When Welsh National Opera director fell in love with music, and how he depicts mad love triangle of Pelléas et Mélisande
Captivated as a five-year-old by a lone voice singing in a darkened barn, David Pountney has made a career of directing opera singers. He explains how he uses water as a metaphor for a character’s shifting mental state in Debussy’s opera
He was five years old, crouched in the crook of a beam in an old barn in southern England. And then a man began to sing in the gloom. The boy never forgot it. And it changed his life.
“It was 1952, I was five, it was the coronation year, and since the war my parents had been going for the holidays to an institution called Music Camp on a farm in Berkshire [a county in southern England],” recalls David Pountney, one of Britain’s leading opera directors.
“It was Florestan’s aria Gott! Welch Dunkel hier! [“Oh God, what darkness is here!” from Beethoven’s Fidelio]. And the thing that stuck in my mind, which is probably odd for a five-year-old, was this one lone man singing about the darkness. Of course, I had no idea what he was singing about, but evidently his plight made an impression on me.”
The other thing he never forgot from that holiday, he said, was seeing the musicians digging the orchestra pit, “which I think is something that needs to be repeated for every orchestral union member … first dig your own pit”, Pountney says jokingly.
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He is in Hong Kong this month with Welsh National Opera, which is performing his production of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the Hong Kong Arts Festival.
