In 2015, in a radio quiz, Stéphane Lissner was only able to identify one of the five arias that were played to him.
The malice was great: the opera director recognized neither "La Wally" nor "La forza del destino", "Madama Butterfly" or "Tosca"!
However, one can also see things differently: Lissner, who privately prefers to listen to chamber music, as artistic director of three music theaters and an opera festival of international renown, always preferred music drama to singer opera, the risk of playing it safe and the friction with the unknown over wallowing in the familiar.
Coming from spoken theater, the native Parisian took over his first theater of national importance in 1988, the Théâtre du Châtelet.
The mayor of Paris at the time, Jacques Chirac, was trying, as part of his competition with President Mitterrand, to set up an urban counterpart to the National Opera, whose glory had faded since the Liebermann era.
Extreme reduction and concentration
The money flowed, Lissner had the means to give the Châtelet a second golden decade until his departure in 1997, eighty years after the "décénnie fabuleuse" under the aegis of Gabriel Astruc.
The “Wozzeck” that Daniel Barenboim and Patrice Chéreau developed together with Franz Grundheber and Waltraud Meier became emblematic: extreme reduction and concentration of scenic resources in the service of text and music.
In addition to Barenboim and Chéreau, Lissner engaged other luminaries at the Châtelet who accompanied him in his subsequent career – Bondy, Boulez, Christie, Gardiner, Grüber, Rattle, Salonen, Stein and Wilson are some of the best-known names.
Lissner's second major feat was rescuing the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence from a crisis that threatened its existence in 1998 and re-establishing it on a permanent footing.
The historic venue was renovated and modernized, and an academy was established under the patronage of Pierre Boulez, which in some ways paved the way for the Lucerne Festival Academy, which was five years younger.
Above all, in his ambitious and advanced programming for Aix, Lissner emphatically articulated the conviction that “opera must respond to the major political and social issues of our time”.
At the opening of the newly established Don Giovanni festival, he had the old master Claudio Abbado and the very young Daniel Harding conduct alternately, but Lissner also demonstrated the courage to take risks in his next three posts as artistic director.
At the innovation-hostile La Scala (2005 to 2014) he commissioned several works and, with Susanna Mälkki, put a woman on the podium of the orchestra for the first time;
at the Paris National Opera (2015 to 2020) he had the young sculptor and filmmaker Clément Cogitore stage his first opera, Rameau's "Indes galantes" with sensational success;
at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples (since September 2020) he is presenting Ludovico Einaudi's "Winter Journey" at the end of this season, a contemporary work about boat people in the Mediterranean.