[This is the fourth part of an ongoing series. To read more, see Parts 1, 2 and 3 here.]

Peter Isackson: Welcome to FO° Talks. I’m Peter Isackson, Fair Observer’s Chief Strategy Officer. It’s my great pleasure to welcome back the talented opera and theater director Emily Hehl for this, our fourth edition of a series of conversations we’ve labeled The Culture of Culture. We’ve been focusing on how people produce and consume music, theater and all forms of storytelling. But we’ll begin by considering the relationship between music and, I would say, the sacred, which I think is basic to every culture on Earth. Music, as far as we can trace it back in different cultures, is always related in some sense to the perception of the divine, the celestial.

In the theoretical tradition that dates back to Boethius at least, you had something called the music of the spheres. So there was an idea that there was some essential harmony in the universe that was inaudible to humans, but which they could begin to express in their own attempts to do music, either in a sacred setting or in a secular setting. But I think in both cases, there was this idea of the divine, the celestial, universal, cosmic harmony.

Is that how you see it, Emily?

Emily Hehl: Honestly, until you mentioned that term, I had never really heard about it. But it’s a beautiful idea, and it makes sense that human nature starts looking for music in whatever is out there in the universe.

Peter Isackson: That goes back to Pythagoras, because he promoted music as an illustration of the fundamental mathematical principles that govern the universe and constitute something that really looks like a miracle. So we’re really in the domain of the sacred.

But I will insist — my specialty was late medieval or more Renaissance literature, and music of the spheres is a theme that comes back all the time. It’s something that’s in the mind of every writer, every musician. And what’s interesting about it is that they know it’s impossible to hear it. So it’s something that exists and which is perfect, and it was illustrated in that poem I mentioned the last time by Campion. So it’s something you can’t hear but you know exists, and then it becomes something you can aspire to.

Emily Hehl: Yeah, it’s beautiful. And it’s beautiful to see how fundamentally music was always involved even in science and next to the really fundamental columns of life and of science — to see that music was a part of that. I think it’s interesting to look back to Pythagoras and all these people, and then to see where we are with music today, and how we would maybe describe how existential music would be for us. I think it’s interesting to see the different weights shifted on that question.

Peter Isackson: That could lead to an interesting discussion. I won’t take it up now, but it might come back later.

Passion Plays and theatrical liturgy

Peter Isackson: And that — going back to Passion Plays and Bach’s Passions and all that — comes, in some sense, from the fact that during the Middle Ages, music was part of the quadrivium, which was part of the seven liberal arts. So it was essential in schooling, in education — it was an essential ingredient of education. I don’t think it is today.

Emily Hehl: And there’s even discussions, especially in Germany, going, is music education in school even necessary? Is it necessary that children think in school?

Peter Isackson: Yeah. That’s tragic, as far as I’m concerned.

Emily Hehl: Yeah, it really is. But as you say, back then in the Middle Ages, it was absolutely fundamental. And I think to come a little bit to the question we’re arriving at — okay, we’re both not experts in religion, at least I am not — but I think it’s interesting to see what is left today, and that is, of course, the age in music, and both of these have some trace in that medieval Easter time. We have the mystery plays, the Passions, which both developed in theater and in music. Both of these derived from liturgy.

And it’s interesting, because when I was in my studies, there was one theory that there was no theater in the Middle Ages because there were no records of theater. But it’s proven that that is actually wrong. And there are these Passion plays which are so known and are being retraced until this very day in different, contemporary art and performance forms.

Peter Isackson: Well, in the Middle Ages there was a tradition of theater. And you’re right, it was basically neglected because it didn’t resemble either classic Greek or Roman theater, or, obviously, Elizabethan and later forms of theater in Europe. But you had the miracle plays. You mentioned the mystery plays. And “mystery” actually meant “trade.” It wasn’t about mysteries. They weren’t mystery stories, and it wasn’t about the mysteries of the universe. And there were morality plays.

So the mystery plays — because mestier or métier was the guild that put on these plays. I don’t know that much about what the content of those plays was, but it was a vibrant tradition in the towns, because the guilds would do it, and it was a form of entertainment that contained lots of interesting ideas, I think, and which led to the emergence of theater in European countries basically in the 16th century.

Emily Hehl: Yes, absolutely, yeah. I’m currently reading a book, Till, about Till Eulenspiegel. He also derives from exactly that culture — the fools and so far and so on — like these traveling people. That’s really different from the Passions we’re now talking about regarding Easter. Because it’s interesting that the liturgy itself had so much theatrical potential that it developed some kind of a play within liturgy, and was then put outside of liturgy at some point, eventually.

And there was this very interesting form of simultaneous stages. That’s how they performed these plays. When it reached its biggest form, it had these simultaneous stages. So the audience would travel. It’s not that, okay, you have one set, and the set design would change, and we switch the places. It would be simultaneous stages where things happen in parallel, and the audience would travel. And I think if you then again look at contemporary kinds of compositions or contemporary theater forms, there are actually a lot of interesting correlations happening there with simultaneity.

Disappearing performers and sacred soundscapes

Peter Isackson: Absolutely. If you do the classic analysis of the development of European music after the fall of the Roman Empire, it was liturgical. You had the Ambrosian and then the Gregorian chant, which was a monody, and then that became progressively more complex around the 12th, 13th century. Polyphony came on, and so on.

But what’s interesting about that is that it was meant to be purely liturgical. Up to that point, it was purely a part of religious ritual. So it took place in churches, and it was a way of demonstrating or giving performative life to the ideas and the texts — obviously in Latin, which people probably couldn’t understand — but they could understand the drama of it. And that’s when the Passion plays or the mystery plays were in the vernacular. So that was for the people outside of the church, and adapted to their local culture.

And then when all that starts building and becoming more complex, what happens is that — one of the things that intrigues me is how the only musical instrument that accompanied the church music we’re talking about was the organ, which is an incredible instrument.

Emily Hehl: It is.

Peter Isackson: It contains the fullest range of sound one can imagine. So it gives an idea — maybe somewhere in people’s minds — that this could contain the music of the spheres. I don’t know, but…

Emily Hehl: Yeah, but I’m not sure if we talked about it — sorry — like just the organ, because it’s something that comes back to me again and again when we talk about the presence of a musician. If you have a cellist, the musician is very, very present in front, behind the cello. Whereas the organ is usually constructed in a way that you cannot see the person who is playing. It makes it something very magical. I’m not sure if that’s the right word for it.

Peter Isackson: And the organ is always up exactly in the heavens, really, on its way to the heavens, yeah.

Emily Hehl: Yeah. And that very detail — that the organist is meant to disappear inside the sound and behind the instrument — is something that is basically carried until today, very often in classical music concerts, because there’s still a kind of school where musicians are taught to basically disappear behind their instrument, to not be present with their body. Although I see them, you very often see musicians perform brilliantly, but you don’t really perceive them as a person, because they’re trying to put all they have into the music and the instrument.

And then there is the other approach to classical music, where the performer — the musician, himself or herself — is trying to be very present, because this person is absolutely necessary and a part of creating the music. But so I think what you described with this organ is already a big point, if we look back to it.

Peter Isackson: And it’s interesting that it was only, I think, in the 16th century that you started having other musical instruments associated with composition, especially the Venetians — Gabrieli and Monteverdi. And they added instruments — secular, let’s call them secular instruments — to the sacred chorale, and that changed everything.

I think about that, because when you listen to the Passion of St. Matthew, you realize it’s not just a choral work, it’s a total instrumental work with solos and just a wonderful, incredible variety of musical creation. And there, because you go from instrument to instrument... I don’t know how it’s done visually. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked on the mise en scène of a Passion, but that must be an interesting thing to do for someone like yourself.

Emily Hehl: It is.

Body, voice and dual identity on stage

Peter Isackson: How do you get these people to perform and to be seen in the performance, or to play their role or emerge as a role player in it? Because they do represent the characters of the Passion as well.

Emily Hehl: Exactly. I think you’re hitting a very, very interesting spot there, because the Passions and other forms — also oratorios, or these kinds of forms, which are in themselves a concert, purely musical — but through the musical form already evoke theater. One of our first conversations was talking about the classical music concert and where this could evolve. And I think these musical forms are exactly between a concert and an opera. I would say it’s in between.

Like, for example, the Matthew Passion by Bach — he composed, if I’m not completely mistaken, a work that is meant for three orchestras. It’s three different instrumental groups. And I experienced a staging, if you can call it so, of this very Passion in Berlin at Deutsche Oper. And what they actually ended up doing was putting the third part of the orchestra really in the back of the audience, so that you really experience a three-dimensional sound.

Peter Isackson: Wow.

Emily Hehl: And then the staging went a step further, where there was a group of children representing, again, the story, and the singers were just the narrators. But I think there’s this in-between thing where the singer is, on the one hand, just narrating — being that very private person telling a story — and at the same time turning into the character he or she is narrating about. And if this doesn’t happen in full costume, but just in whatever they would perform it in a church as well, you are in a very interesting, liminal space that could be called the performative, where it’s exactly about presentation and representation.

And this is a very, very thin line that is so interesting, because if I sit in an audience, what I’m worried about is if someone on a stage falls over. I’m worried for that person in private — not for the character. I don’t care about Hamlet. I’m worried about the actor, that he would hit his nose or something. So that’s a moment of compassion, of feeling with this person.

But at the same time, that’s the beautiful thing about acting and also singing. A painter has something to paint on, and you can hang it on a wall, and the painter doesn’t need his body for this painting to exist on a wall. Whereas in the art of live theater and singing, every artist needs his or her body and voice in order to become the artwork. But therefore, there’s always a private body left in there. Like, if for example — I don’t know — I have a problem with my foot, these kinds of things will merge into the character. And if the staging is done in the right way, it will always be possible for an audience to feel both.

Space, atmosphere and immersive ritual

Emily Hehl: And that’s the interesting point where my perception in the audience switches from one to the other, because I perceive myself as a perceiving person. And that’s when a sort of meta level also comes in, and that’s where performativity and so on start. It’s a completely new chapter, but it’s also the base of any kind of ritual and religious ritual — when I drink a sip of wine in liturgy, we know what it is, but we also know what it’s meant to be or what the symbol of it is. And this liminal sphere is a very interesting one.

Peter Isackson: Well, that’s something we’ve lost, I think, to some extent in our attempt to understand what all these performances are about. Because we’ve divided — I think our culture, modern culture has divided us very much inconsistently with the, I would say, philosophy of the consumer society: You’re either a producer or a consumer. And the producer produces for the consumer, and the consumer consumes for the benefit of the producer. And this idea of playing different roles or identifying with different roles, which may have been the norm…

Even with Shakespeare in theater, the fact that the stage was a proscenium going into the public, and the public was the lower-class public, surrounded the scene — the proscenium — and they could see the actors from different angles— 

Emily Hehl: Absolutely.

Peter Isackson: —which you cannot do once you’ve got the proscenium arch that sets everything back. And you could say that gave people the idea of cinema and television. But theater was, back in the Middle Ages, all taking place outside — in the street or in a park or somewhere, in some natural environment that wasn’t designed for performance.

Emily Hehl: Yes. I think we could have a whole conversation about the proscenium and the fourth wall. Maybe it’s a term for some of our listeners — the idea that the sphere on stage is a completely separated sphere from what the audience is, there is no connection. Whereas what we have just talked about — the whole performativity aspect — but also concerts, it is one sphere.

And interestingly enough, concert spaces are very often designed in a round way, where the audience is even sitting behind the orchestra — like the Berlin Philharmonic, for example. And also what you said about Shakespeare — even in Shakespeare’s texts, he has these meta reflections on the space itself. After a theater play, there would be some kind of animal fights. There are several references to that. Or the fact that Macbeth is set two-thirds at night, but they were playing at daylight because there was no electricity — these kinds of things. If you really look back, the origins of theater in that sense... the actors were present as actors, and at the same time they were representing something, but they were present as who they are. And this gives them massive liberty, because there are direct jokes possible, or interaction.

And then on the other side, you have the more Russian acting school, where the best actor is the actor who disappears completely behind the role. Where you have, for example, Macbeth, but you cannot perceive who the actor is. But of course, you need the actor to impersonate Macbeth. And then there is the form where you can see both almost equally, or where it’s switching.

Peter Isackson: If you go back to Greek theater, of course, it was masked. You never saw the faces of the characters. So it was played by the cast. I don’t know what that means in terms of creative performance, but I also believe it was very close to chanted text rather than just spoken text. I can’t remember what I learned about Greek theater, but what that means is that, depending on where you are in time and place, you’re going to have different ideas of how to represent something which people are inevitably — that’s the whole point of art — going to identify with.

If you’re creating art, and if you’re performing art, you’re working on at least emotional identification taking place between the performers and the audience. Aristotle talked about catharsis and all that — the fact that it wasn’t just seeing something interesting that was intellectually stimulating. It was about actually being transformed emotionally by the experience.

We can’t draw any conclusions about the way to do it, because what we can see is that each culture and each period of history has found different ways of doing it, and probably different varieties of ways each time.

Emily Hehl: Yeah. And I think also what you say, like the whole thing you’re describing now is also part of these performance studies. Because it’s different if I perform a Passion in a church or in an orchestra concert hall or something. And also, like what I just talked about with the body — the body is just one factor that contributes to the so-called atmosphere that we experience.

And that’s something that was, I think, fundamental in the Middle Ages. And that’s something that is maybe, again, connected to the spheric or the holy, or these kinds of terms we’ve been using, is that the atmosphere of a church is different than that of a concert hall. If I experience something with candlelight, it will be different than a very bright LED top light. If there is the smell of something in church, this influences how I perceive something. If I sit very close, I can eventually feel the breath and the sweat of someone. Whereas if I’m very, very lonely, seated in a concert hall, that’s a different kind of experience. And concert halls were created in order to delete all of these sensual experiences — to concentrate on nothing but just the hearing.

But I think we’re in a time period where a lot of things have been designed to ban the senses from what we experience. And at the same time, if we look back in culture, we were so much connected to rituals and the sensual experiences of all these kinds of arts or art forms. And therefore, I’m not very surprised that there are more and more theater forms — forms of listening to music — coming back that actually think about the kind of atmosphere we’re listening with or listening in.

But it also forces us to step back from our human podium, saying we’re the ones defining everything. No, the church itself is contributing to the concert as much as the violinist is. The concert hall is an existing... it’s not a person, but it’s an agent, in a way. There’s power through that. The chair I’m sitting on is defining the way I’m experiencing a concert, up to a certain part. And I think to switch perspective in that sense — to a more, what Bruno Latour and all these philosophers have with network theory — just accepting the fact that the human is not the very first and only contributing factor to life experiences, but everything around us — my neighbor, the space, the smell, the temperature — all of this is contributing to it. And then we are already, again, in something spheric, one might say. Yeah.

Peter Isackson: Your remark about sitting on a chair made me think of a question to ask you: As someone who directs and organizes and sets up and stages operas and concerts, is there any concern on your part about how people are going to be seated?

Emily Hehl: Yes. Absolutely. Sometimes you can’t change it. Depending on the opera house you’re working in, you just sit in the chair. You’re like, “Oh, that’s a nice one!” or “Oof, it’s very uncomfortable!” There’s nothing you can really change about it sometimes. But then, if I sometimes do — for example, I did the Church Parables of Benjamin Britten, which are meant to be happening in a church — and at that very moment, if you go in smaller churches, you can even sometimes arrange the wooden benches. You know that people will not be sitting very comfortably, but you can already define the space.

And now I have two projects coming up where we’re very actively eliminating the orchestra from the pit to another space in order to get the audience closer. And I’m currently working on a concept for La Bohème by Puccini. And our main question is — because it’s on the one hand a bohemian story, but also it’s a story about suffering and a lot of very bad things. How close can you actually sit and experience that story?

Because with La Bohème, if it happens in a proscenium back there, we think, “Oh yeah, people are freezing, people are suffering, right?” We’re looking at it, we’re enjoying the beautiful music. But if it’s very, very close to me — happening inside our society — it’s a very, very different narration. So I think the placement of the audience is one of the most crucial questions to ask before even thinking about any kind of different design.

Reimagining opera for today’s audiences

Peter Isackson: That is a question that you can ask today as you’re preparing a production. But 50 years ago, 100 years ago, did people think about these things? Or were they just saying to themselves, “Well, the theater is… there’s some standard idea about what a theater is and how people are seated, and that is not our problem, because we’re working on the music and the drama?” Is that something new? Is this something that we can do now because of our control of technology, which we didn’t think we could do? I’m asking you a historical question you may not be able to answer.

Emily Hehl: I’m not sure if I can fully answer that, but I think for a long time, of course, people were intentionally building the theater and concert halls we’re now still performing in very intentionally, because they wanted the fourth wall, they wanted the proscenium. Wagner built his whole thing in Bayreuth in order to not see the orchestra. But it’s a whole idea from, let’s say, the mid-19th century, when all of these institutions were designed.

But I think also in the last maybe 50 years, or let it be 30 or 40, as this is not the kind of experience that our normal life is still mirroring, because we’re not in that time anymore — and these kinds of spaces seem to fall out of time, one could say — directors or conductors or whoever is in charge of designing the listening experience, also with the beginning of performance theory and so far and so on, people are indeed reconsidering the perceiving experience of an audience. So I think it’s a newer thing to consider — but actually a very, very old thing we’re going back to. I don’t think we’re inventing anything here.

Peter Isackson: No. I think probably, if you think about the design of theaters — especially concert halls and opera venues — the Italian theater, which I think was made for opera, right? It was used for drama afterward, which had different stages, different levels. That was an incredible innovation, and it’s a clear case of taking into account the needs of the audience and the perception of the audience.

Emily Hehl: Absolutely. And then also, once we had the buildings, pieces were composed for that very setting. So because we’re mainly playing there — honestly, we play mainly the repertoire of the last 200 years of opera. And these pieces were composed for that very setting — where an audience is here, there’s the orchestra, and there’s the stage. So you can’t just rip apart these kinds of things into settings, which Bach was using already for his Passions, for example.

And therefore, if we go back into Baroque music, it gives us a lot more possibilities to rearrange spaces — as, again, contemporary music does. But in between, there is a block of repertoire which is rather challenging to set in a different way. I’m trying anyway. Other people are trying, too. We’re failing as well, and people are complaining, “But I just want to see it as it’s meant to be!” and I understand that. (Both laugh)

But I think there is a big desire in our society, nevertheless, to experience things with our full senses and full bodies — and not just with a brain that is disconnected from the rest. And yeah, some pieces, like Passions, have that in their DNA, one could say. And so do contemporary compositions, which are actually about spherical kinds of sounds or even electronic things which are meant to a Dolby surround sound, which are more like in a church, and in these kinds of things. There are new forms, new compositions coming back.

Peter Isackson: Okay, well, we’ve gone a long way from the music of the spheres and the sacred origins of music to the practical problems of sitting, watching, listening and identifying with and relating to the performers. But we’ll have to stop there. We’ve exhausted our allotted time. So thank you, Emily, and we’ll be back for more in about three weeks’ time, I think.

Emily Hehl: Yes. Thank you, Peter.

Peter Isackson: Bye, Emily.

Emily Hehl: Bye-bye.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

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