UK Edition
Kasper Holten: 'Regrets? I’ve had a few...'
With his bracingly short and controversial tenure almost over, Covent Garden’s director of opera talks to Rupert Christiansen
Six years ago, Kasper Holten’s arrival from Copenhagen at Covent Garden as its new director of opera caused high excitement. His powers extended over all matters of production and, in partnership with music director Antonio Pappano and casting director Peter Katona, this strappingly tall and fiercely articulate 37-year-old promised a radically new era that would open up the opera house up to fresh aesthetic winds.
It hasn’t worked out quite as everyone hoped. The expectation was that Holten would serve a decade in order to see his long-term planning come to fruition, but in December 2015, claiming the need to return to his native Denmark, where his two young daughters were being schooled, he announced that he would not be renewing his initial five-year contract – and so, following the première of his new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg next month, he will hand over to a relatively unknown quantity, Oliver Mears.
He leaves with his head held high, battered but unbowed. Nobody could doubt Holten’s sincerity and commitment to opera or the Tiggerish enthusiasm and energy with which he has addressed his brief. Yet although he was popular internally, he has been given a fairly rough ride by the press and public, with criticism of his salary (£250,000 for a part-time job) and doubts cast on his judgment after front-page scandals were caused by stagings of Guillaume Tell and Lucia di Lammermoor marked with graphic episodes of sex and violence.
His self-assessment is candid and uncomplaining. He believes he has been treated fairly and openly admits that he has made mistakes and miscalculations. “It takes a while to get your bearings in a new theatre and an unfamiliar city and its culture, and I regret that I am leaving just when I was beginning to understand them and feel more comfortable.
“What I have learnt is that, unlike Copenhagen, where there is basically just one opera audience, at Covent Garden there are several different publics – some people come just for the singers, some want traditional stagings, some want innovation. I should have thought more sensitively about the directors I matched to which sector and project.”
Perhaps Holten’s greatest shortcoming in consequence has been his failure to curate solidly handsome productions of core repertory, such as John Copley’s La Bohème or Richard Eyre’s La traviata, which can repeatedly serve as vehicles for visiting star singers. He has nothing against such “traditional” stagings, he says, but “you can’t set out to commission a hit. It doesn’t work like that.”
The challenges of risk, experiment and concept come to him more naturally, yet he denies that he has ever wilfully set out to shock or offend. “In fact, I would rather not have had the controversies over Lucia and Guillaume Tell. The rape scene in Tell lopsided attention away from the rest of the production and we should have adjusted it in rehearsal. The Lucia I liked very much: I thought that the director, Katie Mitchell, added nuance to a story that can seem crude. We issued a warning to ticket-holders about the explicit content, and in retrospect that wasn’t a good idea. But it was a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
He also feels “bad” that Britten and Janáček have been so poorly represented on his watch, but promises that amends will soon be made – notably with a cycle of four of Janáček’s operas scheduled over the coming seasons. As to his achievements, he is proud that he has been “transparent and accountable” at Covent Garden, improving interface with the public by scheduling lectures, talks and Q&A sessions, as well as responding with unfailing courtesy to a stream of “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” missives.
He rightly feels he has been successful in programming neglected 20th-century classics such as Enescu’s Oedipe, and forging partnerships with outside institutions such as Shakespeare’s Globe, the Young Vic and the Lyric Hammersmith for baroque and new work. The latter is something close to his heart: he fought hard to persuade the accountants to sanction a loss-leader revival of George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Written on Skin, an opera he considers to be a modern masterpiece, and he is thrilled that he leaves another creation by the pair in the pipeline.
“I’ve introduced some wonderful young directors to London, too,” he adds, singling out Damiano Michieletto, whose acerbic Guillaume Tell was followed by a more widely admired Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci that mollified the Tunbridge Wells brigade, won an Olivier Award, and is now booked in for two revivals.”
Is there one who got away? “Yes, Dmitri Tcherniakov. His Eugene Onegin for the Bolshoi is one of the great things, and I should have signed him up for another Russian opera. That was my fault – I just wasn’t quick enough.”
Squashing rumours of friction with Antonio Pappano, he pays the warmest of tributes to the music director. “The worst thing about leaving this job will be ending our official relationship. Collaborating with him on Szymanowski’s Król Roger was an absolute highlight of my time here. Yes, we have disagreed sometimes, but our conversation has always been totally open and honest. And he is simply fantastic with singers – for that alone, there is nobody like him.”
Holten believes that although the art form of opera is thriving, the business model is “in crisis”. “The root of the problem is not audiences preferring HD cinema broadcast, but falling rates of subsidy. We are lucky at Covent Garden because we can call on philanthropy to an extent that other companies can’t, but what saddens me is that although we get incredible value for money out of the little that the taxpayer contributes, there is no real appetite in government to support us.”
Does he think that Covent Garden’s struggling neighbour ENO can sustain a future? “I very much hope so. The competition is very healthy.” Because operas require so much advance planning, Holten’s commissions will continue to dominate the schedule until 2020. But he’s chosen to sign off from his post with his own new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – an opera that raises many of the profound questions about the place of art in our lives and society that preoccupy Holten’s own thinking.
“It discusses populism versus elitism, the new versus the old, the question of nationalism. At the centre of it is the cobbler and poet Hans Sachs, who sees how easily everything can fall apart,” Holten says. “But it needs to be humorous, to have subtlety and irony. When one calls it a comedy, that shouldn’t make anyone expect a Feydeau farce, but it does smile at the folly of the world.
"As I start rehearsing, what is disturbing me most about it is the subtext of sexual politics – Pogner is offering his daughter up as the prize for a competition run by a club of local businessmen: what are we meant to think? All this means that it seems very much as an opera for today.”
And that is how Kasper Holten likes it.
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opens at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk) on March 11