“My role has never been to invent new worlds,” he explains, “but to act as the curator of a vast collection from the whole of history and to choose the bits of our world that are right for the opera I’m working on. As I travel around, I collect images that seem to pop out at me and I store them in my head. Then, when I am starting to put together initial concepts for a production of a specific opera, I go shopping in my interior charity shop of ideas to see what would work. There is a huge treasure trove that we can pick from and sometimes you can take an item and transform it into something new… a director’s or a designer’s ‘brand’ does not have to be associated with the same aesthetic all the time, and by taking on both roles I instinctively challenge myself to be bolder, to take risks, to push things further. The ideas I come up with early in the process are not necessarily representative of the final staging, but they provide a starting point for my formal research – I love to research. I tend to identify the soul, the DNA of an opera early on. Once you find its core aesthetic, you must explore it deeply. You can’t veer away from it, even if details can change as you go through the process of bringing the opera to the stage."
(Thaddeus Strassberger)