Opera dignifies the negligible

DANA SCHLANGER

For those who revel in intellectual debate and do not skip a beat at the occasional cutting remark, talking to Jonathan Miller is chocolate cake for the mind: an intellectual of the generation that still put general literacy well above technological know-how, he scoffs at anything “archetypal,” just as he scoffs at having been knighted (don’t dare call him “Sir Jonathan”) and at being called a “Renaissance man.”

So, how would you define this individual who is considered one of the greatest brains of Britain, who juggles medicine and theatre, humor and tragedy, Shakespeare and Verdi, radio and television, sculpture and literature – sometimes at once? You don’t. Not to his face anyway!

Coming from a London Jewish background, Miller trained as a doctor and aimed towards neurology before becoming involved in the 1960s satirical stage revue Beyond the Fringe. This led to an invitation to work in television and then in theatre before he made his debut directing opera in the 1970s.

Despite regularly “threatening” to retire, Miller is still directing opera all over the world – among others, he has directed a highly acclaimed production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv. Talking to the Jewish Independent during a break in the rehearsals for the upcoming Vancouver Opera production of La Traviata (at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre April 30-May 12), Miller explained the source of his manifold interests and skills.

“My family background is very literate and intellectual,” he said. “My mother was a novelist and my father was trained as a philosopher before he became a doctor, a child psychiatrist, so I was embedded in that world from the very start. My parents and their contemporaries found it perfectly natural to be interested in many things – high intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge were taken for granted.”

This eclectic approach and his breadth of education have given Miller skills that are integral to being a good director.

“When you work as a doctor, you’re trained to take notice of very small details which are symptomatic, and you watch people and you talk to them and you have very interesting conversations. People don’t do that very much nowadays because they’re being distracted by instrumentation and X-rays and MRIs ... but we were taught how to talk to patients and take histories. And my mother, as a novelist, was absolutely preoccupied by what she would describe as ‘negligible details’ and that’s [of which] the whole of opera and theatre consists.”

Though well known in the opera world for updating the context and time periods of some of the operas he directs, Miller has not done so with the Vancouver Traviata. He has set it in the year it was written, he explained, “because Verdi was wise enough to set it in the year he was writing! I only have any temptation to update when the composer has rather foolishly ‘backdated’ it to another era that he may not know much about. It’s not that I feel free to change, it’s just that I don’t believe the world in which they set it – if you listen to most of the operas written in the 19th century and most of Verdi, they are nonsensical, because they don’t take place anywhere that really exists. It’s just a sort of exotic ‘elsewhen.’”

As an example of one of his more successful re-interpretations, Miller said, “There are certain operas that you can’t update because they have such ridiculous stories that I wouldn’t touch them anyways, but every now and then you can, as long as there’s correspondence between the world that they seem to come from and the world in which you put it. When I did my rather famous Rigoletto, the world of Italian thuggish aristocracy in the 16th century transposed very easily into the world of the New York mafia of the 1950s. This Rigoletto has run for 28 years.”

Traviata requires a different take, however. In describing it, Miller said, “Traviata is a perfectly normal story about completely boring regular people. The only thing interesting about Alfredo is that he’s a perfectly commonplace young man surrounded by perfectly commonplace guests at a commonplace party. Almost all the great works of fiction and art are about the commonplace. The main thing that my mother pointed out to me is that it’s the function of dramatic and literary art to draw your attention to things that you’ve overlooked, instead of being ... exotic. I can’t bear the exotic or the idiotic, vulgar romanticism associated with most operas.”

But that doesn’t mean that the plotline is boring, with only the music making it bearable to watch.

“No, no, it’s still the story!” Miller was quick to point out about what made the opera entertaining. “The music, of course, galvanizes it in a very peculiar way, but most of my colleagues exoticize it, they have them [the performers] waving their arms as if they’re drowning in deep water. This is behavior, as Winston Churchill would have said, “Up with which I will not put!” I just want them to be ordinary [in their acting]. The interesting thing about the arts of any importance is that they remind you of what it is like to be alive and, for most of us, 90 percent of our lives are totally forgettable and negligible.”

Miller doesn’t believe that opera or theatre should be a form of escapism for the audience.

“I don’t like people who say, ‘I go to the opera to be taken out of myself.’ The whole point about going to an opera or going to a play is to have yourself galvanized into an awareness of what you have previously overlooked, which is the ‘interestingness’ of mortal life, most of which is utterly negligible. The great works of art dignify the negligible and make the negligible considerable.”

Though now focused on directing, Miller never fully left medicine behind, working on TV series like The Body in Question and exposing his strong secular stance in Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, his 2004 documentary for BBC.

“I am genetically Jewish but don’t have a ‘subscription’ to the race or the religion,” he said of his own faith. “In my mind, any belief in a disembodied intelligence at work is pure dottiness. My father was an ‘amphibious’ Jew, in that he was half in and half out of the water in terms of Judaism and my mother was just satirical about it, so I grew up as a ‘cradle atheist,’ without anyone getting to me before my cognitive immune system was working.

“I don’t associate at all with ethnicity, it doesn’t really mean anything to me – I think I’m a Londoner! I’ve said it before, I’m a Jew just for the sake of antisemites, to throw it in their face. The history of Christian antisemitism dismays me on a general human basis, but it doesn’t make me feel any more Jewish. I remember someone asking me during an interview for the London Jewish Book Week if, by being there, I didn’t I feel surrounded by the warmth of a Jewish audience. I don’t think he liked it when I told him that was a form of narcissism, that I didn’t feel any superior form of ethnic warmth coming to me as a Jew and that I think I engage all audiences equally, by being warm towards them. I also get very annoyed with people who say I am a self-hating Jew. I’m not. I’m just indifferent to it.”

Dana Schlanger is a freelance writer and director of the Dena Wosk School of Performing Arts.

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