An artwork should emancipate itself from its creator and their personal circumstances that may have motivated them to create it, and point far beyond toward something supra-individual and general. This fundamental assumption is contradicted by the clear parallels between Alexander von Zemlinsky's DER ZWERG and the composer's own life which, when viewed superficially, make it easy to interpret the opera as an autobiographical self-portrait. How do you view the relationship between life and art in the case of DER ZWERG?
They are not two different entities. There are biographies later on with knowledge of the work. That is why I often have a problem with solely basing a piece on a composer's biography. It can serve as a source of information, but I have never considered it to be the only source. And in other areas as well I have never really found it to be very productive. With Zemlinsky I think it's more interesting that the piece is made more open through his lived experiences.

In the short story by Oscar Wilde that served as the basis, the dwarf is initially a figure of otherness. And he happens to be a dwarf, ultimately as a metaphor for this fact. Yet Zemlinsky injects this with personal experience. It is known that he was of short stature, sources say 1.56 or 1.58 metres, and he was at odds with this all his life. So there is a sense that Zemlinsky takes this metaphor of the dwarf literally. Two layers thus pervade one another: a metaphor for otherness with Oscar Wilde, and a very concrete thematisation of literally being "short-changed" with Zemlinsky. On top of that Zemlinsky turns the dwarf into a singer, a musician, which is an even stronger reference to his own personal experiences. Biographically I think that is the most decisive point. Not so much that a character can clearly be identified as Zemlinsky, I would neither say nor stage that so exclusively, but rather the fact that a new doorway bursts open through lived experience.

Whereby the author of the libretto Georg C. Klaren, who was nearly thirty years younger than Zemlinsky and in his early twenties when the libretto was made, clearly tried to write a "psychoanalysis" of Zemlinsky into his text. Although it is no longer knowable how aware the composer was of this ...
At the very least it is striking that Zemlinsky continued to seek out libretti that deal with a sort of wounded masculinity. That is the case in the FLORENTINISCHE TRAGÖDIE, which is about a husband who is deceived by his wife and must proceed to fight his rival. A near topos of this topic in Zemlinsky's own life can be found in his affair with Alma Schindler, who would later become Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel. She put this affair to a very dirty end and left him with great wounds and trauma, giving one the sense that they are being reprocessed through Zemlinsky's works. There is thus certainly a causal relationship in the selection of the pieces.

But then, what I find even more interesting, there is a similar wound to this composer who is so uncertain about his place in music history. For the avant-garde he is too conservative after a certain point, but for an upright 19th-century proponent he writes too much, to use the phrasing of the time, "decadent music". This created a situation of a permanent search for his own position and status. I believe that both experiences found their way into the piece. This is what sets ZWERG apart from, for example, FLORENTINISCHE TRAGÖDIE. The latter is a marital drama that can very easily be read as a pure romantic tragedy. ZWERG, however, is simultaneously an aesthetic assessment of Zemlinsky's condition.

DER ZWERG at the Deutsche Oper Berlin is not being played as part of a double evening together with a second one-act performance. What have you done instead?
Playing the piece on its own was what the house wanted at first. Initially I was confused, but then upon second glance I thought this decision was very consistent, as it is an entirely cohesive and consistent work in itself. But then I felt that the work could be given a sort of prologue, primarily to further emphasise its uniqueness. My suggestion was Arnold Schönberg's "Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene" from 1929. First it was a purely musical idea, since I felt that the viewers would hear Zemlinsky differently if he were preceded by Schönberg. During the conception process it became apparent that Schönberg can most strongly be scenically connected to ZWERG if the two works aren't artificially combined. Even if they both even have a similar underlying layout: "impending danger – fear – disaster" is how Schönberg works. That could actually be the subtitle for ZWERG.

I developed the actual musical theatre configuration from the very prominent piano part in Schönberg. We divide this part between two players whom we show on the stage and who narrate a situation that can be historically proven: Zemlinsky teaching music to Alma Schindler. From this scenario unfolds a romantic drama, trimmed down to ten minutes, that precedes ZWERG and thus reveals a sort of basic trauma underlying it. It's not so much about cause and effect for me, though. In scientific theory there is the concept of induction and justification. "Induction" is the (sometimes very random) trigger of the discovery of a theory; "justification" is the evidence of its objective validity or intrinsic accuracy beyond this induction. That is also how I view the two parts of the evening.

On the "justification" of the dwarf: what topics in ZWERG do you see addressed beyond any sort of autobiographically motivated "tragedy of the short man"?
The piece can be viewed as a critique of a very superficial society: as it is revealed at the beginning by the women's chorus how strongly the Infanta ensures her own beauty from her environment, this is very similar to modern-day Instagram culture in which everyone is courting for a "like". It can be read as an artist drama that shows a singer who introduces himself with the "Song of a Bleeding Orange", which functions almost as a mise en abyme, and who flounders in society with his art. And it can be read as a sketch of the discrepancy between self-image and outside appearance that affects everybody regardless of size, looks and age: for nearly every character in the piece there is a wide rift between how they wish to be perceived, how they think they are perceived, and how others truly perceive them. This type of "schizophrenic rift" is at its most extreme for the dwarf, of course. But his tragic fate is also a metaphor for a very familiar phenomenon. I believe that everybody sees traits in themselves, internal or external, that we do not want to acknowledge. And the more one shies away from them, the greater the shock of the realisation when one can no longer keep up this self-delusion.

A challenge to every director is the character of the dwarf, and the question of how to bring him to the stage.
I had decided very early on against casting a particularly short tenor in the role, who may have to be given make-up to be made ugly. At the same time I did not want to go the opposite route and say that it's all about what is attributed to someone, completely internalising the "dwarf-like" traits. I then decided to bring this conflict between the character's self-image and outside appearance to the stage with two characters. The title role is played both by a tenor whose casting was based solely on presence and musical quality, and by an actor of short stature.

At first the singer merely dubs his voice over the actor. As the piece progresses these two characters conflict more and more with each other. They are no longer congruent, no longer a body plus a voice, but rather two bodies who act with and at times against one another. And for me that was the way to bring this conflict within the dwarf to the theatre. It is interesting that this superficially clear allocation of singer = self-perception and actor = outward appearance is not quite so clear after all. For example, there is a scene in which the singer is standing all alone in front of the mirror and depending on the stance in which he looks at his reflection, he finds himself beautiful and loved or he wrangles with himself and finds himself "dwarf-like".

It seems remarkable to me that, in the libretto, it is claimed that the dwarf had never seen himself in the mirror, yet his "Song of the Bleeding Orange" is a condensed synopsis of his fate.
I also believe that the dwarf is consciously or unconsciously aware, ultimately, of how others see him. He just doesn't express it directly. He transforms it into art, into a song that reveals everything about his existence and self. And after this song you see with other eyes the naïveté with which the dwarf moves through the piece, and you have the feeling that a person is quite actively keeping a bitter truth at bay. This makes this character very ambiguous yet at no expense to what makes him tragic.

What resources do you use to tell the artist drama?
We make very strong use of the space. This is very concrete. It could be a sort of private chamber musical for the king in which music is performed on the occasion of his daughter's, the Infanta's, birthday. At the same time, with its whiteness and composers' busts up on the wall, the space is abstractly elevated to a sort of "private Elbphilarmonie". This turns the space into an abstract playground where art is formed and where everyone who moves automatically forms a relationship with the art.

The Infanta's friends do not really take this hall seriously, play with the instruments, wobble around on the chairs and do not keep the desks arranged. A nightmare for a musician! Yet for the dwarf the room is almost holy, and he is excited that he gets to conduct a large orchestra there. This hall becomes a metaphor for the dwarf's status as an artist. Whether he is accepted, whether he is celebrated, or whether he is even taken seriously as an artist. Or whether the whole thing suddenly morphs into a nightmare of characters saying: you cannot do anything, you are nothing, and we do not want what you want.

And how do the characters look?
That's the central question of the piece! But of course it also concerns the costumes in particular: there is a clear divide between Schönberg and Zemlinsky in this regard. We illustrate the Schönberg piece, which would generally be considered the more modern and also more resistant and contemporary music, with more historical accuracy, namely in the style of the early 20th century. So Schönberg's music may sound different, with a sort of Viennese melody.

On the other hand we try not to make ZWERG too colourful and decadent. The piece itself is in constant synesthetic uproar, evoking textures, colours, shimmering effects both in the libretto as well as in the orchestra. We try not to double that, but rather to create a film before which the wealth of this music's sonic colours will hopefully seem even stronger. That is why ZWERG is being illustrated in a somewhat more reserved, modern way.

How would you characterise the second main character of the piece, the Infanta?
The Infanta is actually the second tragic figure in the piece. The work itself is often accused of being misogynistic. Yet I find that the Infanta is not a character who ruins the dwarf out of pure cold-heartedness. Of course that is how she is on the surface. But at the same time we see how strongly enveloped she is in her friends' web of expectations. From the first moment she is hailed through song as the most beautiful of all, and there is this expected behaviour that she stand at the centre of this society with composure and beauty. Yet then we notice how touched she is by the dwarf in her first duet with him. One gets the impression that she sees a bit of herself in him. And she is astonished at herself that she could suddenly have an emotional connection with him. At once there is a sort of convergence – and then moments of shock when the Infanta breaks away. One learns that she puts on a cold mask because she never learned how to appear vulnerable. I believe that is one of the most touching moments in the piece.

And then, with Ghita, there is a second woman figure in the piece …
The Infanta ultimately delegates the dirty work of telling the truth to the dwarf to her waiting girl Ghita. And Ghita is entirely overwhelmed by it. She is caught in a moral conflict that we are all familiar with. It is the question of whether it is in the other party's best interests to always discover the truth. There are plenty of situations from everyday life that make one feel as though keeping silent on a certain topic may be better for the other person. It makes one guilty of omission, yet the other person's life is still sometimes happier if they do not know everything. This is the conflict that Ghita enters into. And with her I find the most interesting question, namely how she handles it. At the beginning the character is equally driven by compassion and zeal for the truth. But at the moment when these two principles come into conflict with one another, she despairs of it entirely. And when she then overcomes this she is unable to rhetorically and elegantly give the dwarf the truth. She slams the accusation of ugliness before his eyes, which he of course cannot accept – and must then determine that she has no means to convey the bitter truth in a gentle or constructive manner. And she fails here. That is also what makes this piece such a great tragedy.

It is a tragedy that affects all three figures. The Infanta, who cannot break free of her emotional incrustation. Ghita, who enters into an actually unresolvable moral conflict. And the dwarf, who from the very start suffers from having virtually broken away from a part of himself. And he dies the second he is confronted with this truth. That is what is interesting: the dwarf's actual cause of death is not further specified in the libretto. The dwarf dies upon realisation of the truth. And philosophically that is an immense thesis, of course. That in the moment when truth is known, death enters immediately.