Mariame Clément Q&A
Director Mariame Clément gives us an insight into her production of Il turco in Italia
Back in 2021 she spoke to David Kettle about her love of Rossini and how she has reimagined this early opera for a 21st-century audience.
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The first opera you directed was by Rossini, and you’ve directed several more by Rossini since then. What do you enjoy about his stage works?
Yes, my first experience as an opera director was actually a double bill of Rossini’s Il signor Bruschino with Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, and my second opera was also by Rossini – Il viaggio a Reims. I love Rossini because I love directing comedy. His music is intrinsically funny – even a Rossini opera overture makes me laugh. He has a way of playing with classical codes, pushing them to an extreme for comic effect.
As I progress in my career, I’m realising that the other thing I increasingly enjoy about Rossini is his abstraction. In fact, that’s one of the things I like about opera in general. Rossini has very good plots and characters, of course, but his music is formal rather than naturalistic. However you stage it, opera is not like real life. So it offers a fundamental freedom from reality and realism, which I think is very liberating.
How would you describe your relationship with Il turco in Italia in particular?
I hadn’t seen it often before embarking on this production, which actually makes it easier for the imagination to flow. As a director, I’m always looking for what makes an opera special, or different from other works. In Il turco in Italia, you have a classic trio of husband, wife and lover (actually two lovers in this case). But what makes the opera unusual is the character of Prosdocimo, the writer, who’s supposedly drawing on what happens in the opera to write his own story. To my knowledge, that kind of set-up is quite unusual in classical opera repertoire – it makes you think more of 20th-century literature, and of a writer like Pirandello, for example.
How have you approached the character of the writer in your production?
I’ve actually focused everything around the writer, and I’ve turned things upside down. Instead of having him walking around with a notebook and writing down everything he sees to turn into a story, we have a writer sitting at his desk with a blank sheet of paper, trying to come up with a story. Everything is happening inside his head, and we’re seeing his creative process. Of course, that also makes for some funny situations when his characters try to get involved with the writing themselves. I’ve spoken to several writers, and they say that’s very much the way things happen: characters can seem to take on lives of their own and actually guide their author, even surprising them by doing something unexpected.
Above: The writer, Prosdocimo (Alessio Arduini). Festival 2021. Photographer: Bill Cooper
Il turco in Italia has a few elements that might be considered problematic for 21st-century audiences. How have you tackled them?
The first of those issues crops up in the work’s title: the Turk. I’m half Iranian, so I’m really careful about questions of culture, race and Orientalism. But at the same time, I don’t think you can just turn an opera into a political statement. In Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, for example, you can definitely try and work with the questions it raises about culture and race. But Il turco in Italia is from a generation later, and it’s already a parody of those attitudes. I don’t think it intrinsically matters that the Turk is Turkish: it’s more that Fiorilla needs to desire someone from outside her experience. There’s a similar question with the gypsies: I think we have to conclude they’re there because there’s a scene involving palm-reading, and because there had to be a reason for Zaida to be around. As with the Turks, I’m not sure they’re something we should problematise.
You mentioned Fiorilla, who raises another perhaps problematic question, this time about the opera’s representation of women. How have you addressed that in your production?
Gender questions are very interesting in Il turco in Italia. Right from her first entry, Fiorilla is a strong woman who’s very much in touch with her desires, and who’s sexually liberated – she even sings about butterflies flitting from flower to flower, implying that love becomes boring if it’s always with the same person. But at the end of the opera, she repents in a very moral way, telling her husband Geronio that she was wrong to try to elope with Selim, the Turk. I don’t have anything against making peace in a relationship, of course. My problem lies with the way that Fiorilla seems to be punished, and the fact that her reconciliation with Geronio doesn’t seem very satisfying or convincing.
I’ve tried to link the figures of Fiorilla and the writer together, because there’s always a question of who’s telling a story. In opera, there are often many layers of men talking about women: perhaps a male novelist writing a book about a woman; a playwright and librettist turning the novel into a play and then an opera libretto; a composer setting it to music; probably a male conductor conducting it and a male director directing it. It’s especially interesting with Il turco in Italia, however, because we have the writer right there – he’s writing the story as it happens, and he’s clearly taking sides with Geronio, pushing him in the direction he wants to get the story he wants. It shows an inherent flaw in the creative process, but also the very natural way in which it happens. You can’t condemn it for that very reason. But it still made me want to bring that issue out and question it.
Above: Fiorilla (Elena Tsallagova), Festival 2021. Photographer: Bill Cooper
How have you dealt with all these ideas in your staging?
It’s not easy to show the creative process! It actually gave us lots of opportunities for humour, however, as the writer invents different ideas, rejects them and returns to them, requiring lots of set and costume changes. In a way, our opening set is both the famous blank sheet of paper that faces any writer beginning a new project, and also their mental space before ideas start flowing. You could almost say we’re inside their brain. Then all I want to say is that we have quite a surprise in store for the beginning of Act II.
How does it feel to be back at Glyndebourne directing this opera?
It’s always a blessing to do comedy at Glyndebourne, and we know Glyndebourne has such a comedy-loving audience too. But more than that, let’s just say that our set and costumes require a love of detail that we knew we’d be able to achieve in Glyndebourne’s workshops. You know that every detail is going to be taken care of, with creativity and humour.
David Kettle is a music writer and critic based in Edinburgh who contributes regularly to The Scotsman and The Daily Telegraph, among other publications. He is also Programme Editor for Scottish Opera.
This interview first appeared in the 2021 edition of Glyndebourne’s Festival Programme Book.