Jonathan Mills, Director of the Edinburgh International Festival
interviewed by Jonathon Brown
Edinburgh people like me can be very possessive about 'our' festival - and I speak after fifteen years away. The three weeks of excellence and adventure gave us what the French call a 'formation' in the arts that few could enjoy that lived far from the Thames or the Hudson Rivers...
Some events are etched permanently in our grateful memories, such as the glorious moment Leonard Bernstein, still facing the audience, launched the gleaming New York Philharmonic upon Ravel's Boléro, as an encore, with a bending motion of his bottom... Or the Leningrad Philharmonic scorching us with Mozart's Requiem the night their city became St Petersburg again and there was not a call box free for blocks around the hall... Some moments of cringe too remain, as when the Edinburgh audience applauded Radu Lupu two thirds of his way through Weber's Invitation to the Dance, ignorant of the reprise of the gentle introduction... Images of provincial incompetence stay in the mind too, as in the photograph of Rudolf Nureyev at a bus stop when the Festival hadn't bothered to book him a car to go to rehearsal across town... But sometimes I muse that the most profound tribute to the power of this event, even now when people have far more opportunity to travel and far more exposure to 'the arts', is that one remembers vividly the events one didn't actually go to: my parents didn't take me to hear Callas when I was 2, nor Klemperer when I was 6, and in my stupidity twenty years later I preferred to hear Rostropovich ahead of an Athol Fugard play - yet these missed chances stock my shelves of festival highlights. This year I shall miss the Festival again but it is the first time in fifteen years that I have been so ratty about it. Things are changing there.
The Edinburgh Festival is older than the National Health Service and most would agree it is in better shape. Both were born in the late 1940s, in the shadow of the Second World War, a time that blended hard-won optimism and a sort of robust practicality, as if to say, we need our health and this is how to go about it. And the arts are a crucial part of our health. Europe has since enjoyed six decades more like peace than any similar stretch in history, yet this relative comfort has not diminished our needs, though it has seen their dynamic shift, in our lives and in our history. Part of this shift has seen what we call 'the arts', for want of a better term, acquire an almost institutional character - the term 'the arts' is part of this process - that both protects their clout, so to speak, but threatens their freshness.
This history could be traced through the succession of directors of the Edinburgh Festival. In the sixties and seventies there was Peter Diamand, never photographed without a large telephone receiver and a cigarette, whose crowning achievement was to stage the 'perfect' Carmen, with Domingo and Berganza, after a decade of negotiations. Then John Drummond in the early 1980s brought an eclectic intelligence and was the first perhaps to experiment with quite thoroughly 'themed' programmes, most notably and most successfully with his Viennese year. He was followed by Frank Dunlop who was more of a song-&-dance man in charisma, carrying all his paperwork in a wheeled shopping bag and asking Horowitz if he would play Edinburgh for a reduced fee (he wouldn't); Dunlop himself staged an opera by Weber in a winningly magical manner and tried to loosen things up. Dunlop was followed by market forces and for many the Festival lost its panache such that one Edinburgh festival-goer I know said to me, of this year's programme, "There's an opera by Szyanowski, I didn't even know he'd written a bloody opera." Um, well, enter Australian Jonathan Mills, and he's going to sort that sort of nonsense out.
A Fellow of the Royal Society, Mills has quite a brainy CV, having taken the degree of Bachelor of Music in composition, at Sydney - he studied with Peter Sculthope there and later studied piano and composition with Lidia Arcuri-Baldecchi and Bruno Bettinelli in Italy - as well as being a Master of Architecture (Acoustic Design) from RMIT University, all to pep up a list of 'arts administration' jobs starting with the Blue Mountains Festival nearly twenty years ago and focussed more recently on Melbourne. In 2005 he took the Prix Italia for Sandakan Threnody for tenor, chorus and orchestra. (His work has not yet been included in the Festival and he has said he won't do so. Not yet, I hope.) In 2006 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Festival and regulars regard the 2008 programme as the first with him well in the saddle. If I have tried to set the stage for him it is because this is a Festival Director to whom context is all; his programme is no collection of this and that but seeks to respond to a context and that context is, this year, Europe.
He speaks carefully, in an accumulative syntax and with something of the softly articulated, cultivated Australian accent that made the cricket commentaries by Jack Fingleton and Alan McGilvray amongst the most mesmerising spoken English radio has ever broadcast. Mills starts from the beginning and builds from there.
"The Festival was founded in 1947, in part to respond to the circumstances in Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War II. When the Festival was started there was rationing, when the Festival was started it was quite a radical step in the first couple of years to invite an orchestra like the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to play because only a couple of years earlier all the members of that orchestra would have been considered enemy aliens. The Edinburgh International Festival was not a solution to the very many problems at the time but it was a very small stone in what has grown to be a very large wall, in terms of the development of a different idea of Europe, and a different consciousness of what collectively the different parts of the broadest interpretation of what "Europeanness" could actually be, in order that the horrors of the second - and indeed first - World Wars could not be repeated. It is no exaggeration to say that Edinburgh was chosen as a result of the fact that it was one of the very few towns sufficiently intact to cope with a festival."
"These are the circumstances in which Edinburgh emerged and they are circumstances one should never forget - circumstances that are not simply a desire by a tourist committee or by an economic development board to establish a festival for the purpose of tourism; it is something much broader than that. Much of the continuing success of the Festival is that it's a festival that has a greater meaning to those people who are participating, whether they are artists or audience, it's about the rôle we have played in the European project, a small role, but a very significant one."
In the recent timely to-do over the Irish vote, I wonder if the Europe dreamt of in those founding years is now fulfilling the dreams?
"This is a very interesting question. In the broadest sense Europe may well disappoint, Europe may well enrage, there are all the things that engage or infuriate us more or less, but this is not to suggest for a moment that we should give up on it or that it's a lost cause. I think that as long as there are people gathering to celebrate the arts, there will be this kind of contested debate. It's not whether this is encouraging or discouraging, it's the fact of it happening that is essential to the very fabric of Europe, vital to the very essence of what Europe was about and is about. Let's not get caught up in whether it is infuriating, that is part and parcel of the human condition - a truism but a truism we need to take on board as part of the way in which we exist. When things are infuriating, when they are simple, dare I say it when they are simplistic, that is of far greater concern to me than when things are complex, complicated and contested. What I am saying about all of this at the moment is that in 2008 it's a timely moment for the Edinburgh International Festival to remind itself of this, to remind itself of how far things have come and how far things will go in the future. "
"It's about internationalism. On one level we came to understand what western European internationalism meant, and we've been living through that for 60 years. But in 2004 that idea of internationalism started to shift and change, because the expansion of the European Community meant that the debate would be more diverse, perhaps more frustrating for a while, certainly more interesting I would suggest, what with 27 nations, 500 million people, and cultures as diverse as Estonia & Cyprus. Of course there are going to be challenges and what I am asking the festival-goer today to think about this year is how that debate might change, how it will inevitably shift, how countries such as Poland, Hungary and Romania will bring that debate into the future; and how, if you like, the border lines, the fault-lines, the political visions, all of the things that could be described as defining it have actually shifted and are under constant discussion. And so, things that were once taken for granted must now be thought through in a completely different way; things like the fact that a country that was once divided from us by a border is now on this side of the border. So the questions of politics, questions of geopolitics, of geography, and by extension much more interestingly questions of cultural identity, of European identity, these questions are being defined not only by what is formally inside Europe, but by what are the aspirations of countries just beyond the formal borders of Europe - such as Bosnia, such as Turkey; but by extension, in terms of a broader sweep of civilisation, these are questions not just about politics, geopolitics and so on, they are questions of cultural identity, of spiritual, religious, and even psychological identity, so, I have dedicated the programme of the Edinburgh International Festival to exploring works that in some way or other deal with the question of artistic borders, or lack of borders, vanishing borders - questions that are cultural, spiritual and not just physical, geographical and political. And so by extension we are looking not just along our borders but beyond them to countries not just like Turkey but Palestine and Israel too, in a way that I think is essential for international festivals."
He cites for instance the play Dybbuk to be presented in the Festival's first week by the Polish company TR Warszawa in which, within the fault-line of city & ghetto, that's to say a culture and a subculture, there is a search for identity and a problem with identity concerning the relationship between Poland and its Jewish population, broadly suggesting things that need to be dealt with even in contemporary Poland. (For those of us who recall the dissident appearances of Tadeuz Kantor in the 1970s two points strike home; one is that such edgy excitements have always had a home at Edinburgh, but secondly that it was Richard Demarco's fringe programme and not the 'official' Festival that brought Kantor over, against all the Communistic odds and some tut-tutting from Edinburgh worthies.) The term 'dybbuk' means in Jewish folklore a restless soul that inhabits a living person, a term therefore with great metaphorical mileage in the context of a country and its past. On a more tuneful note, Mills then pointed to the three-day visit this year of the Budapest Festival Orchestra performing music that has specific gypsy connotation:
"They are the emblem of people who live beyond borders, who have a very specific culture, nomadic, roaming; and the question of European identity from a gypsy perspective is a massively interesting one. The theme of the Festival, 'artists without borders' is a loose one, what we are doing is inviting people to embark upon a journey, a journey of ideas, of personal discovery. And I mean discover for yourself, it's not for me to shove this down your throat."
"There is another motivation for this look at Europe; at a time when there is a greater level of convenience and movement, it is more important than ever that we should not take this journey for granted, and that this has been hard fought for; therefore we must recognise the very recent tradition, the very recent achievements of which we are the beneficiary, with a strong sense of history. As an Australian with strong Scottish ancestry, coming to Europe this time has surprised me; the experience of living in Europe is not foreign to me [he has lived in the UK and in Italy] but what has struck me this time in coming to Europe is the degree to which people are very much contributing to this discussion, very much connected to it, and that is expressing itself both in terms of expansion of the EU but also potentially in what you can describe as the contraction, the shrinking of the EU as well, in the sense of devolution to smaller entities. You could argue that there is a specifically greater urgency in the desire in those countries seeking devolution, and greater interest in the tendencies in those countries, desires which would also obviously in no way suggest they do not feel themselves a part of Europe. Indeed in Scotland itself, the oldest alliance in Europe is the alliance between France and Scotland and it should never be forgotten that in so many of its attitudes, ideas, institutions and opinions, Scotland has looked to France and Europe before it has looked to its immediate neighbour to the south for inspiration. We see Galicia, the Basque country, Kosovo, for example, all flexing their independence in ways simply unimaginable 20 years ago."
"It's a very exciting time and a very interesting and complex time to live in Europe; it's a time not just for the superficial description of Europe as a place of strong traditions, but as a place where certain kinds of allegiance, certain kinds of history are being written and rewritten constantly in ways that redefine those traditions and tightly held customs."
"The central rôle, the biggest, the most important thing I do as director of an International Festival is to ask a very simple question, which is, what is the journey of the Festival, what is the journey worth taking. I am embarking on a very different kind of journey next year, and a very different one the year after; because what I think I am doing is not asking questions on a constant basis about the nature of an international festival from a European point of view, but from a wider point of view; in 1947 the axis of power in the world was most definitely along a line that could be drawn from London to Washington; it has shifted in Europe and probably far sooner than we think it may not even involve Washington at all."
He admits there to being provocative but, like many people with good experience of China and the Pacific, let alone India, their perspective is one that sees American domination as recent, in world history, and as ever with domination, transient. Yet our conversation seems quite politically charged and I ask him about this element in the scheme of things.
"I haven't thought to be particularly political in the choices I have made in the programme; much is surprisingly lyrical rather then political - there are discoveries to be had, such as "Jidariyya" from the Palestinian National Theatre: at first you'd expect a bunch of very angry young people from Ramullah, and they have every right to be angry, but instead what you'll be confronted with is incredibly lyrical, a gentle, beautiful life-affirming piece. And of course this is appropriate; this is going to be the case because the great tradition in Arabic culture is their poetry, the art they can carry with them. They are saying, we are first and foremost poets, if we need to come to terms with what is it to be a Palestinian today, this is a question of defining a poetic language."
On a larger scale, on a European scale, indeed on a global scale, I suspect that - to use a favourite word of his - our journey to define a poetic language is the motto that guides Jonathan Mills.
For information and to book seats visit www.eif.co.uk or telephone: [+44] (0) 131.473.2000
Dybbuk, presented by TR Warszawa, can be seen at the King's Theatre between 9th & 11th August.
Jidariyya, presented by the Palestinian National Theatre, can be seen at the Royal Lyceum Theatre between 14th & 17th August.
The Budapest Festival Orchestra is in Edinburgh for three concerts on 23rd, 24th & 25th August.
King Roger, an opera by Szymanowski is at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre on 25th & 27th August.