Tabachnik - Benjamin dernière nuit - GB

Benjamin, dernière nuit

Michel Tabachnik Lyrical drama in 14 scenes, 2016 Libretto by Régis Debray In French, English and German Length: 1 hour and 30 minutes Tickets from 10 to 64 e Conducted by:

Bernhard Kontarsky

Directed by:

John Fulljames

Sets:

Michael Levine

Costumes :

Christina Cunningham

Lighting:

James Farncombe Choreography: Maxine Braham Video : Will Duke Sound : Carolyn Downing Choral director : Philip White

Walter Benjamin (singer) : Jean-Noël Briend

Walter Benjamin (actor) : Sava Lolov

Asja Lacis :

Michaela Kus ˇteková

Hanna Arendt :

Michaela Selinger

Arthur Koestler : Charles Rice

Gershom Sholem Scott Wilde

Bertolt Brecht : Jeff Martin

André Gide :

Gilles Ragon

Theodor Adorno :

Karoly Szemeredy

The cabaret singer: April Hailer

Mme Henny Gurland :

Elsa Rigmor Thiemann

Joseph Gurland :

Baptiste Mansot*

The Boss:

Emmanuel Amado

The Doctor:

Bruno Froment

M I C H E L TA B A C H N I K LIBRETTO BY R É G I S D E B R AY

Archivist player:

François Leviste

Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra de Lyon *Member of the Children’s Choir of the Opéra de Lyon March 2016

Tuesday 15th 8pm Friday 18th 8pm Sunday 20th 4pm Tuesday 22nd 8pm Thursday 24th 8pm Saturday 26th 8pm

World premiere,

commissioned by the Opéra de Lyon Under the aegis of the Biennale Musiques en scène 2016

Encounters about the show:

L’Ecole du spectateur : Tuesday 15th March 6:30 PM

INTERVIEW WITH R É G I S D E B R AY, L I B R E T T I S T Benjamin, dernière nuit takes place at the moment when Walter Benjamin is about to flee from Europe, in the hope of reaching the USA by way of Spain. He then commits suicide…

What you are depicting in this story of an exile who arrived in France in 1933 is also a tale of political exile and anti-Semitism. How did you appropriate this subject?

It actually appropriated me, when I visited the sites, looked at period photos, and read the testimonies of the actors in this human, but also historic tragedy.

But let’s not get carried away about the historical aspect, and start by looking at the facts. And first of all the moment, which was the darkest one in dark times: September 1940. After the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the collapse of France. Hitler was the master of Europe, with Stalin his ally, blocking the horizon, where to go? When you were an antifascist German Jew, finding an exit became a question of life and death.

And the place, Portbou, a Catalan village beside the sea, with a massive shunting yard looming above it. I felt my way into writing the play after spending a few days exploring this little border town, looking for traces of Benjamin’s stay, when he was on the run: the hotel, the garrison, the cemetery. The bells of the nearby church chiming out the hours, the obsessive thudding from the tracks, all of this already formed a rhythmic backdrop in my mind. The idea then occurred to me to adopt an expressionist approach, as in a cabaret, half-spoken, half-sung, with songs, and a barrel organ and an accordion to one side of the stage. Like with the young Brecht and Kurt Weil. A rhythmic writing, with assonances and rhymes. And so, when my friend Michel Tabachnik suggested turning this stage text into an opera libretto, I may have felt daunted by the scale that the project was now taking on, but certainly not out of place. It seemed to me that his orchestral music would round off the distancing and elevation of an anecdote into a myth. Finally, when Serge Dorny agreed to programme it, my fears were replaced by intense curiosity.

Is it possible to compare the destiny of Walter Benjamin with that of Stefan Zweig, who managed to emigrate but, once he had got to Brazil, committed suicide like his younger colleague?

Yes, but Zweig had considerable standing, whereas Benjamin was still marginal and had never managed to mark out a place for himself in Paris, Berlin, or in Moscow, and the intelligentsia of the time never opened their arms to him. He had every reason to despair. The worst thing of all is that he could easily have crossed the border a day later, just like his fellows, Lisa Fittko and her husband Hans, who had walked over the Pyrenees with him, but were in better physical and mental condition. He, on the other hand, felt oppressed by twenty years of failure and rejection.

So I can understand his reaction. Objectively, with hindsight, I feel that he shouldn’t have done what he did, but then maybe I’d have done the same thing, there comes a time when you’ve just had enough…

Do you have the feeling that you were in a similar situation, when you were detained in Bolivia? Is there a little of yourself in this libretto?

Let’s not exaggerate. I have been infinitely more fortunate than he was, but it is still true that you always put a little of yourself in the portrait of a great forebear.

Your own experience may well have enriched your text…

Despite myself, perhaps. My fate was an uncertain one in Bolivia, and being an outsider or an undesirable is never pleasant. But I had an embassy, and a distant homeland to protect me. Walter Benjamin didn’t have such things anymore. He came from everywhere and nowhere, a perfect candidate for a stateless Nansen passport. In the end, Benjamin’s destiny is the tragedy of a multiple man, uncertain about himself and about others, divided inside, not managing to be completely German, or Jewish, or French. He was all three at once, and constantly hesitated between them. He turned this incompletion into a style and a path towards discovery.

Hence his modernity. We too have lost the thread, and are in pieces. “This is the age of double men,” said Aragon, as quoted by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot le Fou. Double, or triple or quadruple people. So this discontinuous, intentionally chaotic drama is a eulogy to fragmentation, which has become our condition.

And so Benjamin, dernière nuit started out as a play?

Yes, and it’s not my first. I’ve written several, which are not at all discursive or sermonising, as might be feared from someone who’s supposed to be a philosopher, which is a sorry reputation to have and negative in this context. I began with a dark, cabaret-like play, which was rather farcical, on a taboo subject: the taking of hostages and their political exploitation.

It was called Secret défonce ou Tangos pour les temps futurs. Then came Julien le fidèle, about the Emperor Julian the Apostate, a baroque monologue about, or rather against God, as seen by a pagan. Jean-François Balmer directed public readings of it then staged it.

And then L’Anniversaire. These plays are a little too “textual” for today’s formal, visual theatre. A writer imposes his presence on a play, but not on an opera.

In that case, the author is the composer. The text’s transfiguration leads to dispossession, that’s the way it goes with metamorphoses, and I readily accept the fact. We remember Mozart, not Lorenzo da Ponte. Der Rosenkavalier is not by Hofmannsthal, but Richard Strauss. Lulu is not the work of Wedekind, but Berg.

So, Benjamin, dernière nuit is by Michel Tabachnik, and I’m delighted about that.

Did you work on your libretto first, without discussing it with the composer? Did he ask for any modifications once you had given it to him?

No. Just some fine-tuning. We didn’t really alter the framework, even though I told him that I’d be ready to do so if necessary, because the medium dominates, in this case the stage direction and the score. I am free from any authorial vanity. Which is just as well.

But if there is no literary input, then there may be no opera.

The text and the music are intertwined. And the director always needs to pay attention to the former.

But the final word always belongs to the two of them, the director and the composer.

How did your collaboration with Michel Tabachnik go?

Very well. Tabachnik was both inventive and respectful.

He suggested that I replace Horkheimer by Adorno, who is better known and was a musician. He had some very good ideas, the cabaret scene for example. He also dug up some very beautiful traditional Jewish music.

When you’re as impatient as I am, the amazing point about an opera is how long it takes, and meticulous it is. I’m generally frantic and spasmodic when it comes to my centres of interest. I had to learn to be patient.

Isn’t the story of Benjamin, dernière nuit also a little bit about Michel Tabachnik too?

It’s true that he too has been through some difficult times. And it was during this period that we became friends. It was also then that I discovered the detestable nature of calumny. But that’s the past. What remains is the conductor and composer of contemporary music who works with the greatest names, while remaining fascinated by mystery and also wonderfully vigorous.

He has done me the honour of adopting what Brecht, as a man of the stage, might have called a “dramatic parable” rather than a “didactic play”.

Interview by Bruno Serrou

INTERVIEW WITH M I C H E L TA B A C H N I K , C O M P O S E R Benjamin, dernière nuit is your first opera. Why have you waited so long before approaching this form?

I had previously written an opera-ballet, in which singers and dancers interact around an ancient fable: the Légende de Haïsh which I composed for six voices, double chorus and orchestra. That score was the fruit of a commission from Radio France for the bicentenary of the French Revolution of 1789. What is more, I have written several oratorios and pieces for voices and orchestra. But, sure enough, Benjamin, dernière nuit is my first real opera, because writing one means having enough time, the goodwill of the director of an opera house – as this is the case here in Lyon with Serge Dorny, who commissions and creates a new work every year, which is extremely rare – plus a subject, and a librettist you feel in complete symbiosis with… to sum up, a large number of conditions which had never come together before.

What finally convinced you to take part in this adventure?

The libretto is extraordinarily well balanced. It consists of a series of relatively brief, but extremely varied scenes. This allowed me, as a composer, to write a succession of strongly marked “sections”, rather like in a Mozart opera, for instance, as opposed to a Wagnerian opera, whose “tableaux” are deployed at length and uniformly, when it comes their style. The subject is moving, full of profound questions which all of us can ask ourselves every day, such as the grip of politics on people, the tragic decisions to be made so as to escape from the conditions of a life that has become unbearable, the upheavals of exile, submission or revolt when confronted by an unacceptable situation, the confrontation with racism, and so on.

Did this opera give you the chance to envisage a new approach to the genre or did you instead conform to the lyrical tradition?

I opted for a “traditional” form, a sung text accompanied by an orchestra. With no use of electronics, or digital transformations. I set out to personalise the composition in a different way. Firstly by constructing an atonal material which, rather than attempting to distance itself from tonal language, includes it within its system. Then, by trying to remain as close as possible to the libretto, while applying

to it extremely divergent types of music, quotations from past composers, popular songs, ancient religious anthems, military music, etc. The aim being to get as close as possible to the text’s sonic evocations.

How did you discover the text which Régis Debray had devoted to the philosopher and art critic Walter Benjamin?

Régis Debray read it to me. His idea was to turn it into a kind of stage musical. So I suggested making into a “real” opera instead!

How did you work with Régis Debray?

We’re friends. He writes texts that interest and speak to me, because he has the ability to look at the most subjective questions, such as religion, using a rigorous, rational analysis. I have seen the same approach with Ernest Ansermet, Pierre Boulez or Iannis Xenakis.

Emotion is there, submerging us. When it comes to transmitting it, or translating it into sounds, words, or representations, the mind needs to subject it to a shared means of transmission, such as common languages, techniques, or structures. Régis Debray has focused on this question, which also fascinates me. It is there in his work as a mediologist, which consists in seizing how the “medium” serves ideas, inspirations and feelings.

What language is the libretto in?

It has been written in the various languages spoken by the characters. German for Hanna Arendt, English for Theodor W. Adorno, who was in New York at the time of the action, French for André Gide, etc.

What convinced you about the musical dimension of the moving figure of Walter Benjamin and his desperate flight that finished so dramatically one night in Catalonia, at a stone’s throw from a new exile?

What appealed to me about the series of scenes, as imagined by Régis, is the journey through life, that succession of events which end up forming a particular, unique existence, and which, so they say, flash before our eyes just before death.

This subject is overwhelming and tragic. Did it lead you to compose a dark, serious score, or instead to bring in light and spirituality?

The score attempts to stick to the text. And, it is true that the text is tragic. So much so that, with the exception of a few cabaret songs and popular tunes, the music effectively reflects its dramatic atmosphere.

Did you experience any difficulties making a philosopher sing, even though the only solution he sees is suicide?

In the narrative present of the opera, Benjamin arrives in a hotel in Portbou, and he is played by an actor. So he speaks. We are here in real time and space. But when he remembers his life, Benjamin, who is thus younger, is then interpreted by a singer.

The opera, which is his past life, is thus “thought”.

It has been lived through, but it is not the time of the action. Reality is transformed, as in a dream.

Vocal expression fits with such shifts, and with an unreal vision of the world. In this way, opera is an artifice evoking a reality transposed by imagination.

What are the particularities about your score?

It juxtaposes various styles: a “classic” singer and a variety singer, drinking songs and liturgical melodies, orchestral instruments and a musichall band. But this is all wrapped up in a radically contemporary style, coming from the languages I have learnt from the masters of the 20th century (Debussy, Stravinsky, Boulez, Xenakis…).

Is there a thematic material?

I don’t think so. There are no leitmotivs evoking characters or feelings, as with Wagner. And no classic borrowings (sonata forms, a passacaglia, or variations…) or harmonic (dodecaphonic) construction as with Berg. No intention to suppress certain intervals, certain overly obvious rhythms, or past allusions, as with Boulez and his clean slate. Each scene has been built up using a musical material with its own identity, and which aims at making it distinct, and fitting with its location (a street, an inn, a synagogue…), or a moment in life, with each scene being a portion of a singular existence.

How has this opera been divided (into acts, or scenes)? How are they arranged?

The scenes are the various encounters which Benjamin experienced during his life. When thinking about such things, we are outside time. So the scenes of life can be interwoven, shifting suddenly from one to another, one time to another, or one place to another…

The connections are different on each occasion…

What is the structure of this piece?

The music sticks to the text…

Did you work beforehand with the stage director John Fulljames?

John Fulljames and I saw each other a lot. We started out by discussing a certain number of points raised by the text when it came to the music. For example, people sometimes appear in the characters’ thoughts.

How should such “virtual” singers be situated? On the stage? In the wings? Would they need monitors so that they could see the conductor? How should the choruses be positioned, given that they have considerable musical importance, while not including them constantly in the action and the dialogues?

Being a conductor yourself, how did you see your relationship during the rehearsals, and beforehand, with your colleague Bernard Kontarsky, who is conducting the premiere of Benjamin, dernière nuit?

Bernard Kontarsky is a great professional. So I had very little to do. I trust him completely. I may be of help when it comes to the overall balance, for example, in the Brecht scene, when the musical abundance becomes particularly complex. But the conductor and director take over the score. It is out of my hands. It belongs to them, and their task is to bring it to life. I have left them free to do whatever they want with it and, in return, I’m expecting to be surprised, for them to amplify it in unexpected ways and give it a new dimension.

Interview by Bruno Serrou

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN FULLJAMES, DIRECTOR “No longer to see refugees as simple toys of fate.”

Benjamin, dernière nuit has been conceived as a philosophical dialogue.

Which intellectuals appear in it?

Walter Benjamin’s circle included some of the greatest European minds of the 1930s, such as Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno or Gershom Scholem… And the opera of course reflects all these encounters. But, for the better known ones, the point was not just to give potted portraits of them on the stage. Verisimilitude or realism are not simple matters when it comes to opera. Each of these great figures also stands for a vision of the world, a big idea or utopia that existed in Benjamin’s mind. So the point for us is to think with him about these various voices, which were being raised at the very time when Europe was being taken over by Nazism, thus forcing him to flee.

And so it all forms a kind of inner journey?

Yes, we wanted to take up the challenge of a staging that was completely impregnated by Walter Benjamin’s philosophy. In other words, to create the impression of being inside his head, and to build up a dramaturgy based on the mental structures of his own philosophy.

So we tried to imagine not only what inhabited him on the night of his death, but also to reconstruct his familiar thought processes through montages, flashbacks, or the use of texts and videos. This gave us an extraordinary freedom. Nothing was irrelevant, each detail could have its point. It was up to us to find it.

Even if there is a special thrill about creating an opera, and there is a need to stay as faithful as possible to the ambitions of both the composer and the librettist, in a permanent dialogue with them. But the staging was in the end constructed from the world which was being mentally composed around him, and thus in front of us.

What towns and cultures are we going to visit?

The opera is set in Portbou, the Spanish frontier town where Benjamin died, while intending to leave France.

As he lies down to die, he remembers his most recent travels, going to see Brecht in Denmark, Koestler in Marseille or Scholem, his childhood friend, in Israel.

But he also goes back to visit his Bolshevik mistress in the USSR or his sister for a few days in Paris.

So it is a portrait which is at once intimate and philosophical?

Opera has that almost unique quality of mingling music, which is an immaterial art par excellence, with a text grounded in reality. It is thus an art which is both distinctly emotional and distinctly political. Verdi’s greatest operas draw us at once into his characters’ private lives, and the larger historical picture. Benjamin, dernière nuit is really an opera of ideas, which raises essential aesthetic questions about the way history is constructed in our minds, to connect our lives but also, sometimes, to take them away… In this way, intimacy and philosophy are mingled.

What political resonances do you see with the world of today?

Philosophy, like Benjamin’s tragic death, brings to mind the way our society treats refugees. The aim is to present a man fighting to find his place in a world which is in upheaval. In this respect, this opera is unfortunately only too topical. It is a powerful work, charged with history, but it is also a genuine provocation inviting us to think again, and no longer see refugees as simple toys of fate.

Interview by Luc Hernandez

BIOGR APHIES M I C H E L TA B A C H N I K Composer – Benjamin, dernière nuit After playing a decisive role as artistic director of the Brussels Philharmonic until June 2015, Michel Tabachnik is today its Emeritus Conductor. With this orchestra, he continues to conduct several concerts every season, in particular during international tours.

He is also a regular guest of such prestigious institutions as the SWR Stuttgart, the Konzerthaus of Berlin, the Residentie Orkest of The Hague, the Orchestra della Fenice in Venise and the Philharmonia of Saint Petersburg.

He appeared three times during the inaugural season of the new Philharmonie de Paris.

Michel Tabachnik studied piano, composition and conducting in Geneva. Just after graduating, he drew the attention of several major conductors, who gave him their full support: Pierre Boulez, Herbert von Karajan and Igor Markevitch. He started out as assistant to Markevitch at the RTVE Symphony Orchestra in Madrid then, for four years, to Pierre Boulez, mainly with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. This collaboration made him familiar with new music. Close to Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti or Messiaen, he conducted numerous world premieres, and in particular a good twenty pieces by Iannis Xenakis, who saw him as his favourite conductor.

Michel Tabachnik has been the chief conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Lorraine and the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris. Collaborations with the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, the NHK Symphony Orchestra of Tokyo, L’Orchestre de Paris and festivals such as Lucerne, Salzburg, Aix-en-Provence, among others, have enriched his career.

After 6 years as the chief conductor of the Noord Nederlands Orkest, he is today its Emeritus Conductor. Since he was appointed in September 2008 as the conductor of the Brussels Philharmonic, Michel Tabachnik’s influence on the orchestra has been spectacular. La Cité de la Musique in Paris has provided it with a residency of 3 concerts per season. They perform in Berlin, London, Vienna, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Salzburg… Their tours take them to the Far East, Germany, Great Britain, France…

In the world of opera, Michel Tabachnik has conducted the orchestras of houses in Paris, Geneva, Zurich, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Rome, Montreal, Genoa, and the Bolshoi… he has in particular been a frequent guest of the Canadian Opera in Toronto, where he conducted numerous performances of Lohengrin, Madame Butterfly, Carmen and The Rake’s Progress.

Alongside his activity as a conductor, Michel Tabachnik is also a composer and writer. Several of his pieces have been premiered recently, including Lumières Fossiles in the Netherlands, as part of the 100th anniversary of the premiere of the Rite of Spring, le Prélude à la légende at the Festival of Besançon, his Violin Concerto with the Brussels Philharmonic and Le livre de Job at the Cité de la musique de Paris.

In literary terms, after De la musique avant toute chose (2008) and L’homme sauvage (2013), Michel Tabachnik is about to publish a second novel and a book devoted to his relationship with music and life.

Michel Tabachnik devotes a lot of his time to young musicians. He has conducted several international youth orchestras. He has been the artistic director of the Orchestre des Jeunes, Quebec and, for twelve years, of the Orchestre des Jeunes de la Méditerranée, which he founded in 1984. As a respected teacher, he has given a large number of masterclasses, particularly in Hilversum, Lisbon (Gulbenkian Foundation), and the conservatoires of Paris, Brussels and Stockholm, as well as the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Sienna. He has been made professor of conducting at the University of Toronto (1984-1991) and the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen (1993-2001).

His discography (with Erato and Lyrinx) reflects the eclecticism of his repertoire, which extends from Beethoven to Honegger, or Wagner to Xenakis. His recording of Schumann’s Piano Concerto (with Catherine Collard) was praised by the international jury of Radio Suisse Romande which chose it as the best performance of this work. It is currently being enriched by recordings on the label of the Brussels Philharmonic with, above all, his Rite of Spring which was hailed by the Gramophone Awards in 2013 and his interpretation of Debussy’s La Mer, which was ranked Number 1 by the magazine Classica ahead of the two reference versions by Pierre Boulez.

B E R N H A R D K O N TA R S K Y Conductor – Benjamin, dernière nuit

JOHN FULLJAMES Director– Benjamin, dernière nuit

Born in Germany, Bernhard Kontarsky studied in Koln. As a student, he won the Mendelssohn Prize for chamber music then had his debut at the Opera of Bonn before being invited to the Staatstheater of Stuttgart by Ferdinand Leitner, who entrusted him with conducting its contemporary repertoire.

Bernhard Kontarsky was at the Opéra de Lyon in 2013 for Capriccio (Strauss), in 2011-2012 as part of the “Puccini Plus” festival with the Orchestre des Jeunes de la Méditerranée where he conducted Von heute auf morgen (Schoenberg), Sancta Susanna (Hindemith) and Eine florentinische Tragödie (Zemlinsky). Still with the Opéra de Lyon, he conducted the premiere of Les Nègres by Michael Levinas in 2004, which was later performed and recorded at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

He was on the podium during the world premieres of Bruno Mantovani’s L’Autre côté at the Opéra du Rhin and of Philippe Fénelon’s Faust at the Capitole de Toulouse, as well as for Il segreto di Susanna (Wolf-Ferrari) and Eine florentinische Tragödie (Zemlinsky) in Montpellier. In recent seasons, he has conducted Nosferatu (Pascal Dusapin), Lulu (Berg) and Die Soldaten (Zimmermann) for the Opéra de Paris, Boris Godunov (Mussorgsky) at the Capitole de Toulouse, Boris Godunov and Les Nègres in Geneva, Oedipus Rex, Symphony of Psalms (Stravinsky) and Bluebeard’s Castle (Bartok) in Toronto, Il Prigioneiro (Dallapiccola) for the Opéra de Lorraine, and Tristes Tropiques (Aperghis) for the Opéra du Rhin. After the success of Fénelon’s Faust in Toulouse, he was invited to conduct it again at the Opéra de Paris.

He has also conducted Dusapin/Ravel concerts at the Konzerthaus in Dortmund and the Philharmonia in Essen, as well as Der König Kandaules (Zemlinsky) with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, which won him international recognition. Bernhard Kontarsky has conducted a large number of operas as well as premieres at the Staatstheater in Stuttgart, the Deutsche Oper of Berlin, the Vlaamse Opera, the Royal Opera House of Stockholm, the Bayerische Staatsoper of Munich, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein of Düsseldorf, the Canadian Opera Company, the Staatsoper in Vienna, etc...

He has given stage concerts at the Wiener Musikverein, the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, the Bayerischer Rundfunk München, Verona, Palermo, etc., and recorded for the major German and Austrian labels. Among the orchestras he has conducted must be mentioned the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre National de Lille, the Mozarteum Orchestrer, and the Berliner Sinfonieorchester...

And among his recordings: Die Soldaten for the radio and television (German Record Critics’ Award), Les Nègres by Michael Levinas (the Prix du Syndicat de la Critique) and Requiem for a Young Poet (Zimmermann).

Bernhard Kontarsky taught contemporary music at the Hochschule für Musik in Frankfort for over twenty years.

John Fulljames is associate director at the Royal Opera House, London. He has directed there: La Donna del Lago (Rossini), Quartett (Francesconi), Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Weill) and Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck) in collaboration with Hofesh Shechter.

John Fulljames was artistic director of The Opera Group (now the Mahogany Opera Group) from 1997 to 2011. He has worked closely with a large number of composers and librettists so as to develop, present and produce new operas.

As artistic director of The Opera Group, he directed Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu (then again at the Scottish Opera and the Fesival de Bregenz), David Bruce’s The Firework Maker’s Daughter (then again at the Opera North, and the New Victory Theater, New York), Elena Langer’s The Lions Face, George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, Jonathan Dove’s The Enchanted Pig (then again at the Royal Opera House 2, the New Victory Theater of New York and the Young Vic; London).

John Fulljames has also directed Nabucco (Verdi) and La Clemenza di Tito (Mozart) in Nancy, La Clemenza di Tito (Mozart), From the House of the Dead (Janacek) and Roméo et Juliette (Gounod) at Opera North, The Excursions of Mr Brouček (Janacek) at Opera North and Scottish Opera, Where the Wild Things Are (Oliver Knussen) and Julietta (Martinu) at the Théâtre de Brême, Von Heute auf morgen (Schoenberg) and Sancta Susanna (Hindemith) at the Opéra de Lyon, Gianni Schicchi (Puccini) and Eine florentinische Tragödie (Zemlinsky) at the Greek National Opera, Cosi fan tutte (Mozart) at the Garsington Opera, American Lulu and Le Portrait (Weinberg) at the Festival de Bregenz.

John Fulljames has worked on shows using very large casts, in particular Tobias and the Angel (Jonathan Dove) at the Young Vic and The Knight’s Crew (Julian Philips).

His production of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene (The Opera Group and the Young Vic) won the Evening Standard Award for the best musical and was performed at the Théâtre du Châtelet and the Liceu, Barcelona.