Stage director
Born: July 17, 1948;
Died: November 28, 2015
LUC Bondy, who has died aged 67, was one of the world’s ace opera directors and a major contributor to the Edinburgh Festival during Sir Brian McMaster’s period at the helm.
Though his activities were hampered by cancer for many years (he directed one production at the Paris Opera from the confines of a hospital bed placed at the side of the stage) he managed to establish himself as one of the most illuminating operatic practitioners of the day, several of whose finest achievements were chosen by Sir Brian for performance in Edinburgh.
It was there, in 1999, that Scottish Opera staged his outstanding version of Verdi’s Macbeth, a difficult work to bring off, but handled by him with maximum flair. With Richard Armstrong, the company’s musical director at the time, in the pit of the Festival Theatre, it was a production as good as they come, with a dominant Lady Macbeth from Kathleen Broderick, an affecting Banquo and minor roles - castle staff, troops, murderers - scrupulously portrayed.
Though cripplingly expensive to stage (Scottish Opera took years to recover from it) it was also seen in Vienna and Bordeaux and was a milestone in the company’s history. Around the same time, a Verdi year specially planned by McMaster had likewise involved Bondy and had proved no less historic, with Bondy’s Covent Garden production of Don Carlos at the Festival Theatre.
Though critical of certain aspects of Verdi’s monumental score - in interview he dismissed the spectacular auto da fe scene as junk - he nevertheless gave every moment of the vast masterpiece its place in the drama. All five acts were sung by a sterling cast, complete with a stately white horse (said to be authentically French) for the opening Fontainebleau scene.
His treatment of Britten’s Turn of the Screw, imported from Aix-en-Provence and conducted by young Daniel Harding, proved more controversial in its Hammer House of Horrors representation of the ghosts, with a Peter Quint who lurched around like Frankenstein’s monster. Again, however, it stuck in the memory.
Yet opera was not Bondy’s only contribution to the Edinburgh Festival. He also staged Peter Handke’s voiceless drama, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, in which a cast of 33 played 400 roles. This, too, was a controversial tour de force and a sensational sample of his style.
Born in Zurich, and once described as “Swiss with a French twist,” he was the grandson of a Prague-based impresario, and son of the editor of a French literary journal and of a dancing mother repressed by the Nazis. He began his career as a 12-year-old actor, going on to study drama and mime with Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
By 1985 he was staging Shakespeare (inevitably Macbeth) in Germany and coming to opera - what better than with Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte? - in Brussels, vowing however that he did not want to do opera all his life.
All the same, he joined his wife Marie-Louise Bischofberger in writing the libretto of Philippe Boesmans’s opera based on Strindberg’s Miss Julie.
After becoming artistic director of the Vienna Festival, he was invited in 2012 to make the Odeon Theatre of Europe in Paris his centre of operations. There he staged Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, but made a famous fiasco out of his erotic version of Puccini’s Tosca at the New York Metropolitan, replacing the sumptuously ornate and much-loved old Zeffirelli production with something more challenging.
On the first night he was resoundingly booed by almost the entire audience. His response when he appeared on stage to take his bow was a characteristically terse declaration that he was scandalised that the audience had been scandalised.
Very much a passionate modernist as well as a fascinating classicist, Bondy staged his final opera production, Charlotte Salomon by the French composer Marc-Andre Dalbavie, at the Salzburg Festival last year. The story was that of a young German-Jewish artist who died in Auschwitz. Bondy’s luminous production was described as "clairvoyant” but the work itself was deemed problematic - little more, as one critic acidly put it, than “the musicking of a teenage diary with the Holocaust as a makeweight”.
Yet the performance marked the start of what was planned as a series of modern operas by such composers as Kurtag and Thomas Ades, which might yet help to revolutionise a festival whose performances of Der Rosenkavalier today cost up to about £400 a seat. Luc Bondy, had he lived, might have become a bold contributor to this development.
He is survived by his wife and twin son and daughter, Emmanuel and Eloise, who are students.
CONRAD WILSON
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