Translator: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Opera ...
entertainment for the elderly,
a leftover from the 19th century,
boring, expensive, elitist,
perhaps the most elitist art form of all time.
I am Lotte de Beer, and I'm an opera director.
And my slides have very little to do with my story.
They're just pictures of productions,
so don't let them disturb you too much.
I am 34 years old,
and if I were, let's say a soccer player, a ballerina or a model,
I would slowly be thinking about retiring.
However, I work in the opera business,
so I am considered very, very young, practically a baby.
And that is why I've turned into this sort of ambassador
for the rejuvenation of opera.
I often get asked to talk in front of audiences of people,
usually opera lovers.
I tell them about the importance of opera houses
to find a younger audience,
a more diverse audience, a broader audience.
I tell them how opera needs the people.
Today, it is a bit different, I think,
because I think it's safe to assume
that most of you, and most of the people who are going to watch this online,
have probably never ever been to an opera.
Am I right?
Lady in audience: No.
Lotte de Beer: No? Oh? Oh God. Okay.
Well, I'll change my entire speech -
No I won't.
(Laughter)
I thought, today, since there's a lot of young people,
I shouldn't be talking about why the opera needs the people,
but about why people actually need opera.
Because, even though there are so many opera lovers here,
around the world, opera houses are doing everything.
They're bending backwards
to try to find you guys to buy opera tickets.
They are printing glossy magazines,
and they are getting sexy-looking singers on stage,
and they're hosting red carpet events with VIPs and soap stars,
and it's not really working.
If you see around the world who's actually attending,
it's pretty depressing.
And then I heard another really depressing fact,
that all the money that gets spent in advertising,
so that people will actually go to the opera,
can never be made back in ticket sales.
So it seems like a really rotten business model, sort of, this opera.
So, I was actually, you know, going in a downwards spiral
and thinking should I do this talk.
I was sitting at the dinner table
with my boyfriend's children, Maya and Jonathan, 12 and 14 years old,
and they were suddenly getting really passionate.
And they were passionate,
not so much because they love opera,
but they absolutely wanted me to do this talk
because they love TED talks.
Ah, yeah!
They said, "Our entire school watches these talks constantly."
You know, they sit with their laptops in their rooms,
and apparently they watch TED talks.
And that to me was very striking.
Because I think, wow, you have these teenagers,
and they have the World Wide Web, they could see everything,
and they choose, you know, this,
just a person standing on a stage telling a story,
sharing a story with a community.
Apparently, they don't go for the red carpet,
sexy, multifaceted events.
And I thought, "Well, that might have something to do with our time.
It might be that we live in a 21st century
where there's not a lot of time for sharing stories."
You know, I don't go to church on Sunday to get inspired with a sermon.
We don't listen to big idealists
to tell us how the world can be turned into a utopia,
because it seems like generations before us
have tried out those utopian [ideas],
and they they didn't really succeed in that.
And we respect each other so much
that we, you know, we've agreed that there's not one truth,
but there's only several different opinions.
I think there's probably a big longing
for people to hear those great stories told as if they are the truth,
and to share experiences.
And I think there's people also profiting from that, you know, populists,
they're using those those grand almost operatic truths.
It's very dangerous, and I think the opera could do a lot better,
and give it a positive swing.
I think opera is a fantastic discipline, it has it all.
It is a discipline that tells stories that are centuries old.
These stories, you know, they were written sometimes in the Renaissance,
and we're still telling them,
because apparently there's something universal in them
that still touches us.
And then opera is music theatre, music and theatre,
and it reaches us on different levels.
It uses text and it uses images -
of course, it uses music, which is most important -
and texts go directly to our brain.
They help us think, they pose questions,
they maybe challenge our ideals.
Images are very contemporary.
If I want to put up an opera,
I build a set on the day that I actually play the show,
and afterwards we break it down again.
So, through image we can get the associations of the audience of now
and connect them to those universal truth in those stories.
And then we have music.
Music communicates in a most unique way:
it reaches your soul directly, no detours.
We don't know why that is,
but when we hear a tune composed in 1850,
I think, biologically, we have the same reaction
as a person listening to that when the ink was still wet.
Why is that? We don't know.
Why can music make us feel sad or excited,
or make us want to dance or shout or be scared.
It's something that we can never really explain,
it's abstract but very accessible.
And it needs no translation,
needs no explanation, it needs no updating,
and if, and I say "if",
because I don't think we always succeeded at it in the opera,
but if we can take the strength of the music,
and we combine that with those great universal stories,
and we use images to reach a contemporary audience,
then opera is the best art discipline that I know.
I'll give you another random picture.
Yeah, it worked!
Exactly ... there's discussions in the opera world
of how to treat these great stories.
There are purists who say
something written in the 19th century should look like the 19th century,
you should do what the composer intended to do.
Then there's other people who say,
"Why do we need to tell those boring old stories again and again?
Let us focus on writing something new."
For me, actually, the challenge of taking
those sometimes really outdated stories
and bringing them to today is invaluable.
I think by looking at the past with the information that we have today,
showing it and commenting on it,
might tell us something about our future.
I'll give you an example.
There is this fantastic opera by Mozart
called "Die Zauberflöte", "The Magic Flute",
and I will stage that in Vienna in a few years.
It's a bizarre story.
It's, like, a fairy tale with a gazillion characters and storylines,
and nobody really knows what it's about;
although people generally seem to think
that it's about our Western civilization,
about the enlightened Western civilization,
about intellectual ideas and and humanism.
I was reading through the uncut version of the texts,
and usually you don't hear the uncut version,
because it's way too long,
the music is divine, but the texts are slightly flawed,
and I was shocked.
It is so sexist and it is so racist.
It has this character, a Queen of the Night,
who is considered this evil bitch
just because she's standing up for her most basic rights
of raising her own daughter and being in charge of her own estate.
Then there's this black slave called Monostatos
who gets slapped around a lot.
They tell him he's evil,
and his soul is just as black as his skin,
and he gets tortured.
The order for the torture
gets given by this wonderful, enlightened white protagonist.
If you get a story like that,
as a stage director, you have to make a choice:
Do I cut those sections out?
It can be done.
I can make a version that hurts no one and still portray the piece.
But I think it's maybe more interesting
to actually thematize this racism and this sexism
that is part of our society,
that we can't look away from.
So what I will do is
I will make this Queen of the Night and this black slave Monostatos
the protagonist of my piece,
and everything that gets done gets looked at by these two people.
In that way, I think I can show
that our wonderful, civilized Western society
is actually drenched in sexism and racism and colonialism and whatnot.
And by doing so, by sometimes sitting in an audience all together
and having this intellectual work out,
we might be able to speak in a more eloquent manner
when we discuss current matters, such as "Zwarte Piet" or "Black Peter",
which is going on in Holland right now.
So, by looking at our past
in a way that we know things from the current situation,
we might be able to change our future.
Ah, yeah, I think that's the last picture.
There's also a wonderful other thing in opera that is casting.
Since singing and the voice
is actually the first and the last thing that you think about
when putting someone in a role,
we get to see very different people on stage.
There's a reason that we have this image of a really fat opera singer:
it doesn't matter how she looks; it matters how she sounds.
That's why, if someone can sing the part,
it doesn't matter what the colour of their skin is,
if they're tall or if they're short,
or if they're the standard beauty image that we have right now.
And even though, unfortunately, opera houses think
that in order to reach a younger audience they have to look more like Hollywood,
I think they're never actually going to get there,
and I think that's a great thing,
because I think we need, we deserve, a place in society
where falling in love, being a hero, living life, dealing with death,
doesn't have anything to do with how we look.
And that brings us to the last, very important topic of opera,
and that's the voice,
the unamplified human voice
which communicates so much more than just words, text.
I think singing is what comes
after speaking is no longer sufficient to make a statement.
And if you've never been, please go,
because it's the most awesome experience that you can have.
Somebody is tearing their soul out, and reaching you with the sound,
just natural, just live.
And that is why, even though people might not come anymore,
even though opera might be based on the worst business model ever,
even though if we go on like this,
the regular audiences in 15 years will be dead,
I am going to keep making the plea to the world
that in this very scary 21st century
in which the person who screams the loudest
seems to be getting the power,
we might need just that:
the human voice, live, unamplified,
that moves us, and that connects us,
and that brings us into connection with our deepest fears,
that makes us think and makes us cry and makes us hope.
I think that is what opera can do,
and that is why the world needs opera.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)