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Fast Chat: Peter Sellars
2006 Newsday interview

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

He set Handel’s Orlando at Cape Canaveral and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaroin Trump Tower. Though director Peter Sellars is pushing 50, the “enfant terrible” label still sticks, at least among tradition-minded opera lovers.

The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Sellars has staged operas for the Salzburg and Glyndebourne festivals, the San Francisco Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera—but not the Metropolitan Opera (yet). New Yorkers can sample his audacious stagecraft at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, which presents Sellars’ production of Zaide, an opera the 23-year-old Mozart began in 1779. (Performances take place Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; for information, visit www.lincolncenter.org or call 212-721-6500.)

Zaide tells of a forbidden love between an Ottoman sultan’s daughter and a European slave, a tale Sellars sets in a modern-day sweatshop. Ever courteous and lucid, positively humming with energy, Sellars caught up by cell phone with frequent Newsday contributor Marion Lignana Rosenberg.

Peter, how did your rehearsal go?

It was very intense, 2 1/2 hours longer than we expected. So often, Mozart is performed for the surface, because the surfaces are so marvelous and completely enchanting, but as soon as you reach below that, you find worlds and worlds. So we’ve been going there—a lot of tears, a lot of very private emotions.

You’re of the view that Mozart was a deeply political artist. How do the personal and the political come together in this work?

I think one of the things that makes Zaide so moving is that Act I could have been written by Martin Luther King, Jr. There’s this incredible power of recognizing that no one can give you freedom; you have to claim it. Mozart is writing music for that awakening into full humanity. He shows you a movement taking place as he goes from solo aria to duet to—finally, at the end of Act I—a trio and the beginnings of a community.

I understand we’ll also be hearing music from another Mozart work.

One of the interesting things about Zaide is that the dialogue that connected the musical numbers has not survived. I take this as an act of God, because I can never stand spoken dialogue in music. To make connection material, we’ve taken music from what Mozart was working on simultaneously—his theater-play Thamos, King of Egypt. It’s Mozart at his most avant-garde, with really extreme orchestral effects of dynamics, key changes, shocking rhythmic shifts. And, like Zaide, it’s music that Mozart never heard in his lifetime.

Is it true that Zaide was written on spec?

Completely. Mozart wrote it without any commission, which is unusual for him, and proceeded to write the most serious music of his life. It’s the intensity of a 23-year-old confronting the injustices of the world: music of struggle, incredible courage and shocking honesty. It’s not your usual evening of light Viennese entertainment, and that’s why it never played in Vienna.

Zaide is classified by most scholars as an unfinished work, but I take it that you no longer see it this way.

Going into rehearsal, I certainly thought it was unfinished. Then, once I staged the [final] quartet, I realized that Mozart could not write one more note. Zaide ends with a question: Will there be mercy? Are we going to prosecute to the maximum limits of the law, or are we going to back off and explore what mercy would mean—from both sides? That question of mercy is where we are now, between the Muslim world and the West, and it’s certainly where relations between those worlds were in Mozart’s lifetime. Of course, this is Mozart’s great theme that he pursues throughout his life; every Mozart opera ends with an act of mercy.

The Lincoln Center performances will include discussions about slavery in the contemporary world, correct?

Yes, we’re asking people who are interested to come one hour before for the pre-show talk.

How do you respond to people who say, “I don’t want a political lesson or ugliness when I go to the opera. I want something beautiful and ingratiating”?

Probably the highest moment of Western musical culture is the Viennese classical style represented by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. They are writing about something. This is the generation that invented the string quartet—a conversation among equals. Sonata form: Idea A meets idea B and has to reorganize its identity in order to include idea B. That’s a pretty radical social image.

The Zaide quartet, for Mozart, takes people who are socially and politically unequal and creates a structure of musical equality—in 1779, three years after the founding of the United States. Haydn and Mozart were part of the Freemason movement, the people who were making the French and American revolutions. This generation was the beginning of the abolitionist movement. These are their commitments. What it takes to surgically remove this from Mozart is what I protest!

I know that we’ll be seeing your production of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic at the Met in 2008. What else do you have coming up in the United States?

We’ll be bringing work from New Crowned Hope [the festival Sellars curates in Vienna later this year] around the world: the new John Adams opera, A Flowering Tree; Kaija Saariaho’s astonishing Passion de Simone, on the life of Simone Weil. All of these pieces will in the next years come to America, with our collaborator Lincoln Center.

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