Luc Bondy: Opera, theatre and film director who was celebrated round the world

When news of Luc Bondy’s death appeared online, the first reports were in five different European languages. Not so surprising, as the celebrated Swiss opera and occasional television/film director began his career as a theatre director, and was in demand all over the world. He directed 60 plays and 16 operas in his 30-year career. Libération summed him up as a “small man with bright eyes who never walked without a book in French or, more often, in German. Perfectly bilingual, he admitted to not knowing what language he dreamt in.”

Though said to be uncomfortable with English-language texts, Bondy staged several plays latterly at London’s Young Vic, and his earlier work had included Shakespeare, and Samuel Beckett, whose estate was fastidious about granting performing rights. As an opera director – from the sustained praise for his Covent Garden Don Carlos in 1995, to when his Tosca was booed at the Metropolitan Opera in 2009 – Bondy was representative of a European artistic sensibility. President Hollande said that the director had “embodied cultural Europe through his personal history and exceptional work.” In a 2013 interview Bondy said: “I have no nationalistic feeling; my identity is like those trees that have many roots.”

His brief at the Met had been to replace Franco Zeffirelli’s much-loved, but artistically moth-eaten 1985 Tosca. He did away with the candles Tosca traditionally places around the body of Scarpia, the would-be seducer whom she has just stabbed; and, worse still, edited out her traditional suicide leap from the parapets of Castel Sant’Angelo. Bondy’s intention was to emphasise the sensuality of Puccini’s music, but it was perhaps not a good move to do this by showing Scarpia having an orgy with three prostitutes. Bondy claimed to be shocked by the booing, and by the reverential attitude of the audience: “I didn’t know that Tosca was like the Bible in New York.”

Those of us lucky enough to have seen Bondy’s close-focus-on-Herod’s palace version of Salomé at Salzburg or Covent Garden in 1992 saw him at his startling best, concentrating on the neurotic family bonds that destroy people and even societies, but allowing the starry singers, who included Anja Silja, Bryn Terfel and Catherine Malfitano, to give their best performances. It catapulted Bondy into the first rank of opera directors and made all the great houses compete for his services.

He began as a stage director. Having trained in Paris in 1966 with Jacques Lecoq, a proponent of physical theatre and a mime artist, Bondy got his first job in 1969 in Hamburg as an assistant at the Thalia Theatre. Bondy’s acting credo was simple, though often neglected: “All over the world you must teach actors how to play together and not play by themselves.”

His first professional engagement was in 1971, when he staged The Fool and the Nun by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz at Göttingen. He was remarkably in touch with international developments in the theatre, for his next play (in 1973) was a German version of Edward Bond’s The Sea for Munich. Following the resignation in 1985 of the great Peter Stein, he was a surprise appointment to take over at the Berlin Schaubühne. Soon he was associated with the Salzburg Festival as both a stage and opera director. In 1986 he directed Cosi fan tutte in Brussels and Vienna.

Born in Zurich in 1948, Bondy was sent to a boarding school in the Pyrenees. He had a distinguished literary pedigree: his Jewish grandfather, Fritz (1888-1980), who also published as “NO Scarpi”, was part of the German-speaking minority in Prague (like his near-contemporary Franz Kafka), ran the German theatre there, and worked with Max Reinhardt. In 1918 he moved the family to Davos in Switzerland, where his wife died in the sanatorium, leaving their son, Luc’s father, François (1915-2003).

Bondy said his parents were not practising Jews and that he was “part of that generation that felt Jewish only because of the Holocaust…To say that I was Jewish was simply asserting a difference, otherness, with a kind of pride.” At the 2014 Salzburg Festival he staged Marc-André Dalbavie’s opera Charlotte Salomon; a journalist raised the question of Gaza and suggested that Bondy had been chosen to direct because of his being Jewish. “So I said to her this is a production about a Jewish artist... the subject is the story of Charlotte Salomon,” and then walked out.

He had been stage-struck, at least since the age of 12, when he had a two-word part in a comedy by Rabindranath Tagore. “It was a revelation,” he remembered, “I worked those two words to exhaustion.”

One of Bondy’s most remarkable productions was at the 1994 Edinburgh Festival, when he staged Peter Handke’s The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. The cast of 33 played 400 roles. Reviewing it, I was mesmerised: there was no dialogue, simply groups, sometimes crowds of people, rushing back and forth, across and around the stage, interacting or simply passing another by, some in a hurry, some dawdling, others loitering, with or without intent. From this commotion there emerged stories, dozens of them, tiny tales without words.

Bondy’s final post was in Paris. In 2012 President Sarkozy made him head of the Odéon Theatre of Europe, one of France’s six national theatres. It was a controversial appointment, because Bondy, at 63, was thought too close to the statutory retirement age of 65. But there he directed The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, and his production of Chekhov’s early play, Ivanov, has just finished its run. His wife, Marie-Louise Bischofberger, frequently collaborated with him. They jointly wrote the libretto for Philippe Boesmans’s chamber opera Julie, based on Strindberg’s play.

He had been ill with cancer for a long time, and made it public early on: “Why hide? When you’re bald at 25 it normalises things.” Despite recurrences, he never gave up working, once taking rehearsals at the Paris Opéra from a hospital bed stationed next to the stage. “I have always acted as if nothing had happened,” he said. “I lived, I had fun.”

Luc Bondy, opera and theatre director: born Zurich 17 July 1948; married 1993 Marie-Louise Bischofberger (one daughter, one son); died Switzerland 28 November 2015.