A SIMPLE TRAGEDY

Interview with Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Wéber

Let’s begin with the beginning - how did everything start?

KM Journey of hope was Aviel Cahn’s idea. He wanted to target thesubject of migration and to do this he wanted to use the Swiss award-winning movie by Xavier Koller. He came to me because he knew I had already worked a lot on the subject of migration theme. Why he asked a filmmaker to adapt a film to the opera stage, that could be more the question. It could be pretty contradictory. I have to confess that I was quiteskeptical about the idea but then after watching the movie, it touched me and I changed my mind. It is quite refreshing that the “refugeesubject” is not affected by politics like it now is. In the movie, the story happens really on a human level and not as a mass phenomenon. That can be a veryinteresting perspective for today: how can you tell a refugeestory today? Then I asked Kata, the librettist, if she could imagine adapting a film into an opera, two genres that are so far from each other? On one hand, an almost documentary movie and on the other, a totally stylized world with “tableaux” and people singing. (laughs)

KW The moviereminded me of a Greek tragedy: the story would be one of a father’shubris. But is it really? Is Haydar battling against fate? Or is he obeying it? The material reminded me a lot of thestories of Greek tragedies like Medea, Elektra or even Prometheus. I thought I might reduce the whole story to the right characters. I had experience in writing plays andmovies, so the question was, how could I write a libretto, what

does this specific genre need and what are the rules. I tried then to condense the structure, to put the bigger meaning in a smaller structure. With Kornél we always try to get to the simpler way of telling a story, without losing its poetics. We worked together on thebig turning points, reducing their number and making them bigger. Mostly in what we do, we believe in storytelling. That’s for sure themost important thing for us.

KM You know, this opera is a new item, a new work of art. We don’t goagainst the movie but again what we do is still something different. The good thing is that, even if it is not too long ago that the movie won in Hollywood (just 30 years) we are completely free to move on, since not that many people remember the movie (well). That’s actually weird! In Hungary, everybody, even the young generation, remembers Mephisto, our last Oscar.

How was it to work with the composer Christian Jost?

KM I was fascinated by his symphonic music. When we met, we talked a lot about a mixed form, which could of course use the narrative of the sung text but also the physicality of the music. So that the piece would prepare your heart for the intellectual message and not the opposite, where you would have to first understand something to have the possibility to feel anything. For me, I feel a complete freedom in opera, it’s great! Your role as a director is not so important as in movies or even in theater. In opera, at the end, what stays is the music. It cannot be anything else than opera, than music. The director is not the centre of the work. In the end, what is, is a Christian Jost Opera. I am just an interface. Of course, the skeleton, the structure, the archaic side, the road movie aspect, the documentary

38 approach come from our side, which is I suppose because we think in a dramaturgical way but Christiuan Jost composed to this dramatic structure.

In Greek tragedy, everything is said at the beginning, the drama of hubris is clear from the first scene.

KW Yes, like in Greek tragedy, we used the first act to establish what was the major conflict the audience should understand, which happens here between the wife and the husband: should we leave or should we go, is it a better future to go and leave everything behind? And then the real tragedy is to choose the kid, who embodies the figure of fate. He is both fate and fortune. A human but also a symbolic figure. The opening scene in the movie shows this quite well and it’s a parable, a premonition of what will/could happen after. The second act is how you see them going through all kinds of trials until fate pushes them in the third act into the mountains, another metaphor of fate. In Greek tragedy, there is always fate but there is also always hope, the hope to find a better way, to fight against the unavoidable and unescapable. In this way this story is also such a contemporary story even if nowadays everything happens without the gods, and yet for me the kid himself represents this divine character.

KM We thought also about the old Greek chorus. In this opera, the music is like a chorus, commenting on the action of the protagonists, sometimes going against or with them, not always telling what you would expect, but without words.

You have a lot of distance with reality even if on stage you use almost only real elements.

KM As I am always saying, what we have on stage is like an installation. But an installation in a narrative framework, a simple frame made by a complex

machine without you noticing any complexity. And for me the opera stage is a place of stylization, an ideal place to make a new piece of reality for a contemporary time. As a form of total work of art, it brings everything together to serve the same aim. That’s the best place today to explore the multiple layers with which we are all overwhelmed. Opera gives you the possibility to use all these layers together but still have something to tell! Not like in cinema where you are more like a piano player, you may have a great instrument but it has limits and borders within its nature. Here, in the end you have simultaneity and depth, it is expandedcinema. You can create time, dreams, prospective, it is still a very innovative genre - and audiences are starting to feel it. I already did afew music productions and I think there are still a lot of new territories to discover.

What would you want people to feel (and think?) after the opera?

KW We tried as much as possible to personalize the story: we had already worked a lot with refugees even before the crisis and suddenly then there was a twist on the subject.

When you meet a refugee personally, even coming from a left-wing liberal family, it is a turning experience. There is deepempathy. Sure, we all have our political opinions but that doesn’t tell you what to do, it is actually just the way you vote. Now people are discovering how people create their opinions, how they think,and we are finding out that actually you never change your mind, you are almost born with it, or at least you grow up with it. So perhaps it is time not to believe in something or try to change people minds, but just to find other answers. All stories are different, they are just like people’s bodies, all the same, all different: here you have one story, not the story of a crowd. You identify with Haydar and Meryem, they are not strangers anymore. Their story could be yours too. And their decisions as well.