BAMezine Interview with Jonathan
Miller, director of St. Matthew Passion
Questions by Joseph V. Melillo
Joseph V. Melillo: What originally inspired
you to consider Bach's St. Matthew Passion as a staged production?
Jonathan Miller: I had known the St. Matthew
Passion for many years, and I had been to many traditional performances
of it. It’s impossible to resist in any form, as a concert
or oratorio—that, after all, is how it was intended to
be done. But I became increasingly aware that it had a dramatic
story to it, a narrative, and unlike many oratorios that are
sequences of prayer, these are events that are narratively recorded
in the gospel. It seemed that there was something stultifying
about seeing a row of singers dressed in their evening dresses
and tuxedos standing in front of lecterns, with an orchestra
behind them, with no relationship between the orchestral instruments
and the singers, and practically no representation of the dramatic
events that are described within the gospel.
About twelve years ago, someone asked if I’d I ever thought
of staging it. I said that it occured to me, but I hadn’t
begun to see clearly how it might be done. I knew what ought
not to be done if it were to be staged—that it ought not
to be pictorially real, it shouldn’t have scenery, it
shouldn’t have biblical costumes, it shouldn’t look
like a C.B. DeMille “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”
I managed to persuade the man who asked me whether he could
set up a workshop and he managed to secure the services of a
small orchestra, soloists, and a small choir. We sat around
in a room in a school in Westminster, London, and my wife and
I sat like a pair of priveleged German aristrocrats, enjoying
this performance. And they simply sang it through.
They all sat round in a circle, and they sang, and as they went
along, I kept saying ‘why don’t you stop here, why
don’t you get up and talk to the person who seems to be
the person you’re addressing?’ And then I’d
hear someone sing an aria, with an obligato instrument, and
I’d say to the violinst or flautist, ‘why don’t
you come and sit beside the person who’s singing, and
have a musical dialogue?’ And at the end of the day’s
workshop, they said to me, ‘Well, have you got any ideas
of how to do it?’ and I said, ‘I think we’ve
just done it!’ and I realized that a minimally dramatized
version was all that was needed. We began rehearsing, and halfway
through the rehearsals members of the orchestra said ‘what
are we going to wear?’ and I said, ‘You’re
wearing it,’ and they said ‘What do you mean? I’m
in jeans!’ and I said ‘fine, you’re in jeans.’
It’s a dramatic story that doesn’t require you to
look like the people that you’re playing. The people you’re
playing will become apparent by what you’re singing. The
rapt attention which the members of the choir, and the orchestra
who perhaps are not playing at this moment, will give to the
performance, will focus the attention of the audience. That
was how it started, and that’s how I’ve done it
ever since.
JVM: How did you discover your specific directorial
approach to the staging?
JM: It simply happened as it so often happens
to me when I’m directing a play or opera. I don’t
come into the room with very clear ideas about what I’m
going to do, but no sooner has someone begun to sing or say
something, it always occurs to me, ‘Wouldn’t it
be nice that when you’re singing that, or saying that,
you were in fact sitting next to the person who you seem to
be addressing? It wasn’t that I had a directorial approach
to start with, it’s only by hindsight that I can see as
one emerged as a result of working in rehearsal. Rehearsal,
for me, is really a way of finding out what to do. I think for
a lot of directors, rehearsal is a way of bringing into existence
what they had already conceived in their mind’s eye before
they even got to work with the cast. It’s the work with
the cast which for me develops the drama.
JVM: Why did you want Paul Goodwin to be your
musical partner?
JM: It wasn’t that I started with any
particular idea of who the musical partner would be. the producer
who first put it on had suggested Paul Goodwin as the conductor.
We immediately established an absolutely perfect partnership,
which doesn’t always—and to some extent rather rarely—prevails
between director and conductor. It was so intimately related—what
I was doing was related to what he was doing—and what
he was doing was somehow part of the drama, and that he wasn’t,
as it were, simply wagging his stick… that in some strange
way he was part of the drama as well. Ever since then, I’ve
always done it with him.
JVM: What do you consider your greatest challenge
to be in working with the singers for the staging?
JM: I think the only challenge is just simply
personal reality. You have to persuade the singer to try and be
what they are actually expressing. It’s to some extent a
question of eliminating the mannerisms of singers, particularly
the mannerisms of being the singer of an oratorio. People who
are accustomed to standing behind a lectern, encased in a tuxedo,
often have a standard way of doing it. You have to tell them very
early on. I met with no resistance from any of the people I’ve
worked with, and many of the people who are going to be in this
particular version are people I’ve worked wth several times
before, and they know what I do and they feel themselves to be
partners in its creation. They’re not people upon whom I’ve
imposed an idea; they’re co-producers of it.
JVM: What is your opinion of working within the
architectural environment of the BAM Harvey Theater?
JM: The BAM Harvey Theater is the ideal setting and circumstance
for anyone who works like me, and as indeed it was for Peter Brook
when he first encountered it. Peter and I have been long dedicated
to the idea of the unfurnished space in which you don’t
have to put up lots of elaborate scenery, in which what happens
dramatically takes place between the participants, not in a setting
that needs to be illustrated. There’s something so wonderfully
informal and heartwarmingly shabby about the Harvey. It’s
not shabby in a perjorative sense, it’s just wonderfully
informal. It’s the ideal circumstance for doing most of
what I enjoy doing. I can’t really conceive of doing it
elsewhere. I don’t really like doing opera in opera houses.
I think probably if I were to start my opera career over again,
I’d probably do most of my productions in somewhere like
the Harvey, and best of all actually in the Harvey. I’ve
done many scenic versions of operas in which I have often expensively
built scenery, and they’re often quite impressive. But I
could see very many of my previous scenic productions done in
the Harvey. It’s an ideal circumstance. It’s one of
the great artistic centers of New York, if not the United States
as a whole. It’s the only place in the U.S. where you know
the performing arts are actually close to the original energy
of performance.
November, 2005