Rolando Villazón directs opera at the world’s top houses while still singing

By RONALD BLUM
Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Tenor Rolando Villazón was singing the title role in Massenet’s “Werther” in 2006 at Nice, France, when he started thinking about how he would direct the opera.

“I said, ‘oh, this last act is very difficult. He shot himself and keeps singing for 40 minutes.’ And so, what would I do?” he recalled. “And I started inventing, creating for fun a staging.”

Nearly two decades later, Villazón is making his Metropolitan Opera directing debut in Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” which opened Monday night with a standout cast of Nadine Sierra, Xabier Anduaga and Alexander Vinogradov.

“He is very sensitive to singers,” Sierra said. “Maybe some directors, because they’re not singers or they were never singers, it’s hard for them to really relate to the psychological struggle that some singers, we deal with on stage. We want to make our characters as believable as humanly possible through the actions that we show, but sometimes it’s hard to do that because you also have to sing high notes.”

Career as tenor took off 26 years ago

Villazón grew up in Mexico City, won Plácido Domingo’s Operalia competition in 1999 and made his European debut that year in Massenet’s “Manon” at Genoa, Italy. He debuted at the Met in Verdi’s “La Traviata” in 2003 and gained wide renown when he sang Alfredo with Anna Netrebko’s Violetta in Willy Decker’s austere staging at the 2005 Salzburg Festival.

Vocal problems developed in 2007, causing Villazón to cancel his schedule, and he had surgery in 2009 to remove a cyst from his vocal cords. He developed performance anxiety around 2015 and had another operation in 2018 to relieve acid reflux.

“Two things coincided when I stopped singing for a year in 2009 — and that was I wrote my first novel and I prepared my staging, but both didn’t happen because I was resting,” he said. “Would I have finished my novel? I don’t know. But stage direction for sure that would have happened.”

Long road from concept to stage

When Villazón conceived his “Werther” staging, he shared it with Alain Lanceron, then head of the tenor’s record label, Virgin Classics. Richard Jones, a director Villazón had worked with, helped him find a theater. After being turned down in Berlin, Villazón won over Serge Dorny, then general director in Lyon and now head of the Paris Opéra.

Villazón’s “Werther” debuted in 2011, and he directed Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” the following year at Baden-Baden, Germany, while also singing Nemorino.

He has gone on to direct Verdi’s “La Traviata,” Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale,” Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus,” Rameau’s “Platée,” Bellini’s “I Puritani” and Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” and has upcoming productions of Mozart’s “ Die Zauberflöte” and Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri.”

His “Sonnambula” unfolds in an icy Alp village within a single set in front of projections and was first seen at Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 2021, then at Nice in 2022 and Dresden, Germany, in 2023. It was to have traveled to the Met in 2023-24 but was postponed because of budget cuts.

“In the staging rehearsals, he was always on the stage with them,” Met general manager Peter Gelb said. “Usually, directors are in the room with the singers, but they spend a lot of the time watching from a distant seat. He was more in the trenches with the singers than most directors are.”

`Sonnambula’ staging has unusual twist

Villazón rejects the happy ending of Donizetti and librettist Felice Romani. Rather than Amina awakening from sleepwalking in ecstasy when she learns Elvino will marry her, she gives him back his ring and runs off to an independent future. He tweaked the direction for New York, cutting the dancing spirits Amina hallucinates from three to one and adding a globe, a telescope and a newspaper as gifts from Count Rodolfo to show the worldly curiosity she seeks.

“It remains in essence the concept I had thought for it, the concept of a closed society, patriarchal, for sure very religious, where there is a strange woman adopted by a widow,” Villazón said. “She is obliged to follow the rules and to adapt to the way the community behaves for the good of the community, but she still feels this call of the wild.”

Sierra and Anduaga had sung these roles in a Barbara Llutch staging that opened in Madrid in December 2022 and traveled to Barcelona last April before coming to New York to work with Villazón,

“He really understands our situation,” Anduaga said. “He doesn’t want to to do anything weird or strange with the body because he knows that all the movements are important, but the singing is the most important thing.”

Villazón learned from his experience with a string of top directors, including Decker, Jones, Robert Carsen, Claus Guth, Christof Loy and Bart Sher.

“Richard Jones told me: `You ask something three times,’” Villazón recalled. ”`If the performer doesn’t do it, either he or she is unable to do it or incapable to do it. In either case, you will not get what you’re asking, so move on and think of something else.’”