Damiano Michieletto: 'Being booed is not an honour'

  Earnestly bespectacled and politely reasonable, Damiano Michieletto is a 40-year-old Italian, with a mild demeanour that makes him appear an unlikely object of screaming hostility. But that’s just what he became during the first night of his new production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell at Covent Garden in June.

Although revisionist opera stagings get the bird with monotonous regularity today, this time it was different. Normally the audience restrains itself until the final curtain calls, when the director takes a bow and acknowledges authorship of the concept; here, for the first time anyone could recall, the attack was launched with obscenity-heavy heckling as well as loud booing while the music was in progress – specifically, during a dance interlude in which a woman was graphically stripped and raped at gunpoint by some drunken soldiers.

 The enraged protest to this scene made tabloid as well as broadsheet headlines and went viral globally, raising yet again the ancient quarrel between those who want opera to provide glamorous escapism and those who want to drag it – if necessary, kicking and screaming – into the 21st century.

 Michieletto has now returned to Covent Garden to prepare new productions of those grand old Italian melodramas of murderous sexual jealousy and revenge, Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. He is unfazed by Guillaume Tell’s reception, having learnt long ago to take booing in his stride: it’s something that he first experienced in 2007 when his police-state staging of Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra (“The Thieving Magpie”) at Pesaro precipitated the wrath of the gods. Later he described that downpour of hostility as “like having the ice-bucket thrown over me in the Ice Bucket Challenge. But I don’t feel tarnished if I’m certain I’ve done my best”.

Born in the Veneto region to working-class parents, Michieletto trained at theatre school in Milan and subsidised the start of his directing career by working in a pizzeria. Such experience roots him, and he can already look back at the Covent Garden furore with wry detachment  – “I wasn’t shocked by it,” he says. “But I was surprised.” Then he makes an impressively firm defence of his philosophy and practice.

“If you only want to be entertained, don’t go to opera, because it is an art form which will tell you extreme stories about sexuality and power. Don Giovanni murders an old man; Butterfly has her child taken from her and kills herself. Guillaume Tell is equally unpleasant – it shows a father forced by a perverted sadist to shoot an apple from the head of his own son. This is brutality, and it should not be romanticised.

“What I showed in the scene that was booed was only honest: the directions in the libretto state that soldiers are forcing the girls to dance with them and that the villagers get more outraged. You have to present that as you think it would be in reality, as something cruel and oppressive.

“I don’t regard being booed as an honour: something isn’t working if you get booed. Like everyone else, I want to be appreciated, and I was disappointed that 99 per cent of the reviews focused on three minutes of the production. But I must be honest to my vision, honest with myself.”

Does good taste set any limit on what can be shown in the interests of that honesty? “No, it does not. The only limit has to be whether there is a reason for what you do.” But can’t showing something less overtly make it mean something more? “Yes, I would agree.”

And in that spirit, he claims he had “no problem” with the decision to tone down the depiction of the rape after the first-night outburst. “This is natural – theatre is something always in development.”

 What about the idea that a director should observe the composer’s intentions, however they may be determined? “Well, the composer is always the first director of the opera, because the music sets the pace and the mood. But when I start, I don’t look at stage directions or research the background – those facts only narrow your imagination. I need to engage with it at a personal level, so without any programme in mind, I just read the text and listen to the music and ask them all the important questions – who, why, where, what, how.

 “Then the problem becomes how to make sense of your answers in theatrical terms and connect them with an audience today. But that doesn’t mean you need to force the story towards something contemporary or highly unusual, and I don’t believe a production always needs to engage with crises of modern life. It just needs to have the electricity that makes the story alive in the theatre and different from listening at home to a CD.”

 Sometimes, he admits, that electricity is absent. “I can be really doubtful about the need for opera direction – something that has only existed, after all, for less than a century. Most operas you can understand without staging – you just listen to them, and they work perfectly. If I was God in the opera world, I would commission concert performances and give audiences just Verdi, just Rossini.”

 Yet his production of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci will attempt to weave the two narratives into “one long story” – something the composers, hostile to each other, never intended and something which could be said to ignore the differences between them. Michieletto thinks it is more significant that “they share a common atmosphere and humanity. So I am trying to mix them up, by showing characters from Pagliacci in Cavalleria, and vice-versa.”

He becomes evasive when asked whether the staging will contain anything as sensational as that scene in Guillaume Tell. “I am putting these operas into a modern period. A reference point for me is Francesco Munzi’s Black Souls, a recent movie that I liked very much.”

This is, by all accounts, a broody drama about the Calabrian mafia network 'Ndrangheta, and while it isn’t noted for its shoot-outs, it’s certainly a far cry from Covent Garden’s previous productions of these operas, directed by Franco Zeffirelli in folkloric spirit. “I don’t want to shock: that’s not my style,” says Michieletto firmly. But he certainly wants to keep us awake. 

Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci  opens at the Royal Opera House, WC2 (020 7304 4000) on Dec 3