants, we must make space for them and imagine collaborative processes.

We need to create projects that ignore the frontiers between genres: between theatre and opera; opera and dance; dance and concert performance. The more of these that are difficult to pigeonhole, the more we strengthen opera, by presenting it as something that can open its borders or windows, rather than being rigid and unreachable. We must also invest time, energy and passion into making new pieces. Not all of them will work or stay in the repertoire, but every year, there should be one or two new productions that make a huge impression on the audience, proving that the storytelling in opera is irresistible. When opera is used to tell new stories, and it works, people realise how crucial it is for humanity – for understanding who we are and what we do.

We can find new audiences by staging new repertoire, but also with new aesthetics. This is why it’s crucial that when we do older repertoire pieces, we invite diverse young directors and choreographers, so these works are presented in a style, dramaturgy and aesthetic that appeals to a younger audience. With a young director and aesthetics, the youthful audience recognises itself and will come back. That doesn’t mean that everything on stage must look like what’s happening on the street – rather the opposite. Opera is about magic, glamour, fairy tales. It always will be, but we can create a modern take on these aspects and not just leave them as they were 30 or 50 years ago.