Interview with Anna Niwińska – Maria Sartova

Interview (excerpts)

Anna Niwińska: CHow did you start off in this field of art? With your exceptional career as a soloist, one would have expected you to train young vocal artists. You do teach singing, of course, but you are first and foremost a stage director.

Maria Sartova: This was not an easy decision for me. I simply returned to my first love, drama. My mother loved music and when I was a child I went to the conservatory to learn how to play the piano. So it became natural. Then it appeared I had a nice voice and I could sing and I was ecstatic at the idea of combining my two greatest passions.

At one point in time, I felt like changing – or, rather, slighly altering – my career path. AT that time I was very fortunate to work with a remarkable director, Bronislaw Horowicz, who taught me several key rules and gave me valuable advice as to what I should do to become a director.

I started to shoot documentaries – all of which dealt with music – and I learned a great deal. I had to get organised, to conceptualise images and sounds. Quite honestly, if I could begin all over again and choose my profession, I would begin by choosing direction.

A.N.: But with your musical expertise you could have become a director in a specific line of work. Your opera work is not the same as directing plays. Have your musical background and professional career significantly helped you in your work in musical productions?

M.S.: Of course. It was very helpful. First of all, I was aware of the huge amount of work and the difficulties that soloists had to face. But I do know that the more demanding it is for an artist to act, the easier it is to sing. It may not seem to make sense, but that’s the way it is. The liberty you acquire by embodying a character is reflected in your vocal performance.

A.N.: Why did you choose opérette? What is your relation to this musical genre? In musical circles, opérette is often regarded as the poor parent of opera, a minotr genre that is looked down upon.

M.S.: I have never made a clear distinction between what some consider as “good”, “less good” or “bad” plays because I think what matters most is the execution, the interpretation or the direction which can be good or bad, regardless of the text. Personally, I am very fond of Offenbach and French opérette that I can really relate to.

Unlike Viennese opérette, which is highly popular in Poland and is sentimental and bloated, French opérette is full of humour and abstraction. This abstraction conveys a great sense of modernity and it even makes it timeless.

Nowadays people tend to dislike and to avoid sentimentalism and that is precisely why I think French opérette is reaching its climax!

A.N.: How about Orpheus in the Underworld?

M.S.: Now that’s a challenge! Actually, my début was with Orpheus in the Underworld I played the part of Eurydice at the Wroclaw Opera and I hated it at the time! In Poland, the German-style performance was in and itw as completely different from the French original. Much later, in France, I discovered a version of Orpheus in the Underworld that really enchanted me.

It was funny, it was very much in tune with the times, in terms of the social, erotic, political and philosophical issues. It was about us and the hypocrisy that surrounds us.

If you consider the year when Orpheus in the Underworld was written, you have to admit how innovative, courageous and incredibly contemporaneous it was. I tried to extract as much as I could from the original version by Halévy and Crémieux.

I brought about minor alterations to the vocabulary to make it more familiar to modern-day spectators but the text was very contemporary in the first place.

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