The Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski in Salzburg, Austria, where he is preparing a production of Strauss’s “Elektra.”Credit...Louisa Marie Summer for The New York Times

A Director Brings Cerebral, Sexy Style to Opera Classics

Krzysztof Warlikowski, who is staging “Elektra” at the Salzburg Festival, gives ancient myths a contemporary flavor.

SALZBURG, Austria — On a recent afternoon here, Krzysztof Warlikowski sat on a roof terrace, tousling his mane of hair and drawing deeply on a vape pen. Behind him were the spire of a church where Mozart prayed and the hills made famous by “The Sound of Music.”

Just as the louche clouds of vapor he expelled jarred against the idyllic Salzburg landscape, so Mr. Warlikowski’s theater and opera productions have been sexy, cerebral interlopers on some of Europe’s grandest stages over the past 20 years.

This Polish director was in town preparing a new production of Richard Strauss’s “Elektra,” which is scheduled to have its premiere at the Salzburg Festival on Aug. 1. His stagings have sometimes divided audiences, though his work is always highly anticipated — even more so here in this pandemic year, when his “Elektra” will be one of the few shows in town.

A typical Salzburg Festival features up to 10 new opera productions; this year, because of coronavirus restrictions, the original program of eight fully staged works has been scaled down to just two, “Elektra” and Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.”

The streets are eerily quiet for a town normally overrun with tourists. “Usually, this city, for me, it’s a disaster,” said Mr. Warlikowski (pronounced var-li-KOV-ski). “This year, because of coronavirus, it’s bearable.”

The festival’s organizers aren’t so enthusiastic about the effects of the pandemic, which has put a damper on Salzburg’s 100th anniversary. Nevertheless, “Elektra,” a collaboration between two of the event’s founders — Strauss and the librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal — is a perfect work to celebrate the centennial.

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Mr. Warlikowski, standing right, next to his wife, the set and costume designer Malgorzata Szczesniak, at a rehearsal for “Elektra.” The soprano Ausrine Stundyte, on the floor, will sing the title role.Credit...Louisa Marie Summer for The New York Times

It is also a perfect work for Mr. Warlikowski, 58, who has been drawn time and again to the myths of ancient Greece that are the basis of “Elektra.” Mr. Warlikowski said he was fascinated by the brutal themes of these stories: “It’s matricide, it’s infanticide, it’s patricide, it’s incest, it’s eating the body of your own children.”

As recounted in plays by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, murders her husband as revenge for him killing another of their daughters many years earlier. But the opera, which focuses on father-adoring Electra’s plot to murder her mother, doesn’t include this explanation for Clytemnestra’s original act. There is, Mr. Warlikowski said, no moment “when Clytemnestra would say to Electra: ‘Yes, I did kill your father — because he killed my daughter, and your sister.’”

To refocus the audience’s attention on the mother’s motivation, Mr. Warlikowski’s “Elektra” will begin with a spoken prologue by Klytämnestra, as the character is called in the German text. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, the mezzo-soprano who will deliver the monologue and sing the role, said in an interview that this opening speech was an opportunity for her character to defend herself.

“We never go for clichés with Krzysztof,” she added.

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A scene from Mr. Warlikowski’s “(A)pollonia,” first performed at the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw in 2009.Credit...Stefan Okołowicz/Nowy Teatr

Mr. Warlikowski’s treatment of the classics isn’t just about fleshing out their psychological motivations. He also wants to show how these ancient stories can resonate now. In 1997, he staged Sophocles’s “Electra” in a setting that many critics recognized as the former Yugoslavia, a war zone at the time; for his Paris Opera debut, in 2006, he set Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride,” an opera about Electra’s murdered sister, in a contemporary retirement home.

His most ambitious engagement with ancient Greek texts so far has been his 2009 work “(A)pollinia.” A collage assembled from snippets of classical tragedies, as well as reflections on the murder of Jews in Poland during World War II, it was developed at the Nowy Teatr, a theater Mr. Warlikowski founded in Warsaw in 2008.

“The thing was to make a tragedy on the level of tragedy of the Holocaust,” Mr. Warlikowski said.

“It was a period in Poland when the public wasn’t used to discussing this,” he added. “And so I was doing shows which are like a public discussion.”

Every production Mr. Warlikowski has staged has been a collaboration with Malgorzata Szczesniak, a designer he met at college in Krakow in the early 1980s. She has created a signature austere look for his shows, with lots of hard, reflective surfaces and clinical lighting: The stage for “Elektra,” for example, is wrapped in a wall of polished steel, and features a huge, movable plexiglass box.

Their relationship is not purely artistic. Mr. Warlikowski and Ms. Szczesniak (pronounced SHTOYZH-nyek) are married and live together, although he is gay.

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Mr. Warlikowski and Ms. Szczesniak met in a philosophy class at college in the 1980s. They have collaborated on every production Mr. Warlikowski has staged.Credit...Louisa Marie Summer for The New York Times

This might not surprise those who saw his 2001 “Hamlet,” in which the title character got naked and lusted after Horatio, or who remember drag queens in his “Taming of the Shrew.” Although Mr. Warlikowski has discussed his sexuality openly with foreign news media, he avoids the subject when speaking with Polish journalists, who often prefer not to ask.

“Yes, I am gay, but first I am a human being,” Mr. Warlikowski said. “And I think the gay thing, it’s becoming less and less important in my life.”

Mr. Warlikowski and Ms. Szczesniak lived with the prominent Polish actor Jacek Poniedzialek in the 1990s, when he was Mr. Warlikowski’s lover. They now live — in Warsaw and Palermo, Italy — with the French dancer Claude Bardouil, who choreographs their productions, and who is also in Salzburg working on “Elektra.”

Mr. Warlikowski — who was born in Szczecin, near the Polish border with Germany — met Ms. Szczesniak in a philosophy class at the Jagiellonian University. After graduating, they went to Paris when travel restrictions were lifted in the late-80s thaw that preceded the end of communism. They were poor there, Ms. Szczesniak said, but happy: They sat in the cheap seats at the opera, visited museums and hung out in parks and cafes.

In 1989, the pair returned to Krakow and enrolled at the Ludwik Solski Academy for the Dramatic Arts. There, Mr. Warlikowski studied with Krystian Lupa, a towering figure in Polish theater who makes long, slowly unfolding works based on literary texts.

In an interview, Mr. Lupa said that a student production by Mr. Warlikowski, drawn from the writings of Proust, marked him as a rising talent. “I felt there and then that Krzysztof Warlikowski was going to be a distinguished director,” he said.

This potential was not always seen by Polish critics, many of whom found Mr. Warlikowski’s early work too strongly influenced by his teacher. “The umbilical cord of our student-pedagogue relationship had not yet been severed,” Mr. Lupa said. But, he added, the first inklings of Mr. Warlikowski’s mature style were already clear in those 1990s shows, particularly an enduring fascination with “perverse, unobvious, not straightforward situations, where one person inflicts pain on another.”

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Danuta Stenka, front, and Malgorzata Rudzka in Mr. Warlikowski’s staging of “Electra” in 1997.Credit...Stefan Okołowicz/Teatr Dramatyczny

His stark, bloody 1997 staging of Sophocles’s “Electra,” his Warsaw debut, was poorly reviewed. Looking back in 2004, however, the critic Maciej Nowak wrote in the theater journal Notatnik Teatralny that, in that production, Polish theater “made contact with what was happening on the stages of Western Europe.”

By the time Mr. Warlikowski staged his first important opera — Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” in its French version, at the Polish National Opera in 2000 — he was beginning to be celebrated as an original voice, though still a provocative one. The 2001 “Hamlet” in which Mr. Poniedzialek (pronounced pon-ya-JOW-ek), in the title role, took his clothes off, was shocking when it played in Poland, and many audience members walked out, said Piotr Gruszczynski, a dramaturg who works with Mr. Warlikowski.

“A naked actor onstage was something totally new,” he said.

But this was Mr. Warlikowski’s international breakout: It was rapturously received when it traveled to the Avignon Festival in France, and an offer to work at the Paris Opera followed.

Mr. Warlikowski now works on two or three opera productions each year. Every two or three years, he develops a new work with the actors in the permanent troupe at the Nowy Teatr, and occasionally makes a show with his friend Isabelle Huppert, the French actress.

Ms. Huppert, who starred in Mr. Warlikowski’s “A Streetcar” and “Phaedra(s),” another work that drew inspiration from Greek myth, said in an interview that Mr. Warlikowski was a “unique” director.

“What he does is so daring,” she said.

Ms. Huppert added that Mr. Warlikowski always had a clear and definite vision, “but I never felt in the least manipulated by him — no, no. Of course, he is in command, but he gives you the sense that you 100 percent participate in his creation.”

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Isabelle Huppert, right, in “A Streetcar” in Paris in 2010.Credit...Pascal Victor/ArtComPress

Mr. Poniedzialek said that Mr. Warlikowski had more recently “stopped being so scandalous” and was “not so much interested in sexuality anymore.”

“Of course, he’s getting older,” Mr. Poniedzialek added. “I think he’s much more mature and much deeper now, talking about the human condition.”

Although Mr. Warlikowski had become wiser with age, Mr. Poniedzialek said, the director was still like “a little prince” — “closed in his own bubble” — and needed strong figures around him to help him realize his creative potential.

Karolina Ochab, a Polish theater impresario and the general manager of the Nowy Teatr, said she agreed Mr. Warlikowski was more a dreamer than an organizer, but noted, “For artists, this is normal.”

Mr. Poniedzialek said Mr. Warlikowski is very strong, and stubborn. “But on the other hand, he’s also very fragile,” he added. “It can really destroy him if the performance doesn’t go right, if actors are frustrated, if reviews are roasting him.”

In the interview, Mr. Warlikowski focused his ire more on a certain subset of star-struck audience members. “The worst public in the opera are these obsessed gays,” he said. “All these rich guys with nothing to do in their life, just following Anna Netrebko or Jonas Kaufmann on all continents. This is not a real audience for me.”

People like this, he said, and audience expectations of opera — that there will be pyramids in “Aida,” for example — can make the art form into a prison. But, he added, “If you are in prison, you must find a way to come out of the prison — in order to make you free.”

Tolek Magdziarz contributed reporting and translation assistance from Warsaw.

A correction was made on 
July 22, 2020

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a Polish actor. He is Jacek Poniedzialek, not Pondiezialek.

How we handle corrections

Matthew Anderson is the European Culture Editor of The New York Times. More about Matthew Anderson

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Be Daring, That’s His Direction. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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