'Juliet is suicidal from the beginning'
Elijah Moshinsky, director of the opera “Romeo et Juliet” which will be staged at the Seoul Arts Center through Sunday / Courtesy of Korea National Opera
Opera 'Romeo et Juliette' director says 'truest love is like death'
By Yun Suh-young
Renowned opera director Elijah Moshinsky said he was fascinated how Juliet of "Romeo and Juliet" resembled the characteristics of teenagers committing suicide in England at one time.
"It's like a suicide pact. I don't know how it is in Korea, but there was a time in England when university students made pacts to commit suicide together and it fascinated me," said Moshinsky during an interview with The Korea Times after a rehearsal for the opera "Romeo et Juliette" Tuesday. The French opera version of the Shakespearean play is staged from Dec. 8 through 11 at the Seoul Arts Center. Its music is composed by Charles Gounod, who was heavily influenced by the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner.
"Juliet feels doomed from the beginning. She's always desperate and her emotions are always in conflict. She's a character with a lot of inner conflict. She's a potential suicide from the beginning. You know those young girls who commit suicide. I feel she has that sense of destiny in terms of her character."
The opera director said he tried to be faithful to the story and culminate the emotions toward the tragedy at the very end.
"My main interest is to go to tragedy because this opera can be done light and sentimental but I'm trying not to do that. The opera is very different (from the play) and is influenced by Wagner. I like the way Gounod has taken from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde ― the idea of love and death together ― which is not in the play. The idea of the opera is that the truest love is like death. The most sublime is combined with death. When you think of it, a lot of it is like Freud or Jung," he said.
"Love and death lifts their souls in some way and makes them not like ordinary people. If I made it too realistic, it wouldn't be able to reach the poetic atmosphere. Most operas are based on myth and you have to create myths on stage, it's not television. Staging it, you have to make very intelligent choices not to make it too real but real enough so that the feelings of the poetic thing come across ― and it's really hard."
The 70-year-old director staged the same opera here in 2014 for the first time, but this year's performance has a new cast with some additions here and there.
"We have a stronger Romeo than we had before and a real French Juliet. She really is the French style. Her style is really authentic," he said.
"I made the action a bit more tragic and more decorative than I did last time," he added.
But despite the added decoration, it's still nothing more than minimalistic -- from the costumes to the stage.
"Everything is simplified. The costumes are simplified, the gestures are simplified. It takes a lot of concentration to make it dramatic when you're that simple," he said.
"The use of color is very important. The blue against the white, they have an emotional quality. For example, Juliet is always in white until she's dead when she's red, and Romeo is red when he commits suicide. It's to be emotional against the blue. When they get married, it's pure white."
The colors reflect the characters' emotions and the blue background reflects the overall atmosphere which is dreamy and graceful, in line with Gounod's light music.
"By making an opera the way that he did, Gounod tries to lift you spiritually with the music. So nothing on the stage is actually realistic. There are no props. There's a bench and an empty stage. Because the way I want to do it is to make the action flow like a film from sequence to sequence," he said.
The director's favorite scene is the last one because the music is intense.
"The thing about the last scene is that it culminates (with the climax in emotion). My job is to make you believe they're actually in love, to make you feel that they're so passionately in love, enough to kill themselves. That has to do with physical action."
The difference between the opera and the play is that in the opera, the two lovers meet each other for the final time before their death. In the play, Juliet wakes up after Romeo commits suicide and in grief drinks the potion to enter eternal sleep. But in the opera, Juliet wakes up when Romeo comes to see her, but only after Romeo has drunk the poison and prepares to die. In the end, the two sing a final song of prayer to God and die together.