THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020 AR 5Classical
SALZBURG, AUSTRIA — On a recent after-
noon here, Krzysztof Warlikowski sat on a
roof terrace, tousling his mane of hair and
drawing deeply on a vape pen. Behind him
were the spire of a church where Mozart
prayed and the hills made famous by “The
Sound of Music.”
Just as the louche clouds of vapor he ex-
pelled jarred against the idyllic Salzburg
landscape, so Mr. Warlikowski’s theater
and opera productions have been sexy, ce-
rebral interlopers at some of Europe’s
grandest theaters over the past 20 years.
This Polish director was in town prepar-
ing a new production of Richard Strauss’s
“Elektra,” which is scheduled to have its
premiere at the Salzburg Festival on Aug. 1.
His stagings have sometimes divided audi-
ences, though his work is always highly an-
ticipated — even more so here in this pan-
demic year, when his “Elektra” will be one
of the few shows in town.
A typical Salzburg Festival features up to
10 new opera productions; this year, be-
cause of coronavirus restrictions, the origi-
nal program of eight fully staged works has
been scaled down to just two, “Elektra” and
Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.”
The streets are eerily quiet for a town
normally overrun with tourists. “Usually,
this city, for me, it’s a disaster,” said Mr. War-
likowski (pronounced var-li-KOV-ski).
“This year, because of coronavirus, it’s
bearable.”
The festival’s organizers aren’t so enthu-
siastic about the effects of the pandemic,
which has put a damper on Salzburg’s 100th
anniversary. Nevertheless, “Elektra,” a col-
laboration between two of the festival’s
founders — Strauss and the librettist, Hugo
von Hofmannsthal — is a perfect work to
celebrate the centennial.
It is also a perfect work for Mr. War-
likowski, 58, who has been drawn time and
again to the myths of ancient Greece that
are the basis of “Elektra.” Mr. Warlikowski
said he was fascinated by the brutal themes
of these stories: “It’s matricide, it’s infanti-
cide, it’s patricide, it’s incest, it’s eating the
body of your own children.”
As recounted in plays by Aeschylus, Eu-
ripides and Sophocles, Electra’s mother,
Clytemnestra, murders her husband as re-
venge for him killing another of their
daughters many years earlier. But the
opera, which focuses on father-adoring
Electra’s plot to murder her mother, doesn’t
include this explanation for Clytemnestra’s
original act. There is, Mr. Warlikowski said,
no moment “when Clytemnestra would say
to Electra: ‘Yes, I did kill your father — be-
cause he killed my daughter, and your sis-
ter.’ ”
To refocus the audience’s attention on the
mother’s motivation, Mr. Warlikowski’s
“Elektra” will begin with a spoken prologue
by Klytämnestra, as the character is called
in the German text. Tanja Ariane Baum-
gartner, the mezzo-soprano who will deliver
the monologue and sing the role, said in an
interview that this opening speech was an
opportunity for her character to defend her-
self.
“We never go for clichés with Krzysztof,”
she added.
Mr. Warlikowski’s treatment of the clas-
sics isn’t just about fleshing out their psy-
chological motivations. He also wants to
show how these ancient stories can res-
onate now. In 1997, he staged Sophocles’s
“Electra” in a setting that many critics rec-
ognized as the former Yugoslavia, a war
zone at the time; for his Paris Opera debut,
in 2006, he set Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tau-
ride,” an opera about Electra’s murdered
sister, in a contemporary retirement home.
His most ambitious engagement with an-
cient Greek texts so far has been his 2009
work “(A)pollinia.” A collage assembled
from snippets of classical tragedies, as well
as reflections on the murder of Jews in Po-
land during World War II, it was developed
at the Nowy Teatr, a theater Mr. War-
likowski founded in Warsaw in 2008.
“The thing was to make a tragedy on the
level of tragedy of the Holocaust,” Mr. War-
likowski said.
“It was a period in Poland when the pub-
lic wasn’t used to discussing this,” he added.
“And so I was doing shows which are like a
public discussion.”
Every production Mr. Warlikowski has
staged has been a collaboration with Malgo-
rzata Szczesniak, a designer he met at col-
lege in Krakow in the early 1980s. She has
created a signature austere look for his
shows, with lots of hard, reflective surfaces
and clinical lighting: The stage for “Elek-
tra,” for example, is wrapped in a wall of pol-
ished steel, and features a huge, movable
plexiglass box.
Their relationship is not purely artistic.
Mr. Warlikowski and Ms. Szczesniak (pro-
nounced SHTOYZH-nyek) are married and
live together, although he is gay.
This might not surprise those who saw
his 2001 “Hamlet,” in which the title charac-ter got naked and lusted after Horatio, or
who remember drag queens in his “Taming
of the Shrew.” Although Mr. Warlikowski
has discussed his sexuality openly with for-
eign news media, he avoids the subject
when speaking with Polish journalists, who
often prefer not to ask.
“Yes, I am gay, but first I am a human be-
ing,” Mr. Warlikowski said. “And I think the
gay thing, it’s becoming less and less impor-
tant in my life.”
Mr. Warlikowski and Ms. Szczesniak
lived with the prominent Polish actor Jacek
Pondiezialek in the 1990s, when he was Mr.
Warlikowski’s lover. They now live — in
Warsaw and Palermo, Italy — with the
French dancer Claude Bardouil, who chor-
eographs their productions, and who is also
in Salzburg working on “Elektra.”
Mr. Warlikowski — who was born in
Szczecin, near the Polish border with Ger-
many — and Ms. Szczesniak met in a philos-
ophy class at the Jagiellonian University.
After graduating, they went to Paris when
travel restrictions were lifted in the late-80s
thaw that preceded the end of communism.
They were poor there, Ms. Szczesniak said,
but happy: They sat in the cheap seats at
the opera, visited museums and hung out in
parks and cafes.
In 1989, the pair returned to Krakow and
enrolled at the Ludwik Solski Academy for
the Dramatic Arts. There, Mr. Warlikowski
studied with Krystian Lupa, a towering fig-
ure in Polish theater who makes long,
slowly unfolding works based on literarytexts. In an interview, Mr. Lupa said that a
student production by Mr. Warlikowski,
drawn from the writings of Proust, marked
him as a rising talent. “I felt there and then
that Krzysztof Warlikowski was going to be
a distinguished director,” he said.
This potential was not always seen by
Polish critics, many of whom found Mr.
Warlikowski’s early work too strongly influ-
enced by his teacher. “The umbilical cord of
our student-pedagogue relationship had
not yet been severed,” Mr. Lupa said. But,
he added, the first inklings of Mr. War-
likowski’s mature style were already clear
in those 1990s shows, particularly an endur-
ing fascination with “perverse, unobvious,
not straightforward situations, where one
person inflicts pain on another.”
His stark, bloody 1997 staging of Sopho-
cles’s “Electra,” his Warsaw debut, was
poorly reviewed. Looking back in 2004,
however, the critic Maciej Nowak wrote in
the theater journal Notatnik Teatralny that,
in that production, Polish theater “made
contact with what was happening on the
stages of Western Europe.”
By the time Mr. Warlikowski staged his
first important opera — Verdi’s “Don Car-
los,” in its French version, at the Polish Na-
tional Opera in 2000 — he was beginning to
be celebrated as an original voice, though
still a provocative one. The 2001 “Hamlet”
in which Mr. Pondiezialek (pronounced
pon-ya-JOW-ek), in the title role, took his
clothes off, was shocking when it played in
Poland, and many audience members
walked out, said Piotr Gruszczynski, a dra-
maturg who works with Mr. Warlikowski.
“A naked actor onstage was something
totally new,” he said.
But this was Mr. Warlikowski’s interna-
tional breakout: It was rapturously re-
ceived when it traveled to the Avignon Fes-
tival in France, and an offer to work at the
Paris Opera followed.
Mr. Warlikowski now works on two or
three opera productions each year. Every
two or three years, he develops a new work
with the actors in the permanent troupe at
the Nowy Teatr, and occasionally makes a
show with his friend Isabelle Huppert, the
French actress.
Ms. Huppert, who starred in Mr. War-
likowski’s “A Streetcar” and “Phaedra(s),”
another work that drew inspiration from
Greek myth, said in an interview that Mr.
Warlikowski was a “unique” director.
“What he does is so daring,” she said.
Ms. Huppert added that Mr. Warlikowski
always had a clear and definite vision, “but I
never felt in the least manipulated by him —
no, no. Of course, he is in command, but he
gives you the sense that you 100 percent
participate in his creation.”
Mr. Pondiezialek said that Mr. War-
likowski had more recently “stopped being
so scandalous” and was “not so much inter-
ested in sexuality anymore.”“Of course, he’s getting older,” Mr.
Pondiezialek added. “I think he’s much
more mature and much deeper now, talking
about the human condition.”
Although Mr. Warlikowski had become
wiser with age, Mr. Pondiezialek said, the
director was still like “a little prince” —
“closed in his own bubble” — and needed
strong figures around him to help him real-
ize his creative potential.
Karolina Ochab, a Polish theater impre-
sario and the general manager of the Nowy
Teatr, said she agreed Mr. Warlikowski was
more a dreamer than an organizer, but
noted, “For artists, this is normal.”
Mr. Pondiezialek said Mr. Warlikowski is
very strong, and stubborn. “But on the
other hand, he’s also very fragile,” he added.
“It can really destroy him if the perform-
ance doesn’t go right, if actors are frus-
trated, if reviews are roasting him.”
In the interview, Mr. Warlikowski focused
his ire more on a certain subset of star-
struck audience members. “The worst pub-
lic in the opera are these obsessed gays,” he
said. “All these rich guys with nothing to do
in their life, just following Anna Netrebko or
Jonas Kaufmann on all continents. This is
not a real audience for me.”
People like this, he said, and audience ex-
pectations of opera — that there will be pyr-
amids in “Aida,” for example — can make
the art form into a prison. But, he added, “If
you are in prison, you must find a way to
come out of the prison — in order to make
you free.”Be Daring, That’s His Direction
Krzysztof Warlikowski brings
a cerebral and sexy style
to the classics of opera.
By MATTHEW ANDERSON‘We never go
for clichés with
Krzysztof.’Top, the Polish director
Krzysztof Warlikowski in
Salzburg, where he’ll
present Richard Strauss’s
“Elektra.” Above left, Mr.
Warlikowski, standing
with his wife, the set and
costume designer
Malgorzata Szczesniak,
at a rehearsal for the
opera. Ausrine Stundyte,
on the floor, will sing the
title role. Right, a scene
from Mr. Warlikowski’s
“(A)pollonia.”LOUISA MARIE SUMMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESSTEFAN OKOŁOWICZ/NOWY TEATRTolek Magdziarz contributed reporting and
translation assistance from Warsaw.
LOUISA MARIE SUMMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES