A taste of the Swiss big cheese

WHERE do you meet an opera director in Dublin when he's working? In the case of Dieter Kaegi, who is directing Verdi's Macbeth in Opera Ireland's spring season (and who's standing in the wings, so to speak, as the company's artistic director designate) the mid-afternoon location is the Olympic Ballroom.

In this most unlikely of places, with its wall decoration of leaping white- dressed dancers balancing an arch of Olympic circles, the floor-space is dominated by the sloping curve of the Macbeth set. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (an Italian-speaking Russian and an American), crouch closely together and wrestle with the instructions of Kaegi (who is Swiss) over the handling and positioning of a sword.

The phallic symbolism seems to the fore. The couple embrace, their hands ranging ever more adventurously. She discards her shawl. His coat comes off. And before you know it, he's on top of her on the floor. It's the very stuff of opera - violence, murder, sex.

The acoustic in the Olympic is warm and generous (the physical temperature, too, seems high enough that even an opera singer wouldn't complain about it). The sound is kind and supportive of the voices, and you can spot a sense of fracture when the thrust of a vocal line is interrupted to correct a physical movement, the direction of a glance, or the placing of the sword.

We move to a scene with witches, three dancers who do those I've-cast-a-spell-on-you wavings of the hand that witches do in opera. The dancers, of course, don't sing, and the only singer present is Macbeth himself, so the Irish musical team, Fergus Sheil (standing in for Alexander Anissimov, who'll be conducting the opera at the Gaiety) and the repetiteur, Mairead Hurley, row in to provide some eerily understated vocals.

Kaegi's manner is soft-spoken but intense, and something of the same combination of reserve and firmness is when we meet. The Zurich-born director is no stranger to Ireland. Dublin saw his Martha in 1992, his Cosi fan tutte in 1993, and Wexford his Liebesverbot (the festival's sole excursion into Wagner), the following year.

With a precocity that cannot be all that common, he began his stage association with opera in his home town at the age of three or four by playing the child in Madama Butterfly. "That was the beginning of this passionate love for opera. I was then in the children's chorus at the opera house. I grew up with wonderful singers, like Tito Gobbi, James McCracken, and so on. It was an important and decisive experience.

At college, he pursued his passion by studying musicology and literature, an experience that wasn't as rewarding as it might have been. "Quality music for the professors had stopped about 1720 and started again about 1950. Everything in between just didn't exist. A name like Verdi, if they knew it, they just laughed about. It was just opera. The whole 19th century was not worthy of discussion or analysis."

Kaegi did, of course, develop useful skills in the reading of scores, in musical analysis, and in the knowledge of early music. He made his professional debut as an assistant director with English National Opera in 1980, and has since held posts in Zurich, Dusseldorf and at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. He takes over, from Dorothea Glatt, as artistic director of Opera Ireland from the winter season later this year. His invitation to work on Macbeth pre-dates his appointment and he was not involved in the wider artistic decision-making behind the spring season, which begins at the Gaiety from Saturday (April 5th) to Sunday April 13th.

He was attracted to the Opera Ireland post for a number of reasons. "It's very rare that you find an opera house where you have no obligations - no singers, for instance, on contract on a permanent basis." Here in Dublin he sees himself as having the freedom to search for exactly the right cast for any particular opera.

Another attraction is Ireland itself. "Ever since I came here to work, I love the country, and I'm completely in love with Dublin. I think it's a town of the future. There's hardly any town in the world where I would feel so comfortable." Also, there's just so much to be done, so much to be developed in operatic life in Dublin. "I think it's wonderful to come to a place where we can build something, give our best to get people interested in opera again."

He wants to extend the repertoire, to chip away at the reliance on the immediate box-office appeal of the most popular operas. He talks mouthwateringly of exploring the Russian repertoire with the conductor Alexander Anissimov, and of mounting more French operas. He's anxious, also, that there should be more nights of opera in Dublin. "For a town with the importance of Dublin, its population and so many people visiting, I think it should be possible to do more than 20 evenings of opera a year." One of the first stages in capturing a news audience, he says, has to be to reach out to young people.

Beyond that, he stresses the long-term importance of Dublin getting its own opera house. "As a European capital, Dublin deserves its own opera house. This is a big problem for the company. As long as we don't have our own opera house, we don't have an identity . .. as long as we don't have a home, our own house, we're lacking."

At the moment, he describes the strength of the company as "a sort of a festival atmosphere, in the sense that people from all ever the world come together for a month. They work on something, they give all their energy to it. They do it, they perform it. And everybody leaves again.

"The big problem in opera houses in Germany, say - with an 11-month season and a repertory company, is that people are constantly tired, and they're not motivated. Here, if people choose to come, they want to give their best, and they do give their best, and the result is wonderful. It needs so much energy. Energy is wasted in these repertoire houses; they are tired and, they have no motivation.

HE talks with enthusiasm about Irish singers, responding without prompting to the criticism Opera Ireland has faced from time to time for the neglect of singing talent of local origin. "There are lots of wonderful Irish opera singers around, mainly women. I will try to have them come to Dublin and perform here.

"It must be a joy for them to perform in their home town or home country.

A reserve creeps into his answer, when I ask what is to be expected from his Macbeth. "I'm doing this Verdi Macbeth with the same set and costume director, Bruno Schwengl, with whom I have worked in Ireland before, so people who have seen one of these productions know approximately our visual approach. It's definitely not a historical recreation of Scotland, with period drops and forests. I hope we've found solutions that surprise people and surprise them positively. We have a wonderful cast and I'm looking forward to moving to the theatre to see if everything works out as I have seen it for two weeks in the rehearsal studio."

The fly in the ointment at the moment is lack of money, not just the amounts that can be spent on productions - "We have to offer the audience a stunning visual production" - but also the fees the company can afford to pay singers. "We pay very low fees, whether it's for singers, or conductors or productions. People who come here, come because they love Dublin, or they come to do me a favour. We must get more money, in order to compete with opera houses in the rest of Europe.