JEAN-PIERRE PONNELLE : ICONOCLAST TURNS CONSERVATIVE

Jean-Pierre Ponnelle used to be regarded as an enfant terrible .

He staged and designed opera productions that often ignored or distorted the specific instructions of the composer and librettist. He didn’t mind taking certain narrative liberties in quest of dramatic truth.

He hated cliches. He despised concerts in costume. He abhorred star egos. He constantly probed for new images and metaphors to illuminate old rituals.

Some adored him for his insight, his daring, his sense of style, his concern for psychological credibility, his eye for visual poetry. Others reviled him for his iconoclasm.

It was Ponnelle who created possibly definitive productions of “Madama Butterfly” and “Le Nozze di Figaro” for television--productions that functioned as inventive motion pictures, not merely as mementos of stage performances.

It was Ponnelle who gave San Francisco--and then various international companies--a “Cenerentola” that found the perfect, elegant fusion of wit, pathos and fantasy.

It was Ponnelle who made an overwhelming emotional experience of Aribert Reimann’s “Lear” by focusing the conflicts of the ancient Shakespearean tragedy in a bleak, neo-Brechtian perspective.

It was Ponnelle who gave Salzburg a “Zauberfloete” of virtually unparalleled wit and charm, a “Zauberfloete” in which the magic was rooted in human whimsy and the mysticism was stripped of pomp and murk.

It was Ponnelle who decided, in San Francisco, to play “Rigoletto” as the cynical jester’s flashback nightmare. It was the same Ponnelle, not incidentally, who cheapened and coarsened the same concept when he translated it into a bacchanal for television starring a self-indulgent, eye-popping tenorissimo named Pavarotti.

A man of Ponnelle’s wide-ranging, modernist vision obviously cannot turn everything he touches into operatic gold. Even his staunchest admirers have winced at certain aberrations.

He was responsible, for instance, for a trivialized “Fliegende Hollaender” in which the sweeping drama was played out as the little Steersman’s wet dream. He came up with an “Otello” that was plagued with constant, grotesque exaggeration. In his “Cavalleria,” the rustic villagers became masochistic religious fanatics, poor Santuzza was all too palpably pregnant and Alfio emerged as a Mafioso thug.

Turning to the passions of Puccini, Ponnelle gave San Francisco a perverse “Tosca” in which the crucial action at the end of the murder scene was visible only to a handful of lucky spectators in smack-center seats. His “Turandot” was dominated by a monstrous ivory statue of a symbolic Asian princess who cried--yes, cried--tears of blood when love finally triumphed over fear.

At his inspired best, Ponnelle has made opera a source of stimulation for the thinking man. At his undisciplined worst, Ponnelle has offered comparable stimulation, but the stimulation has tended to defy such old-fashioned virtues as logic, focus and balance.

His enemies have claimed that he sometimes works against the music, or that he contradicts tradition merely for the pleasure of contradiction. No one, however, has ever accused Ponnelle of boring his audience. And until recently, no one would have dreamed of calling him old-fashioned.

Everything is relative.

Valkyrie maidens now crop up in provincial German theaters as leather-outfitted lesbians on motorcycles. Instead of running off into the ethereal spring night, Siegmund and Sieglinde copulate on a grassy mound at the feet of a stuffed fawn in Seattle. Bayreuth has given us a Nazi industrialist named Gunther who wears a tuxedo, a.k.a. “Smoking,” when he welcomes the heroic Siegfried.

Wagner isn’t the only victim of the dramaturgic revolution. Don Giovanni can dress these days as Superman. Handel operas take place in outer space where countertenor astronauts sing blithe coloratura arias intended for castrati. The sacred tree of the Druids in “Norma” has been superseded by a gigantic wooden hand. Pelleas finds his Melisande in a Victorian mansion. Rossini’s Rosina lives inside an arty structure resembling a nude female torso. Baroque divas model designer jeans, and Gluck’s Orfeo travels to Hades in clown-face and tennis shoes.

Even at his most indulgent, Ponnelle never took liberties like this. In a recent New York interview with the new general director of the Metropolitan Opera, Ponnelle actually was labeled a conservative. At 53, the erstwhile enfant terrible is confronting the rigors of middle age.

Times have changed.

It is ironic that an official of the chronically cautious Met would regard Ponnelle as anything but an avant-gardist. It was at the Met, after all, that his “Fliegende Hollaender” was greeted with boos and catcalls. It was at the Met that a production generally hailed in other cities wreaked public havoc.

“I couldn’t understand it,” Ponnelle recalls in fluent, French-accented English over lunchtime pasta.

“The cast and orchestra were, if anything, better in New York than they had been in San Francisco. The New York audience is terribly conservative, and so is the press. They accused me of destroying a monument. The scandal was enormous, and in some ways comical.

“I did nothing against the music. I just interpreted the work in a different romantic way. It made New York very angry. Strangely, the same ‘Hollaender’ was a success in Chicago, which is also conservative.”

Ponnelle has two productions in the current San Francisco Opera repertory. One is “Falstaff,” an ambitious enlargement of the version he first staged in Glyndebourne nine years ago. The other is a revival of a “Tosca” that dates back to 1972.

The preparations for “Falstaff” consumed Ponnelle, virtually day and night. The rehearsals for “Tosca” didn’t involve him at all.

Ask any artist to name his favorite work. Chances are, the response will identify the work in progress at the moment. Ponnelle isn’t like most artists.

“What I am doing now,” he declares, “is always the worst.”

He has just come from a “Falstaff” rehearsal, and still seems lost somewhere in Windsor. He knows all about the Italianate style of the music, all about the Shakespeare plays that inspired Boito, all about the sociopolitical customs of the reign of Henry IV. He is eager to make a mutually sympathetic ensemble of the cast assembled by Terence McEwen, anxious about projecting essentially intimate tragicomic impulses in a house seating well over 3,000.

He says he wants to reveal the fat knight as a credible, almost noble, sexually potent figure, not as a conventional buffoon. He says he wants to expose the “merry” wives as class-conscious schemers, Ford and his followers as obsessive bullies. He says he wants to depict Fenton and Nannetta, the young lovers, as identifiable exponents of innocence.

He wants to do all this, moreover, within an Elizabethan setting that is realistic in detail yet universal in appeal. He also wants to convey the fundamental philosophical messages with appropriate comic accents. It all sounds eminently persuasive.

“I love to laugh,” he explains. “Man is the only animal who can laugh. Laughter is what separates us from the lower species. I must use that.”

When the production opens a week later, it does not seem to function exactly as Ponnelle had envisioned. Many of the intended profundities somehow get blanketed in sight gags. Something subtle apparently got lost in translation from theory to action. Nevertheless, audiences and most critics hail this “Falstaff” as the funniest show in town.

For better or worse, it bears the Ponnelle imprint. That is more than can be said for the “Tosca,” which utilizes his sets, remnants of his original traffic plan, and a cast that had never even met him.

“This ‘Tosca’ reflects a terrible problem,” Ponnelle sighs. “I cannot do repertory. It is my curse, my destiny. I have no protection once the premiere is past. Thank God, I haven’t even seen a rehearsal.

“It is not possible for the company to pay me to restage an old production, so someone else must do it. But that person cannot do it the way I would have done it. Also, if I had done it, I would have changed things the second time.

“Productions should not be frozen. Action that makes sense with one singer looks ridiculous with another.

“Still, in the repertory system, productions must be cranked out over and over again. Whatever happens, this will not, cannot, be my ‘Tosca.’ ”

He entertains hope that the system will eventually change. “The problem,” he says, “relates to superstars. Eventually they must disappear, like dinosaurs. Then we can have ensembles again. Then we can create musical theater that has a chance of surviving.

“That cannot happen, however, until the press stops building altars for star singers. The young generation, a generation that can act and that takes dramatic challenges seriously, already looks at opera in a healthier way. Not everything has to be egocentric and instantly glamorous. Even now I can see some positive signs when a Marilyn Horne agrees to sing a role like Quickly in our ‘Falstaff.’ ”

“Falstaff,” incidentally, is the only foreign-language opera on the current San Francisco agenda that does not use supertitles.

“I am absolutely against them,” Ponnelle declares, “especially for operas in which the words move quickly. The brain cannot follow both the written text and the vocal line at the right pace.

“It is arrogant to pretend that opera must be done in the original language. Ideally, it should in the language of the audience. However, given the star system with international casts in international houses, that is not very realistic.

“Supertitles do not disturb much in an unfamiliar work where the music isn’t terribly demanding. I don’t happen to know ‘Werther,’ which I saw last night, and which isn’t exactly to my taste. Here I did find the titles helpful.

“But in a very good production, a masterpiece will be understood by everyone. It doesn’t matter if 50% of the audience is Chinese.”

Ponnelle enjoyed a long and very active relationship with the San Francisco Opera (and vice versa) during the regime of Kurt Herbert Adler. The relationship has cooled somewhat since McEwen took over. The universally celebrated Ponnelle “Boheme” and the controversial Ponnelle “Turandot” have been replaced by more modest, more conventional productions.

“I won’t be back next season or the next,” he volunteers, “but there could be something new by me in 1988. Maybe. We are having talks.

“I won’t come just for a revival, and a new production is very expensive. I would consider coming for a production that has been done somewhere else but not here. I have several interesting projects, for instance, in Houston. These are not being discussed.”

Nor, for some strange reason, is anyone discussing the possibility of a Ponnelle production in Los Angeles. Although his work has been seen in Southern California only on television, the newly formed, super-ambitious Music Center Opera has, he says, made no overtures.

Ponnelle exercises certain veto rights when it comes to casting his productions. “I happen to believe in the plausibility of opera,” he says. “It would not be possible for me to do a ‘Boheme’ with Pavarotti and Caballe, no matter how beautifully they sing.

“When we made the ‘Butterfly’ film, Pavarotti was supposed to be the Pinkerton. He had already recorded the sound track with Karajan. We made a screen test, and I showed it to him.

“The rushes we shot happened to show him kneeling. It was unfortunate. He was very gracious when I pointed out the difficulties with illusion. He understood, and Karajan agreed. We were very lucky to be able to substitute Domingo.

“Later, I did not object to Pavarotti when we filmed ‘Rigoletto.’ His figure does not contradict the debauchery of the Duke of Mantua.”

It is not surprising that Ponnelle, who studied painting with Fernand Leger and design with Johnny Friedlander, worked as a director for the spoken stage long before he turned to opera. It is surprising, however, that he never studied stage direction.

“It can’t be taught,” he insists. “Studying literature, philosophy, art, music--that is important. When I was young, I was always playing the piano. That was important.”

He is characteristically candid about his colleagues. The current directors he admires most in opera are Giorgio Strehler and Harry Kupfer. When it comes to movies, he cites an interesting trio: Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen.

“I love movies,” Ponnelle says. “I love being able to liberate opera from the confines of the stage.” He is one of the few directors who have succeeded in making operatic singing--obviously an unnatural act--seem natural on the screen.

“I have explored the technique of non-singing,” he explains. “It is a philosophical question of juxtaposing two different realities--the reality of time against the reality of music. In opera, sometimes real time stops. In a reflective aria, there is no forward action. Thoughts take over.

“The audience has to listen to thoughts, not to declarations and declamations. It is the expression that counts.

“With film one can do more than one can do on the stage. One can use flashbacks and slow motion. One can use close-ups. One can show one thing while another thing is heard. The singing must be heard, but it doesn’t always have to be seen.”

Although the television version of his Salzburg “Zauberfloete” has been extraordinarily successful, Ponnelle expresses some doubts. “It is OK,” he says, “as a documentation, but filming a stage performance is not a form of art.”

Even with this qualification, he feels the casting of cinematic opera must respect the possibilities and limitations of a stage performance.

“Mirella Freni does not happen to sing Butterfly in opera houses, but she probably could. Given her voice, her temperament, her face, it was reasonable to use her in the film. She is close enough. However, when a director casts a fragile lyric soprano like Teresa Stratas as Salome, that goes too far.”

“I need unconventional challenges,” Ponnelle avers.

“I was not happy with my ‘Otello.’ Fundamentally, it is too conventional an opera. Killing someone doesn’t automatically make a tragedy. In this work I could not find the right metaphoric position. I kept seeing cliches.

“I couldn’t find the right way to focus Shakespeare’s drama without hurting the opera. I probably won’t try to do it again.

“I have always said it is wrong to approach such a task with too much reverence. One should not believe that everything that has come before was right. Still, limits must be defined.

“I suppose I could try to do something really modern with ‘Otello,’ something scandalous and outrageous.” He looks pained. “That would not be my way.

“I refuse to do fashionable things. For instance, when I do ‘Fidelio,’ I can’t make it take place in a Nazi concentration camp. It is an easy solution. Lots of others do it. I can’t.

“Does that make me suddenly a conservative? I don’t know. But I do know one thing. I try to be honest.”