“Fresh and free from mannerisms”

- What is the Opera Exam Festival all about and what is its original purpose?

- Earlier I travelled a great deal and saw very many exams abroad. I was interested in how opera singers were trained elsewhere and what was expected of them at exams. From Chicago to Stockholm, from Berlin to London and Frankfurt, I watched extremely interesting productions being put on at these moments. I chatted about my experiences with Éva Marton, the then head of department, and between the two of us we came up with the idea of organizing a festival linked to the opera exam in January. Each year we invite a couple of university productions in order to get something in the way of a cross-section.

- How did you make contact with the universities that were invited this year?

- Our relations with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London have been very good for some time. For example, last year we invited them to bring their production to Budapest. Their producer, Stuart Calder, also works in Dublin and he asked whether we would be interested in the music academy in Dublin because they put on extremely interesting performances. They invited us to attend their exam performance in Ireland last year. The Baroque production being staged in the Solti Hall of the Liszt Academy this January is gripping and very intimate. We made contact with Ljubljana university through the department of composition – at this very moment they are actually out in Ljubljana. The current production of the Slovenes is similar to how we do things: they, too, get students of music composition to write mini operas for vocalist students.

- Do you already have plans for the next festival?

- We have hosted guests from Sweden, Florence, London, now it is the turn of Dublin and Ljubljana, but we are constantly looking for new contacts. For instance, a London production in the Guildhall is very exciting: Julian Philips is writing an opera for students based on a novella by Chaucer, in Middle English, which debuts in February. I will be there for the premiere and I really hope that we will be able to put it on in the Solti Hall. Next year I trust that we will reach agreement with Ferenc Anger because I would like him to direct our opera students.

- Originally, Heinrich Marschner’s opera The Vampire was in four acts, but you are performing it in just one. What is the reason for this?

- Once again I chose an opera that is not performed in Hungary so that there is no pattern and students of singing have to come up with something unique. This will be a contemporary transcription done by composer Ákos Lustyik. The Vampire is an extraordinarily dramatic early Romantic piece. It is based on the novella by Polidori, the opera was written from this, since when it has been shortened several times, including by Hans Pfitzner who made a two-act work out of it in 1924. We started off with the Pfitzner arrangement but then implemented our own cuts in order to concentrate on the story and get rid of all incidental plot lines.

- How did you come across this work?

- I find myself attracted to those operas that work on out-of-the-ordinary themes. Every period has its own special operas and Romantic Gothic literature, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampire, which are extremely exciting in their own way. I consider it truly fascinating if an opera focuses on a topic which belongs to the popular culture of the period; this is also very typical of contemporary opera. The Vampire is a true horror story, full of female characters, and since we have nine sopranos the roles can be assigned very well. The theatre itself gives us additional help in the unique shaping of the work. Choreography is by Dóra Barta.

- What do you consider is most important in opera direction?

- When the singers can bring about a comprehensible, original character. They don’t ‘carry out’ or fit into something but their personality actually breaks out. I make every effort in my productions to ‘mould’ the direction to the performers, and I look for the same thing when I watch the works of others. For example, in the directions of Claus Guth the human presence is groundbreaking, as it is in the works of Barrie Kosky. This type of approach is about the assumption of personality: the most important path that the theatre has to take now is that singers do not represent a tradition on the stage but rather they bring to it their own character, their own experience of life, emotional and intellectual life, because this transubstantiates operas.

Lili Békéssy