Tempus Fugit
It’s a good stage of year to be reminded of how time marches on. Those ceaseless, clammy days of summer have already been lost to shorter, cooler autumnal ones. Deciduous trees now struggle, helpless to prevent the onset of their oranging leaves. Schoolchildren prepare for their uneasy return to the classroom. And we all begin to feel another season’s change as our summer slips inevitably towards autumn.
Slaves to the rhythm of the seasons, we grow to know, and love the patterns they impose on us. All our years are stamped with an annual watermark that brings familiarity as we journey on, and grow older.
My latest project, filming Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, is wonderfully riddled with the thread veins of time. Wherever I look, I see time’s incessant patterns and hear its regular beat. Its tick-tock imposes itself everywhere.
Firstly, of course, there’s the beat of the Maestro’s baton. Music is perhaps a small-scale metaphor for our seasonal clock. As we grow to know and love a piece of music, we become locked to its miniature aural seasons, feeling the warmth of its halcyon summers and the dark days of its winters. It communicates universally, transcending the boundaries imposed by language alone.
Maybe this is one reason why opera has proved such an enduring art. Chart-topping tunes coupled with a fairy story narrative and brought to life, more often than not, with spectacular staging; it’s a powerful set of ingredients with which to conjure delight and sorrow. A hundred or more years on, people still flock to see the classic operas and certain celebrated productions of particular operas are lovingly revived, decades after they were premiered.
This is the case with this 2013/14 season’s Royal Opera House Turandot. There’s a whole set of neatly nested timeframes here. It was Puccini’s final work; despite enthusiastically working on it for up to 12 hours a day, he never completed it. After Puccini’s death in 1924, Franco Alfano finished the final act and, eventually, it premiered in 1926.
This particular production of Turandot has been performed more than 100 times around the world in its thirty-year history. Two of its original custodians still keep a firm hold on their creation, designer Sally Jacobs and choreographer Kate Flatt once again help revive the production they brought to life in 1984, with original director Andrei Serban. Their keen eyes notice any foot out of place or poorly fitting costume, they both know this version of this work so well.
After meeting Sally and Kate, I found a TV interview they did when their production at the Royal Opera House was first televised. I saw the same people, heard the same topics discussed but I was looking back over a quarter of a century. I felt time travel was possible, there’s one place it can happen: in our minds.
Now, as I watch Sally and Kate in the rehearsal room, together with revival director Andrew Sinclair, shepherding the cast and crew for another short season of this much-loved production, of this much-loved opera, I know we’re all aware that every time it is revived, it grows a little and each time it is performed, it is unique.
Tick-tock, there’s another thing time brings: the alarm-clock pressure of a deadline. The General Rehearsal is on Saturday; our camera rehearsal is five days later; and five days after that we’ll be showing a performance of Turandot live to the world. So much to do… as the saying goes.
Afterwards, that one performance, in some way, will be frozen in film, preserved on DVD and Blu Ray. Yet, time will continue to breathe new life into it. Each viewer’s response will be unique; each time it’s seen there’ll be a different reaction. It will allow lovers of this production to return more often to a work they cherish and to get to know it even better.
I’m glad I’ve been able to see how the creative team shapes their production in the rehearsal room. I’m glad I’ve heard the first person insight into its development and workings. I’m glad that in 2013, I’m able to take the time to make sure the details of a 1984 production of a 1926 Opera are reflected in the cinema version I’m directing for the Royal Opera House.
I’ve just heard the call; it’s time now for me to attend another rehearsal.