Jonathan Miller: Useful <i> Provocateur </i> at the Opera

When the curtain rises this afternoon at 5 on the Music Center Opera premiere of “Tristan und Isolde,” Los Angeles will see Wagner’s epochal, symbol-laden, ultra-romantic drama of agonizing life and ecstatic death for the first time since 1953.

1953!

It remains to be heard, of course, if the current singers--William Johns, Jeannine Altmeyer, Florence Quivar, Roger Roloff and Martti Talvela--can match the memories and reputations of their not-so-immediate predecessors: Ludwig Suthaus, Gertrud Grob-Prandl, Margarete Klose, Paul Schoffler and Deszo Ernster.

It can be debated whether the 51-year-old Zubin Mehta, who conducts the new production, is worthy of comparison with the 41-year-old Georg Solti, who presided over the old one.

One thing, however, is certain. The modern staging at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is not going to have much in common with the tired and tattered version offered by the San Francisco Opera at Shrine Auditorium 34 years ago.

We live now in the age of the director and designer. Audiences are being conditioned to take opera seriously as drama.

It is significant, no doubt, that Albert Goldberg’s perceptive and otherwise informative review of the 1953 “Tristan” in The Times made no mention of scenic values. This may have been a simple journalistic matter of Procrustean exigency. More likely, it was a matter of artistic priority and contextual habit. Arthur Bloomfield’s official history of the San Francisco Opera is no more revealing.

The director, it turns out, was one Carlo Piccinato. Scanning the fine print among the minor program credits, one discovers a strange division of scenic labor: The sets were designed by Armando Agnini, painted by Julius Dove.

In those dark and distant days, the singers did pretty much what they wanted to do, or what they remembered having done in Vienna or Berlin. The stage director just told them where to enter, where to stand and where to exit.

The assorted costumes came from the singers’ suitcases at best, or from a dusty wardrobe locker at worst. The sets usually were assembled from all-purpose canvases in the warehouse. The lighting director’s primary goal was to keep the rips and scratches in the shadows.

Wagner, a visionary and a fastidious man of the theater, would not have liked any of that. As creator of the Gesamtkunstwerk --the all-embracing art work--he might have been positively stimulated, on the other hand, by what the Music Center is about to venture on his behalf.

The designer here is a much celebrated contemporary painter, David Hockney. The director is Jonathan Miller.

Although Miller did stage a solitary “Fliegende Hollander” in Frankfurt a decade ago, he isn’t generally regarded as a Wagner expert. He is generally regarded as something of a renaissance man, however, and the potential cliche is used advisedly.

Born 53 years ago in London, Miller is a physician and historian, a scientist with a special interest in neuro-psychology, a medical researcher, author and lecturer, a Shakespeare authority, a television producer and presenter, a remarkably successful and diversified director of plays and films as well as operas.

At the moment, he serves as head of the Old Vic. A chronic workaholic, he also finds time to be an associate producer of the English National Opera.

This is the same gentleman, moreover, who came to fame in 1961 with a zany revue called “Beyond the Fringe.” His co-authors and co-actors in that memorable effort were Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Allan Bennett. Without their comic example, there might never have been a Monty Python.

Miller and Moore will be reunited, incidentally, in March when the former stages a decidedly anti-conventional “Mikado” for the Music Center Opera, and the latter makes his quasi-operatic debut as Ko-Ko. This event may just make Miller the first director in the history of Western civilization to deal both with the sublime Wagner and the ridiculous Gilbert and Sullivan.

He smiles at the realization, over Scotch in his downtown hotel, but registers little surprise. Being typecast, after all, was never his style.

Right now, his formidable mind is occupied with preparations for “Tristan.” He isn’t accustomed to working with big budgets, itinerant singers and star-conscious companies. He finds a three-week rehearsal period for a challenge as complex as this less than generous. Nor is he used to sharing the stage with a symphony orchestra.

“Things are slightly different,” he admits, “at the Coliseum (in London). It is more like family there. I know the choristers and the wig master by name. Things here are a bit more tentative, more hesitant. But it is coming along, and we do have a great technical director.”

Miller sports a tweedy jacket over his gangly 6-foot-3 frame, a blue button-down shirt with an unruly collar, a conservative necktie slightly askew, and no-nonsense jeans. His wiry hair, formerly ginger, has turned gray. Quick-witted, eminently amiable and given to marvelous, rambling monologues, he resembles an obsessive college professor more than any colonist’s preconception of a Commander of the British Empire.

“Tristan,” he says, “is a mythic fairy story. I don’t have an enormously complex concept to enforce here. We are playing in a quasi-realistic setting, following what Wagner asked for. Actually, I am against elaborate, Germanic conceptualization.

“It is enough, I think, to play against Hockney’s vivid, brightly colored images. What we present is realistic in the sense that what is mentioned in the text is there. We are dealing with a world of illustration.”

Many a so-called realistic production of this opera has looked silly at the end of the first act, when the ship carrying Tristan and Isolde is supposed to dock in Cornwall. Miller remains unfazed.

“All we have to depict is the scurrying of the sailors. The arrival has no impact on the lovers. They are locked in a trance.

“The love potion doesn’t have to work on Tristan. He is in love with Isolde from the start. As a good knight, he keeps his passion under control. When she yields, however, he melts.

“Isolde doesn’t just demand his love. She also demands his Ehre --his honor. The deep emotion that that arouses concerns Platonism, sublimated passion.”

The passion, according to Miller, cannot be literal.

“It would be hard for Tristan and Isolde to sing the love duet tangled in a physical encounter.” He smiles.

“They are in a trance of erotic, adulterous love. It is allegorical. We must tell everything with the fixity of their gaze. Suddenly she sees him in ways we don’t understand. If one plays it any other way, one confronts the uncomfortable prospect of Wagnerian soft porn.”

Miller had little to say about the casting of this “Tristan”--the lovers originally were to have been Placido Domingo or Peter Hofmann and Jessye Norman. Not being involved in personnel decisions, he adds with a pleasant edge of sarcasm, may have been just as well.

“Getting people with the right voices for such roles is a strange lottery.” The right voice, he has discovered, may not accompany the ideal body or be activated by the most receptive brain.

“Sometimes direction becomes a matter of taking things away, of cleaning and eliminating. I hate heroic mannerisms. I want things simple, not awkward.”

His view of Isolde may surprise, perhaps even alarm, traditionalists. Miller does not see the heroine as a pure, noble, all-sacrificing innocent. Banish the stereotype.

“Actually,” he says, “she is another of those 19th-Century Germanic sirens, a Lorelei, a decapitating priestess. She wounds with love and consumes. She is related to Judith, to Salome, even to Turandot. She is one of those creatures who un-man men. Her eroticism subverts and destroys a loyal community of men.

“Tristan is her tragic victim. King Marke is the father figure who nourishes, gives life. Isolde forces Tristan to dishonor the King, and that destroys him.”

And what, in this rather unorthodox context, of the ultimate transfiguration, the “Liebestod”?

“The love-death is a non-medical death. Isolde’s death is not important. It is just an obliteration. I see her as the angel of death, a strange, caressing vampire.”

How, one had to wonder, can the heroine remain sympathetic within this perspective? The answer turns out to be simple.

“I’m not certain she is sympathetic, or that that is what this is about.

“I don’t think she dies. I see her as a presiding figure in the discovery of a metaphysical dawn. Ultimately Tristan and Isolde are sublimated. Apotheosis takes over them.

“She may sink to her knees, but I don’t know yet exactly what she will do. The performances are still so far away.”

Miller wants to keep his options open until the curtain goes up.

“I always change my ideas as I work. Rehearsals are moments of experimentation and of discovery. My rehearsals are very open-ended. I don’t like to plot things out.

“What works in my mind may not work on the stage. What works for one singer may not work for another in the same role.

“A production is like a painting. Once, when I was in Rome, I was once allowed to view the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel from a very close vantage point. It was astonishing. At the distance of 18 inches, I discovered that Michelangelo had painted out certain things. He had second, even third thoughts. A figure was redrawn three times. I could see it. The artist redid things right up to the very end. That gave me confidence.”

Although he is consumed with Wagner at the moment, that composer’s output does not happen to loom very large in Miller’s plans.

“Some day, I might want to do a rather unusual ‘Meistersinger.’ I’d play it at the Nurnberg rally in 1936.

“I have some ideas about the ‘Ring’ too. But there are other things I’d rather do--Mozart, Monteverdi, Gluck, Janacek, ‘Don Carlos,’ ‘Lulu,’ ‘Wozzeck’ . . . .

“I am interested in Wagner. But the interest is more distant. Perhaps it is because I’m Jewish. I keep seeing Wagner’s work as the dream of an SS officer, a morbid world of battle wounds and dying with one’s blond soul mate, sort of a Wehrmacht ‘Gotterdammerung.’ ”

Will this interpretive attitude be apparent in “Tristan”?

“I hope not.”

Although Miller’s prime concern must be dramatic projection, he harbors “very mixed feelings” about supertitles.

“This is the first time I will have worked with them. At the ENO we always do opera in English. I think I’m against them.

“The titles are important for an audience that doesn’t know the piece. The danger lies in the possibility that the translation won’t adequately render the German. I also worry about optics, about the angle of the projections. If the eye has to keep moving up and down to read the titles and watch the stage, it can be a problem.

“It is too easy, however, to adopt an elitist view. One doesn’t want to put on an oratorio that no one out front understands. We can’t just do it in a foreign language. . . .

“Given a choice, I’d prefer to do the opera in the language of the audience. The gains in comprehension are worth the losses. But one can’t get the big international artists to relearn their roles in English.”

Big international artists are, in any case, not among Miller’s favored collaborators.

“I would not work with those great, sacred beasts,” he declares.

“I don’t want my singers to arrive on the day of the final rehearsal with a pre-set interpretation. I wouldn’t want to work with Pavarotti. I don’t want singers who are hurrying from one engagement to another.

“I did have a pleasant surprise with Eva Marton when she sang Tosca with me in Florence. I was able to persuade her that my idea of playing the opera in Fascist Italy--it was ‘Open City,’ ca. 1943--was not a gimmick or a trick. But she, I fear, is not like the others.”

Miller has been happiest working with small companies that can keep an ensemble of intelligent singing actors together. He thinks back fondly of the “Cosi fan Tutte” he did in St. Louis, and of his intense collaboration there with the late Calvin Simmons.

He looks forward to a “Traviata” with the modest Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., just as he does to “Vec Makropulos” at the Met and--in 1989, he thinks--”Mahagonny” here.

The “Mikado” that will bloom in our spring, however, is of more concrete concern.

“I am very proud of it,” he says.

The production, created for the English National Opera, is not guaranteed to warm the cockles of a traditional Savoyard. Miller takes the “Duck Soup” aesthetic of the Marx Brothers as his updated inspiration, and allows poor Katisha to resemble poor Margaret Dumont.

“The production here will be a bit more Americanized than it was in London. In any case, there is no point in doing the thing in Japan. Those names--Nanki-Poo and Pooh-Bah--they’re certainly not Japanese. They have the sound of the nursery about them, of potty training.

“This comes from the world of British nostalgia and of Punch. The D’Oyly Carte tradition made the opera fatuous, inane. We have come away from that.”

There was a time, back in 1982, when the theater thought it had lost Jonathan Miller. He announced some valedictory productions and then devoted himself, full time, to medical research.

He immersed himself in the study of anoxia and brain damage. He explored matters of neuro-psychology, neuro-biology and cognitive science. He wrote scholarly papers and, he insists, did not miss the theater.

Nevertheless, after four years he returned, reluctantly. Now he misses scientific academia.

“It was painful to discover the discrepancy in age between me and my young colleagues. I found youngsters, 23 years old, who had grown up in the laboratory. They thought of me as an amateur, a tourist. They found me interesting, perhaps, but they always thought I was a show-biz figure.

“It was a very happy time for me. But I found I was too old to be a serious contender. One can’t make a serious contribution if one is out of it too long. At best, one can be a useful provocateur .”

A useful provocateur . There are worse fates, in science and in the theater, even at the opera.

Especially at the opera.