"A chicken that looks wonderful, but can also be eaten."

Leaving home was a very important time for me.

My father was a Soviet director born in 1937. As an artist, he did not survive the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. In his heyday, he made avant-garde theater in Siberia, where I was born in Tomsk. Niches kept opening up in the Soviet cultural scene. At that time, a director and theater manager was an unquestionable authority, a local deity so to speak. The theater that my father ran received state support, although the responsible bodies had no idea what they were supporting. My father's downfall came when television came to record one of his successful productions, which drew the attention of the censorship authorities. As a result, he lost his position.

My education, which took place during the period of perestroika, i.e. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, still took place within the coordinates of the old Soviet system. As a child, I began training in drawing and, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, found my way to a kind of abstract expressionism.

To avoid being drafted into the army at the age of 18, it was helpful to start studying: As a student, the reprieve was a bit longer. I decided to study acting at the Shchukin Theater Academy. This had been founded in 1914 and was affiliated to the renowned Vakhtangov Theater. It offered the best acting training at the time, while the MChT, the Moscow Artists' Theater, and the acting school that belonged to it were going through a difficult phase. The Shchukin Theater School was something like Hogwarts from the Harry Potter saga. A monastery school, but with a very creative, constructive atmosphere. The training was a course; you were evaluated right from the start, every etude and every lesson was also an exam.

As one of the best students on the course, I was accepted into the ensemble, which was a great honor. I belonged to the Vakhtangov Theater for four seasons and learned how to act on the big stage. Then I dropped out because I realized that the creation and development of a new performance was the most exciting thing for me and that I wasn't interested enough in reproducing a performance in the repertoire. Then there were experiences like this: Outside it's spring, inside on a rehearsal stage you're listening to the director discussing the concept, and you think you feel a complete loss of reality and the present; you suddenly no longer know what year and what world you're living in, as if it's completely irrelevant to what you're doing. In addition, an incredible club scene developed in Moscow at the beginning of the millennium. At that time, we Russians discovered the world that had been closed to us for so long: contemporary theater, contemporary music and painting.

I started to just "hang out", which became a really important time and experience. Because that's when I found out how to communicate with people. That's the most important thing for a director: how do you connect with people, why do we all need each other and why are we all dependent on each other? How can we inspire each other? As a theater person, you can't practice your art alone. I then also gave scenic classes at GITIS, the Russian Academy of Theater Arts. It was during this time that I found my first sponsor. He made it possible for me to give my first performance in Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In it, I raged against my own past; I didn't want any text or actors on stage. Anna Abalikhina, the choreographer I work with regularly and who is also in Luisa Miller, saw the performance at the time (we didn't know each other yet) and says she remembers it as a horrible performance. Today, at every rehearsal here in Vienna, I notice how I work with the tools I learned in that damn theater school. I remember how much it shaped me. It shapes your whole life. Incidentally, I was already in Vienna once at the beginning of the noughties, on the occasion of an artist exchange at "brut". And I recently put on a staged concert here with Klangforum Wien.

In 2012 in Perm with La Voix humaine by Poulenc and in the same year Medeamaterial by Pascal Dusapin/Heiner Müller with Teodor Currentzis conducting. I was associated with the theater in Perm for many seasons, with productions at the opera such as Love for the Three Oranges by Prokofiev or at the theater with Maskerade by Lermontov. Since then, my work has shifted to German-speaking countries, and I have also directed an opera and a Gershwin musical at the theater in Giessen.

I worked on Bluebeard's Castle by Bartók in Wuppertal in May 2022. My contact with Wuppertal came about through a visiting Russian dramaturge, Ilya Kucharenko. Ilya had been my most important collaborator in opera direction since the beginning with La Voix humaine. I learned everything about opera directing from him, but I feel the need to apply this knowledge perhaps a little differently than he did. For all my discipline and the need to be able to "extrapolate" scenic decisions, I don't have to anticipate everything, I can also leave things open. Due to such methodological and aesthetic differences, we have now both taken a break, but Ilya was also an important partner in my preparation for Luisa Miller.

I never really want to show the author on stage. But Verdi, as a mature man, writes and composes the story of a young woman, and it seems to me that he identified with the father and that it is Verdi's eyes that look through Miller's mask at what is happening. We tell the whole thing as a flashback: a homeless, elderly man at the bus stop - that's the image you and I found together. And on the stage behind it, the whole world and the fate hidden behind the appearance of the old, decaying man unfold.

I am now 50 years old and have understood that I am building on Vakhtangov's fantastic realism. Vakhtangov, the actor, director and great innovator of Russian theater, once said: "With Stanislavsky, a chicken on a table looks absolutely realistic, but that's why it's not interesting. With his antipodean Meyerhold, the chicken looks wonderful, but you can't eat it. I want a chicken that looks wonderful but can also be eaten." That is my training, that is my school. My theatrical reality is made up of fragments, feelings and imaginations.

A crime was committed for the happiness, for the future of this young person, a person was murdered. Rodolfo was thus taken hostage by his father. You have to imagine that: As a child, you can only close your eyes to such a mortgage; it takes a tremendous effort to open your eyes even a crack to perceive your own situation. Rodolfo was broken by his father before he was born. His fate is even more terrible than Luisa's. Luisa is also confronted with evil, but she still has a real chance of escaping, even if her attempt to flee with her father fails. On social media today, we can practically watch rich, powerful parents murder their obviously gay son in front of our eyes by forcing him to marry a woman.

Federica is part of this glamorous and merciless world of power. When she returns to the place of her supposedly carefree, "innocent" youth, she celebrates sentimental memories. But we soon understand that she grew up in this world, which we visualize as a sauna populated by killers and escort girls. Now she returns as a rich and powerful aristocratic widow, but the façade of her performance quickly falls away and she reveals herself to be an Eastern European "gopnik", a woman socialized in a criminal milieu who has come to power, money and prestige.

Walter and Wurm are both villains. But perhaps Wurm is the worse of the two. Walter has misunderstood his role as a father and perverted it, but Verdi concedes that his behavior has a certain understandable justification. I really ask myself - and have no answer: isn't it better to deal with an obvious villain like Walter than with a functionary like Wurm, a cowardly bureaucratic desk jockey who is prepared to do anything? What would an autocrat be without the hundreds of thousands of hangers-on and denunciators who profit from his misdeeds? As I said, I have no answer.