Illustration by AMY HABER/Daily Bruin
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By John Mangum
Daily Bruin Contributor
If John Schlesinger’s first love is film, then opera is
his mistress.
Schlesinger, the Academy Award-winning director of films
including “The Falcon and the Snowman,” “Midnight
Cowboy,” “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and, most
recently, “The Next Best Thing,” first tried his hand
at opera nearly two decades ago when he directed Offenbach’s
“Tales of Hoffmann” at London’s Royal Opera
House, Covent Garden.
“I love music and opera in particular,” Schlesinger
said. “I go to see it a great deal and when the chance came
to work in it, I said I’d try to see if I enjoyed doing it,
and I did.”
Since his first attempt, Schlesinger has directed productions of
Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier” and
Verdi’s “Un ballo in maschera” at Covent Garden
and the Salzburg Festival, respectively. His most recent endeavor,
a production of English composer Benjamin Britten’s
“Peter Grimes,” premiered at Milan’s prestigious
Teatro alla Scala. The Los Angeles Opera will present the
production in seven performances beginning Oct. 18 at the
Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County’s Dorothy
Chandler Pavilion.
Of course, directing an opera is quite different from directing
a film. Schlesinger sees a number of differences between the genres
and the creative processes involved in bringing each to
fruition.
“You have to know what you’re doing,”
Schlesinger said. “Movies have more flexibility because of a
pair of scissors.”
“With opera, you have to know what you’re aiming for
everyday,” Schlesinger said. “You have to have a
picture of the whole thing in your mind when you’re
discussing it with the designer, which is months before
you’re going to meet the singers.”
 L.A. Opera Academy Award-winning director John
Schlesinger will direct Los Angeles Opera’s new production
of Benjamin Britten’s opera "Peter Grimes." Opera also presents a
challenge because, in addition to the libretto ““ which, to
continue the comparison with film, is an opera’s screenplay
““ the director has to factor the music into his or her
approach. For Schlesinger, the music makes directing an opera into
a special challenge, one that requires a director with a unique
sensitivity to music.
“An opera is a world of its own,” the director said.
“You have to know something about the music to enter into it,
which is a nice thought. Nobody needs to know anything, Bill
Goldman once wrote, for the movies, but you do have to know
something to do an opera.”
Opera also differs from many films in that singers may have
performed a role dozens, if not hundreds, of times. Of course, the
same may be true of casts in filmed versions of plays, but the
opera director has to reckon with singers who may have set ideas on
a role. Schlesinger has had good luck with singers so far.
“I’ve never worked with singers who tell me,
“˜This is where I stand and I need a handkerchief so that I
can do it and this is how I do it,'” Schlesinger said.
“No, I’ve never come across that. Plácido
(Domingo) was the first opera star I worked with and he’s
wonderfully flexible, listens and discusses things. He’s
quite wonderful.”
Schlesinger has had the same experience with Philip Langridge,
who sings the title role in L.A. Opera’s “Peter
Grimes.” Langridge has performed the role in many of the
world’s great opera houses, and he sang it in the first
staging of this production at La Scala.
“Philip has come with an experience singing it and I
suggest something totally different and he says, “˜Well,
let’s try it,'” Schlesinger said. “If it
works, fine, and quite often it doesn’t work, so we have to
think of something else.”
In moments like this, Schlesinger can draw on his long career as
a director. His first feature film, “A Kind of Loving,”
was released in 1962. Since then, Schlesinger has directed for
stage, film, and television, winning the Best Director Academy
Award for “Midnight Cowboy” in 1969.
 L.A. Opera Los Angeles Opera’s newest production is
Benjamin Britten’s "Peter Grimes," directed by Oscar-winner
John Schlesinger. Schlesinger has also directed
this production of the opera in Milan, Italy.
Several of his films have dealt with subjects similar to that of
“Peter Grimes.” In the opera, the title character, a
fisherman, becomes a pariah when his apprentices die in suspicious
circumstances. His fellow villagers, thinking Grimes a child
murderer, ostracize the fisherman and place tremendous pressure on
him until he commits suicide, scuttling his ship at sea and
drowning.
The outsider, a character that no one quite understands, figures
in many of Schlesinger’s most powerful films. Dustin
Hoffman’s role in “Midnight Cowboy” is an
especially memorable example.
“That’s one of the reasons I like this particular
work,” Schlesinger said. “It deals with the reality and
the fantasy of what someone feels cast in this role of not only
being an outsider but also of being held responsible for the deaths
of apprentices, two of them, which is why the villagers hound him.
It’s a totally modern ““ well I won’t say
it’s a modern idea. It’s been an idea, unfortunately,
forever.”
Some of the opera’s most powerful moments come when
Grimes’ outsider status is thrown into sharp relief. In Act
One, for example, Grimes stumbles into the town’s pub to seek
refuge from a torrential storm. He sings a haunting solo that
upsets the other villagers, so one of them suggests starting a song
to calm their nerves. Grimes contributes a verse that almost
derails the whole thing ““ he just can’t fit in, and the
villagers think he’s insane.
“Grimes looks like a drowned rat because he’s chosen
to sit out in the storm and he’s had this row with Balstrode
(one of the villagers who initially tries to help Grimes exonerate
himself),” Schlesinger said. “And then Grimes comes in
and everybody recoils, and he goes in to a poetic mood. I’m
not doing anything extraordinary, because the music and the text
are extraordinary enough.”
It’s an approach that has served Schlesinger well in his
previous operatic ventures, and it bodes well for this latest
production.
OPERA: Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes,”
directed by John Schlesinger at the Los Angeles Opera for seven
performances beginning Oct. 18. Tickets: $28-$148; $20 student and
senior rush tickets one hour before curtain, subject to
availability. For more information, call 213-972-8001 or visit
www.laopera.org.