Andrea Baesler is a German opera director.

Andreas directed the Gormenghast production in 2004 in Saarbrücken and Luxembourg.

Translated form the German text by Alex Paulick.

Andreas Baesler: Irmin, I was always aware of you as a musician with Can, and I actually saw you play in the seventies at the Stadthalle Cuxhaven. I always found you fascinating as a musician. So when I heard that you had composed an opera, I wanted to get to know you. In this sense, it was a wonderful duplicity that with “Gormenghast” you had delved into the theatre universe, where I have been active for a long time. With our first conversations we already spoke the same language, and I realized: you are also a theatre man. When I finally had “Gormenghast” in my hands and could study it more closely, I soon realized that this piece could not clearly be assigned to any one genre. It was not a pure opera, neither was it a musical, nor was it rock music. Was it a rock opera?

Irmin Schmidt: Perhaps it was a pop opera.

Andreas Baesler: Precisely that difficulty is what made “Gormenghast” really interesting to me – also musically interesting. Because the first encounter with the music immediately fascinated me and mesmerized me. Only then came the consideration of the literary origins. I soon realized that you had piled up a huge mountain – a mountain that now had to be climbed. The whole thing challenged me, of course, but it was particularly the difficulty of not being able to clearly assign your composition to a genre or a practice, which really fascinated me. It soon became clear to me that the challenge was to create a unique style that, beyond all expectations, would do justice to the material. A piece like “Gormenghast” can not be framed in an ordinary theatre context, and it doesn’t allow itself to be performed like a “normal” opera, because a number of elements that make an opera are missing from it. Our organizer Joachim Arnold soon came up with the rather happy and ingenious idea to go to the World Cultural Heritage site in Völklingen, and that, of course, was a bombastic framework. The room concept was predetermined in Völklingen. There was already a plenty of atmosphere, where the music could spread out. And with the staging we were able to achieve a maximum degree of effectiveness with very clear and reduced means.

Irmin Schmidt: Yes, I also found that fascinating. The first production actually took place in the context of a completely normal theatre environment, and the set was also very elaborate. And then you achieved quite a lot with rather few resources, since the space has also made a big contribution, of course, but I think your staging would have been equally effective in another space. I want there to be different ways of interpreting the piece, and the two performances solved that very well. I have even imagined that “Gormenghast” could also be performed as ‘Kabuki theatre’, so that the actors only mime the protagonists’ roles – and the singers stand at the side and sing, Japanese style. I still think it is a very good idea, and I’m sure that it would work. What fascinated me most about the two productions was that they were so fundamentally different and yet they both worked formidably.

Andreas Baesler: This of course has something to do with the vast and very open form of the piece – both musically and spatially. Of course, the reduction to a string quartet and surround sound offers the advantage that a director or stage designer has no limits. One could theoretically perform “Gormenghast” in a forest glade or on a mountain. It’s not necessarily bound to an opera stage – and that’s the great appeal of it. And as far as the dramaturgical form is concerned, “Gormenghast” has a very open form and does not require any illustration in the classical sense in order to understand it. The piece can work very associatively and is perhaps more influenced by rock operas or rock concept albums in terms of dramaturgy. You have merged those worlds brilliantly. You have enough theatre instinct to know what the stage requires. Many so-called “rock operas” or “concept albums” fail in their possibilities for theatrical presentation because their creators never really had concrete thoughts about their scenic feasibility. In your “Gormenghast”, however, the formal aspects of musical theatre have been considered from the outset – it also leaves a lot of freedom in the associability of the figures and also of the scenes. Ultimately, these are all aspects that allow a director to approach the piece more easily and move around within it aesthetically. There have already been two scenic productions of “Gormenghast”. And you just mentioned a Kabuki variation – and in turn, I could imagine the material as “Holiday on Ice”.

Irmin Schmidt: I wrote in my preamble to the piece that it was meant to be danced, that “Gormenghast” is dance theatre, and that the singers would stand to the side. Regardless of the form or version in which the piece is performed, it remains understandable because the figures are so precise. They simply are well-developed characters, and each has its own style. You can close your eyes and you’ll always know exactly when Steerpike, when Prunesquallor or Barquentine is singing, because everyone only sings in his own style. So far that has worked wonderfully in both productions. There is already a dramaturgy through the musical characterization of the characters.

Andreas Baesler: That’s right. Through the different styles that collide, from classical coloratura singing to typical rock singing, the spectrum is very broad. The Count’s aria, for example, goes into the realm of the art song.

Irmin Schmidt: And that was exactly my intention.

Andreas Baesler: On the one hand, there are so many different stylistic devices. On the other hand, you have somehow managed to merge everything into a single unit. Listening to “Gormenghast” for the first time, you hear a mishmash, a conglomerate or a collage. At the same time, the work has a tremendous homogeneity from the first to the last note. Of course, it also has to do with the sound design, which brings the whole thing into an acoustic framework and gives opera its own sound world. For me, this specific sound world was incredibly important because it offers a contrast to the visual world. Your sound architecture makes the images appear in my inner eye. And the videos that we had made before our production also tried to make this sonic architecture visible, without painting over it or covering it. Strangely, when I think of “Gormenghast” today, I don’t see images in front of me, as I normally do, although I can recall the figures and their costumes and the stage. But the real feeling for “Gormenghast” leads to a sonic space, a sound architecture that makes the castle of Gormenghast into a castle of sound. That is the secret of “Gormenghast”, which is also why I am such a fan of this opera. Naturally, aside from that, I have wonderful memories associated with my own production. Above all, I found “Gormenghast” to be musically gripping from the beginning, and that includes this tension which is built up musically over the duration of the opera. These are all tried and tested elements of opera music. With your work, you have neither negated nor ignored the traditions of operatic compositions, but you have defined them anew and rather differently. That is the reason why “Gormenghast” can definitely be considered a romantic opera.

Irmin Schmidt: Definitely, of course!

Andreas Baesler: In this sense, your “Gormenghast” reminds me of a romantic opera, for example, the “Freischütz” – although you are making use of quite different musical means.

Irmin Schmidt: You used a key word, that of the “collage”, and that “Gormenghast”, despite its many different motifs and styles, nevertheless has a sound aesthetic that makes everything homogenous. There are also collages in the fine arts, but they are only good if they actually become a picture. You can collage newspaper cut-outs, pour a bucket of paint over it, and nail a few wooden planks onto it. Then you have a collage of very disparate components. Yet it only becomes a picture if it has its own dramaturgy, its own architecture.

Andreas Baesler: Making use of different musical styles involves a danger that everything just becomes a potpourri, unless one can identify a continuous thread.

Irmin Schmidt: I was concerned about that, of course. You work on the individual arias – each one in a completely different style – and ask yourself how all this will hold together. And, of course, there are musical connections between the arias; there is a very defined harmonic cohesion, which runs through the whole opera. There are, for example, those four chords, which relate to each other in the tritone interval – two major chords and two in minor – which continuously reappear, but are always applied differently in each style. The listener doesn’t necessarily hear these intervals or chords consciously, but unconsciously one can sense that everything belongs together and is intertwined. And that is, if you will, the secret of my collage called “Gormenghast”. And that’s why this opera doesn’t fall apart. In this sense the music has a force and a cohesion, as one knows from picture collages by Robert Rauschenberg or Kurt Schwitters. Those are not only collages, but real pictures! And each one is held together by an invisible force of attraction.

Andreas Baesler: This attraction, as you call it, results a sense of unity, which is very important and also makes the quality of the work, because nothing is arbitrary.

Irmin Schmidt: I can’t think of anything further to say on this topic, because ultimately everything there is be said about “Gormenghast” is incorporated in the opera. And you made a beautiful production out of it.

Andreas Baesler: It was also interesting how the singers dealt with the material, how some of them struggled sometimes and cursed the complexity of the demands placed on them. Others, like our friend Stefan Vinzberg, became addicted to these arias for life, because he discovered this music for himself and could then personalize it. I think your music left none of the performers cold.

Irmin Schmidt: I was touched to see how the singers did not have their prejudices confirmed. They were afraid that their scores were ‘mechanical’. And then they realized, on the contrary, that they were quite free. This strange mixture of discipline and freedom, however, was something I had intended right from the beginning.

Andreas Baesler: There are not many examples that can be compared with “Gormenghast”. Recently, however, I have seen a production of the “Magic Flute” by Barrie Kosky in Berlin. The set was basically like a cinema in which the singers appear live on the stage, so they are living parts of a film collage that is projected onto large screens. And there everything was also ‘mechanical’ and precisely sequenced. Every cut in the film and every movement on the stage had to be perfectly synchronized musically. I still remember that everyone said: That can’t work! But the result was an extremely fascinating and also very vibrant “Magic Flute”. It was also proof that the core of a successful performance does not necessarily depend on continually redefining the tempo.

Irmin Schmidt: No, absolutely not. It doesn’t have to be like that. The strange thing is that there are always two sides to a tempo. There is the tempo of the machine – with “Gormenghast” it is the clock from the computer, and for the Berlin “Magic Flute” it was the clock of the film section – which dictates the timing as absolutely unchangeable. And despite that, or even because of that rigid corset, every single one of the singers finds his own bodily tempo within this corset, his own breathing tempo, which makes things all the more exciting and alive. Tempo is not simply tempo. And just as there is body language, there is also a breathing language. So although there is an incorruptible, unchangeable tempo, the phrasing is not necessarily fixed. All singers can always phrase things differently, and the tempo becomes quite differently embodied and animated through that.

Andreas Baesler: It’s basically a bit like surfing: you catch the wave, and then it carries you at its own pace, but you steer it naturally, you steer the wave, the rhythm, the tempo according to your possibilities. And for a classical opera singer, of course, an experience like that is a unique experience because they have never done anything like that before.

Irmin Schmidt: The nature of a tempo also means that it can push faster one evening just because the musical director had a row with his wife, or the tempo is running slower today due to a hangover. No, with “Gormenghast” you can rely on the opera being performed at the exact same tempo every night. Indeed, that is the secret of the groove: the more precise the groove, the freer it is. That’s apparent when listening to any record by James Brown.

Andreas Baesler: Or by Can.

Irmin Schmidt: Exactly.