John Savournin and David Eaton on their sparkling new vision for Lehár’s classic.
At Scottish Opera, audiences will hear the first ever outing of Lehár’s The Merry Widow as re-envisioned by John Savournin and David Eaton. Longtime collaborators at Charles Court Opera, the two have many operatic credits – on the stage, in the pit, and behind the scenes – to their names. For this production John has written the book (spoken dialogue) for Lehár’s operetta, while David has taken the lyrics (sung words).
Having separate writers for books and lyrics is more often seen in musical theatre than in opera, perhaps because the former is not always sung through, but the approach is beneficial – especially in a partnership as solid as John’s and David’s after 20 years of working together. They are thrilled to collaborate again on creating a new vision for The Merry Widow. ‘Two heads are better than one when it comes to creative writing, and we have shared our development with takis [the production’s designer] along the way, so “the whole” feels coherent and exciting,’ John says. ‘We have a great shorthand, and an honesty always gets us to the heart of what works. Working together is one of my favourite pastimes.’
Predictably, the two have strong opinions about what makes a good libretto. ‘I think a translation of an opera libretto needs to feel both respectful of the original, where you adhere to the structure of the original in the sung passages, but also relevant and freshened up for today’s audience,’ says John. ‘That’s the opportunity that writing a new translation affords you. That’s not to say that it should be edgy, rude or vulgar, but that it needs to feel immediate, relatable, and accessible. For a new work, I think the challenge is for it to be forward-moving and economical (with nothing superfluous that holds up the story) while presenting well-drawn out characters that are interesting and feel necessary.’
With opera often seen as a pastime of the elite, the other half of accessibility is making opera appealing. ‘People will pay money to see stuff that they like,’ David says. ‘We need to make opera something people like, because there’s lots there to enjoy. I think many problems stem from the fact that many operas were written ages ago. What people want from entertainment and stories has changed.’ He sees his many ‘jobs’ in music as one in service of operatic storytelling. ‘When I am music directing, I might look at getting clarity of text in a way that’s much more music theatre, because no one has any problems understanding music theatre. I think translation is just another branch of bringing opera to people in a way that is interesting and appealing now.’
John similarly sees the line between opera and musical theatre as thin and permeable. ‘I think the genre of musical theatre as we know it today developed from and is inspired by opera,’ John says, ‘particularly operetta. Noël Coward, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hammerstein – they were all influenced heavily by Victorian operetta, so the line is very thin in some ways, but they are also worlds apart, and opera has its own distinctive style that should be celebrated. Of course, the way each is sung is quite different!’ Singing without amplification in a way that is understandable to audiences is a specialisation almost unique to opera today, and an English libretto makes this all the more important.
‘I’m a big believer in opera in English,’ says David, noting that opera in its original language is a relatively new idea from the 1950s (pre-1980s, these were performed without supertitles). Before this, opera in the UK was often translated into English, the local language – or into Italian, the operatic language. ‘But if you go back to when these classic composers were working, libretti weren’t set in stone.’ He notes that many Mozart operas had both Italian (posh) and German (common) versions in their day, and that people resonate more with words in their first language. ‘I think many of these composers would be horrified that their opera was being done in a language that most of the audience didn’t understand,’ he says. ‘We should foster a new generation of good writers who know translations. We never think of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf as a lesser piece of art, because Heaney was a great poet. It is just another piece of art.’ Theatre has similar conventions to literature, rather than opera. ‘You would never do Chekhov in Russian in the UK,’ David points out. ‘You would hire a good translator.’
While translators have to match significant words to significant music, David advises people to ‘write a new libretto that has something to do with the original.’ Here, David draws on his experience as a conductor and coach. ‘I come from a musician’s perspective,’ he says, ‘not a writing perspective. With a libretto, there are words that already rhythmically fit, so you have to find a way of saying what you want to say so that the stress is always in the right place and the feeling of the phrase follows the music.’ Other considerations are high notes and fast passages – giving singers vowels and consonants that ensure the words they sing in difficult passages are still singable and understandable. ‘I’m always trying to make the translation as nice for the voice as possible, because that then frees up the singer / actor to start from a better point. If words come out easy, they can focus on the acting.’
The art of words on stage, according to David, is saying ‘exactly what you want to say in the cleanest, clearest, most efficient way possible’. Even when adding jokes, he wants to avoid ‘bumps’ when people have to take a moment to understand what’s going on. ‘For the second your brain goes, “what?”, you miss five seconds,’ he says. When approaching a song, he thinks about what the characters want, how they’re arguing their needs and reasons, and the cleanest way to express these urges.
Both David and John cite W S Gilbert’s precision in dialogue (his stronger suit, according to David) as inspiration. ‘He was something of a founding father for musical theatre,’ says John, ‘and there’s a reason for that – his imagination was tremendous.’ John gets to explore Gilbert’s genius when he directs Trial by Jury, which plays alongside The Merry Widow in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
In terms of the gold standard of book writing and lyric writing, James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim (who collaborated on the musical theatre masterpieces Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods) are immediately mentioned. ‘Lapine is one of the very best. Funny one moment, moving the next, snappy, and incredibly clever,’ John says.
‘Sondheim loved doing crossword puzzles, and lyric writing is a lot like that because you have a set length and number of words, and you have to shift everything around to say what you need to very keenly,’ says David. ‘I don’t think that anyone – absolutely not Gilbert – comes close. Sondheim is amazing. He uses the cleverness to be clear and clean.’
While matching the stressed-unstressed syllable pattern in German words was a challenge, it was nothing compared to updating The Merry Widow’s outdated gender politics which relies on stereotypical ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ behaviour. ‘It’s about finding a way to reframe dated lyrics so that the women in the story have agency and power but without getting too far away from the original,’ says David. He hopes his battle of the sexes sits more comfortably with today’s mores and imbues all characters with humanity. ‘We have tried to give Hanna agency, real agency, here.’ The men struggle for power, but she calls the shots.
This ties in to Hanna’s new world, decades and an ocean away from Lehár’s original. 1950s New York, with its Mafia-run high life and underworld, appealed for many reasons, most of all for its incidental fidelity to Lehár’s world. ‘If updating the original setting is going to add something interesting (this is my golden rule, otherwise, don’t!), I always look for a world that is going to serve the original – not contradict it or do it a disservice – while giving it a new lease of life,’ John says. ‘The Merry Widow is all about displaced people – originally, the fictitious Pontevedrians are displaced in France – so the world of Italian-American Mafia families finding their place in New York feels like a perfect comparison, and the characters fit the mould beautifully’. For instance, Baron Zeta becomes Don Zeta, head of a powerful family. ‘This also means we have been able to maintain an opulent, rich world for the opera (which is a big part of Widow’s appeal, in my view), while relishing the parody opportunities that this brilliant new playground affords,’ he adds.
‘Once you update, the social strata starts to break down,’ says David. ‘The place that strata remains is the Mafia, with its sense of family loyalty and things you can and can’t do. Although they traditionally remain background characters, the women are incredibly powerful in that Mafia world. It was really nice to find this place with family and social structure, but where women had agency and power.’
David hopes the audience will go along with this bold new updating: ‘opera can be a terrible mafia sometimes.’
John agrees, but mainly intends audiences to take away what they always will from a good production of The Merry Widow: ‘a fantastic afternoon or evening, full of humour, visual spectacle, dancing, a moving central love story that tugs at your heart strings, and above all, wonderful music making.’