The Uber-Artist

Nine men and women of various shapes and sizes, dressed in workout clothes and black platform shoes a la Frankenstein’s monster, move in slow, geometric patterns in a rehearsal room in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. They begin in an upstage line, raising first left, then right arms in precise patterns and moving toward the downstage side of the room.

Their director, Achim Freyer, gives notes quietly in German, refining their steps to modify the stage picture he is creating. An enigmatic man with a mop of curly gray hair and an impish energy, he adjusts their movements ever so slightly.

The scene might easily pass as a dance rehearsal or perhaps large-scale performance art. The room is quiet and devoid of instruments; there is no music and no singing. And yet this is a rehearsal for the latest offering at Los Angeles Opera: the North American premiere of Freyer’s production of Bach’s Mass in B minor.

This is Freyer’s U.S. directorial debut, and it features the Freyer Ensemble, and vocal soloists soprano Simone Nold, mezzo-soprano Annekathrin Laabs, tenor Marcus Ullmann and baritone Stephan Loges, with Bach specialist Peter Schreier conducting.

Almost nothing about this production is typical. The work itself--a seminal entry in the Western canon--is rarely taken out of a concert setting and staged. Freyer’s vision has none of the traditional aspects of opera--the singing will be done from the pit, for example. Then there is the rest of Freyer’s abstract style, which is neither representational nor linear, and his interpretation of Bach’s mass, which purposefully avoids the work’s religious context.

“It’s an anatomy of the nature of mankind,” says the director, who is also a painter and set designer, speaking via Los Angeles Opera director of artistic operations Edgar Baitzel, who served as his interpreter during a recent interview. “It’s about a desperate attempt to overcome the solitude of mankind and the solitude of the individual human being.”

Among other things, Freyer’s bold choices serve as proof that Los Angeles Opera is venturing in new directions in this first full season of programming under artistic director Placido Domingo. “Part of the task of the arts is to extend and overcome borders and to risk something,” says Baitzel, who saw Freyer’s Mass in B minor when it premiered at Germany’s Schwetzingen Festival in 1996, and brought it to Domingo’s attention. “We were very well aware that this piece might be the most daring piece in our entire program.”

Interpreting Bach

Bach’s Mass in B minor is widely considered the composer’s supreme accomplishment. Despite creating a wealth of Lutheran church music, Bach rarely set the Latin liturgy, and this massive work, begun in 1733, wasn’t completed until 1748, two years before he died.

Interpreters have often suggested a connection between Bach’s sacred music and the composer’s spiritual convictions. But others see this work more as Freyer does. “It really explores the human condition,” the director says. “It has to do with human feelings. Every kind of politics and ideology works with the same materials--it’s archetypal material about an ongoing dance with death.

“Although Bach’s music is in regard to religious scenes, it’s not only limited to this,” he continues. And certainly not limited to Christianity. “I think that this Bach music is understandable for people who belong to other religions--not only Western religions.”

Consequently, Freyer feels it would be reductive for him to interpret the Mass in B minor as a mass, per se. “It becomes literal,” he says, “And that is absolutely not what I do.”

Instead, Freyer’s method begins with the sound itself. “The music is the basis,” he says. “I work first on the music, not on the text. And at the end, I compare the text and sound with the action.”

The scenes onstage--there are 24, one for each of the numbered movements in the work--and the music emanating from the pit exist in relation to one another, yet this is not musical theater. In fact, it is important to Freyer that his stage pictures are not regarded as an attempt to illustrate the music. “The images of the music are not doubled,” he explains.

In one scene, the men and women of the Freyer Ensemble appear as faceless silhouettes, carrying long poles, coming together in a formation that evokes some kind of collective labor. In another moment, they are spaced across the stage, some climbing on ladders, some in profile, and some facing outward, in a tableau that suggests the varied activities of daily life or an ascent to a higher realm.

The slow-moving bodies are complemented by Freyer’s painted scrims and his designs for dramatic lighting. Sometime the figures move in a cool, almost sterile environment, and sometimes they swim through lush baths of intense color.

It all adds up to a kind of tightly choreographed, abstract, imagistic spectacle theater. “Germany has been developing this kind of work all along,” Baitzel says. “But there is less of this in the U.S.”

Here in America, the closest analogy to Freyer’s work would be the avant-garde represented by the such artists as Robert Wilson, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, the latter two of whom have collaborated with Freyer.

Yet even in Germany, the question remains whether it is possible to successfully add a visual component to Bach. “Can one do that?” wrote Stefan Koch in the German newspaper Morgen, regarding the work’s 1996 premiere. In fact, Koch’s query was echoed by a number of reviewers. Koch added, “Must one invest an additional optical enrichment after all to the work whose music by itself is so closed, so hermetically complete? ... The result left me with ... a kind of fascinated speechlessness.”

Careers in Theater and Art

Born in Berlin in 1934, Freyer was in his 20s when he became a student of playwright-director-theoretician Bertolt Brecht. He began a career as a costume and set designer, emigrating from East Berlin in 1972 to the West, where he soon forged a reputation as one of the key designers of the emerging Bildertheater movement, a school of stage artists highly influenced by the visual arts.

Concurrently, Freyer also had a career as a painter, receiving his first awards in the 1960s. With numerous solo and group exhibitions to his credit since, he has participated twice in Documenta, a contemporary art show in Germany, and is a member of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin and Leipzig.

By the late ‘70s, Freyer was concentrating on directing opera and other musical works, including a Stuttgart staging of a Philip Glass trilogy that garnered international acclaim. In 1988, he formed his ensemble, bringing together actors, dancers, musicians and others for extended rehearsal periods several times a year.

“This ensemble is used in training and developing works,” Freyer says. “If I figure out that something doesn’t work, then I work with them on different approaches and ways that it might work. The intention [is] to find new ways to expand, and new additions and new ideas.”

The ensemble is designed to overcome limitations commonly found in the institutional theater and opera houses. “If you work with singers, for example, you have them for four weeks, and you cannot expect that they will participate in [a] workshop,” Baitzel says. “You cannot expect first-class singers to be able to stay for 10 weeks in order to make it work for one production.”

Freyer’s preferred working style may be one reason why his productions haven’t yet made it to the U.S. There are logistical and financial difficulties in importing an entire ensemble to work on a production, let alone providing the kind of artistic incubation period that Freyer likes.

But Freyer doesn’t work only with his ensemble or in a completely abstract mode. He also directs more traditional operas, and L.A. Opera first considered bringing one of those productions here. “Freyer did a wonderful ‘Tristan’ years ago in Brussels, but we already had the [David] Hockney production here, so we could not do it,” Baitzel says. “The other thing that Placido liked very much was his production of ‘The Magic Flute,’ but we had a ‘Magic Flute’ here too.”

Then again, asking Freyer to create a new production didn’t seem feasible. “He is used to working with six, seven weeks or even eight weeks of rehearsals if it’s a very complicated work, and we cannot do that because it costs too much money,” Baitzel says. “But he still remained on top of the list of artists that we wanted to present here.”

During the planning of the first season’s programming under Domingo, it became clear that there was no production involving early music. At that point, Baitzel recalled Freyer’s Mass in B minor. “It was televised, so I found a video, and when Placido looked at this video, he said, OK, I think that is the right piece to fill our open slot in that season.”

For Freyer, it represented an opportunity not only to make his U.S. debut, but to revisit his production of the mass, which he’s been working on for the last month, modifying to fit the Chandler stage. “He never delivers an exact duplicate of what he’s done before,” Baitzel says. “He wants to be very sure that what he has done is still valid.”

For L.A. Opera, it’s also an opportunity to take the company in a new direction without a great deal of financial risk. “It’s an artistic risk, but it’s not a financial risk,” Baitzel says. “It’s not a very expensive production.

“Nevertheless, we have to look for a new audience that will appreciate this kind of work,” Baitzel continues. “That will indicate for us if this is a direction in which we might go for the future. It opens up different options. It does not necessarily mean that we will have a staged work like this each season, but I think you can build up something here, and new ideas will succeed.”

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Bach’s Mass in B minor, Los Angeles Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Saturday and Feb. 16, 2 p.m.; Wednesday and Feb. 9, 13 and 15, 7:30 p.m. $30-$165. (213) 365-3500.