Svetlana Dimitrova talks to director Vera Nemirova

The Opera and Ballet Festival in Stara Zagora opened on 22 November 2019 with the premiere of The African Woman, the latest work by Giacomo Meyerbeer. The performance is a co-production of the Stara Zagora Opera with Deutsche Oper Berlin, staged by Vera Nemirova, one of the brightest names in contemporary opera direction in Europe. The performance will be performed in Sofia in March.

Let's start the conversation with Giacomo Meyerbeer's The African Woman. You staged it in 2015 at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. How did you come to this opera?

Rather, it came to me. I was very happy because it's a very rare title. It's not often in the repertoire of opera houses. It was suggested to me by Deutsche Oper and they said it would not be called The African Girl, but Vasco da Gama, because there is a new edition from the ed. "Ricordi, which fully meets Meyerbeer's requirements, and he wanted it to be called that. And better, because we all know that Vasco found his way to India, not Africa, and Princess Celica is Indian. The piece says that he bought Celica and Nellyusco in a market in Africa, but then she betrays his route to India - between Madagascar and Africa, Vasco da Gama's famous route.

How did this play come about? Did you work with the artist and set designer or did you create the concept yourself first?

It's called a "grand opera", a very special genre that always involves lavish sets and ballet. The productions have lasted 4-5 hours, but the audience has been able to come in and out. There were big intermissions, lavish dinners and guided tours. Since there was no cinema or television, people went to the opera and it was an event and entertainment. To recreate a world in which there are five different places - the Portuguese parliament, then the Portuguese prison where Vasco da Gama is imprisoned, and the third act takes us out to sea on a ship in which the ambitious Don Pedro wants to get to India first by stealing Vasco da Gama's maps. Acts four and five are set in India. It's hard to recreate them literally, and that's not the point of theatre. We're always looking for a generalization, an abstraction that says much more. For example, India is our longing for the distant, beyond our homeland, far away from us. We think that there we will find our luck and the happiness we seek, our fulfillment. Or the prison they put Vasco in is actually a psychological prison, where just about everyone is in some way.

You also make very topical references to religion, refugees. You deliberately sought them out.

This work has strong anticlerical tendencies, which concern not faith itself but religious fanaticism, which the author Meyerbeer has taken a strong stand against. His other works, The Prophet or The Huguenots, also develop similar themes. The attitude towards the alien is the same - hostile. In our case, in Stara Zagora, it is very interesting that both are performed by the same actor - Ivaylo Djurov, who does this task beautifully - a sinister inquisitor and ruthless priest.

But besides that, the slaves Vasko presents to the council are strikingly reminiscent of today's migrants we see in every European country, perhaps most of all in Germany.

I staged this show for Deutsche Oper in Berlin in 2015, the year of the first huge wave of refugees from the war in Syria, where not a stone was left on a stone. To this day, we still hear on the news about their boats looking for a harbour, but they are not accepted for months and the refugees find no open doors anywhere. Often, however, they find their grave in the Mediterranean. With one boat in the show, we have set up a memorial for all those who died far from their homeland. Selika is one of them. I decided that because she is also a shipwrecked woman, her boat sinks, she ends up in Africa, she is resold there as a slave, and she is actually a queen. So behind every one of these people that we're talking about with just numbers and statistics, there's a destiny, there's an interesting personality. And Vasco da Gama brought Celica to Europe to show that there were undiscovered lands where she came from, and that there was something to take from them. That's actually the conquering trend in our culture. With Da Gama began the colonisation of India - and the cut between East and West, between Western Europe and the rest of the world, which we are actually exploiting. At the expense of the suffering of the one, the other triumphs. A Vasco da Gama enters eternity. He discovers India, he is delighted, he likes the culture, the wonderful climate, but we all know that a little later he returns to India with twenty-one warships armed to the teeth and the bloodshed begins. This is all very topical.

You are about to do Beethoven's Fidelio, another opera in which love is the leading theme.

And in The African, love is leading, because it's the reason that Celica betrays Vasco da Gama's way to his homeland. To save him and for him to achieve his goal, she sacrifices herself. Another woman sacrifices herself for him - his Portuguese lover Ines, who, to save him, marries Don Pedro. Two women sacrifice themselves so that one man can enter eternity! A very scary subject. I think in my play the men are the weak and the women are the strong.

Fidelio, on the other hand, is about Leonora's marital love for Florestan. She, dressed in men's clothes, becomes part of the team in the dungeon, even a girl, Marcellina, falls in love with her. Behold, a weak woman all alone frees a political prisoner. I did "Fidelio" at the Mozart Theatre in Prague, which is in the old city center, where Mozart first did "The Mercy of Titus" and "Don Giovanni." He even conducted from the dulcimer himself. There is a golden plaque with his name on it. That was in 2018, in September. They chose this production for the opening of the newly renovated state opera house in Prague. The premiere is on January 9, 2020.

I'll take you back to my childhood years. You are connected with opera because of your parents. Do you remember the first opera you watched, or at least the feeling you experienced?

When I was maybe three years old, I would go out in the yard to play with the other kids and I couldn't understand why their mothers weren't singing Tosca. I thought everyone's mother sang Tosca or their father worked at the opera. For me, it was normal to be at the opera - our second home. My parents changed cities a lot. First in Plovdiv - I have a picture of my first birthday, then in Pleven and other cities, and after 1982 we settled in East Germany, where my mother took a contract as a staff dramatic soprano at the theatre in Rostock. A different country, but the world behind the scenes was the same - attractive, interesting, a great playground for me as a child. The actors, of course, are the best and most interesting friends. That's the environment I grew up in. I've never missed my family because my family has always been the collective.

Have you tried to turn to singing?

Every opera kid, when they get to be 12 or 13, they start testing them for what they're good at - singing, drawing, dancing. And because I was a little chubby, it became clear that I wasn't going to be a ballerina, even though I had dreamed of going out in a pink tutu and dancing Swan Lake. My mother had fellow vocal teachers who pulled me in for a few vocalizations. I sang beautifully. I was in The Cunning Little Vixen. I loved to draw. But one day something very interesting happened in my life. My mother got the role of Turandot at the theater in Rostock. There came a director from the Komische Oper, Berlin. He was incredible - with very unconventional visions of the image. It all started with her coming home after an introduction to the piece and saying, "Verche, I'm not going to be a Chinese princess, I'm not going to look like a Christmas tree, I'm going to be dressed in a military overcoat. Besides, the director said to shave my head." And I started crying, "Mommy, you're going to be very ugly." So I started to follow the rehearsals and what this director really wanted to say - that there were two souls living in Turandot - one of a dictator and the other of a very gentle female soul. And I was so impressed by this man, by his rehearsals, that I started keeping a director's diary and writing down what he did every day. I sat behind his back and gave him ideas. For example: why does everybody praise the Persian prince for being very brave, here he is walking towards death, but he walks like a ballet dancer and he doesn't look brave at all, but rather grotesque, can't he change his gait? He turned and said to my mother, "The child has a trained eye for the theatre." I was eleven years old. And then I decided what I was going to do. There's another reason. My father is the opera director Evgeni Nemirov. I lost him too early - one week after my ninth birthday. I missed him. He was a wonderful father and a very interesting man. But I didn't know him as a director, and somehow this desire to be close to him, to understand him better, to have him be part of my life, made me enter his profession. I had the chance to get into one of the best schools, the Hans Eisler Music School in Berlin, founded in 1950, where opera directors are trained. The first teachers were Bertolt Brecht and Walter Felsenstein, then Ruth Berghaus, who was my teacher. She and the great German director Peter Konwitschny opened my eyes to how to read a work at all. It was a great chance that I started too young - at eighteen, and at twenty-three I already had a diploma as an opera director. Twenty-five years have passed since then and I have had over sixty productions.

What was the first opera you staged on your own?

My thesis work, Richard Strauss's The Shadow of the Donkey, a masterpiece, a very interesting work because it was only in sketches. It was written in 1945, shortly before the composer's death. It's a grotesque, a political satire that he wrote for his grandson Christian, who was in an elite high school where operas were made for children. But it's much more than an opera for children because Strauss was describing his disillusionment with politics, the trauma of war.

Do you have a permanent team that you work with?

I even have three. The one I work with most often is my set designer, Jens Kilian. He is connected to Bulgaria through the figure of Dimitar Gotchev, with whom he worked in the theatre in Germany. And Dimitar Gotchev was the first to talk to me about Jens and that I should work with him. I'm working with the artist Marie-Thérèse Jossen and with Therese Reiber, who is the assistant director.

You are the daughter of a singer and I see that when you work with singers you have a wonderful attitude towards them.

Yes, when one manages to convince singers that what they are doing is interesting and important, that it has something to do with their image, that it can enhance their means of expression, then the most impossible things seem possible.

Vera Nemirova staged Giacomo Puccini's The Girl from the Golden West at the Sofia Opera in 2008, Gaetano Donizetti's Elixir of Love in 2012, and in 2019, The Cat, to her own libretto and music by Massimiliano Matesic (the work was commissioned by the Hamburg Opera and has also been performed in Baden-Baden). Vera Nemirova is the granddaughter of the writer Dobri Nemirova, her father is the opera director Evgeni Nemirova, one of the founders of the Ruse Opera. In 2015, she staged Dmitri Shostakovich's Katerina Izmailova in Rousse on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first production of the work in Bulgaria, performed by her father in the presence of Shostakovich himself. Her artistic biography includes impressive productions for the Wiener Staatsoper - Tchaikovsky's La Dame Picca and Verdi's Macbeth. In Frankfurt, her Wagner tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelungs was applauded, and in Erfurt, The Nuremberg Master Singers. At the Salzburg Festival she was invited for Berg's Lulu and Wagner's Die Walküre. Her Verdi's Macbeth, Gounod's Faust and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde are performed in Bonn, and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in Riga. In 2020, she will be working in Salzburg on Verdi's Don Carlos, a production that will star Anna Netrebko, but she will also be in Bulgaria for Kalman's operetta The Countess of Maritza in Varna.