42 LISTENER FEBRUARY 29 2020
Books & Culture
D
irector Peter Sellars always has
vertical hair and a friendly
smile. The iconoclastic artist
has also raised the hair and
the ire of conservative ele-
ments of the classical music
establishment since his arrival
as enfant terrible on the US operatic scene.
“Artistic vandalism” thundered Opera News
after his radical staging of Mozart’s Don
Giovanni at the Monadnock Music Festival
in 1980. In Sellars’ production, set in an
urban ghetto in the style of “blaxploita-
tion” cinema, the promiscuous Don partied
almost naked, shooting up heroin.
Four decades later, a laughing Sellars is
unrepentant. “It’s so weird,” he says, “when
people want to own something. For me, it’s
all about what people are doing right now.
These composers are writing for the ages.
Mozart hated the 18th century and to force
him back there now he’s finally escaped is
just cruel.”
Productions directed by Sellars will be
staged in March at both the New Zealand
Festival of the Arts in Wellington and
the Auckland Arts Festival. Today, he is
lauded as one of the most “disruptive and
influential” directors on the contemporary
performing-arts scene, collaborating with
such conductors as Sir Simon Rattle and
Esa-Pekka Salonen, composer John Adams
and visual artist Sir Anish Kapoor.
It seemed inevitable that Sellars would
work in theatre. As a precocious 10-year-
old, he was apprenticed to a marionette
theatre producing fairy tales in exotic
settings. High school took Sellars to thelegendary Phillips Academy Andover in
Massachusetts where the teenager discov-
ered the operas of innovative director Sarah
Caldwell, founder of the Boston Opera
Group.
“I saw Alban Berg’s Lulu, Berlioz operas,
things no one would touch – an amazing
view of what opera was.” After high school,
Sellars’ mother moved the family to Paris
for two years. “I was three nights a week
at the Paris Opera, and at museums andcinematheques, just absorbing everything
like crazy.”
Fame – and notoriety – came early
after college years at Harvard, where
Sellars directed Anthony and Cleopatra in a
swimming pool and placed a Lincoln Con-
tinental on the set of King Lear. The turning
point was a Denver street production. “I
spliced together 1960s Bayreuth recordings
of Wagner and made this wild one-night
‘Ring’ Cycle with people and puppets. I
brought it out to Harvard and all these
people came – my first national ‘thing’.”
His mid-twenties were exhilarating.
“When I was 25, I was made head of the
American National Theatre at the Kennedy
Centre, which was really wild. And I wasawarded a MacArthur Fellowship – and
fired from a Broadway musical.”B
efore he was 30, Sellars had directed
three Mozart operas – that notorious
Don Giovanni, Così fan Tutte and The
Marriage of Figaro, set in a luxury apartment
in Trump Tower. “It felt like Mozart was a
friend. We were all young and so was he; it
was classical music by a young person. And
politically we felt connected – in the US
it was the ghastly Reagan period, like the
Austrian regime Mozart was fed up with.
Like him, we were furious and outraged but
wanted to operate artistically with humour
and generosity.”
Kopernikus, the chamber opera he’s
directing for the upcoming New Zealand
Festival, has strong Mozartian connections.
Composed by the little-known Canadian
Claude Vivier, it is described as “a ritual
opera of death”. The “transcendent, mind-
blowing” work explores death and the
wonders of the afterlife in what Sellars calls
“pure musical magic”.
He explains the links to Mozart. “Mozart
is a character in Kopernikus – everybody
sings to Herr Mozart – and the Queen
of the Night from The Magic Flute is also
there. Vivier was an orphan, taken from
his mother at birth, and the Queen of the
Night has also lost her child. Vivier took
opera in such a personal way and the
bizarre, strange world of The Magic Flute
was home to him, a place he could find
himself – and his mother.
“Opera is always eccentric, an unusual
angle on the world – which I deeply loveDirect from America
After shaking up the US theatre world for 40-plus years, director
Peter Sellars is staging two “mind-blowing” and “beautiful” musical
productions for audiences in Auckland and Wellington. by ELIZABETH KERR
Sellars believes artists
have a transformational
role. “That’s always
been part of the jobdescription.”
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