Luc Bondy, Swiss-Born Theater and Opera Director, Dies at 67
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Version 0 of 1. Luc Bondy, a Swiss-born stage director whose productions, known for their shrewd probing of human behavior and attention to acting subtlety, were featured in Europe’s most prestigious theaters and opera houses, died on Saturday. He was 67. Odéon Theater in Paris, where Mr. Bondy was the director, said on its website the cause of death was pneumonia. Unconfirmed news reports said that he died in Zurich. Since receiving a diagnosis of cancer in his 20s, he had often had health problems. Mr. Bondy’s range encompassed the classic and the modern. In theatrical drama, he directed Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen as well as Ionesco, Jean Genet, Peter Handke and Yasmina Reza. He directed operas by Mozart, Verdi and Strauss and by the contemporary composers Philippe Boesmans and Marc-André Dalbavie. Mr. Bondy was a widely respected figure in Europe. President François Hollande of France said in a statement that Mr. Bondy had “embodied, by his personal history and his exceptional work, the culture of Europe.” But his reputation didn’t shield him from controversy in the United States, where he is best known for his production of Puccini’s “Tosca” for the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2009. (It concluded its most recent engagement at the Met on Tuesday.) The production, spare, dark and sexually daring replaced Franco Zeffirelli’s sumptuous, hyper-real “Tosca,” which had been a Met favorite and a tourist attraction since its first staging in 1985; it created an immediate brouhaha. The curtain call on opening night elicited a wave of booing; several critics weighed in with corrosive reviews; and Mr. Zeffirelli, who hadn’t even seen it, called Mr. Bondy a “third-rate” director and declared his tinkering with “Tosca” to be “a crime.” The New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini wrote, “Mr. Bondy probably wanted to rid his ‘Tosca’ of stock clichés, yet his heavy-handed ideas are just as hackneyed.” When that production returned in the spring of 2010 with a different cast led by Patricia Racette, Bryn Terfel and Jonas Kaufmann, Mr. Tommasini wrote that Mr. Bondy’s production remained “drab, confused and full of gratuitous strokes geared to rattle ‘Tosca’ devotees.” Though he also declared the opening “one of the most exciting performances of the Met season to date, thanks to three exceptional singers.” In any case, most critics acknowledged that however notorious Mr. Bondy’s “Tosca” had become, it was not representative of his work. Mr. Bondy was far from a self-aggrandizing extravaganza creator or provocateur. In operas, including Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” and “Don Giovanni,” which he created in the early 1990s for the Vienna Festival; in “Hercules,” an oratorio by Handel that Mr. Bondy staged in modern dress when it appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2006; and in theater works including Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” Mr. Bondy became known for illuminating character and finding unexplored depths in the emotional lives portrayed on the stage. Manuel Brug, the music critic for the German newspaper Die Welt, said in an interview on Monday that Mr. Bondy was a great director who made the most of great collaborators. One example, he said, was Mr. Bondy’s production of Richard Strauss’s “Salome,” which was created for the Salzburg Festival in 1992. It starred the soprano Catherine Malfitano and Mr. Terfel, the bass-baritone, and was conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi. “You could feel his great sensitivity in his work,” Mr. Brug added. “He was at his best when he was exploring relations between human beings. With him it was always about shadow and light. He made you look in the corners. It was not so much that he told me something new about the text; but he did show me the most subtle things in the heart of a piece. Not newness, but richness and nuance. When you saw a good Bondy production, you went away happy.” Mr. Bondy was born in Zurich in July 1948, into a family of intellectuals — the French newspaper Le Figaro reported that his father, François, was a philosopher — and grew up there and in Paris. He studied mime with the French actor and teacher Jacques Lecoq, and then spent much of the early part of his career in Germany, working in Frankfurt and Cologne and helping lead the Schaubühne theater in what was then West Berlin. Mr. Bondy’s survivors include a wife and two children. His most recent productions include Chekhov’s “Ivanov” at the Odéon in Paris this year, and Mr. Dalbavie’s opera “Charlotte Salomon,” at the Salzburg Festival in 2014. “He was Swiss but with a French twist,” said Mr. Brug, noting that Mr. Bondy was a bit of an outsider in Germany, where his career began after a period of political and protest theater. “French elegance, French taste — and French melancholy, that too,” Mr. Brug added. “He was never a guy for spectacles. He was not a political guy. His work seldom had political impact. He started doing pantomime, and he always loved magicians onstage. He had tricks, he showed tricks — but subtle tricks. He would never let an elephant disappear — but a mouse, yes.” |