(Photo Credit: Jan Reiser)

For Theater Magdeburg’s General Director, Julien Chavaz, color is at the core of how he approaches his opera productions.

It’s also where his artistic journey commenced. Specifically, he worked a job in painting as a teenager. When his attempts to embark on a college degree in agricultural engineering didn’t pan out, he returned to that very job as he charted out his next journey into the world of theater and opera. Then a major opportunity to work with Laurent Pelly vaulted his career to the next level and he’s never looked back, directing his very opera productions and eventually taking the helm at Theater Magdeburg where he can be both the administrator but continue to be a creator.

OperaWire had a chance to speak with Chavaz ahead of the 2024-25 season in a wide-ranging conversation that highlighted Chavaz’s artistic journey and the three fundamentals of his approach to directing opera.

OperaWire: Where does your artistic journey begin and how do you transition from painting to opera?

Julien Chavaz: Well, painting was a student job for me. At the age of 15, I wanted to have more money in the summer, so I worked for this painting company, and I was helping all the summers. Then I studied engineer at the university as an agriculture engineer. After a few months in that business, I decided that actually, the only thing I want to do is to be an artist and to be a director. But I was really full of respect of what it means and also full of anxiety about what if I’m going to be judged or if I can get through this world. So I went step by step, and I did first director jobs. I also became an assistant in small things, every year, bigger things. Then I became the assistant of Laurent Pelly all over the world. And that changed my life.

But because I decided at the age of 26 or 27 that I wanted to be a director, I’ve also decided that I don’t want to wait home to get jobs, and I don’t want to get the distress that artists get of not being sure to be wanted by the industry. So I decided I need a job and I went back to the painting company that employed me when I was a teenager. And I would like to say that the three first years of my artistic journey enabled me to have something between assisting jobs. So it kept me alive, and it gave me a very thick skin. That was kind of an important decision that I’ve never regretted.

OW: How did your artistic identity evolve and develop during those years?

JC: The first thing is, I had a very strong intuition that I wanted to do this job, but I was very respectful of it, and I thought that I needed to understand it. I decided to found the company to do first small, small scale opera project. We wanted to do things that you don’t see on the big stage and to do some funny and out of the industry projects. Parallel to that, I became an assistant director to Laurent Pelly, as I said. I started to understand much more about how my job works. When you are assistant director on big scale opera productions, you get to direct chorus, you get to direct revivals, you get to work with important singers. So you develop a portfolio of competencies that you never lose for the rest of your career. For me, a very strong understanding is that opera is a lot about corporality. That’s something that still, 16 or 17 years later, is fundamental to my work. I don’t see opera as something very different from putting music into bodies, putting voice into bodies.

I tend to see the opera director as almost a frustrated choreographer, someone that has to put the music into the bodies, to organize the bodies onto the stage. So that’s the first main fundamental of my work. The second fundamental is what I would say, the thin line between comedy and poetics. That’s also something that came very intuitively to my work, is that I always see theater as the art of reduction. Theater, to the contrary of movies or other arts or literature, cannot show everything. So you always have to work with what I call “reduction.” In a very positive sense, you cannot show everything. So then you have to focus on some things. You have to transform the things you want to show to an audience into poetics, into other ways. And that’s something that I still consider as the core fundamentals. At the same time, comedy, because I cannot help it. Already, as a child, my teachers were complaining to my parents that I was always obsessed with making my comrades, in class, laugh.

I always felt alive when I made people laugh or cracked jokes and imagined funny situations. And so it means that in most of the works, of course, not in all of them, but I’m always very attentive, always very cautious at making space for comedy. And comedy doesn’t mean clown-esque. Comedy can be irony, comedy can be poetics, comedy can be the ability to laugh at yourself. This is why I’m so at home with composers like Mozart, because I feel that he had the capacity to not only create fantastic things and fantastic words, but also had the capacity to laugh at them or to make them less important than they are. And those elements, I think, create the kind of fundamentals that are still accompanying me through the different stagings I’m doing.

OW: Regarding your last point about comedy, do you find that because of your natural attraction toward exploring, you find that certain composers like Wagner or Verdi, whose dramas are very intense and often very tragic, are more difficult for you to approach as a director? Or is that a challenge you welcome?

JC: I would say when I do think about staging works that do not have a natural instinct for comedies, that you can find things like this in a very different sense. I focus on poetics or I focus on mystery. To give you an example, I did a staging of “Eugene Onegin” that was revived at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo last season. For me, it was very important to bring poetics to the stage. I’ve added an additional character, a gardener, which is like a kind of a white clown hanging around on stage, being almost the male side of Tatiana, being there when she writes the letter, in the letter scene. When I cannot express myself through laughter or through comedy, I immediately switch to what I call poetics and reduction, and I find very complimentary feelings.

OW: What is your process for discovering your approach to an opera?

JC: I think I start with something very specific, which is color. That might surprise you and your audience of readers. But, for instance, if I’m thinking of a new production now I start with colors. Let me try to be specific about that. I try in the designs I do or I co-create with my team to always expand, be very storytelling in the color schemes, in the color tension. I think that some words need to be explained through colors. I think that characters can be explained through colors. I think that opera lives from the contrast that exists between the colors, the color palettes of characters, and the color you would give to the set.

That’s the absolute first thing. Not because I want to start with it, but I get obsessed with it. I always get very obsessed. I talk to my costume designer, and I say, “I think we should be in that direction.” We exchange pictures, and we get very emotional about some pictures, and very often they are related to colors.

The second thing I’m always very interested in is about creating what I would call the dance floor. For me, I always need to give to the performers a place to dance. And when I say “dance,” of course, it’s a metaphor. It doesn’t mean that they are doing steps and choreographies. But I need to create spaces where the space enables people to create tension, to activate their bodies, to fight, to love themselves. Where bodies can articulate themselves on stage.

The third thing is, of course, what I would call the “poetization” of a work. It means how do you transfer and how do you translate ideas? Let me give you an example. In the “Die tote Stadt” I just did there’s this scene in Act two where Marietta comes back and joins the comedians. As I always think she’s very glamorous, and she always comes back, and she’s kind of the star, and everybody admires her for her glamorousness, we decided to make her a very spectacular entrance. She kind of arrived on the moon sitting, and she was admired by everyone. So that’s the third thing. How do you find ideas to magnify? What are the key moments in the opera that you want to transform? That you want to present in a way that is true to the story? Because I think I never go against the story, but that presents some crucial elements in a new way, in a poetic way, in a way that is both a surprise and an emotion for an audience.

OW: You just said that you never go against the story. Is there a line that you draw so that you don’t go against the story?

JC: Some works need to be reinterpreted and to get, I would say, an adaptation to make them understandable by an audience. I want to give you the example of the operetta tradition of the 1930s, of the Weimar Republic, of what happens between the world wars in Germany. Here you have a repertoire that was very based on the current political feelings, that were based on the passion for exoticism, that were based on the world perception. That is not our world perception today.

An opera has always been created as a genre that has to feel like something created today. You know, it’s not museum, it’s not the art of the museum. When you’re doing an operetta, you want to transform things, you want to make them different, you want to make reference to actuality, you want to change some parameters so you can allow yourself to be very unfaithful, to, let’s say, what we call the piece. But I don’t think unfaithful to the spirit of the piece.

When on the same period of the music history, you do Korngold, who has written something that I think happens in the world of dreams, happens in the world of hallucinations, happened in the worlds of the confrontation of our interior and exterior world, then basically you can feel very free and you don’t have to fear that things will feel out of the story because everything you do might happen in the world of dreams.

You can be very true to the story while spicing up your production with elements that show an understanding of our current issues, that show a refusal of some clichés that you were funny 100 years ago but are not anymore. I think you don’t have to destroy an opera to make it actual. Some directors think that they have to have revenge against repertoire. I don’t think you need that. I don’t think to explain to the whole world how bad our thoughts about the world were 100 years ago. I just need to create something that feels honest to me and mixes up a story of back then with values of today.

OW: In regards to Laurent Pelly, what are some things that, while working with him, you learned along the way that have been really influential towards your approach?

JC: I want to be very emphatic, and I want to say that Laurent Pelly changed my life very much because I’ve learned things with him that I don’t think anybody could have taught me in the same way. He was never trying to teach me things, but it was so inspiring to me. The first thing is to bring joy on a stage. It might sound very artificial and very basic, but in the productions he stages, there is always this fantastic feeling that is actually not always the case in the opera – that every character is alive, that every character conveys a portion of joy. This is especially the case with big chorus scenes. So that was something very strong that I learned with him.

And the second thing is to put music before words. This is also something not every director has the same hypothesis about. But there’s something very strong in the sense that in the work I do today, the obsession is to stage the crotchet or the note or the high c or the tension in the orchestra piece before the words. And that’s something that creates, I think, a potentially beautiful, very musical-looking production. I get along very much with conductors because they always say “you are working very musically,” and that’s something I probably learned with Laurent Pelly.

OW: In terms of the productions, the operas that you’ve had an opportunity to stage, which are your favorites and which have been the most challenging for you?

JC: It’s a difficult question. I always had the most satisfaction with challenging works I did, and they were not always opera. Sometimes I did crossover projects, like I premiered in January, this piece called “Hojotoho! Heiaha!”, which is kind of a mock-up of Wagnerism. And it was an evening that I was very proud of, but it was very challenging because there was nothing. We started with nothing. When you do an opera, you start with a piece. You start with a repertoire. You start with singers that know the part. For this, you start rehearsal day one, and you start by improvising with your performers. So that’s something I was very satisfied about.

With my “Die tote Stadt” in Seoul. It was the national premiere of the work, by the way. I did it with Lothar Koenigs and there was something difficult to explain, which has to do with the chemistry. It was a chemistry of a team, a chemistry of a fantastic company, a chemistry with performers, a chemistry with a dancer that was interpreting the Marie, the dead wife. I think theatre is beautiful because you never completely control the parameters of success. Sometimes you think that you are all ready for success and you don’t get it, and sometimes you think “that’s not gonna work, it’s too challenging. I don’t have everything I want to get a success.” And yet it becomes one. That’s the magic that is very precious for me.

OW: What are the challenges of managing a company, while also maintaining your creativity as a director in other productions. How do you find balance between the administrative side and the creative aspects?

JC: It feels very natural to me. I don’t need to organize myself to be in a rehearsal between 10 and one, and then to have a general manager meeting at one. But many parameters need to be gathered to maintain that and the most important is a fantastic team. I do have this in Magdeburg. We are four branches, four genres – opera, drama theater, ballet and an orchestra. So it’s a very big institution. I have very good leaders, artistic leaders into all the different domains. And for me, the fact to also direct in parallel gives me some advantages that a pure administrator will not get.

For instance, I feel very close to the workshop departments. Not later than this afternoon, I ran with my bike to the workshops and we talked with the costume department about a specific color we want to choose for a specific costume. So this gives me the opportunity to talk very naturally to many people that you don’t get if you are more like a classical administrator king. It feels the same with the chorus and other artistic forces. To sometimes be able to stage my chorus and have a fantastic course in Magdeburg gives me unique access to those people.

For me, it’s a chance to also invite other directors because there are many things I don’t want to do. For instance, I will never be, I don’t think I will ever one day be the techie director that involves video, that involves artificial intelligence, or involves technology. But I have the love and the pleasure to invite directors that do that.

We just did the “Fidelio” by Ilaria Lanzino, and she’s a director that thinks about “Fidelio” and how to transform it from its political aspect. So actually, to manage those two things at the same time is a big chance. It’s a big opportunity for me, but is also big responsibility and a big chance in the way I can talk to the other artists I’m inviting. I’m really happy with this. It’s a crazy life, but it’s a life that feels right to me.

OW: This season in terms of the operas on offer, there’s a mix of classical and contemporary works. How do you choose which contemporary operas to showcase?

JC: Obviously, that’s a big question around the opera world. Contemporary opera and the importance of continuing to evolve the art form. Obviously, that’s a big endeavor. And you obviously can assume that every single one of them is going to be a masterpiece. But that’s unfair, of course.

In terms of selecting works, it’s a mix of dreams and opportunities. You love the pieces, you feel connected to the pieces, you think the audience needs to see or to see again. That’s the part of the dream. But of course, as a theater general manager, your dreams are contained into a big field of constraints. These constraints are first Germany specific. With our ensemble, we are working with a 14-person ensemble. Of course, they are not covering all the parts.

For instance, when we do “Carmen,” the lead singer, the title role will be a guest. But you have to make things that fit your ensemble. When you do “Le Nozze di Figaro”, this is a perfect piece where your ensemble, where your people can debut beautiful roles. So there’s the ensemble management.

Then there are specifics to what I would call the “East German taste.” This is good for me because it’s not the same as in Switzerland. It’s not the same as in France. Some things that you would consider as no brainers in France, like, for instance, “L’Elisir d’amore” by Donizetti, are not so popular in East Germany because many people in East Germany sometimes consider bel canto as not the most refined way of doing opera. So you also want to please those tastes.

And for me, I have a big focus, of course, on the Slavic repertoire. This is something I can do in a German house, probably more than in any other place around the world. So we have this focus on Janácek with even some Rimsky-Korsakov. You also want to work with pieces where your orchestra feels at home, where your chorus feels at home. That’s the thing.

And then you also respond to some opportunities linked with co-productions. So it’s a big mix of many influences that leads to a season.