The magic Mozart - and life

By BARRY DAVIS
Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ will be on show for Jerusalem opera lovers on December 28 and 30 (photo credit: GAYA SA’ADON)
Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ will be on show for Jerusalem opera lovers on December 28 and 30
(photo credit: GAYA SA’ADON)
Music is more than the sounds we consciously capture with our ears. As with any art form, a great deal of imagination and emotional energy goes into the creative continuum, which, hopefully, eventually produces a work worthy of our attention.
Monica Waitzfelder certainly puts a lot into her work, and has a better handle than most on understanding the psyche that goes into both creating the magic of operatic music and the spellbinding onstage action.
Waitzfelder is currently in town to direct the forthcoming Jerusalem Opera production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which will be offered for the opera-loving public’s enjoyment at the Jerusalem Theater on December 28 and 30, closing with a third airing at Ashdod’s Performing Arts Center on January 3. Joining Waitzfelder in the creative process are Jerusalem Opera Choir conductor Oded Shomroni, the Jerusalem Oratorio Choir, and the Ashdod Symphony Orchestra with conductor and Jerusalem Opera artistic director Omer Arieli.
The Brazilian-born Jewish director has been in the music business for more than 30 years, but she has also had her capable fingers in an entirely different line of work.
“This is my first time working with the Jerusalem Opera,” she says when we meet at her apartment hotel in Nahlaot, overlooking the hustle and bustle of the Mahaneh Yehuda market. “I came some years ago, to work at Hadassah Hospital. I am a doctor. I am a psychiatrist.”
Music came first.
“I studied music from the age of three,” she notes. “Music was important for my parents and I liked that.” It was, says Waitzfelder, a natural development.
“We didn’t think about it. We just learned it. It was just like that.”
The director’s parents escaped Nazi Germany before World War II and some of their co-religionist fellow émigrés were on hand to help the youngster move smoothly along her evolving musical path.
“There were some fantastic teachers around, because they came from Vienna and all those other places and they didn’t know how to work [in other fields] and they gave lessons to the stupid little kids,” Waitzfelder laughs. “So we had fantastic teachers. We had the former director of the Vienna Opera living in our building, so it was completely crazy. I didn’t appreciate that as a kid. For me it was normal. But later, when I grew up, and realized the people we had there – it was crazy.”
It was a Holocaust-induced boon for musically inclined Jewish Brazilian children. “We just saw them as poor people giving us lessons. Afterwards we realized how lucky we were.”
Music may have been a commendable leisure-time pursuit for the daughter of Holocaust survivors living in Brazil, but it wasn’t really an acceptable profession. So betwixt ivory tickling and expanding her musical knowhow, Waitzfelder got down to the serious business of studying and getting herself a safe, income-generating profession and duly became a psychiatrist.
Still, her musical funny bone kept twitching and, at the age of 28, she relocated to France determined to land herself a position at the Paris Opera. Easier said than done, or was it?
“I came to the Paris Opera house and said to the man at the door that I want to work there,” Waitzfelder recalls. “He said to me: Yes, dear lady. You’re not the only one,’ and he began to laugh.” But the Brazilian was made of sterner stuff. “I told him that I really want to work in the opera.”
Her then-linguistic deficiencies came to the rescue.
“I didn’t speak French very well at the time, and I asked him with whom can I speak. I was very insistent and he gave me a number to call. I made a mistake in French. I changed one word and, instead of saying ‘I want to speak to this man’, it came out it as ‘this man that sent me.’” That spot of unintentional namedropping got Waitzfelder an audience with the man in charge of hiring and firing staff at the Paris Opera.
“He asked me who sent me to him, and I told him I sent myself,” she recalls. Rather than being summarily dismissed the two got into a free-flowing discussion about music.
“He said I was completely crazy and that he would give me this opportunity [to work at the Paris Opera]. The only thing I ask is choose your schedule and please get out of my office.”
So it came to pass that Waitzfelder got her foot in the door of the French operatic scene, as an intern and, happily, the first opera she worked on there just happened to be The Magic Flute.
Things went well for the budding opera professional and Lady Luck soon brought her into contact with feted Italian opera director Giorgio Strehler.
“I was his apprentice. That was great for me,” Waitzfelder says. “I worked with him for two or three years. After you work with Strehler, you just say that and everything opens up for you.”
She returned to the Paris Opera as a bona fide professional and over a 20- year period, she gained experience at all levels of opera production, including directing.
Things were going well for Waitzfelder in the music sphere, but she eventually reverted to her initial career choice.
“I went back to being a psychiatrist, for 10 years,” she says.
That must have been quite a transition.
“You know, when you work in opera you are in the middle of madness,” she laughs, “or maybe you should just say, a fantasy world. That sounds better.”
So, would it be accurate to surmise that Waitzfelder adopts a psychiatrist’s approach to opera production? Does that give her deeper insight into the inner emotional machinations of her fellow professionals?
“I like working with actors and I work with feelings,” she observes, adding that her two areas of professional pursuit shared common ground.
“I think the opera is very interesting for my psychiatrist’s work, and I think a psychiatrist’s work is very interesting for opera.”
She says she is not alone in that belief.
“In France today, and I think in Israel too, medical students have to study theater, not to be an actor, but they have a teacher who teaches them about the relationship with the patient. I have a cousin who is a doctor and she told me there is going to be an article in all the big papers about how medical students who have worked with the arts work much better with patients.”
Makes perfect sense to the opera director.
“You know, in the beginning, healing was an art.
It became very scientific. It is scientific, but not only scientific.”
By now it had become abundantly clear that, medical training notwithstanding, and after all these years in the business, Waitzfelder is still as enthralled with opera as she was back in those early Parisian days. That goers for her take on Mozart, too.
“The idea behind this production of Mozart’s masterpiece, The Magic Flute, with my original directing, is growth,” she posits. “How to overcome and to grow without losing the link with the magic of life, the song of life, with the magic and song of nature, with ourselves and with others around us.”
Some may relate to opera as a fantasy world, or melodrama, that only relates to the microcosm of the stage. Waitzfelder feels that art and day-to-day life are indivisible.
“Sometimes we are full of courage and decisiveness to take on what life throws up at us and sometimes we are not. Sometimes we are too stubborn to understand what is required of us. Sometimes we believe in ourselves, and other times we don’t. There are days when we feel lazy, and we also recognize our limitations, and can understand and exceed them. Or not. That is our daily challenge. The idea is to try to find there a bit of magic and a bit of song, every day…”
For tickets and more information: Jerusalem – *6226 and www.bimot.co.il, (02) 560-5755 and www.jerusalem-theatre.co.il. Ashdod – (08) 956-8111 and www.mishkan-ashdod.co.il/