David Alden

David Alden (* 1949 in New York City ) is an opera director who is known for his postmodern opera productions. Occasionally he has also worked as a film director .

He is the twin brother of Christopher Alden, who is also an opera director. Both brothers have covered a similar repertoire in their careers. While Christopher places more emphasis on the emotional range of his characters in his productions, the protagonists in David Alden are more caricatured and his productions are much more politically influenced. Another difference between the brothers is that David Alden's work focuses more on Europe. He worked closely with Sir Peter Jonas for more than twenty years at both the English National Opera and the Bavarian State Opera .

Beginnings

David Alden and his identical twin brother, Christopher, were born into a show-business family closely related to Broadway. Her father was the playwright Jerome Alden, her mother the dancer Barbara Gaye, who danced with Ethel Merman in the first productions of On the Town and Annie Get Your Gun . When they were eight, they were at home listening to records of operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan , and as teenagers they often bought standing tickets at the Metropolitan Opera . At the age of thirteen they both decided to become opera directors.

David graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and began his career as a director (like his brother) at Opera Omaha. In 1976 he traveled to Europe, where he got to know the opera direction in the style of Giorgio Strehler , Harry Kupfer , Hans Neuenfels and Ruth Berghaus . This generation of directors continued the tradition of Expressionism and Bertolt Brecht in particular . For Alden, this encounter revealed intense passions that he had long wanted to translate into music theater. His first European production was Rigoletto at the Scottish Opera in the late 1970s, which was critically attacked because, as Alden says, it was “very early in England for this style , a style I had tried to do Addressing the audience directly and portraying passion and schizophrenia on stage. "

In 1980 the Metropolitan Opera hired Alden to replace the late Herbert Graf for the new production of Wozzeck and for the revivals in 1985 and 1988. At the time, John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times : “Alden's production is in the tradition of Expressionist films like Das Cabinet of the Dr. Caligari , full of bare outlines and staggering zombies . "

English National Opera

In 1984 the former Artistic Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Peter Jonas was appointed Artistic Director of the English National Opera . Together with chief conductor Mark Elder and chief director David Pountney, Jonas began the so-called “ powerhouse years” at the English National Opera with modern stagings of classical pieces and productions of commissioned works. A controversial David Alden production by Mazeppa (Tchaikovsky) became the flagship of the new program policy in the first year of Jonas' directorship. At the end of the second act, when the hero Kotschubej and his friend Iskra are led to the execution, Alden shocked the audience with a gruesome chainsaw massacre, so that the entire production was remembered in the minds of the London opera audience as “chainsaw mazeppa” and “ a kind of shorthand for the entire Jonas project became - brutal, uncompromising, a must, the ultimate 'succès de scandale' ” .

In the course of the following years Alden continued to play the role of provocateur with many productions at the English National Opera such as u. a. Simon Boccanegra , Un ballo in maschera , Ariodante (Handel), La damnation de Faust (Berlioz) and Tristan und Isolde . His 2006 production of Jenůfa won a Laurence Olivier Award for best new opera production.

Bavarian State Opera

During Peter Jonas' directorship at the Bavarian State Opera from 1993-2006, David Alden was a permanent guest in Munich. His numerous productions there include a number of Handel operas ( Ariodante , Orlando , Rinaldo and Rodelinda ), as well as L'incoronazione di Poppea and Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria by Claudio Monteverdi , by Richard Wagner der Tannhäuser and the Ring des Nibelungen ; La Calisto by Francesco Cavalli , Giuseppe Verdi's La forza del destino , Queen of Spades by Peter Tschaikowsky and Lulu by Alban Berg .

For the 2006 Munich Opera Festival , the State Opera returned eight of these productions to its program. In addition, David Alden was awarded a special Bavarian Theater Prize for all of his Munich productions.

Web links

• Conversation between Peter Jonas and David Alden

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This article is based on an abbreviated translation of the Wikipedia article on David Alden.

1. ↑ Conversation between Peter Jonas and David Alden  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Stephen Moss, "Twin Powers" in The Guardian . May 26, 2006