A man stands in front of the projected image of a naked woman, her body imprinted on his white shirt.
A couple embraces passionately on the floor as dappled light filters across their bodies.
A man sits alone on a narrow bed. “I will be waiting for you,” he says, as the lights dim.
These are some of the poetic, surprising images from Ivo van Hove’s staging of Leos Janacek’s song cycle “Diary of One Who Disappeared,” which will come to the Brooklyn Academy of Music April 4-6.
Angular, lyrical and passionate, “Diary” — written for tenor, mezzo-soprano, a small chorus of three women, and piano — is rarely performed in concert, and it’s even more rarely staged. But it is pure drama. Based on an anonymous series of poems published in a Czech newspaper and completed in 1920, it tells the story of a young man who falls wildly in love with a Gypsy girl, abandoning his village and family to follow her.
It’s an unusual project for van Hove, the Belgian director who has become one of the most important voices on the international theater scene. He has directed more than a dozen operas as well as classic and contemporary plays; adapted films for the stage; and soon will tackle a signature American musical, with his revival of “West Side Story” scheduled to come to Broadway next year.
But a song cycle?
“I haven’t done anything quite like this before,” he said in an interview at the Comédie-Française in Paris, where he was rehearsing a new production, “Electre/Oreste.”
“You have to invent more,” he added. “An opera composer is thinking about staging, but with this you have to create a theatrical world. It’s bringing alive something that was just going to stand there and sing.”
Van Hove and his longtime partner, designer Jan Versweyveld, drew from Janacek’s own history for the production. The story of “Diary” parallels the composer’s obsession with Kamila Stosslova, a married woman 35 years his junior, who inspired some of his most important works.
“The black Gypsy girl in my ‘Diary of One Who Disappeared’ — that was you,” Janacek wrote in one of his more than 700 letters to Stosslova. “That’s why there’s so much emotional fire in the work. So much fire that if we both caught on, we’d be turned into ashes.”
Van Hove said: “I always adore when an author writes something that is a matter of life and death, which this is, I think, to Janacek. Some of my work, like ‘Electre/Oreste’ or ‘Boris Goudonov,’ is very political. But this one is about why we are here on earth, what is this life of ours?”
Pulling out a few sheets of paper covered in neatly written notes, van Hove said that he always began a project by writing down his initial thoughts. “It’s important to remember why you want to do it,” he said. “This piece is really human. It’s not about gods and dramatic events; it’s about things that everyone has experienced. Everyone has been in love with someone who hasn’t been in love with him or her, or has experienced platonic love.”
He added that he had long been a fan of Janacek’s music; his Flemish Opera production of “The Makropulos Case” in 2002 was one of his first forays into opera. He suggested “Diary” to the Muziektheater Transparant, a small, innovative opera company based in Antwerp, Belgium, with which he has long collaborated; he wanted to bring out Janacek’s ability “to write dialogue that became music, to turn language into notes. Even when they are singing, they are talking.”
He and Versweyveld began to read Janacek’s diaries, and his letters to Stosslova. (The relationship remained almost entirely platonic, and most of her letters were destroyed by Janacek, at her request.)
“I think Janacek saw his feelings reflected in the poems,” van Hove said. “It’s a kind of self-portrait. We started to see a framework to let this short song cycle shine.”
Since the mezzo-soprano part is slight, he decided to give the Gypsy girl, Zefka, more of a voice. He asked Belgian composer Annelies Van Parys to add more music for the character, which she based on Romany folk songs.
“It’s full of colors, very personal and sensitive,” said Marie Hamard, who will sing the role in Brooklyn. “Annelies gives a true thickness and density to the feminine voice.”
Van Hove also incorporated extracts from Janacek’s diaries that are read by an actor (Wim van der Grijn) who is dressed to resemble an older version of the cycle’s tenor protagonist (Andrew Dickinson), emphasizing the similarities between composer and character.
Working with the dramaturge Krystian Lada, van Hove and Versweyveld decided to make this main character a photographer, and the stage space, in part, a darkroom. “It’s an atelier, a world of imagination, in which the pictures that have been taken bring back the past that is sometimes forgotten,” van Hove said.
Versweyveld said the challenge was to create an intimate space in which the character looks back on his life and love, but also to evoke the woods, trees and natural light that he is recalling. The solution was an apartment in which the character lives and works, permeated by golden, mottled light when the memories of glimpsing and meeting Zefka are evoked.
“I like to design things that are functional,” Versweyveld said, adding that the mid-20th-century-modern set was inspired by the interiors of the photographer protagonist’s home in the Antonioni film “Blow Up.” Similarly, he added, “the light may be striking or beautiful, but it always serves a purpose. When it comes through the walls like light in a forest, it is opening up the space in the most dramatic moment in the show.” (Unlike in many van Hove productions, there is no video element.)
Van Hove said his preparation for directing an opera or vocal score begins with finding a good recording, and working with a dramaturge who knows the music intimately. “I really study; it takes me three times as long for an opera as for a theater production,” he said, adding that while he doesn’t read music, he has learned to understand a score in terms of “where the opportunities are for a director.”
“If you are not deeply interested in music,” he said, “stay away from it as a director, because there has always been a director there before you: the composer.”
There are also practical issues to take into account. “You have to be sure,” he said, “that everything is absolutely constructed for singers, much more than with actors, because they have to take care of what they are singing, respond to others on stage, and also be able to see the conductor.”
“It’s really music theater,” said van Hove, who added that the show’s genre — a combination of spoken word, music and visual elements — greatly interested him. His adaptation of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” incorporating music by Weber, Schoenberg and Nico Muhly, will have its premiere April 4 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.
“What can it give us? What can it bring?” he added. “I would like to think about this in the next years.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.