Louis Andriessen has collaborated with the versatile British artist Peter Greenaway on three projects: a video and two operas.
Andriessen had been admiring Greenaway’s films for a long time before they collaborated. He recognized something of himself in the way Greenaway opposed ‘intellectual material and vulgar directness’ in his films. Instead of using the ‘ordinary’ narrative forms, he used analogies, allegories and metaphors, resulting in a multi-layered structure. Greenaway’s aesthetic principles are based on late seventeenth century European Renaissance painters such as Vermeer, Hals and Velazquez, and he has often tried to translate the spatial conception of their paintings to film. In this video interview both Greenaway and Andriessen talk abou the relation between film and opera. 

‘Opera offers the filmmaker the kind of freedom that cinema cannot afford.’

 Peter Greenaway

Andriessen:

We have been able to do without a plot since Meyerhold. His working method with techniques of montage and tableaux vivants formed a starting point for new developments in theater and music, which have persisted up until today. In the early 1960s, to compose an opera was the most stupid thing one could do as a ‘revolutionary’ artist. It was considered a bourgeois art form with boring music and outdated scenarios. Yet transformations in theater have brought about changes in opera since then. I have composed for theater for a long time and hopefully contributed to its transformation.

Both Greenaway and Andriessen wanted to transform opera from a form of theatre dependent on the nineteenth century narrative to one inspired by the experimental work of Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Greenaway considers the story essentially as the ‘cement’ that keeps events together.

In 1991 they made the video M is for Man, Music, Mozart, in which the music is performed by jazz singer Astrid Seriese and ensemble. It was commissioned by British television for the Mozart Year for which six composers were invited to make a video on Mozart.

On November 2, 1994 the opera Rosa (a horse drama) performed by De Nederlandse Opera premiered. The libretto is written by Peter Greenaway, who also directed the production and was co-responsible for decor and costumes. Rosa is part of a series of twelve operas that has a conspiracy against composers as a theme.

Greenaway also wrote the libretto for the opera Writing to Vermeer (1999). He co-directed it with Saskia Boddeke. For this production Greenaway also made a number of film contributions.

‘M is for Man, Music, Mozart retroactively becomes a kind of overture to the two operas I made with Greenaway’.

 Louis Andriessen Sources: Louis Andriessen – Gestolen tijd (2002), Yayoi Uno Everett – The music of Louis Andriessen (2006), Willem Bruls en Chris Engeler: Naar een vertrouwen in beelden: een debat over twee wereldpremières bij DNO (in: Odeon 9/35, 1999)