Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions

Preamble  

The intention of this keynote address for the Segal Center Conference on Robert Wilson in New York and at Watermill on Long Island was to select from Wilson’s more recent theatre works, grouping them around specified elements of his aesthetic. My oral presentation on notes has here expanded into a written version that seeks to keep the speaking voice I had preferred for a well-judged and timely celebration, on his home soil, of Wilson’s achievements on a world scale. 

 My choice of productions was clear from the outset, as were the questions to be raised, but my opening gambit eluded me. Wilson, unknowingly, provided the cue. We had warmly met up again in Romania in May 2024 at the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival, celebrating its thirtieth edition. This biennial festival had invited Wilson’s The Tempest, made and premiered in Bulgarian in 2021 at Sofia’s Ivan Vazov National Theatre. Performed twice at the National Theatre of Craiova (NTC), the festival’s prime venue, The Tempest was the fourth Wilson production to be seen at this festival.

During the after-show social gathering with the Bulgarian actors, NTC actors (whom Wilson had directed in Craiova in 2014 for Eugène Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros), staff, and friends, Wilson suddenly asked: “Maria, which scene did you like best?” Taken aback, I hesitated for a split second and said “the last.” Wilson, looking surprised, said: “I thought it would be the first.” To which, on a party occasion when everyone wanted to be photographed with Bob, I uttered a few hurried words before someone snapped my photo with Bob, too. Instantly I knew that my New York presentation had to begin with a veritable reply to his query and that answering it was the best way for me to pay homage to a fundamentally unclassifiable, ever-creative, and ever-growing unique artist.   

The Choreography of Sound          

Wilson’s The Tempest begins with a phenomenal sea storm constructed by the play of light, sound, and timing, which are not synchronized but in counterpoint, and in counterpoint again for juxtaposition against the dark visual imagery so as not to make this opening scene illustrative but expressive by association with the event. These are foremost traits of Wilson’s aesthetic in relation to which he offsets movement. Where there is light in Wilson there is color, so add “color” to “light,” “sound,” “timing,” “counterpoint,” “juxtaposition,” “ association,” “movement,” and “motion.” Other of his aesthetic elements will present themselves as we go.

Movement in the tempest scene is stylized, as always in Wilson, and the eye discerns bodily images that suddenly appear in sharp, shaped flashes signifying lightning. These movements flash out and, suddenly, seem to be stilled for a split second. Juxtaposition like this of the moving body and the still body is also a Wilson trait, and here it implies (rather than “says”) the attempts the scene’s indistinct humans make, twisting in angular fashion to steady their bodies in the violence of a ship rolled and tossed by a ferocious tempest. Note my “still body,” whereas, in fact, there is little stillness in Wilson’s theatre since there are always tiny movements, sometimes so small – like the blink of an eye or the twitch of a finger – that they are barely perceptible.

Shakespeare’s story component is embedded in the scene’s composition whose blasting sounds stimulate spectators to conjure up images of thunder and roaring ocean: thus they “see the sound” or “see with [their] ears,” as Wilson usually puts it (1), This crossover of the senses is one of his fundamental synesthetic principles. The scene suggests colossal cosmic upheaval and the devastation of the planet, and its immense sonic build-up explodes into the roar of a gigantic all-consuming wave rushing straight into the audience. Those of you who have experienced a mini-earthquake’s deep-throated growl, swelling up at top speed out of nowhere, would have recognized the terrifying, but also thrilling – because this is theatre  – sonic revving up to the explosive wave, heard but invisible, of Wilson’s score. 

The scene ends abruptly with a swift blackout, followed, almost immediately, by low blue light announcing the next episode. Its overt theatricality, prodigiously powered sonically, is a metonym for Shakespeare’s words, a figurative replacement of them while, nevertheless, relaying their story: here is a tempest, a shipwreck, people stranded somewhere, which, as in Shakespeare, is said to be an island. 

Identification of the what, when, and where of this scene and of all subsequent scenes gives Wilson the structure of his production. Structure is habitually his starting point for arranging space (his term is architecture) and for everything else that enters it, which is decided through testing and checking during the working process. Light is fundamental from the very beginning, counter to the standard practice, which is an anathema to Wilson, of bringing light in at the end, after everything else has been “done.” (2)

For The Tempest, Shakespeare’s story is stripped back, offering what could be called the gist of its essential parts: Prospero seeks revenge; Miranda, his daughter, and Ferdinand fall in love; the foolish Stefano and Trinculo drink alcohol, as they plot a political coup – if braggart natter can be called “plotting” in anything but the vaudeville-type comic-ironic treatment that Wilson gives it; Ariel, demure, plays the role of Prospero’s fairy-angel helper (another ironic touch); Caliban appears, learns to get drunk, and is otherwise subordinated to Stefano and Trinculo’s antics. Caliban’s role in Wilson’s arrangement is really no more significant than that of the usurper Duke Antonio, Prospero’s treacherous brother and father to Ferdinand, or that of Alonso, King of Naples and Prospero’s former friend. Antonio and Alonso are shown in an incidental, rather than vital, run-by-magic banquet scene, attractive for its visual panache but without further consequence. 

Wilson’s is a “short” version of The Tempest – and of short duration, too, taking only ninety minutes – whose excisions in terms of storyline and, especially noticeably, of dialogue can be argued to be as valid as any of the plentiful “short” Shakespeare at the 2024 Craiova Festival, not to mention across the world. None, of course, is like Wilson’s theatre, which is truly one of a kind, sui generis. A few phrases on second viewing of the production seemed over-repetitive, but they were most likely reiterated because a given line or the one that followed it in Shakespeare’s text was too long for the beat, or meter, or rhythm considered more suitable, and therefore necessary, for performance purposes. In other words, the artistic exigency was a matter of the perceived right form rather than one of staying with the right text – the text, so called to the letter of literary concerns. Wilson’s approach here recalls the repetitions used in opera, when, at certain moments, a singer sings again the same phrase or sentence from the libretto to exactly the same music specifically for formal reasons, that is, the arc of the musical writing requires repetition for musically satisfactory completion – such as, for instance, the completion in returning to the tonic of musical composition. 

More than story, then, is at issue in this not immediately evident, indirect approach to narrative typical of Wilson’s theatre. The production elides to its close and to Prospero, alone with Miranda. Wilson condenses Prospero’s lines, but their subject is clearly his bygone suffering and inner turmoil, and this, his internal tempest, is transcended at the very moment when forgiveness, reconciliation, and renewal begin in an atmosphere of peace at play’s end. Prospero’s spiritual voyage is the core of the production and, from it, come new beginnings. His last scene with Miranda is gently moving, and this emergent emotion, together with Wilson’s elision of Antonio and his courtly entourage as extraneous to this particular denouement, opens the space for suggesting that Prospero’s last scene is a legacy offered not only to Miranda but also to all listening and watching in the theatre. “In my end is my beginning” wrote T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets of his own spiritual rebirth. (3) Wilson’s focus and closure on this very note is a clue to his insight into the spiritual dimension of Shakespeare’s play. 

You can see why it was not possible to speak to Robert Wilson about his first scene in The Tempest without speaking about the last: they are, essentially, two parts of the same scene because Wilson’s structural line is straight, going from tempest to reconciliation – to illumination, in fact – in a continuum of thought and action. Further, all factors considered, this emergent emotion emanates principally from the actor in the role of Prospero (Veselin Mezekliev): it stems from something in his manner coming from deep within him, and the sensation transmitted is sustained by the quality of his voice – a long-road-traveled voice that has been and seen and understood. 

The phenomenon of performer attention nurtured from within rather than settled on an external, extraverted, starting point allows what Wilson calls “filling the form,” that is, you, the actor, are filling the form from yourself, from whatever you are thinking, dreaming, feeling – in sum, experiencing there and then. Wilson sets the outer form to which he holds you, down to the angle of your little finger, but whatever it is that keeps you centered and permeates the form quietly, unostentatiously, gives it its interest for both actor and spectator. Wilson frequently maintains that, without this “inner” experiencing – let us also call it an inner energy – the form, however outwardly splendid it may be, is simply empty. (4)

It is important for me to say, in anticipation of the last section of my talk, that the spiritual in Wilson’s work is rarely noticed, let alone written about, yet it is often there to a lesser or greater degree, depending on the work. It was present in his utterly innovative 1976 Einstein on the Beach (its premiere at the Avignon Festival, where I saw it), incarnated in the white beam of light, glowing against black, that took twenty minutes to rise from the floor and, incredibly slowly, slide into a vertical position at the center of the stage. Slowness, with nothing to detract attention away from it, measured time, while accentuating the sense of time as a palpable entity and, also slowly, the sense of time as eternal; and all of this happened to one long note, with minor modulations, held on an organ in the orchestra pit. That was spiritual, reaching beyond material being without signing itself conspicuously as “Spiritual!” 

Mary Said What She Said, premiered in 2019 in Paris two and a half years before The Tempest in Sofia, is a useful cross-reference, although not solely because it also took ninety minutes, which is long for a monologue, but because it relies and, this time, consistently relies, on an incisively fashioned soundscape, now, however, primarily generated by language; and, while Wilson never tires of stressing that all elements of his theatre works are equal, equal can be understood as “all playing their part,” which does not exclude the prominence of selected parts at some point in the multiplicity of a given composition. Language, here, is the eminent factor because it provides an exceptionally dense text, an unavoidable verbal mass with which its performer, Isabelle Huppert, has to deal, or fail. 

Mary Said What She Said is the second of Huppert’s Wilson-directed solos, following her 1993 French version of Orlando, its text extracted from Virginia Woolf’s novel by Darryl Pinckney and Wilson. (5) Pinckney,  the author of Mary Said, draws on the letters of Mary Queen of Scots, cousin of Elizabeth I Queen of England, who imprisons her for eighteen years before executing her. The time is the eve of Mary’s execution.

Huppert’s monologue requires pristine diction and enormous  stamina so that nothing is lost from her gamut of enunciated letters, syllables, words, phrases, but also sentences that flow one after another without marked punctuation. In Orlando she often hurled or spat out words, often defiantly. (6) In Mary Said, she affirms, as if the substance of the text that she is saying need not be explained or defended. Timbre, tone, innuendo, register, pitch, pace, and tempo weave her vocal choreography while she paces up and down, back and forth, and frequently on a diagonal (Lucinda Childs’s signature angle for walking in Einstein on the Beach). A sense of urgency filters here and there through Huppert’s volley of words, while an occasional hop, skip, or cantering motion breaks into her walking, accentuating the intermittent sound of her footsteps, audible only when her feet, hidden by her long dress, press on the heels of her shoes. 

Meanwhile, Ludovico Einaudi’s horizontal piano music runs counter to Huppert’s much thicker textured sonorities, while the latter in turn runs counter to Wilson’s palette of light. The palette is elegant, comprising soft pinks (some folding on the back wall into a sliver of white before sudden disappearance), soft blues, subtle shifts of nuanced shadings of peach-apricots and dimmed yellows, and eventually billowing white feathered clouds that envelop Huppert as the performance draws to a close. 

Space is non-figurative – common to Wilson’s oeuvre – thus enabling the sensorial impact of the light design as well as that of the unexpected and incongruous apparitions, at different moments, of a thinly framed white chair (almost faded out by a white-fog effect); a high-healed white shoe evoking Elizabethan courtly attire, which stands in profile on the floor; and a white envelope whose enclosed page Huppert burns, presumably of an incriminating letter, before Mary’s end. Huppert’s black, slightly shimmering, figure-length sleeved garment has a hint of Elizabethan costume around its neck and sleeves. (7) A high beehive wig completes Mary-Huppert’s silhouette. 

All of these constitutive elements come together, and although operating on the principle of contrast, they combine into a coherent and cogent artistic unit, grounded in its linguistic intensity. The cogency of this particular work is instrumental in evoking sensation and eliciting responsiveness of some kind from spectators, and the language wielded by Huppert, although meaningful, is keyed to Wilson’s non-representational means, none geared to apperception through the reasoning mind and all-affecting intuitive sensing and subconscious release. After all, the subconscious harbors feelings – tangibly in such instances as Huppert’s voice rising repetitively with just enough urgency to trigger spectators’ intuitive perception that she is approaching Mary’s demise. 

There is no trace of outburst when Huppert accelerates pace and pitch, but acceleration is noticeable enough to communicate the wisps of emotion that emanate from her sonorities at these very points in her soliloquy. Spectators are free to link them to earlier vocal points since they are all integral to her “filling the form,” aspects of which could be attributed to Mary’s “inner tempest” (initiated, not unlike that of Prospero, by political machinations) before her death. They are free, as well, to link the entire soundscape—including Einaudi’s musical notes—to the continually changing colors of light, for instance, since all of it together elicits some kind of emotion, not least the feeling of beauty or the wonder that Huppert could have managed it all. “Emotion,” for Wilson, is not about being “emotive,” nor is it “histrionics” or forced or fake “acting emotion,”  any more than it is for Huppert. 

On occasion, Wilson seeks external signs capable of arousing a performer’s feelings behind their actions, as happened during the dress rehearsal of The Tempest (May 19, 2024). The scene involved Tom Waits’s recorded voice singing of love, through which Wilson urged the actor in the role of Ferdinand to look at his partner: “Eyes, eyes . . . Show your eyes. Look at her. . . . You love her.” At this juncture, the actor was so fixated on correcting the arm and hand movements prescribed by Wilson’s template that lifting his eyes for the audience to see them or to look at his partner, let alone allow stimuli to feed into what might pass for inner experience, seemed out of the question. Concern with outer form inhibited inner response.

This brief episode shows that Wilson is by no means solely interested in impassive performers, or that he is immune to the sense of words. The dense presence of language in Mary Said What She Said is a reminder that language most certainly exists in Wilson’s collected works, and not only as playful enigma, as had transpired in his 1974 A Letter for Queen Victoria. The latter heralded his break from the highly imaginative and highly innovative group of “silent opera” preceding it (give or take Wilson’s play of words on opera from the Latin denoting “work”). Yet, while Wilson had avoided using language semantically for meaning and interpretation in his “silent” pieces, language in some of his later ones is expressly tasked to convey meaning. 

Such was the case of his own three solos – Hamlet, A Monologue (1995), Krapp’s Last Tape (2009), and Lecture on Nothing (2012). By comparison with Huppert’s solos, they are not as tightly packed linguistically, thus conveying meaning more immediately. They are also more straightforward, which makes them more quickly recognizable as dramatic texts rather than any other kind of text. Drama-acknowledged works like these (collaboration with Heiner Müller had doubtlessly ignited Wilson’s interest in drama) draw attention to the variety within Wilson’s theatre, but also of his oeuvre as such, which embraces the artefacts – paintings, drawings, sculptures, video portraits, glass, and other objects – that have won them international acclaim as visual art, while leaving their imprint on his theatrical art. Wilson is not beyond self-reference, within or across his artistic forms, as occurs in the unexpected fleeting presence of a video portrait of Aleksandr Rodchenko in Lecture on Nothing, high in the corner front-stage, who, in an inspired joke, winks at the audience! Humor is no stranger to the Wilson repertoire. 

The Music of Opera

Einaudi’s music is integral to Huppert’s sonosphere, but, then, music is of utmost importance to Wilson’s theatre as a whole. (8) It can come in mixtures of musical genres in his manifestly spoken-word/drama creations, as happens in The Tempest, where a Tom Waits song co-exists with fragments of Schubert played by string instruments. His music theatre proper is, by comparison, different in that it is sparked off by music and is music-led; and, notwithstanding the hybrid characteristics that layer his music-led constructions, it is musically genre-specific, which lends itself to grouping into three categories. The first is what I call the “rock-folk” group, whose masterpieces are The Black Rider (1990, Hamburg), where Waits’s music predominates, Woyzeck (2000, Copenhagen), whose music and lyrics are by Waits and Kathleen Brennan, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2009, Berlin), music by Rufus Wainwright, with Wainwright rising up on a small platform from the pit (only once in a “star” gesture), singing into his microphone.

The second is “baroque opera,” notably Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland (2011) at La Scala (Milan) and The Coronation of Poppea (2014) at the Opéra de Paris Bastille, the second, modern house of the Paris Opera, while the older, nineteenth-century house is known as the Palais Garnier. 

The third music-theatre group is “grand opera” (the commonly used but awkward terminology), which, in Wilson’s case, primarily comprises operas from the Romantic repertoire of the nineteenth century, with Verdi foregrounded since the 2000s, giving seven Verdi operas to date. Even so, he staged a sparse but fire-flamed, overall ritualistic and quite mesmerising Ring cycle, all four of Wagner’s operas of this major opus taking two years to be premiered sequentially at the Zurich Opera (2000 to 2002) and be performed in relatively quick succession during 2002 in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Their Wagner predecessors were Lohengrin in 1998 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the glaringly only grand opera Wilson was to stage there at all, and Parsifal in 1991 in Hamburg. Weber’s Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter), connecting this opera with the rock-folk The Black Rider, came in 2009 in Baden-Baden. Just these few geographical details for Wilson-crafted operas show a pattern of European patronage and audience engagement that have sustained his operatic output right until the present. 

Still within Wilson’s grand-opera diapason are two key Symbolist works, both strong and both staged for the Paris Opera – Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1993, at the Bastille) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1997, at Garnier). These productions are still in the Paris Opera repertory, with another reprise of Madama Butterfly scheduled for the 2024–2025 season. And there are various modernist works, going from Bela Bartok’s Blue Beard’s Castle and Arnold Schoenberg’s Expectation in 1995 in Salzburg to Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, premiered at the Houston Grand Opera in 1996 and performed shortly afterwards at the Edinburgh Festival in the fresh, light-hearted way conceived by its authors. Note too Richard Strauss’s The Woman Without a Shadow at the Paris Opera Garnier in 2003, which, in my view, had an undeservedly short life. 

Not to be forgotten in the modernist canon is Igor Stravinsky’s stand-alone 1927 Oedipus Rex, an “opera oratorio,” in Stravinsky’s own classification, for orchestra, narrator, soloists, and male chorus, which Wilson staged in 1996 on a huge staircase designed for the occasion at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. The work was introduced by a twenty-five minute Silent Prologue involving performance artists and dancers in the vein of Wilson’s “silent opera” and so too of his earlier experimentation with hybrid forms. 

Perhaps Wilson’s not altogether successful conjuncture of Oedipus Rex and his prologue (I was among the unconvinced) is best placed not with opera but alongside Debussy’s 1911 hybridized Le Martyr de Saint Sébastien, also a stand-alone piece. Debussy wrote its music for unconventional dancer Ida Rubinstein with text by Symbolist-influenced Gabriele d’Annunzio featuring a narrator. Jean Cocteau, who had collaborated with Stravinsky, also featured a narrator. Wilson staged Le Martyr de Saint Sébastien in 1988, showcasing Paris Opera Ballet’s superstar ballerina Sylvie Guillem in her then home, the Garnier.

Opera, when “grand” – including, for the purposes of this presentation, the maverick modernist works that had contested the habits of the grand traditional opera houses (Blue Beard’s Castle and so on)  – significantly outweighs, in some twenty-six productions so far, the total number of Wilson’s baroque variety combined with his “popular,” more “home-spun” music-theatre. His prolific opera work points not only to his attachment to classical music, but also to the great importance of established opera to his artistic vision and the materialization of that vision. Given that these are matters of fact and not of opinion, it is more than disappointing that theatre scholarship has paid little to no attention to Wilson’s world of opera, within which are to be found some of his most outstanding works. Works of this caliber have enriched the field of opera of the past fifty years, while challenging and changing the field’s artistic vocabulary, outlook, and possibilities of being new in the present rather than entrenched in the practices of the past. Thus, when Wilson’s legacy is at issue, one need not look much further than his achievements in grand opera to gauge that legacy’s enduring force. 

 My contextual remarks are a framework for ascertaining characteristics of Wilson’s direction and design shared by his operas. But they help to identify, as well, characteristics that are heightened in individual operas or are simply unique to a particular production. When looking from the perspectives of what is heightened and what singular, two recently acclaimed opera productions command attention: Puccini’s Turandot, staged in 2018 at the Teatro Real in Madrid, with this theatre’s orchestra and chorus, conductor Nicola Luisotti (returning to Madrid in 2023 before traveling to the Paris Opera Bastille in the same year, the performance discussed here); and Verdi’s La Traviata, first in Linz in 2015, but reaching glory only in the 2016–2017 version in Russia at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre with MusicAeterna, founded and conducted by Teodor Currentzis. This rendition was then performed at the Grand Théâtre de la Ville in Luxembourg in 2018, which is the one discussed here.

Of foremost importance in these two productions is their uncluttered space, which, having distinguished Wilson’s very early career, has become a recognizable aesthetic principle across his body of work. What needs to be stressed, however, is that Wilson’s varied opera directing has completely ratified his principle of bare space. He may well have begun with an understanding of space from visual-art and dance perspectives, but opera progressively showed him that the musically complex organism that is opera required uncluttered space to be fully heard and be heard commensurately with its ambitions. Opera consists of orchestral music, singing soloist voices, choral voices, a libretto replete with names of characters and story and plot – these are its drama components – and architectural, painterly and other scenographic features as well as dance and related physically trained practices like the commedia dell’arte, which Puccini had borrowed for Turandot. 

All these multifarious elements notwithstanding, opera, if pan-artistic (or “interdisciplinary”) in its very essence is, above all else, a sonic universe, and Wilson accedes to this when he observes that he is usually “visually distracted” when he goes to the opera because it is “so busy on stage” that he has to close his eyes “in order to hear carefully. . . . I can [then] listen to the violin, to the harp, to the flutes, I can listen to the singer.” His “biggest challenge” as a director is to “give a space so that we can hear [the] music,” and, for his work, “which is highly visual, the visual must give a space for us to hear music so that, with my eyes open, I can hear better than when my eyes are closed.” In other words, hearing the music, which is imperative, cannot be impaired by busy décor (among other “busy” factors) or, for that matter, in the case of Wilson’s design, by what is visually arresting and even potentially overpowering.

Turandot is a salient example of what is exceptionally visually powerful, even by Wilson’s standards, with its architecturally imposing but constantly moving big blocks and tall columns of colored light in a range of deep blues and some black; sometimes there is only black, barely lit. Vibrating masses of purple protrude and fill the space, also saturating the comical “Chinese” commedia trio whose costumes by Jacques Reynaud, as if cut from heavy paper in an angular fashion, hold the gaze. 

The rarity of purple in Wilson’s palette makes its loud presence all the more striking. Purple may well allude to Turandot’s regal power – indeed, imperial tyranny – to which Wilson unmistakably refers through her appearances, standing on a narrow black platform that moves and juts out from the wings, high up above the stage, and then retreats after her pronouncements to behead her unsuccessful suitors. She poses her three riddles to her last suitor, Caleb, from this same platform. Wilson perceives, in one of the most striking expressions ever of his imagination, just how daunting, how fearful the height and position in the air of his platform really are to eyes that see as they listen. 

The visual potency of this device is matched by Turandot’s stiff, stridently deep orange dress (which she wears throughout) of triangular shape and squared shoulders, accompanied by black squared headgear and long black gloves. Towards the end of the opera, the orange of her dress seems to radiate against washes of rich, warm brown on the back wall; at another moment, an outsize vibrating orange ball appears on it, referring, by association through color, to Turandot’s beginning to be transformed by the power to love.

Turandot, without the capacity to love, is a forbidding sight, countered only by the softer contours of Liu’s, but especially of Caleb’s, simple but confident bearing and the garments both wear. Reynaud and Wilson here approach Puccini’s chinoiserie with discretion, dressing these characters from top to toe in monochromatic, one-patterned thick but stylish fabric which is the color of stone, tinted with very pale green (unless this slight tint is an optical illusion created by light). But discretion is evident most of all in their contained gestures and movements. 

More physically restrained still – Wilson’s understatement to another degree – are the duets between Turandot (Iréne Theorin) and Caleb (Gregory Kunde), particularly their closing series where Caleb is at last able to declare his love instead of continually proving it through his successful feats. The singers’ kinaesthetic minimalism is precisely what allows the cumulative release of the full power of their voice – for nothing can obstruct its intense focus; and the singers bring out vocally, even more than does the orchestral playing, the music’s enormous emotional range. 

Wilson understands only too well that music is both a source and generator of emotions and that it can be this form of energy – distilled, pure – when all the energy of singing is channeled through the singing and is condensed in it. Gestures and movements at this level of condensation can be nothing other than mere clutter, irrelevant to the supreme translucence of the singing voice as it sings from the movement within each singer. And once you can fully hear, untrammeled, what the voices are telling you – the voices rather than the words – Wilson’s sumptuous visual presentation falls into place, holding its own, but not overbearing – “equal,” Wilson would say – while you can hear all the music, vocal and instrumental together, at ease, with your “eyes open.”

A comparable kind of translucence and musically elevated synthesis occurs in La Traviata, with the great difference that the music at the end of this opera soars into transcendence, instantaneously as Nadezhda Pavlova, in the title role, soars into transcendence. This extraordinary metamorphosis happens most of all through the emotional depth and finesse of the vocal and instrumental music from the very beginning of the production until its last note. This refined unison is due to the completely attuned togetherness of all the players, necessarily, including the singer-players, who are inseparable from, and totally sensitive and attentive to, the finely tempered ensemble that is MusicAeterna, nurtured by Currentzis. 

Wilson, meanwhile, pursued his designer-director course, sensitive, by some kind of alchemical intuition and affinity to the tenor of the musical work. His visual imagination, in response, is especially delicate: colors are largely pastels – creams and pinks tinged with gold for Violetta (Marguerite in Alexandre Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias, the source of the opera’s libretto), as they are for her apartment and other spaces related to her. Objects are few, a good number of them floating in the air. Wilson’s more pronounced visual compositions are reserved for Violetta’s lover Alfredo (Dumas’s Armand), Alfredo’s father, and Violetta’s demi-monde friends.

 Accordingly, the opera’s ballroom scene of Act II (Wilson calls it a “party)” is replete with stunning bull-like heads and horns and cat’s-eye masks, pervasive red light, and red and black costumes evoking bullrings, matadors, and flamenco dancers. All are intrinsic to Verdi’s score but, nevertheless, give room for Wilson’s fantasy cabaret-camp-and-queer pianist to do his number with brio in the merriment that, before too long, becomes disaster. (10)

The production’s closing scene is breathtaking. Wilson places Pavlova-Violetta in the shadow of death, her image in the illusion of a darkening skeleton (this through Wilson’s masterful lighting) in her large white bed, until she rises, training a long unfurling white sheet behind her, which is her nightgown and shroud in one. Attached to one of her fingers is the loop of a sheet that she trains along the air, like the sail of a ship, as she takes steps forward, her radiant face looking ahead as she sings her love of Alfredo. She biblically curves her index finger upwards to the Divine. And she is now smiling, smiling as she sings her love, not collapsing in a heap, as in melodramatic views of this opera, but standing tall, with dignity. The strings of the orchestra tremor and gently recede into silence, as does Pavlova’s voice, except that the silence seems to be an illusion of silence and the musical notes seem still to be heard. Never have I heard the quality of such a silence – a holy silence, the silence of miracles – in any Wilson work before. If pressed, I would have to say that this silence is the silence of spiritual experiencing – or, perhaps, more accurately, of spiritual being.

The Spiritual Dimension

 La Traviata closes without closing, having suffused a distinctly palpable sense of togetherness on the stage and between the stage and spectators, binding them all as one. This particular kind of togetherness is in itself a kind of spiritual experience. It is, in the same instance, something like a celebration of life, akin to Pavlova’s celebration of love for and with Violetta. For Wilson, a spiritual experience is not a religious one because, as he sees it, the church (temple, mosque, synagogue) is the place for religion while the theatre can be spiritual without the religious dogmas (my paraphrase) that he believes are divisive. (11)

The spiritual dimension of Wilson’s theatre appears in what may be called “secular” works, but it is more evident in music that is culturally accepted to be sacred music, (differently, of course, in the diverse cultures of the world), or thought to have sacred origins and uses, or which, by its spiritual qualities, is entitled to sanctified places. Such music gave rise to the following in Wilson’s oeuvre, in chronological order: Bach’s St John’s Passion (2007, Théâtre du Châtelet); Adam’s Passion (2015, using four pieces by Arvo Pärt, whose pivotal piece is a Russian Orthodox lament sung in Russian, which in 2009 Pärt had named Adam’s Lament), presented in Tallinn’s Noblessner Foundry, newly renovated for performances; The Messiah (Der Messias, 2020), Mozart’s arrangement and sung in German of Handel’s English-language The Messiah, premiered right at the beginning of the Covid pandemic at the Mozartwoche in Salzburg); Bach 6 Solo (2021, Wilson in collaboration with violinist Jennifer Koh and Lucinda Childs choreographing for five dancers, of whom she was one). Bach 6 Solo was performed at the Chapelle Saint-Louis of the renowned seventeenth-century hospital Salpêtrière in Paris. The concert-dance was integral to France’s celebration of Wilson’s eightieth birthday in recognition of Wilson’s artistic services to France. (12)

Two additional works on the outer edge of this time span rightly belong to the sphere of the sacred, broadly understood. The first is Gloria, a 2022 recorded sound installation in which Wilson speaks in tandem with Huppert and saxophonist Richard (Dickie) Landry playing his own music. Sound was transmitted through unobtrusively situated small microphones in that most venerated of holy sites in France, the Sainte-Chapelle, in the heart of Paris. Most unfortunately, the stream of tourists passing through (some stopping for a minute or two to figure out what was going on) brought in unsettling noise, while the sound installation, although respectfully quiet and intentionally transmitted as if from afar, was altogether too quiet to be heard adequately in such circumstances. 

The second work is an art installation, the 2024 STAR and STONE: a kind of love…some say, which is Wilson’s bold and frequently startling painting of Notre-Dame de Rouen in Normandy via digitally projected images from technology placed in the grounds of the Cathedral. Several of these images, although by no means newsreel reproductions, are surely allusions to the damages done to the Cathedral during the Second World War. Compelling in their destructive mode, particularly given the Cathedral’s beautiful facades in real life and the beautiful colorings that Wilson otherwise inscribes on them, these tougher images can justifiably be interpreted as his profoundly critical thoughts on the devastations of war.  In the face of semiotics like these, it can hardly be assumed that Wilson’s consciousness of the world has been smothered by aesthetics because his is not social-issue art, nor, as a consequence, does he make  “social theatre.” The latter, although a comprehensible label, is unsatisfactory for individuating theatre centered on social issues since all theatres, by virtue of being made in societies, are social. 

Adam’s Passion, created before Covid and the spate of horrendous wars fought in 2024, picks up Pärt’s underlying theme that Adam, the symbol of all humanity, had precipitated the tragedy of humanity, while transposing it into the key of hope. Myriad hues of blue permeate the work from start to finish, suggesting, in the context of Pärt’s thought, the celestial plane of salvation evoked by the painters of the Renaissance. These are the blues, too, of Wilson’s first four minutes of silence (Pärt’s choir sings straight afterwards) in which Adam, Wilson’s “Man,” is Everyman and stands for collective responsibility as well as collective atonement and pardon. The very abstraction of his name gives Man (Humanity) a plural identity, composed of single individuals. 

Atonement and pardon, two aspects beyond darkness, buoy up the production’s motif of hope and summon to the imagination the Man who was Christ. The silver, piercing light, which first appears on the backstage wall as a vertical line, opens out from the line’s central slight swell, growing bigger and brighter, like organic growth from a seed. This iridescent emanation returns periodically, also in order to light a hanamichi-style walkway extended from the edge of center stage into the audience. 

By the time the choir starts singing, the stage has been set for the journey of Man, played by a stocky and naked Michalis Theophanous, who, by a curious trompe l’oeil, does not, at first, look naked at all. This optical deception is probably due to the magnetic light, but also to the attention drawn of the viewing eye to the pearly silhouette of a tree, suspended in space above the stage, with its leafless branches hanging upside down. This can only be the Tree of Man, an evocation of faith and myth; a memory of antiquity and the holy. 

The Tree visually connects to a branch – possibly, symbolically, a branch lopped off the hanging tree (albeit with some leaves) – that rests on the floor at the point where the hanamichi reaches into the audience. Pärt’s religious musical meanings meld into Wilson’s projected humanist vision of human resilience and endeavor, while his pervading play of light conjures up the human spirit, as does, in tandem, the singing choir. Man walks steadily towards the branch as if walking into the future. The performance, at the same time, draws to an end, and nothing in it contradicts the idea that naked Man (who is, also “cleansed” Man), walks forward confidently, with hope. 

Wilson, being an artist of point and counterpoint, sets up rotund creatures in puffball shapes as comical counterparts of the central seriousness of his production. Yet this ploy, in my view, misses the mark, since the puffball scene looks like misplaced kitsch, nor is it particularly funny. Nor is it witty enough to counter and thus puncture high-minded sentiments, as comedy is said to have done for tragedy in Ancient Greece. Choreographer and dancer Lucinda Childs’s incomparable hieratic style is most certainly suitable for the composition, but for some reason – too withheld, or simply lackluster – it does not enhance a work that, by its very nature, poses the greatest of difficulties for rendition as theatre.  

The subject of Handel’s The Messiah concerns humankind, and Handel wrote it theatrically; but, then, he was also a writer of operas. Mozart, who was a prodigious composer, also wrote operas, and this meant that his version of The Messiah made it less problematic for staging than compositions lacking an inbuilt sense of theatre – the case of Pärt’s compositions, which are in the range of prayer and meditation. 

Mozart’s arrangement is lighter and bouncier than Handel’s original. It willingly displays its joyous tonalities and dance-like beats and rhythms, which Wilson caught quickly for his direction and design. Mozart’s and Wilson’s accord was cut short. No sooner was Der Messias premiered in Salzburg in January 2020, playing for three nights, then Covid drove it into “storage.” Wilson, in the meantime, was prevented by the outbreak from traveling back to the United States and found refuge in Berlin, where, in isolation, he continued the black and white drawings of The Messiah begun in Salzburg. Wilson, apart from generally working with and through drawings in the gestational phases of his productions, drew this particular set with the intention of exhibiting it in an art gallery in Paris to accompany planned performances of The Messiah in that city.

My impression of these drawings so full of movement, much of it suggesting wind, was that they were of a different order from the joyousness of the stage movement. The two impulses appeared to be in opposition, the one steered towards shadowed turbulence, the other towards the radiant skies. It might well be that Wilson’s bi-vocality, couched in two different artistic forms, entered into dialogue with The Messiah, which recalled his earlier dialogue with Pärt in Adam’s Passion.  Wilson could well have used Pärt’s name Adam’s Lament for the whole work. Instead, he chose Passion whose nuances of meaning differ significantly from those of Lament, the first coming from the Bible’s New Testament and the second from the Old. Passion inescapably references “Passion of Christ,” which is a singularly New Testament event, and Wilson probably felt that its nuances were closer to the positive, proactive dimensions that shaped his part of the collaboration. Five years later, the spirit of The Messiah is indubitably positive. 

The Messiah resurfaced three times in September 2020 at the venerable Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, while Covid escalated. The theatre management took maximum precautions, and audiences complied, but, as Wilson notes, all the theatres of Paris were shut down after the third night. (Theatres in London, on the other hand, were closed down months sooner.) What, in retrospect, is striking is how uplifting in such fearful times The Messiah would have been to those who had heard and seen it (which argues for the importance of the arts to society). Just as striking is how true this production was to the certitude, breathed by Mozart into The Messiah, that humanity could and would overcome adversity; here the Christian basis and full significance of “Messiah” cannot be ignored. The Grand Théâtre of Geneva dared two performances in October 2020. The Messiah then retreated until its six performances at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona in March 2024. 

Wilson took up the abstractions of the dramatis personae of The Messiah. Mozart had identified them musically, that is, by voice and so by Soprano, Tenor, and so on. This pattern dramaturgically organizes all of the production’s participants, except its magnificent dancer Alexis Fousekis. Wilson’s main goal was to have the whole space full of joy, starting with the tenor, Richard Croft, who, light on his dancing feet, is graceful, gracious, and urbane as he cuts across his “roles,” including that of singing narrator. Like a thread of continuity, he weaves in and out of various tableaux. Tableaux is the most appropriate word in this context for Wilson’s sequences of slightly “stilled,” momentarily “held” images in the manner of Symbolist tableaux. Soprano, dressed in white with long white hair standing in a gondola, is “caught” in a gesture of rowing; Tenor is caught in an echoing, similar gesture: Alto stands with a jet of steam behind her; elsewhere fire burns in the sky; somewhere else a huge moon hangs (in my memory behind Tenor); and, somewhere else, the Tree of Man stands upright in the sky and not upside down, as in Adam’s Passion.

Most of the solos and duos are offset by rows of iridescent thin lines on the stage floor; sometimes they are set into relief by the illuminated outlines of the rectangular shape of the stage; at others, a box framed in white-silver light is framed within another similarly framed box to create depth of image. The effect is entrancing, but does not etiolate the singing. There are also group tableaux. Sometimes the chorus walks in a line of darkened silhouettes behind this or that soloist. Mostly, however, choral singers divide the stage space into two (as in Turandot), with a wide passage between them, usually for entrances and exits. Occasionally, all horizontal space is filled, as happens when, a spaceman in the image of the first man on the moon emerges from clouds and massive effects of exploding snow. No sooner glimpsed, then the singing chorus in black flanks the moon man on either side. 

Even so, this splendor upon splendor is outshone by Dancer Fousekis whose impeccable virtuosic technique gives his jetés the power to leap high and free of the earth, an ethereal not terrestrial being with variations of the position of his arms. Airborne, Spirit incarnate, he leaps through the skies of Wilson’s blues; clouds thicken and darken; black planks, well spaced from each other and held up on “invisible” strings, look downward while he passes to land. At one point, Fourakis leaps and comes down to stand with his shoulders and arms pulled behind him, suggesting they might be touching or even be attached to the plank now settled nearer the floor. It dawned on me afterwards that the image, angled as it was, alluded to Christ carrying the Cross. The whole work is surreal, engrossing, exhilarating, and its instruments and singers perform music less like Handel’s church music (even if touched by theatre) and more like Mozart’s spiritual translucence, here symbolized and materialized in dance. 

Epilogue

There can be no adequate “conclusion” to this presentation except to affirm that Wilson’s spiritual dimension is integral to his legacy. Further commentary waits silently for his future work.