This is the second post in the Play Out series, a collection of profiles on performers, ensembles, and organizations who have chosen non-traditional approaches to classical music performance. The previous post was about Fabricio Mattos, a musician who decided to reject the rules about how a classical guitarist is supposed to build a career.
“The basic motivation in this kind of making theatre is to discover,” David Marton explained to me above the background music and clanging dishes in a Berlin café. David, a Hungarian-born theatre and opera director who trained as a pianist at the UdK and a conductor at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Germany, guides the creation of pieces in which musicians take the stage alongside actors in an attempt to break the actor-musician hierarchy of traditional theatrical genres. He aims to create works of theatre in which music and musicians are central, where “actors also make music and the musicians also play, or they are just characters on the stage like actors.” His pieces have covered a broad range, from reinterpretations of classic operas to a staging of Kerouac’s novel On the Road.
Though he didn’t hate being a pianist, David knew he wanted to create a different kind of art without foregoing music as a central element. His shift to directing was gradual, beginning with a stint as a pit musician in order to earn money. Some of his work was in the Berlin Volksbühne, where directors like Christoph Marthaler were important influences. Around this time, he had opportunities to perform as an onstage musician, which he quite enjoyed, in particular because the repeat performances plus the opportunity to embody a character eased the performance anxiety from which many classical musicians suffer.
The first production he directed, Nackt, entblöst sogar (2004), was an attempted mash-up of Carl Maria von Weber’s classic opera Der Freischütz with a mammoth glass and metal collage, La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, by conceptual/Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. For this performance, David worked exclusively with musicians, whom he gave speaking (as well as musical) roles. The music itself was born from fragments of Weber’s score that were looped, stretched and otherwise altered.
David judges the interpretation as unsuccessful, in part because of difficulty finding an appropriately atmospheric venue, and also because most references to the Duchamp were removed during the creative process. From this he has learned to never abandon any central conceptual foundations of a piece. However, it went well enough to draw interest and additional funding for future projects from state grants.
When he sets out to create a new piece, David usually has the freedom to select repertoire, though of course theatres do prefer something that will fill an auditorium. He likens his selection process to a flea market expedition, in which he has an idea of a broad concept he would like to explore, but “It’s always a mixture of searching [for] something definite and then having an encounter with something you didn’t expect.” When possible, he works with the same actors and musicians whom he already knows and trusts, which makes casting decisions straightforward.
Before the first rehearsal, the stage design and the outlines of basic situations are already in place, but he prefers as much as possible to develop the piece via the six or seven weeks of rehearsal, using input from every member of the team – even if their contributions are not technically related to their official role. “You cannot be a community in a dictatorial working structure,” David pointed out, also emphasizing how allowing cross-field contributions continues to disrupt the theatre hierarchy.
David’s pieces almost always ask the musicians – many of whom have jazz training – to improvise at various points throughout a show. Despite his own musical background, David always appoints a separate music director. After a last-minute cancellation for his production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, he had to take on both roles, which was overwhelming and made the show too imprecise – even for someone who doesn’t like “claustrophobically perfect worlds.”
In terms of the effect of incorporating music into theatre, David described how, from his very first shows, he found it immediately apparent that audience members left the theatre in a particular touched and emotionally altered state, which he claims is more seldom with straight theatre. However, despite this conviction that music has such an effect on people, he is not an idealist about his work’s wider impact. In his opinion, “You can change theatre through theatre, but you cannot change the world through theatre.”