Berliner Morgenpost: At your last annual press conference you said Mozart was “the hardest one”. Why? What’s so difficult about Mozart?
Donald Runnicles: It’s the airiness with which you have to play the material, and the transparency, that are so important with Mozart. It’s the purest form of chamber music; you can hear every tiniest detail. Mozart casts are very small, so everyone is basically performing as a soloist. Getting it all to sound as homogeneous as possible is a challenge. In the Romantic music of the 19^th century there’s a lot more scope to roughen the delivery of a particular note in the score, but that doesn’t work with Mozart. Added to that you have the different layers: his stuff has a fragile quality and also depth. It is entertaining and yet - as in Don Giovanni - unfathomable. As Artur Schnabel once said: Mozart is too easy for young musicians and too difficult for old ones.

When you’re presenting Mozart, what do you find yourself tweaking most in the orchestra sound?
You can’t be too heavy-handed with the material. A forte in Mozart is not about volume, it’s about animation. We’ve spent a lot of time studying the ways conductors have played Mozart in the past, looking at the understandings reached by John Eliot Gardiner and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. You have to know how and at what point the vibrato comes in in the violins, if you want to achieve a musical intensity at that moment.

German orchestras have a darker sound than many others. Is that a problem when playing Mozart, if it’s all about airiness and transparency?
No, we just have to know how to use these darker nuances. With Mozart there’s often a sadness to the arias which are about human feelings. I’m thinking of Constanze in the “Abduction from the Seraglio” or Fiordiligi in “Così fan tutte”. With those roles you can work a lot with different shades, and the dark sound, which our orchestra and many other German orchestras are known for, is very well suited to this type of music.

When Mozart operas are being cast, the parts often go to young singers. Are they more reliant on the conductor than older singers?
As was the case with “Abduction”, I’ve been working with each individual singer on the piano. With young voices you usually have to take more care to prevent them from straining themselves. The thing is to sound natural. In Mozart’s operas the characters are very often young, having their first experiences of life. Singing Mozart is pretty much the trickiest of exercises - and it’s a sacred art. There’s nothing for you to hide behind. People notice if your singing is bang on the mark or not.

Have you conducted “Così fan tutte” often?
Yes, all over the globe. I’m a big fan of this particular opera and I’m thrilled that we’re mounting a new production at the Deutsche Oper Berlin after a break of many years.

It’s a story of love, fidelity, human weakness, moral conviction. Not what you’d call a straightforward comedy, is it?
No it isn’t, and that’s not all. The arrogance, frivolity and vanity reflected in the fateful wager provides a lot of food for thought. Our very life, our relationship to love and our loved one is up there in the dock. The finale is in C major, but one is hard put to find a gloomier, more contrived finale in the history of opera. Will these two pairs of lovers ever be fully at ease and one with their partner again? The conclusion is not a conclusion at all, it’s simply the end of the opera; the story isn’t over by a long chalk. Maybe the couples will split up sooner or later. Obviously as a conductor you don’t have to go there. You can enjoy it as pure entertainment, a piece of brilliant comedy.

What can you say about the musical quality of the opera?
The music is a worrying portrayal of these young people’s feelings. With his music Mozart is peering into people’s heads. It mirrors the masquerade, the shifting between fake and true feelings. It allows listeners a lot of freedom to fantasise, to get in touch with their own feelings as well as with the feelings of the characters. Mozart’s great operas are all wondrous works of art: not a single note is wasted.

One year after the French Revolution Mozart is questioning the institution of marriage. It amounts to a swan song to the established role models. Does the work have a socio-political dimension?
Definitely. Earlier, when he was writing “The Marriage of Figaro”, he was already addressing the question of a person’s right to the first night. All the feudal, old-fashioned, arrogant, chauvinistic rules and rituals are consciously questioned by librettists Beaumarchais, Da Ponte and naturally Mozart himself. Society plays along with the masquerade in “Così fan tutte”. The opera blows the top off all that. So art is relevant. We must constantly be questioning things. At the Deutsche Oper Berlin, too, we reflect on whether we can revolutionise the thinking of our audiences through our selection of a work or the way we present it on stage.

Da Ponte’s libretto had an eventful ride with audiences and critics in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. There were multiple attempts to “rescue” the work by adapting it to death, pseudo-improving it or grafting storylines by Shakespeare and Calderón onto it. Is that at all comprehensible to us today?
It’s very hard to go back a hundred years in time and transpose ourselves into the minds and the aesthetic of another generation and society. Back then Da Ponte was considered much more radical than he is now. When Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung” premiered, the work was considered radical; now we just think of it as a masterpiece.

How do you prepare for a premiere? What are you looking for when you study a score?
I asked for a new score of “Così fan tutte” and I try to look at the work with new eyes. I often do that. I also do it when I’m conducting symphonies that I know very well. I try to read the works as though I’m tackling them for the first time. New productions of a work are always being mounted, which means the biography of responses to that work is always evolving. People develop. I’m not the same person I was 30, 35 years ago, when I was approaching the work for the first time. You’re going to be married, you’ve got kids, you’re older. Suddenly you don’t feel immortal anymore. All that alters my relationship to a piece like “Così fan tutte”.

Are there things you drew from “Abduction from the Seraglio” that you and the musicians have been able to apply to “Così fan tutte”?
The way we approach the staging of the works and the questions we ask ourselves are identical. It was a conscious plan to close last season with “Abduction” and open the new one with “Così”. So we’re on the right track from the word go. We’re picking up from where we left off.

Why did the Deutsche Oper Berlin opt for Robert Borgmann as director?
He’s never directed an opera before but has had a lot of success as a theatre director. We talked things over for a year and then decided that we wanted to do “Così fan tutte” together. In the process I’ve been making the acquaintance of a very interesting and pleasant young man. He loves the music and is very intense about it. We’re all very excited.

How much musicality do you expect from a director of opera?
With a work like “Così fan tutte” it’s pretty much a condition. There are always exceptions to the rule. Luciano Pavarotti couldn’t read a note. Does that mean he should have been banned from singing? That said, it’s nice if the director doesn’t just like the music but also can relate to the piano piece or the orchestra’s score. It’s very helpful if director and conductor are on the same page, as it were.

Isn’t it a little risky entrusting big-name works by masters like Mozart to a first-time director?
Yes, yes, and that what makes it so exciting! But it wasn’t a decision we took lightly. Naturally Robert Borgmann’s experience of the spoken word is totally different to ours. And sometimes it’s especially exciting to watch someone interacting with singers in a different way or coming at a work from a new angle.