About music theatre "Music, and especially when it is sung, offers the viewer, the listener, the opportunity to take in the vibrations and feelings of the actions on stage. Music influences the physical and sensual sensation more than the spoken word. Actively taking part leads to an increased long-term effect. The things listened to remain in the ear and evoke the actions again and again. This is what happens to myself and this is what I want to make comprehensible to others. Besides, I feel a great desire to keep the things I appreciate so much about "my" composers relevant to present times. I feel like a guard in a museum: Is the Rembrandt in perfect position, does it get proper light…" About authors, composers, epochs "I feel good in times of change. This is what ‘Manon’ showed me. I’m interested in Fin de Siècle, with its dissolving notions of morality, rather than Biedermeier – Mozart, Marivaux, Donizetti, Massenet, there’s my world, this is where I can detect ruptures and abandonment of ideas of society." "I only stage works I’m interested in, but my special preference is with the three great music dramatists Monteverdi, Mozart and Verdi. They have a view on mankind I can absolutely identify with. They try to see human beings in a large social context, and their perspective is always understanding, never moralising. The question of who’s to blame is not of importance. The questions posed to society are beyond those of common notions of morality, which only serve to make one’s life more convenient." About idols "There are two directors I have never worked with, but whose productions I hold in high esteem: I admire Giorgio Strehler’s style of serene elegance, which allows seriousness to shine through the feigned superfluity of comedy. About Patrice Chéreau I value his sad and melancholic view on humanity, which, however, never risks drifting to sentimentality. With him, disillusionment is always dressed in the aestheticism of beauty and is never at the mercy of visual effects. And then there’s Luc Bondy, whose assistant I was: He taught me to challenge the singers into expanding their personal frontiers and to take every rehearsal as an opportunity to try how far one can go – all without thinking of the production as the sole aim of this process." About faithfulness to the original "I think possible is everything which is meaningful and credible to the singer and the audience. We have the big responsibility to identify not only those parts that require faithfulness to the text, but also those that only appear convincing once one has departed from the libretto and given way to one’s imagination. Faithfulness to the original understood in a wrong way can obscure the audience’s view upon the essence of the play. This is all about old habits of seeing theatre which became antiquated. However, in theatrical pleasure we are constantly tempted to apply those antiquated habits of seeing to our time. That can be funny, maybe even revealing, but in applying a false sense of tradition we achieve the exact opposite of what the composer really wanted to say." About methods of working "I feel that, with me, a lot of truth lies in the emotions and that feelings function as a motor to my work. I realised that gut reactions are a big aid in making decisions about what I do or do not want to do on stage. I try to understand the atmospheric and emotional structure of a play in such a way that I can take it in into my body and make others feel it, too." About crossing borders "Sometimes one has to beware of vanity when getting to the audience’s or one’s own limits. But one should never betray the productions one believes in. If your convictions as an artist urge you to present a scene in a certain way, you should do it. One puts oneself up for discussion; and this is quite what we as directors expect from the audience: an intense discussion about what happened on stage. When you startle the audience out of everyday life and lead it back to philosophical questions of essence, when the emotional tension sweeps from the forestage to the audience, the question whether such a lavish and demanding artistic genre like opera is still legitimate nowadays becomes self-answering." About working with singers "The singing human being is always my centre of attention." "Sometimes it is exactly out of misunderstandings that beautiful and unexpected things come into existence, which are more personal at long last." About stage design "I’m interested in movement within a certain temporal frame. Thus my interest in the art of dancing. Towards the end of the rehearsals, a choreographic structure with the singers emerges. That is why I distance myself more and more from decoration and need less things on stage – only architecture which is in contact to people."