Peter Sellars watched the rehearsal and wept in the dark.
It was a recent afternoon at Purchase College, north of New York City, and an ensemble was going over a soft yet cataclysmic passage in Matthew Aucoin’s “Music for New Bodies.”
A group of singers was almost wailing the word “down,” over and over, as an instrumental undertow seemed to stretch time into a yawning void. The music made plain the terror in the text — Jorie Graham’s poetry of cancer treatments and climate change — and the cheeks of Sellars, the production’s director and one of the most revered figures in the performing arts, grew wet with tears.
Among his collaborators, Sellars is cherished for this openness with his feelings. He wraps anyone and everyone in a bear hug. He releases sudden honks of laughter. He cries.
“He allows himself to be impacted,” said the soprano Julia Bullock, “and releases his emotions very easily.”
“Music for New Bodies” arrives at David Geffen Hall on Thursday as part of the American Modern Opera Company’s summer residency at Lincoln Center. Sellars’s production is in the pared-down, nearly ritualistic style for which he’s become known. With barely any set or props, the singers and instrumentalists are the focus, onstage together under moody lighting, in shifting formations that have the charged drama of Baroque paintings.
“I made the staging, but staging is too fancy a word,” he said in an interview. “It’s just — you can see the music.”
The show is part of a busy moment for Sellars. On Sunday, “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” a folk tale adaptation that reflects on sexual violence through a meeting of electronics and traditional Indian music, premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France. At the end of July, Sellars will unveil a grim double bill of the “Abschied” from Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” and Schoenberg’s “Erwartung” at the Salzburg Festival in Austria.
“Music gives us a way to poetically address things that are really painful to talk about,” he said. “You have to find a way to touch it without being abusive or exploitative or pornographic, but in these pieces you can really live in those spaces nobody has words for.”
About 40 years ago, Sellars came to Purchase to mount a trio of landmark stagings of Mozart operas. At a time when it was still unusual — and hotly debated — in America for directors to update these canonical works, he set “The Marriage of Figaro” in Trump Tower, “Don Giovanni” in Harlem and “Così Fan Tutte” in a roadside diner. Together, they constituted his anatomy of the excesses and despair of the Reagan era.
Sellars was not quite 30, and the productions, captured in widely seen films, cemented his precocious reputation. The “Così,” the critic Peter G. Davis wrote, “will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
On a break from “Music for New Bodies,” Sellars — now 67 but still with a boyishly vertiginous shock of hair, tropical shirts and endlessly varied combinations of beaded necklaces — walked from the rehearsal space across a lobby to the Pepsico Theater, where the Mozart cycle was performed. It was his first time inside since then.
“It’s the same,” he said, peering down at tiny ballerinas milling around onstage amid giant flowers, part of a children’s dance festival. “That’s great to see.”
Sellars, though, has kept changing. While he still produces vivid distillations of pieces from the past, his aesthetic is generally more minimal now, and his choices usually more obscure and less plot-driven than “Figaro.”
Perhaps most significant have been his collaborations on new works with composers including Kaija Saariaho and John Adams, with whom he created, according to the conductor and his frequent collaborator Esa-Pekka Salonen, “the most important body of work in contemporary opera.”
The Mozart series and “Nixon in China,” developed with Adams and the librettist Alice Goodman and premiered in 1987, set off Sellars’s career in earnest. Since then, he has often seemed to be a step ahead of much of the field, predicting — and shaping — the arts landscape. If cross-cultural collaborations are now the norm, and spare semi-stagings have been made necessary by budgetary belt-tightening, that’s in no small part a reflection of his impact.
“Considering the state of arts funding and the withdrawal of government support, we have to live a little more intelligently with what the resources are,” he said. “And hopefully you let that guide you to more radical choices.”
Sellars infuses even his most stylized work with hot-button issues. Working with the conductor Teodor Currentzis a decade ago, he filled out Purcell’s unfinished “The Indian Queen” with texts by the living Nicaraguan novelist Rosario Aguilar. It was a harrowing immersion in, as Currentzis said in an interview, “the operation of the colonial machine.”
Some roll their eyes at this sort of thing, and he has had his share of cloying failures that flatter liberal pieties. But at their best, Sellars’s stagings so relentlessly embody the music that they don’t feel didactic; they feel human and elevated at once. Their theatrical and emotional power is of the simplest, rawest kind: watching people be vulnerable together on a stage.
“He is so concentrated on the basics of theater,” said Markus Hinterhäuser, the Salzburg Festival’s artistic director. “Why is there theater? Why is the human being expressing something through it?”
Sellars began with puppets. It was the 1960s in Pittsburgh, and, barely 10, he apprenticed himself to a local marionette theater whose founder, Margo Lovelace, had cosmopolitan ambitions.
“‘Rumpelstiltskin’ was set in Egypt with Egyptian music,” he recalled. “‘Beauty and the Beast’ was set in Japan with koto music. Each show had music from somewhere in the world.”
The exposure to global traditions, and to the avant-garde styles embraced by Lovelace, swiftly expanded his horizons, and theater provided a refuge amid family turbulence.
“There is some way in which I do understand those classic opera plots,” he said. “I get that level of emotion. But it’s also why mostly I do things that are very deeply healing and are about taking people who are suffering and going to the other side with them.”
By high school, Sellars was instructing his classmates in puppetry. “But it took too long to teach them,” he said, “so I started doing plays with people.”
He directed dozens of pieces in those years, and dozens more as an undergraduate at Harvard, where word began spreading that a young genius was doing things like producing Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” at the college swimming pool. Boston, an early music hotbed, embraced him, and he began exploring Bach and Handel.
The films of the three updated Mozart operas made his name shorthand for youthful brashness. “When I was a student in Greece,” Currentzis said, “our teachers at the conservatory would basically say, ‘Please, do whatever you want with your life, but never watch this Peter Sellars.’ And of course the first thing we wanted to do was watch Peter Sellars.”
Sellars wrangled vibrant clarity from difficult-to-stage 20th-century works like Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise” and Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre.” His modern staging of Handel’s “Theodora,” also released on video, drew radiantly authoritative performances from Dawn Upshaw and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. And his stark productions of Bach’s Passions with the Berlin Philharmonic translated the music into spartan, poetic gestures.
Along the way, he organized genre-melding festivals in Los Angeles; Vienna; Adelaide, Australia; and elsewhere, becoming a convener and instigator as much as a director.
“A lot of my life is supporting other people’s work, which is a pleasure, because it’s not just about you,” he said in his sunny, book-crammed house in Los Angeles, a few days after rehearsals ended at Purchase. “Being with lots of different artists, in lots of parts of the world, changes how you think and feel, and also makes you realize that Western music isn’t just Western. Everything is a composite.”
For the generation that grew up with his work, Sellars is, according to Aucoin, 35, “a kind of model for how to live through your art” — emanating, Aucoin added, “an encompassing spiritual intensity.”
That isn’t always comfortable. “The rehearsal period can become very, very intense, because he goes deep into the performers’ psyches,” Salonen said. “Sometimes there are tears — but not of pain or anguish. Tears of overwhelming emotion.”
Currentzis views Sellars’s disarming transparency as crucial to his method. “He becomes absolutely open and unprotected,” the conductor said. “So the other person also feels obliged to take off any defense he has, and shares a story, and 99 percent of the people start crying. That’s the first step: to bring people to a point that they become themselves. Not protected supermen, but heartbreaking, suffering, very human beings. Then the piece starts.”
At Purchase, his notes to the performers were about the lucidity of the text (“It’s the first thing the audience hears all night, so you don’t want it to be a blur”); about imaginative nuances of color and phrasing (“The tone should be like your mom is talking in the kitchen and you overhear her”); about the way in which certain gestures would support the singing (“Get really quiet and still, and that will focus it musically”).
And then he was done. Though there were still issues to deal with, Sellars decided to give the ensemble Saturday off. Even given his zeal — what Bullock called “the demands and energy required of everyone sharing a space with him” — he rarely insists on using every minute he’s given.
“If you get it to where people are on the edge of something amazing, you don’t keep hammering away,” Sellars said. “If it’s in an amazing place, the next step will be amazing. But let that next step belong to them.”
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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