Interview with Thaddeus Strassberger on the new production of Lucia di Lammermoor

Final preparations are underway at Opera Nova for the premiere of Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti, which will inaugurate the Bydgoszcz Opera Festival. Director, set and costume designer THADDEUS STRASSBERGER speaks about his interpretation of one of the most famous bel canto works, his collaboration with the Bydgoszcz company, and the contemporary relevance of Lucia’s story.

In your view, what is „Lucia di Lammermoor” primarily a story about?

Thaddeus Strassberger: Lucia di Lammermoor is a story about what happens when a person is denied the space to exist as they are. About how long someone can hold together under that kind of pressure.

I see a situation where someone has no place left to stand. Lucia’s inner life and the world around her are completely misaligned, and there is no way to reconcile that. What interests me is not a single event, but a process. It happens slowly, almost invisibly. She is not suddenly broken. She is worn down over time by forces that appear normal, even justified from the outside.

What makes it feel close to us now is how recognizable those pressures still are. Family expectation, religious structures, the need to conform, the fear of stepping outside what is accepted. None of these things necessarily look violent. In fact, they often present themselves as stability, as order, even as care. But from the inside, they can be suffocating. Lucia is asked, again and again, to deny something essential about herself, until there is nothing left that can hold together.

So for me, the opera is really about that point of no return. How long someone can live against their own nature, and what happens when that becomes impossible. It is not an abstract tragedy. It is something very real. By the time we reach the end, nothing has exploded. Something has simply given way.

Do you think that the title character – initially ethereal and delicate Lucia - can still appeal to the modern woman who is expected to be strong, courageous and independent?

Thaddeus Strassberger: Even though I myself am not a woman, as a director, it is fundamental to my role to put myself in each character’s position, as well as that of the entire audience and imagine what the impact might be. I think Lucia can absolutely speak to a modern woman. She refuses, at a fundamental level, to accept a world defined by male contracts, by her brother’s politics, by the structures imposed on her life. The tragedy is not about strength or its absence, but about the fact that her inner truth has no place to exist within that system.

In this production, that resistance takes shape in the world of the forest and its female presences. The fairies and Alisa are not separate from Lucia, but extensions of her inner life, where imagination and reality exist side by side. In nature, away from the control of her brother Enrico, she experiences a kind of freedom grounded in female companionship, something intuitive and empathetic rather than transactional. The Scottish forest fairies suggest a way of being that is fluid and unbound, something Lucia senses but cannot fully inhabit.

Alisa, in particular, carries a different weight. She can be understood almost as an ancient presence, someone who has seen this pattern repeat itself over generations. There is care in her, but also a kind of knowledge. She understands what is happening to Lucia, even if she cannot change it. In that sense, she becomes a bridge between Lucia’s inner world and the reality that is closing in around her.

What emerges is a portrait of someone who refuses to betray her inner truth, even when there is no way for that truth to survive. That is where Lucia becomes deeply contemporary. She asks what it really costs to remain true to oneself when the world offers no space for who you are. And in the end, that pressure drives her to a point of violence, not as an act of cruelty, but as the final, irreversible consequence of a world that has left her with no other way to exist.

Every production of „Lucia di Lammermoor” must confront the legendary mad scene. How do you approach this crucial moment - more as a vocal showcase, or as a deeply psychological turning point for the character?

Thaddeus Strassberger: The mad scene is the inevitable culmination of the entire psychological structure of the opera. Everything leads to this point. Nothing in it is accidental.

The expectation that a woman must always be strong becomes, in itself, a form of violence. Lucia is not lacking strength. She exists in a world shaped by figures like Enrico Ashton where that strength has no way to exist or be recognized. Surrounded by control and coercion, she does not fail. She fractures. The mad scene is not a display or a spectacle. It is a process of disintegration. We are watching a person come apart because there is no structure left that can hold her together.

I think of her as a shattered mirror. Once whole, now broken into sharp and irreconcilable pieces. Each fragment still holds something of who she was. Each one still reflects a truth. But the unity is gone. It cannot be restored. Under that kind of pressure, she cannot remain intact. She splinters.

And those fragments do not exist in isolation. They are carried by the other women on stage, women who recognize something of themselves in her. They have known that kind of rupture in their own lives. What we are witnessing is not just Lucia’s collapse, but something shared that extends beyond her.

You're not the only director, set designer, and costume designer in this production. Is this a creative endeavor, or a desire to maintain complete control over your artistic vision?

Thaddeus Strassberger: Opera requires a total vision, not as an act of control, but as an act of responsibility. When I work across directing, set, and costume, it is not about limiting collaboration. It is about making sure the work does not fracture before it even begins. If a gesture, a space, and a costume are speaking different languages, the audience stops inhabiting a world and starts observing separate ideas. In Lucia di Lammermoor that coherence becomes essential because the piece itself is about fragmentation. My role is to hold everything together long enough for it to break with precision.

That unity is never created alone. I work closely with collaborators like choreographer Maria Martins and lighting designer Maciej Igielski. Choreography is not simply movement. It is the physical expression of the inner world, the way emotion moves through the body when language is no longer sufficient. It defines how people exist in space, how they encounter one another, how tension builds or releases. Lighting is not just illumination. It shapes perception. It decides what is visible, what is concealed, what feels grounded and what feels imagined. It can divide space, isolate a figure, or blur the boundary between the external world and Lucia’s interior landscape. Their work does not sit beside the central vision. It is part of it.

Together with music director Tomasz Tokarczyk, we connect the physical gestures to the musical ones so that what might appear artificial in bel canto begins to feel like a direct and authentic expression of human emotion.

The set design reflects both the raw Scottish landscape and the aesthetics of bel canto. How do you translate the language of music into visual stage imagery?

Thaddeus Strassberger: For me, translating music into stage imagery begins with recognizing that bel canto is already an act of transformation. It takes something raw and deeply human and shapes it through a highly refined, almost architectural technique. The visual world follows the same logic. For this production, I am not interested in presenting nature as purely naturalistic, but as something vast and elemental that still carries the mark of human interpretation.

That is why the collaboration with the workshops of Opera Nova and  master Italian scene painter Paolino Libralato has been so important. What we created feels like nature, but also like the memory of nature, or perhaps its interpretation. It is distilled and slightly artificial, with a sense that something has been altered or even corrupted. You feel the scale and the truth of the landscape, but at the same time you remain aware that it has been constructed.

This is where it connects most directly to bel canto. The voice begins with a raw emotional impulse, but it is shaped and elevated through technique into something precise and poetic. The set works in the same way. It takes something wild and ungraspable and gives it form. What appears on stage is not nature itself, but emotion that has been processed and made visible, just as the music does.

In this production, you chose traditional means of expression, such as hand-painted landscapes and mirrors. Did you consciously avoid modern multimedia projections in this production?

Thaddeus Strassberger: I do not approach design with a fixed ideology about tools. I let the piece itself determine the language it needs. In other productions I have worked extensively with video and multimedia, but in here I felt that a more traditional visual vocabulary was more truthful to the work. There is something in this world that feels like a fairy tale, something almost mythic, and hand-painted landscapes, oil canvases and mirrors carry a tactile, human presence that supports that atmosphere in a way technology often cannot.

The striking painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, was fundamental to how I conceived the visual metaphor of the space. Painted in 1768, at the height of the Enlightenment, it captures a scientific demonstration in which a bird is placed inside a glass vessel and the air is slowly withdrawn while a group of observers watch. Wright was deeply interested in the intersection of science, light, and human emotion, and his paintings often stage moments where rational inquiry coexists with something far more unsettling. The canvas itself, now in the collection of the National Gallery in London, is remarkable for its use of chiaroscuro, isolating the figures in a kind of theatrical darkness that feels both intimate and clinical.

What resonates for me is not only the subject, but the emotional structure of the image. A living creature is enclosed within a system that is quietly suffocating it, while those around it observe with curiosity, indifference, or discomfort. That dynamic felt deeply aligned with Lucia’s situation. She exists inside a world that is controlling and airless, where something essential is being taken from her in plain sight. This informed a visual language that feels contained and pressurized, where nature is present but mediated, and where the sense of something vital being gradually withdrawn becomes almost tangible.

At the same time, it is not about rejecting contemporary techniques. I still use all the tools available to us, including subtle projections and moving stage machinery, but they are integrated carefully and almost invisibly. The intention is not to showcase technology. It is to ensure that every element, whether traditional or contemporary, contributes to a single poetic language rather than drawing attention to itself.

Although the opera is set in Scotland, which is reflected in one of the traditional costumes, I understand that the inspirations extend far beyond this Northern cultural context. What were the main sources of inspiration for the costume design?

Thaddeus Strassberger: The starting point is Scotland, but not as a fixed historical image. In this production, I am interested in layering different senses of time. The costumes draw from ancient Scottish mythology, from Celtic and druidic imagery, alongside the 19th century world of the opera itself. What emerges is a tension between something very old and something more modern, as if these different moments are existing at once. Even the Prince Charlie kilt, which is still worn in formal Scottish settings today, reinforces that continuity, so the costumes do not feel locked in the past but remain strangely present.

At the same time, I wanted to suggest a wider cultural influence, particularly through Enrico Ashton and the chorus. In the Victorian period, Scotland was closely tied to global trade, especially with India and the Far East, and I imagined that influence quietly entering his world. In the costumes, this appears through certain textures, fabrics, and colours that feel slightly displaced with exotic influences in the textures, colours and patterns. These details are not overt, but they create a subtle sense of tension, suggesting a society that is more complex and more connected than it first appears.

You have a rich and diverse cultural background, including ties to the Cherokee Nation. Does this cultural sensitivity influence your interpretation of „Lucia” - for example in the relationship between humans and nature, or in the metaphysical aspects of the characters?

Thaddeus Strassberger: I don’t consciously set out to “apply” my identity to a work like Lucia di Lammermoor. That can very quickly become reductive. At the same time, it would be disingenuous to pretend that one’s cultural background does not shape perception at a deeper, often unconscious level.

My connection to the Cherokee Nation brings with it a long tradition of oral storytelling and a worldview in which the metaphysical and the natural world are not separate, but intertwined and where female figures often carry a particular kind of spiritual and narrative authority. Equally, my life within British and Italian cultures, both of which are embedded in Lucia, historically and musically, forms another layer of understanding. These influences don’t manifest as direct references or imposed concepts, but rather as a kind of sensibility: an attentiveness to the unseen, to the permeability between worlds, to the idea that what we call “madness” may also be a form of perception.

So I don’t place myself into the work in any deliberate way, but I suspect it inevitably reveals itself quietly, indirectly, perhaps even in ways I cannot fully recognize. What interests me is not illustrating identity but creating a space where multiple ways of seeing the world can coexist, and where the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical feel unstable, porous, and alive.

This is your first opera production in Poland. How has your experience been working with the team of Opera Nova? Has anything surprised you?

Thaddeus Strassberger: Working with Opera Nova has been a very focused and grounded process. Poland clearly has a strong base of vocal talent, but what has been equally important to me is the level of preparation and consistency across the company. We’ve worked with three full casts, all of whom are making role debuts, and each has brought a serious, work-oriented approach to both the music and the dramatic material. The sense of ensemble is strong and the instincts that the artists have amongst each other is a strength of the company and the leadership of Maciej Figas.

What stands out is not a single moment of surprise, but a reliability in the way the chorus, ballet, and soloists engage with rehearsal. All departments arrive ready to work and to learn, and that creates a space where you can build something with clarity rather than persuasion. As a guest, my role isn’t to impose, but to focus that existing discipline into a shared direction.  In this way, the production emerges from a common understanding rather than from external pressure.

What would you like to convey to Polish audiences who come to see your „Lucia”?

Thaddeus Strassberger: What I want Polish audiences to take away from Lucia di Lammermoor is something not entirely comfortable to sit with. We live in a world that can feel arbitrarily cruel, and Lucia’s story is not about a fragile girl from the past. It is about what happens when someone is left with no space to exist as they truly are.

We tend to believe that people can endure anything, that strength is always possible if you just hold on. But this opera suggests something much more unsettling. Sometimes strength is not enough. Lucia does not break because she is weak. She breaks because she is alone, because she is not heard, and because the world around her keeps closing in without ever really seeing her.

What makes it so painful is how familiar that feels. This kind of breaking is rarely sudden. It happens quietly, over time, until there is nothing left to hold together. And what stays with you is not only Lucia’s fate, but the sense that there are people all around us enduring that incredible pressure without anyone taking notice.

If would like to convey that we give more attention to a sharper awareness of that fragility in others. We do not always see where the limit is, and we do not always recognize the cost of the expectations we place on people. The opera asks us whether we notice before someone suddenly shatters and simply disappears under the immensity of the unbearable pressure.