Remembering Sir Peter Jonas – opera’s enfant terrible

Flamboyant opera rebel, Sir Peter Jonas, has died at the age of 73. As Director of English National Opera from 1985 until 1992, then Intendant of Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, until 2006, he brought dismay and delight in equal measure to audiences.

His productions of Wagner rendered traditionalists incandescent. He kept his “stink box” of poison pen letters from Wagner fans, which he flourished with glee.

In a production of Parsifal, Wagner’s most religious work, the hero swings into the action, Tarzan-like. Richard Strauss’ grandson walked out of an Elektra performance, disgusted by the gore. “We must be doing something right”, gloated Jonas.  He regularly appeared in Munich in full fig Highland dress. The kilt was de rigeuer for premieres. He claimed his grannie was a Campbell.

Jonas formed a close partnership with producer David Alden. An Alden production of Tannhäuser in 1994, featuring Wagner’s mythic struggle between “holy German art” and pure lust, was daringly deconstructed as an inner battle for the German soul. A 20’s cabaret-style Venusberg – the godly world in which Tannhäuser almost meets his tempting doom at the hands (at the very least) of the goddess Venus; a Wartburg court overshadowed by a huge sign reading “Germania Nostra” – remember Albert Speer’s “Germania?”; and a finale set in a German concentration camp, ruffled feathers in a country that found any reference to its Nazi past upsetting. Tannhäuser returns later.

Jonas constantly wrestled with operas. “That opera does not yield its riches easily is something to be treasured,” he said in a 2005 interview with The International Herald Tribune. “Accessibility is a good thing, but you can’t go so far as to make opera as easy as going to the sauna. The element of surprise is very important.”

When appointed to lead English National Opera (ENO) in 1984, succeeding Lord Harewood, he surprised at every turn. A good example is a later 1989 London production of Verdi’s “A Masked Ball” (“Un Ballo in Maschera”) directed by his favoured collaborator, David Alden.

The set was dominated by a suspended, skew-whiff clock, representing fate, which straddled a massive, suspended horse on which rode the Grim Reaper. The staging caused a riot. Yet, “When all the hullabaloo died down,” he said in an interview with The New York Times, it “made one understand why the piece was originally censored.” In Verdi’s day, an opera about regicide was deemed incendiary.

Backtrack to 1984. It seemed a risky vote of confidence to choose 37-year-old Jonas, formerly Artistic Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as ENO General Director. He believed in the company’s “wonderful, consistent tradition” of bringing “opera to the people in the most direct possible way,” he said on his appointment. But he would wander far beyond that remit.

There followed “the powerhouse” years, run by a triumvirate of Jonas, music director, Mark Elder and stage director David Pountney. The new brooms shot adrenalin into ENO’s sclerotic arteries – “Can brooms do that?” (ed.). “If they are multitasking, mixed-metaphor brooms.” (auth.) – with a series of modern interpretations of classic operas and a slew of newly commissioned productions from modernist composers, such as Hans Werner Henze.

That year audiences were shocked by a production of Tchaikovsky’s “Mazeppa”. They did not anticipate the Act II chainsaw massacre, when the hero, Kochubey, is led to the executioner’s block. Jonas supported Alden throughout production after production, all designed to be brutal, uncompromising – but unmissable.

ENO was back on the map and the combination of mixing innovative blood-curdlers with well-established favourites brought seat occupancy levels in the 90%s, enviable today.

Mid-gore, some new works were well received. The British stage premiere of Ferruccio Busoni’s “Doctor Faust” was a huge success, bringing Busoni’s Mahler-like melodic music to the attention of British audiences for the first time.

ENO under Jonas’s hand was Jekyll-and-Hyde. At one level it was cherished, casting was careful. Jonas looked after its performers and payed close attention to musical presentation under Mark Elder. Sir Mark is as meticulous today. At another level, every nutcase opera producer was allowed a shot. The intentions of composers were twisted beyond recognition and self-indulgence tolerated. Budget overruns were legend.

The less comprehensible a setting the better, so it seemed. The last to be allowed into the joke was often the audience. An opera company that had been set up to bring opera to all in 1889 was accused of turning its attention instead to a metropolitan elite. Was Jonas leading the house astray?

In 1889 Emma Cons, a Victorian philanthropist who ran the Old Vic, and her niece, Lilian Bayliss, set out with a tiny orchestra to stage Wagner operas. Curtain up in the early 1900s. The Old Vic staged Shakespeare, except on Thursdays and Saturdays, which were dedicated to opera. The company morphed into Vic-Wells in the 1920s, when Bayliss acquired the freehold of Sadler’s Wells, then Sadler’s Wells Opera in 1945, emerging as English National Opera in 1974. Lord Harewood, then Director, took the view that a touring company – which by then ENO was – should not affect a name associated with one opera house.

To nurture an artistic reputation Jonas knew that ENO needed more than popularity, especially if it were to stand out from its bigger Covent Garden sibling and justify Arts Council support. The truth is that Jonas was performing a delicate balancing act, providing well produced popular opera to attract full houses, hoping to lure audiences to the more avant-garde. Under his tutelage ENO became resolutely cutting edge.

And it was to need that reputation in the regular battles with its Arts Council funders. It still does. Jonas proved a doughty off-stage warrior, crossing swords frequently with Luke Rittner, Arts Council Chief Executive, Jonas’ very own bête noire. Budget overruns were common causes of clashes. Frequently grants were withheld as finances were brought under control. Often Jonas careered towards the abyss of insolvency – the Arts Council insisted on plausible budgets before handing over any cash, even bridging loans – but he never went over the edge.

In 1993 Jonas left for Germany. From his appointment as Intendant of Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, until his departure in 2006, Jonas continued the run of Alden productions at ENO, relying on them as his innovation mainstay. Kilted-up, he immediately set the heather on fire with a Handel “Giulio Cesare”, skewering fusty tradition by introducing an enormous dinosaur. Why? Loftily, Jonas opined that if you had to ask, you were insufficiently intelligent to understand. I still don’t know.

Then there was the gratuitous crocodile. The Alden Munich production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1994 is an exemplar of the good – and bad – that flowed from the Jonas/Alden collaboration.

No surprise that control-freak Wagner laid down strictures about the work’s setting. He was a detail fetishist. Act I’s stage directions run to thirty lines of detail; sylvan glades, protruding cliffs, greenish waterfalls; clear blue vapour enveloping the background. You get the picture.

Alden didn’t. His dystopian, scorched earth landscape was far from the medieval idyll Wagner intended. In Wagner-land Naiads, nymphs, Satyrs and fauns disport themselves enchantingly. Alden renders them naked, copulating openly.

Of course, it was an outrage. Gratuitous shock-arama. And yet, and yet…. Compare the Alden Wagner mug-fest with, say, the Met’s 2013 production, recently revived, and Alden’s purpose becomes clear. Otto Schenk’s Met offering was acclaimed as “classic”, offended no-one, but boy, is it dull compared with Alden’s action-packed, provocative mind-bender.

In New York, characters in medieval dress sing rooted to the spot, Tannhäuser is equipped with a joke harp – as per Wagner instructions – possibly as an homage to the trademark Guinness glass. He fakes soundless strumming, not even in time with his harpette’s larger counterpart in the pit. Sometimes the harp plays on, even when it’s hidden behind Tannhäuser’s back. Faithful to instructions? Perhaps. But, risible. The libretto – which in typical Wagner style is elliptical and repetitive – is sung mostly straight at the audience, little variation in character demeanour, little interaction, especially between Tannhäuser and the chaste heroine, Elisabeth. It is dull, dull, dull ……. Dull. Personally, I would have headed back to the Venusburg pronto.

In the Munich production Alden shapes the plot with constant flowing action, throwing out much of Wagner’s over complex baggage. The result? The piece is transformed from oratorio-like stasis to high and compelling drama. Just ignore the crawl-on crocodile chewing on a Naiad. I warned you there would be a crocodile.

Jonas and Alden made Munich its own powerhouse of innovation, with a Handel series, Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea” and “Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria”; a Wagner “Ring”; Verdi’s “La forza del destino”, Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” and Berg’s “Lulu”. When he departed in 2006 Munich Opera Festival paid Jonas the unprecedented compliment of reviving no fewer than eight of the Alden associated productions in his honour.

Peter Jonas was knighted in 2000. Somehow, the millennium seems a fitting moment to mark his anarchic contribution to opera. Anarchic perhaps, but nothing he set out to accomplish was random. He was driven by a philosophy neatly set out in a series of conversations with Steffen Huck, economist, director of the research unit, “The Economics of Change”, Berlin and Professor of economics at University College London.

Here’s what made Sir Peter tick. “Whoever believes that populism, climate change, human trafficking, violence and war can only be countered with data and mathematical models underestimates the power of drama, art and faith, underestimates the significant.” For him chaotic free will trumps hard fact. That shone through in all the productions he oversaw.

And, that’s why Sir Peter so admired Wagner’s “Ring,” because it “weaves analytical with human feeling. In Wagner, freewill destroyed the Gods”. He often argued that freewill implies the existence of at least one God. Because, where else should freewill come from? For him, materialism was never enough. There had to be more. In that belief he was idiosyncratic for his secular era. He mused, “Maybe we actually live in a purely materialistic world and the idea of free will disappears in complete darkness, like Wotan. But then, at least we can say we tried”.

Sir Peter fizzed offstage as much as the productions he oversaw did on. He was a flash of colour, roaring round Trafalgar Square in his green Ferrari, registration number ENO 1, en route to the Coliseum, ENO’s home. The life and soul of every party, he had a relationship with soprano Lucia Popp which resolved into a lifelong friendship. He married Lucy Holt in 1989, divorced in 2001, then married Barbara Burgdorf, violinist and leader of Bavarian opera orchestra. She survives him. And, amidst it all, he fought an almost lifelong battle with the recurrent cancer to which he eventually succumbed. He had a habit of sending amusing “Grim Reaper” cartoons from the New Yorker to friends when the cancer hove into view.

Sir Peter’s last party was held in November 2019. Irrepressible, outrageous, visionary, sociable, brave, ultimately tragic, if Verdi had been around today, he surely would have turned Sir Peter Jonas into his very own opera.