David Alden (director)

David Alden (born 1949 in New York City) is a prolific theater and film director known for his post-modernist settings of opera. He is the twin brother of Christopher Alden, also an opera director in the revisionist mold. The two brothers have covered much of the same repertoire in their long careers, but whereas Christopher's operatic settings place greater emphasis on his characters' emotional range, David's protagonists are more broadly caricatured and his productions far more politically charged. Another distinguishing feature between them is that David has been more active in Europe throughout his career, having enjoyed a particularly close creative partnership with Sir Peter Jonas for more than two decades, at both the English National Opera and the Bavarian State Opera.

David Alden and his identical twin Christopher were born into a show business family closely tied to Broadway. Their father was the playwright Jerome Alden, and their mother was the ballerina Barbara Gaye, who danced in the original productions of On the Town and Annie Get Your Gun with Ethel Merman. As eight-year-olds, they listened at home to recordings of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, and as teenagers in the mid-'60s, they frequently bought standing room tickets at the Metropolitan Opera. By age 13, both had decided they wanted to direct opera.

David studied at the University of Pennsylvania and like his brother, launched his directing career with Opera Omaha in the 1970s. In 1976, he visited Europe where he immersed himself in the cultural stream of contemporary opera directors the likes of Giorgio Strehler, Harry Kupfer, Hans Neuenfels and Ruth Berghaus. Theirs was a generation of direct heirs to the Expressionist movement and, in particular, to Bertolt Brecht. For Alden, the exposure was a revelation that unlocked intense passions he had long wanted to express in musical theater. His first European production in the late ‘70s was a Rigoletto for Scottish Opera that, he says, was assailed by the critics because "in England, it was still very early to speak directly to the audience with the style I was attempting and place passion and schizophrenia on the stage."

...
Wikipedia