Sir  Peter  Ustinov
 
A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

of a native of the Amazon listening to Mozart for the first time, with an expression of almost unbearable sweetness on his face.  It was so eloquent that obviously Mozart had been understood in the land of the piranha very, very, very quickly, and with enormous impact.  They'd never heard sounds like that before.  So I think music has to be the universal language, after the language of babies, and that of animals.

Duffie:    Is there any way to get music into the ears and minds of babies and animals?

Ustinov:    Oh, yes.  I think babies have the same effect, and people who are reduced to babyhood.  I remember when my mother was dying, she was in a coma.  I put some Mozart on the little portable radio by her bed and she suddenly smiled and mouthed the word "Mozart."  So it penetrated where nothing else would penetrate any more.  I thought that was terribly significant.

Duffie:    You've directed operas by Mozart.  Is there a secret to getting Mozart played properly?

Ustinov:    I think it is not to treat it as a comedy and not to treat it, certainly, as a tragedy.  For some reason, Don Giovanni is treated, now, as a tragedy, with the terrible scene when he's drawn to Hell.  I don't think that it is tragic for a person to have slept with 300 women in one town.  It may be athletic, but it's certainly not a tragic occurrence.  It's called a dramma giocoso.  There is the little morality at the end, which people like Klemperer always took out in order to end on a "strong," and I think that's absolutely and utterly against the intentions of Mozart.

Duffie:    It begins in D minor and should end in D minor without into the last little G major section?

Ustinov:    That's what they think, but I think it should end with the little morality of people now not knowing where to begin again after the end of the opera.  That's a very essential point, and I did something which I was criticized by some in the press.  At the end there, when Don Ottavio appears

for the arrest of Don Giovanni.  Now there's nothing for them to do, so while the cast is singing the last bit, I had the two officers, who were dressed rather like Guardi de Civil of the period, measuring the hole down which Don Giovanni disappeared, notating it in a small book for the archives.

Duffie:    Very bureaucratic!

Ustinov:    Very bureaucratic, and I think it's absolutely justified; I think it is a very, very interesting slice of life.  Mozart was a genius and Da Ponte was a genius for just striking a ground which is both pathetic and comic at the same time.  Figaro, which I did recently in the Mozarteum in Salzburg, is exactly that kind of thing, which is terribly touching.  The Count is a very vulnerable character, after all, and at the end he's humiliated by having to apologize.  I think this is wonderfully human.  People have put a French Revolutionary context on it, and I think that's all perfectly justified, but it should never interfere with the actual human reactions of the people themselves.

Duffie:    The characters in Figaro are very human; are the characters in Giovanni as human?  Is Giovanni really a human being?

Ustinov:    Giovanni is a monstrous human being, but he's a human being.  He's like many people today who get their satisfaction where they can.  I think he's a prototype of a certain kind of "macho man" in a society which is frightfully hidebound, and frightfully [under his breath] sort of Spanish.  [Both chuckle]  It does actually happen in Seville, and Spain has always had a fascination for people who are not Spanish.  They love that kind of use of instep and heel, and banging, and the rhythm which suddenly stops violently and is tender, and then goes back into something.  It's a very, very pungent kind of folklore, and it must've had the effect, then, because everybody wrote about it, even if it doesn't sound Spanish.  The Barber of Seville doesn't really sound Spanish at all.

Duffie:    Not the way Rossini set it, no.

Ustinov:    Exactly.  But it is very Spanish the way that Beaumarchais handled it in the play!

Duffie:    Coming back to Figaro for a moment, is there anything forward-looking in the opera, knowing that there is a third Beaumarchais drama still to come?

Ustinov:    I don't really know; I haven't studied it to that extent.

Duffie:    Should there be a little more interplay between the Countess and Cherubino?

Ustinov:    I think it's wrong to anticipate what's going to happen afterwards.  It's rather like your television series in which they really have to be entities on their own.  You must be given a taste of what's to come, but it can't interfere with the matter at hand.  No, but I know what you mean!  Cherubino grows up, and his education is a very interesting feature of the first opera.  I did it in Salzburg, at the Mozarteum with the Prague Chamber Orchestra.  They were marvelous sports because when Cherubino jumps out of the window, I had him jumping into the orchestra pit and disappearing, and all the instruments near the place where he disappeared stood up and looked down.  [Both laugh]  It had an electric effect, and they did it so well.

Duffie:    As long as he doesn't crash through a double bass, it's all right!

Ustinov:    Exactly.  Exactly.  Yes.

Duffie:    When you're directing an opera of Mozart or others, do you take most of your ideas for direction from the text, or from the music to which the text has been set?

Ustinov:    I'm trained in the theater, of course, and I tend to take most from my ideas from the text because I feel safer with a text.  Sometimes you're very depressed because the standards in opera aren't quite the same as they are in the theater.  You can't get the same results; perhaps you shouldn't, but there are several different groups who are active in the opera.  There are aging singers who don't sing terribly well any more but have learned to act frightfully well.  One is very grateful for those at the early stages of rehearsal, because they give you a very clear indication of what they're going to do.  Then there are some people with wonderful voices who can't act very well.  That's much more difficult for somebody like me to cope with.  Then there are brilliant young people, many of them from countries like the United States or Canada or New Zealand or Australia, who are excellent singers and wonderful actors.  They absolutely bewilder you by their prowess, and sometimes are so modern.  One of them might suggest to you during rehearsal that she should play her part topless.  You're not yet quite as evolved as that and you haven't ever thought of it, and you're slightly at a loss as to know what to suggest.

Duffie:    [With a sly nudge]  Are you not grateful for that suggestion?

Ustinov:    Not necessarily because it may be quite wrong.  [Much laughter]

Duffie:    It wouldn't help to sell tickets?

Ustinov:    [Dismissively]  No.  And then there are, especially on the continent of Europe, elderly performers that can't sing or act, and are kept in place by some sort of pension scheme.  They are now professors at other academies, so they have acquired a kind of arrogance whereby you say to one of them, [politely] "Could you move slightly to the left?" and they respond [snaps back immediately, in bad-tempered, curt fashion, in a comically exaggerated German accent] "Why?"

Duffie:    [Chuckles]

Ustinov:    And that's awfully difficult to cope with.  He feels he's being victimized some way.  [Again in the German accent, angrily]  "Just because I've been here long time, you want me to move to the left?  No!!!  This doesn't please me."  And so it goes on.  As a director, you get fairly depressed in about two or three days when you've been doing the opera with a piano.  Suddenly the orchestra arrives, and Mozart, or whoever it is, gallops to the rescue like the U.S. cavalry.  You're home!  You realize what's important at last, and some of your finer points, which would've told if it had been a play, are lost in the melee but very often corrected by the singers' instinct once they hear the music as it should be.

Duffie:    So if you've put something in which corresponds to the music, then that music will prod them each night?

Ustinov:    Yes, absolutely.  They'll know what to do automatically because, after all, directing anything is a mutual adventure.  It's not a dictatorship; I can't bear dictators.  I can't bear them myself when I'm an actor and I'm told what to do.  I feel just like that elderly gentleman who barked at me [again in the defensive German accent] "Why?"  [Both chuckle]

Duffie:    So you have to be motivated to do something from the text?

Ustinov:    Yes!  And I believe that it should be a mutual adventure; it has to be there in the context.  Mozart is a tender bloom; I think you can do all sorts of things with him.  I saw, recently, a performance of Don Giovanni in the reconstituted Estates Theatre in Prague in which it was first performed.  There I discovered a distant ancestor of mine was the first Don Ottavio, under Mozart's baton, a man called Baglioni.  That was fascinating because they did some very outspoken things and very curious things.  Don Giovanni was eating an apple at one point, and he was really played like a psychopath.  He was a frightfully dangerous, terribly good-looking, and a terribly spidery man, with choreographic movements.  The singer was a Ukrainian, and the choreographic movements were slightly sinister the whole time, and he was enjoying himself in a terrifying way.

Duffie:    It was his only opportunity to really be this macho man that you were talking about.

Ustinov:    That's right!  He left the apple on the stage at one point, and one's eye was drawn to this apple the whole time, which was getting older and older the way apples do, and discoloring slightly.  Then right at the end, he came in.  When everybody else was singing their bit, he came back dressed in a boy in a tracksuit; completely modern.  He seemed to be looking for something, found the apple, had another bite, and walked off munching his apple into the wings because there were more women in the wings.  He'd never stopped.  [Both laugh]  It was a revolutionary concept, but it was very, very funny, and very right for the concept of a dramma giocoso.

Duffie:    He just keeps going?

Ustinov:    He keeps going.  He's now fed up with this. 

ho are now nearly all famous, already.

Duffie:    Is it was easier, then, to work with singers you can still mold a bit?

Ustinov:    Oh, yes.  Oh, certainly.

Duffie:    Were you ever conscious of trying to mold them in such a way that the next director

Duffie:    Since we are talking about several different Mozart operas, you've performed the Impresario!

Ustinov:    Ah yeah, but that was for television.  In fact, because it has not much of a libretto, I rewrote it in terms of a festival taking place a long time ago.  The village was thinking, "Everybody else has got festivals; what can we have festival of?"  So they had a festival of music in order to draw people to the village, in spite of a terrible smell of sulfur which pervaded the village from its health-giving spa.  [Both chuckle.]

Duffie:    Are there good operas being written today?

Ustinov:    I think the desire to hear opera has enormously increased, especially by virtue of the fact we all have discs and tapes and goodness knows what.  Even obscure operas are now on record in some way or other.  I think the general desire for opera, and the spread of opera houses in towns which before never had them, is very, very striking!  But whether it is absolutely possible...  I mean the way music has gone, it's drifted very, very far away.  To my mind, there's a huge gap between modern serious music and modern popular music.  The 12-tone system and all sorts of ideas have been tried, but now we're drifting back again.  You can see the parallel thing in architecture, when everybody was building these huge boxes which were very fashionable at one point.  Now we have a kind of austerity, the "back-to-Bach" architecture.  Bits of Romanticism are creeping back in; Gaudí has had his effect, and you're getting that again, but with modern serious music, I can't imagine anybody whistling Stockhausen in the bath unless they're extremely unmusical and are doing it by mistake!  There's no reflection on Stockhausen, whom I find fascinating as a composer, but it's something else now.  All the Boulez things and all those others, my ear isn't fine enough to distinguish between them anymore.  I can't say that is typical of this composer and that is typical of that one.  [See my interviews with Pierre Boulez.]

Duffie:    If you were asked to direct one of the "Days of the Week" that Stockhausen is working on currently, would you accept that or just decline it?

Ustinov:    No, I would decline it simply because I would love to go to the first night of it, but not with the amount of nerves that I would have if I've directed it.  Also, I don't really know what Stockhausen has in mind.  I was absolutely amazed when Stockhausen asked for my autograph for his children.  It suddenly humanized him to an extraordinary degree after the music which I'd heard in La Scala.  It radiated into the square outside the opera house when you'd already gone out of the theater and left Stockhausen behind, but he pursued you into the street like the Furies.  It was very interesting.  I really have made tremendous efforts to feel for it, but I can't yet do so.  I think tonality is not yet exhausted.  This viewpoint was shared by Schoenberg, who said there's still a lot to say within the tonal system.  You don't have to go into 12-tone system.  I remember seeing an opera by an English composer

he wrote an opera called Hamlet... 

Duffie:    That's Humphrey Searle!

Ustinov:    That's Humphrey Searle, exactly.  It was a very, very serial opera on Hamlet, and there came one moment when I laughed out loud, I regret to say, as much respect as I have for Humphrey Searle.  There was a moment when Ophelia suddenly appeared mad, and sang an extremely beautiful, and as far as I could ascertain, tonal aria.  At the end, Claudius got up and said, [sings in operatic tenor style, with wide, dissonant leaps between the high and low register between nearly every syllable] "She has gone out of her mind."  I'm afraid I laughed and everybody around me said, "Shh!!"  We were back to normality then.  [Hearty laughter].

Duffie:    So to be grotesque on a grotesque stage, you must be more normal!

Ustinov:    That's it!  You've got it.  I wish you'd been with me; I would've understood much quicker.  [More laughter]

Duffie:    Did this Hamlet become a little bit more melancholy, or too melancholy, because he was working in this atonality?

Ustinov:    No, I just don't see any point of setting Hamlet to music, because it was a very respectful text, as it was in that other opera of King Lear by... [again searching for the composer's name]

Duffie:    Oh, Reimann!  [See my Interview with Aribert Reimann.]

Ustinov:    ...yes, by Reimann, Aribert Reimann.  I don't see any point of setting it if you're just going to set the play to music because there are still niceties in the play which are open to a wider interpretation than they can possibly be if it's sung.  It's an extremely subtle play and I think it's a very interesting opera, but not terribly subtle in the same sense.  Now I speak as somebody that's played it twice, and recognizes by now that King Lear is mad as a hatter at the beginning, dividing his country up, and [begins to lapse into the reedy voice of the doddering old King Lear] and giving little favors to his prettiest daughter, and then suddenly turning surly.  "What do you mean??  Nothing will come of...nothing?  Yeah, give her a second chance; speak again;..." [returning to his normal speaking voice] really mad as a hatter.  Senile.  And then, through a series of absolutely ghastly events, including the moor scene in which he's suddenly, really, practically a naked man, coming face to face with reality.  Gradually, under that kind of pressure, his sanity returns, and he understands suddenly, with terrible and painful clairvoyance, all the horrible things that have happened to him.  Then, when he is rejoined to civilization as a prisoner, he is absolutely sane.  But for a man of that age, it's less trouble to pretend you're mad because you don't have to use [begins to lapse again into the voice of a weary, enfeebled King Lear] energy in trying to decide on things.  "All right, I'm mad!  [Wheezes]  Oh, leave me alone!!!  Ha ha ha!"  [In a normal voice again]  Inside he's clear as a bell when he dies; that's the real tragedy.  Now how you're going to express that in music, I'm not sure.  I don't think it can be done.  Especially, when you play King Lear, half your text is taken up by footnotes of distinguished professors.  You respect these enormously when you begin to work.  After two weeks of rehearsal you begin to doubt one or two of them, and then the doubt becomes fairly general.  When you're actually playing it, you feel you're rowing out to sea in the company of Shakespeare, and the professors are like bungalows on the seashore; they are getting lost in the mist, and eventually they disappear altogether.  Suddenly you realize something, which is that the professors unravel as much as they can without actually having played the parts, and that when you play them, something quite different becomes clear, because you're forced into contact with people that have to understand them... and not just in an intellectual way!  In our cast in Stratford in Canada, we made great jokes of these professors simply because there were lots of notes by professors, and then suddenly it said, "Kirschbaum, however, disagrees with this."  [Note: Leo Kirschbaum is an actual Shakespeare scholar, who has written about King Lear.]  [Both chuckle]  We were all looking for Kirschbaum all the time, trying to find someone else to disagree with what the professors said.  But the musician is isolated just as the professors are.  Anybody who sets this to music is not actually playing the part, but is inventing a musical background for it, and this is quite a different process.  I think for a great play like that, it's frightfully, almost impossible to set it to music and preserve the most intimate values of the work.  [Note: It is interesting to realize that Verdi wrestled with King Lear for much of his life, and left it in his drawer, unset, when he died.]

Duffie:    Have there been no great plays which have been made into operas?

Ustinov:    Well, Othello, but Othello is a sillier story, in a way.  I mean, I've never really taken Othello seriously because Othello seems to be such an idiot to fall for this rubbish of the handkerchief.

Duffie:    And of course Boito recrafted the play, so it's not a straight setting of the Shakespeare.

Ustinov:    That's true, it isn't a straight setting.  You regret it less because you feel, "Oh, God, it takes place in Venice with a Moor; that's really Italian territory so let them have a shot."  But King Lear is ancient Britain, and Hamlet is Denmark.  Carl Nielsen might have a crack.  [Laughter]

Duffie:    Have you never heard the Thomas setting of Hamlet?

Ustinov:    Yes, of course I have, yes.

Duffie:    You don't think that works?

Ustinov:    I think it works as something else!  But I think the trouble with Reimann and with Searle, is that they stuck very closely to the original text.  They didn't have the kind of brutality to wield it into an opera, which is valid in a completely different sense.

Duffie:    Then let me ask

who was conducting Beethoven's 6th Symphony, the "Pastoral," which is not one of my favorites.  He shouted at the orchestra during the rehearsal [bellows overexcitedly in German accent] "Here women in crinolines are coming with hampers!  It will be a picnic!"  [Hums melody from the third movement]  Tsahh, dum, da-dahhh, dum...  I really had completely different visions at that moment, and I really hated seeing this rehearsal with the imposition of crinolined women with hampers!

Duffie:    Now your idea has been colored so that every time you hear that music you're going to think of them, I'm afraid.

Ustinov:    Well, that happens, of course.  They used this call sign during the War, which became notorious for underground movements.  London Radio went [hums several bouncy tones, all on the same pitch, in a low, tone of voice] "Bum-bum-bum, bum."  So the whole Beethoven's 5th Symphony is now spoiled... except that it's slightly different.  It starts with a pause and it goes [hums a similar phrase, this time louder, in a higher tone of voice, and descending a minor third for the fourth note] "Tsi-ta-ta tsumm."  But they got it close enough to worry you.  Every time you hear it now you think, "Oh God, I hope the French Resistance understands what's happening!"  [Both laugh]  Even the European Hymn is the "Ode to Joy" of the 9th Symphony.

Duffie:    Some of these things have been overworked.  I've been lobbying for a long time to take many of the warhorses completely out of the repertoire for ten years, and then put them back gradually so that we come to them fresh!

Ustinov:    Yes, but I think people would still be outraged 'cause they're not there.  I have no great respect for national anthems; I think they're all terrible.  They're usually very belligerent, and the words are absolutely atrocious.  I did a whole television program in Europe about national anthems. 

Duffie:    And your disdain for them?

Ustinov:    Oh, my disdain for them, absolutely.  The British anthem says about the Queen, "Send her victorious / Happy and glorious."  Well, who in this day and age with nuclear weapons can be victorious and glorious at the same time?  Or happy is absolutely out of the question!  It's such nonsense.  The Mexicans are working on the words of their national anthem, to get away from the "grito de la guerra."  The Germans too; it's no longer "Deutschland über alles"; it's now something quite different, "Through Bavaria's streams and hills," or something of that nature.  [Chuckles]   The words of national anthems are beyond belief ridiculous.

Duffie:    You should find something that would work... or write some new national anthems yourself!

Ustinov:    No, but Western Samoa's was written, like many recent national anthems, by a clergyman who was the greatest authority they could find.  I don't know the words of it, but the end of every verse is, "Well done, Western Samoa / Well done, well done."

Duffie:    I was hoping it would be a hymn to peace, or something like that.

Ustinov:    Yeah.  No, he was probably a cricket-playing padre.  They all have words like that.  The Egyptian, if I remember rightly, has words which are, "Oh, my rifle, where were you when I needed you most?"  [Note: The anthem "Walla Zaman Ya Selahy," used from 1960 to 1979, begins, "It has been a long time oh my weapon! / I long for you in my struggle! / Speak and say I am awake, / Oh war it has been a long time."]  They all have absurd lines, and the very most belligerent of all is Monaco, which is really extremely aggressive towards her neighbors.  [Laughter]  I have no great respect for national anthems.  It seems to me such a travesty we stand for those and sit for Beethoven's string quartets!  Although I must say I'd rather stand more briefly for an anthem than stand all the way through a string quartet...

Duffie:    We should stand mentally for string quartets!

Ustinov:    Yes!  Exactly.  Well, I think we do.  But I think "Va, pensiero" would be a much better national anthem for Italy than the "Inno di Mameli," which they have at the moment!

This interview was recorded at his hotel in Chicago on May 22, 1992.  Sections were used (along with recordings) on WNIB the next day, and again in 1996.  The full interview was transcribed and posted on this website in 2012.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM.