Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 5 - Cinderella

25 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Jean-Pierre Ponnelle his career, working as both director and designer, his productions—from the costumes and stage direction to the set pieces and lighting schemes—reflected his radical, focused attention on the source material. Ponnelle’s vision for his creations transcended the size or style of the individual operas themselves. Whether in Wagner’s all-encompassing stage works, Mozart’s opera seria or comedies, or even 20th-century masterworks from Berg and Schönberg, Ponnelle immersed himself in his uncompromising conceptions. The results of these “whole world creations” elicited both glowing praise and purist disdain—but the mark he made on the discipline as director-designer is unmistakable and extends well into the 21st century. His productions were and still are welcomed onto the stages of the world’s greatest opera houses. Among his most beloved is La Cenerentola , a 1969 commission for San Francisco Opera under its longtime General Director Kurt Herbert Adler (1905–1988). The work provides an immediate glimpse of quintessentially Ponnellian attributes. Two-dimensional scenery evokes the muted hues of 19th- century postcards, against which the colors of his costume designs form striking contrasts (or blend intentionally into the setting), while the lighting thoughtfully focuses rather than disperses our attention. Every element on the stage is intended to amplify the music. As a young music student in the Conservatoire de Paris, Ponnelle additionally studied painting (briefly at the Sorbonne with cubist Fernand Léger). It was this latter skill that brought him to the attention of composer Hans Werner Henze, and the composer’s invitation for Ponnelle to design the sets and costumes for his two new ballets in Wiesbaden, Jack Pudding (1950) and Anrufung Apolls (1951). The following year, Ponnelle designed Henze’s first opera, the twelve-tone Boulevard Solitude (itself a reconceived one-act Manon Lescaut set in postwar Paris). Ponnelle’s designs for the opera were inspired by the Bauhaus movement established in 1919 Weimar, with clean lines, established rectilinear shapes, and stylized forms. Ponnelle made his American debut under Adler’s invitation in the late 1950s, designing Carl Orff’s Die Kluge and Carmina Burana , and the following season he was commissioned to design the American premiere of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (the composer was a family friend of the Ponnelles). These early works from Ponnelle as designer—heavily influenced by his previous training as a painter—are awash with vivid color and audacious designs, a far cry from the productions that would follow. Adler had seen something brilliant in the early work that he was invested in cultivating and encouraging. Ponnelle acknowledged several individuals as the inspiration for his approach, including actor- turned-director Carl Ebert (a co-creator of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera), with whom Ponnelle worked in 1950s Berlin. Ebert impressed upon the young Ponnelle that he should “read a musical score with the eyes of a director.” Together with the specific stage lighting and scenic theories of Adolphe Appia (1862–1928)—who espoused the ineluctable significance of unity between the director and the designer—Ponnelle formed his own musico-directorial practice. In what was an organic and gradual evolution—certainly informed from his work with spoken theater—Ponnelle followed a prescriptive methodology of his own devising. This began with the music. In an Opera Quarterly interview three years before his untimely death, Ponnelle described his process: “I cannot think before I know the score perfectly, I cannot. Not only the piano score: I prefer to work with the full orchestral score… For me, all the information comes from the music. After that follows dramaturgical analysis, trying to discover the relationships between the characters… When the musical score and the analysis of the libretto are ready, I see my mise-en-scène clearly, automatically.” He eventually assumed the role of director and designer for all his projects, a dual capacity that facilitated and even necessitated close association with the conductors of his productions. He was a frequent collaborator with Claudio Abbado, Herbert von Karajan, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, among others. “A conversation with him about a score,” remarked the German conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, who conducted Ponnelle’s productions of Hindemith’s Cardillac and Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten , “was a genuine dialogue.”