KEEP ON MOVING
October 2024 in Articles
Francesca Zambello talks to Heidi Waleson
Opera with Opera News November 2024
Beethoven’s Fidelio, which opens Washington National Opera’s 2024-5 season, has significance for Francesca Zambello, the company’s artistic director. ‘I thought we should do it in the fall of an election year,’ she says. ‘Who knew that our country was going to be in such upheaval? We’re in a revolution, and this piece speaks of political upheaval and questions of morality.’
For Zambello, opera has always been about creating a medium for communication and community. ‘We have this desperate need for roots and connection, and we can use the arts for that. In opera, we’re a bridge, we can bring together different factions. In Washington, I feel that we allow a place for dialogue.’ Her production sets Fidelio in the 1950s, with Florestan as ‘an activist, a dissident, Navalny-kind of character’. At the same time, Jaquino is ‘not such a wimp; these people are caught in the vise of working in a prison, and these are political prisoners’. Zambello and Kelley Rourke, a long-time collaborator, are writing new dialogue. The company is also taking the opera outside of the Kennedy Center: in partnership with the DC Department of Corrections, they will be bringing Fidelio into incarceration facilities and starting a music training programme to create a chorus with the ultimate goal of presenting West Side Story in a prison.
Zambello, 68, likes to do more. She had spent three decades building a major international directing career, wrangling big shows in theatres—and on outdoor stages including the Bregenz Seebühne and Sydney Harbour—when she was tapped to head Glimmerglass Opera in 2011. The Cooperstown, NY, company, once a pathbreaking summer festival, had fallen on hard times and Zambello, with her bulging Rolodex and a brain filled with ideas, was ready to try and turn it around. A year later, she was invited to take on the artistic director role at WNO as well.
The jobs offered considerable scope for her talents. In Cooperstown, she persuaded the board that they had to spend money to build back up. She rebranded the company as the Glimmerglass Festival, leveraging the tourism appeal of its bucolic setting and intimate theatre with additional events. Each summer, she enlisted an international singer—Deborah Voigt, Eric Owens and Christine Goerke, for example—to headline a show, do a special project, and work with the company’s young artists. She mounted classic American musicals, giving audiences the opportunity to hear such shows as Annie Get Your Gun, Candide and The Sound of Music with full orchestra and no amplification. (Zambello has always viewed musicals as a quintessential American operatic form.) In an especially savvy move, she created a youth chorus and commissioned a series of operas for them to perform—what better way to reach into the community than through young people and their parents and friends? She launched an outreach programme at Attica, the maximum-security prison. She commissioned the composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist Tazewell Thompson to write Blue, a searing work about a Black police officer whose son is killed by a white officer; it won the Music Critics Association of North America’s Best New Opera award for 2019 and has also travelled internationally.
Zambello put herself out in front to sell her vision. She courted donors, driving hundreds of miles to visit them in their homes, sometimes bringing a singer along. Before every Glimmerglass performance she welcomed the audience, urged them to come back for more performances, and—in the nicest way possible—asked for money. During intermissions she could be found circulating, chatting to anyone and everyone, thanking them for coming and listening to their concerns. ‘No one is prepared for this kind of job, but I had worked in enough companies, done enough fundraising, and watched enough people do it well—and not well,’ Zambello says. ‘You have to respond to your time. Thirty or 40 years ago, it was different; a few big donors carried opera companies. Now, you really have to work, and I really worked at building up those small-level donors and talking to them about ideas.’
She can also pivot when necessary. In 2021, as opera companies gingerly returned to live performance, she staged ‘Glimmerglass on the Grass’ with the singers on an outdoor stage, the orchestra playing in the opera house and piped outside, the audience on the lawn and in specially built chalets, and with every event under 90 minutes to avoid intermissions. The experiment was a hit; many patrons even asked if it could be done again.
Born in New York and raised in Europe, Zambello caught the theatre bug early—her mother was an actress, so she spent a lot of time backstage—and picked up several languages. She was already directing in high school and college (she graduated from Colgate University, 60 miles from Glimmerglass). In the early 1980s a year-long internship with the opera director Nathaniel Merrill took her inside theatres in Europe and the US. On her return she snagged an assistant director job at Lyric Opera of Chicago and then moved on to San Francisco Opera. There she met Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who appreciated her skills and facility with languages, and invited her to assist on his productions in Europe and take charge of their revivals.
At the same time, she and Stephen Wadsworth became co-artistic directors of the Skylight Opera, a company in Milwaukee that performed in a garage converted into a tiny theatre. ‘We were producing eight shows a year, with a budget of about $10,000 for each one; I directed at least two each season. It was a laboratory, in the old-fashioned sense—an ensemble company, with very little money, where you have to be creative. I learned how to direct in a big space through mentors like Jean-Pierre and Nat, and to really do detailed work, directing people up-close, at the Skylight.’
Her big break was, coincidentally, Fidelio, starring Hildegard Behrens, at Houston Grand Opera in 1984. ‘This is how your career jumpstarts—be in the right place at the right time,’ Zambello says. She got a call from David Gockley—a director had not delivered a concept; could she come up with something, for a small amount of money, in a week? The hungry young director said yes; with the Contras and the Sandinistas in the news, she set it in contemporary Central America, not yet a common practice in US theatres.
After two other big shows—a War and Peace in Seattle and a Troyens in Los Angeles (because another director had cancelled)—Zambello got a call from Joseph Volpe at the Metropolitan Opera. ‘He said that he and James Levine wanted a new kind of production style at the house.’ The result was Lucia di Lammermoor conceived as a tale of psychological terror, played on John Conklin’s set of an exploded castle with a mountain of coffins. The conservative Met audience was shocked, and the production team was vociferously booed on the opening night in 1992. Zambello thinks that Lucia was probably ahead of its time. ‘If I did it now, people would say, “Oh, that’s so passé”.’
The rest of the US was no further along. ‘It was hard. The only people who would hire me in the US after that were John Crosby in Santa Fe and David Gockley.’ Europe was more welcoming. The Ponnelle connection had opened doors, and Zambello directed in numerous theatres in Italy, and in London at English National Opera and the Royal Opera. She worked for Hugues Gall in Geneva; when he moved on to Paris, he invited her there. ‘I did so much abroad for 15 years. I bought an apartment in London and was living there half the year.’ Then, a decade after the Lucia debacle, came another call from Volpe—another fired director, could she come up with a concept for Les Troyens for 2003? ‘The thing about a career is, never say never,’ Zambello says. ‘In certain places, the door closes, but it might open again. I have had a career where it is head down, keep moving.’ More Met invitations followed that successful Troyens, and Zambello built a presence in the US, with major stagings including a Ring cycle at the San Francisco Opera.
As a company leader, Zambello has always been ahead of the curve. At both Glimmerglass and WNO, she has pursued a deliberately expansive casting philosophy. ‘Fifty per cent of every cast we have put on stage in the last 12 years has been non-white singers,’ she says. She has also insisted on gender parity, with 50 per cent of the production teams made up of women. This was particularly important for Washington, Zambello points out. ‘How can we be national if we are not showing what our country looks like?’
The creation of new operas has also been central to her work. Most of the pieces that she helmed in Santa Fe were new, including Tobias Picker’s Emmeline in 1996; the same year, she directed the premiere of Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas at Houston Grand Opera, which has become a popular repertory choice. The next step was incubating new work: in 2012 she launched WNO’s American Opera Initiative, which commissions three 20-minute operas annually from young composer-librettist teams. The creators are mentored by distinguished practitioners, and their pieces are workshopped and performed by members of the WNO orchestra and the company’s Cafritz Young Artist Program. The initiative has also commissioned several hour-long operas, which received the same resources. Several AOI works have been expanded and performed in other theatres: most recently Damien Geter’s American Apollo, about John Singer Sargent and Thomas McKeller, his Black male model, had its premiere as a full-evening work at Des Moines Metro Opera this past summer.
For Zambello, initiatives like these are common sense. The AOI shows sell out, people talk about them, and board members are proud when WNO projects are taken up elsewhere. When the Met announced in 2022 that the house would devote a much larger percentage of its season to contemporary operas, Zambello says, ‘So many board members said to me, “We are so proud that we did all these things first”.’
In 2022 Zambello left Glimmerglass to focus on WNO, where she works in collaboration with the general director Timothy O’Leary. While American opera companies, especially the biggest ones, face serious post-pandemic financial and audience challenges, WNO has an advantage: it has three venues—a 2,000-seat opera house, the 1,000-seat Eisenhower Theater, and the 500-seat Terrace Theater. Big companies like the Met, Chicago and San Francisco ‘are dealing with a venue that is too big for the art form. Most of the work that we do was never meant to be in a 3,000-plus-seat house. Everything is about scale, and if you can’t match that scale, it’s very difficult to produce. There were golden years for these companies, and I feel blessed that I worked in them then. But now I’m truly thankful, and very happy to be here, because WNO’s three venues give us a palette to curate a season in.’
Last year’s WNO season was almost entirely sold out. In the summer, ticket sales were already strong for 2024-5, which in addition to Fidelio has Macbeth, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Porgy and Bess and a family opera Jungle Book, the composer Kamala Sankaram’s South Asian twist on the Kipling story (originally commissioned for Glimmerglass), plus several concerts. Other than Porgy, none is traditionally a top-selling title, but Zambello says, ‘We have created an audience that believes in the quality we present to them. Voices are number one—I believe if they can’t sing it, don’t hire them. And we produce for our audience. Some may say our programming seems a bit conservative. I say, my audience likes that, and I’m in a service organization. I’m going to give them some things that challenge and ask questions, but I’m also going to give them some things that they feel comfortable with. Make an audience trust you, so they will come whatever you do.’
Zambello is directing Porgy and Fidelio and co-directing Jungle Book. She still does a few projects outside WNO, such as Odyssey: A Journey Through Worlds, a 400-performer extravaganza staged on the Danube in 2023, and a new version of the musical Rebecca,by Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay, for Vienna which then went to Asia. But her wanderlust has cooled. And she has non-operatic projects, including a business rehabbing old buildings to create new housing in the Cooperstown area, where she and her wife Faith Gay, an attorney, still have a home. The choice wasn’t random. Zambello always makes her many interests relevant to the needs and challenges of the world she lives in, whether it be addressing housing, regional economics and ruralism—or staging operas that make people talk to one another.
Francesca Zambello’s new production of ‘Fidelio’ opens on October 25 at Washington National Opera, c. Robert Spano. www.kennedy-center.org/wno
