Primadonna Or Nothing (a world premiere in The Sound Of Music sidebar at DOK.fest Munich) focuses on three top-level opera singers at very different stages of their careers.
The youngest, mezzo-soprano Valerie Eickhoff, is still fighting to establish herself. Meanwhile, Angel Joy Blue is at her professional peak. A former beauty queen, she initially struggled for recognition in the US but came to Europe to prove herself and is now playing in some of the world’s largest and most prestigious concert halls. The fiery and imperious Italian star Renata Scotto is now retired. She’s a legend but is in the latter stages of her life. (She died before the film’s completion).
All three share the same willingness to make huge sacrifices in pursuit of their careers.
“I sometimes had the feeling that they are all dreaming of something different than the current state they are in now,” director Juliane Sauter reflects on the restless creative nature of her protagonists. “Valerie dreams of being as successful as Angel. Angel wants to recognise for herself that it was all worth it. Renata can now look back to an enormous career [but] wants to be like Valerie again, at the beginning, and just being able to sing on stage. For sure, I am showing three women willing to give everything.”
Sauter is a music journalist as well as a filmmaker. The documentary was conceived when she was doing a course in directing at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. (She later went on to take a summer school in documentary directing at UCLA).
The director very deliberately chose ‘Primadonna’ rather than ‘Diva’ (a term often now often used in a misogynistic way) in the title. She acknowledges the three singers put their careers ahead of anything else in their lives. “But I don’t think that is negative. As Valerie says in the film, you just have to be aware of that.”
Audiences who see the women performing are very unlikely to be aware of the sacrifices they have made. As lead singers, they are always in the spotlight. Unlike members of the orchestra, they are completely exposed. They take the plaudits but, if anything goes wrong, they also will be the ones judged the most harshly.
“Being a musician in general, there is so much work you do by yourself and no-one sees it. A singer is not able to hide behind her instrument. A pianist or a violinist, they have their instrument…but the voice is so personal. That’s why I decided that opera, and singing specially, was something that I would like to show.”
Sauter first thought about the project in 2019. “Obviously, Covid was a big thing,” she says of the time it has taken to complete the documentary. During the pandemic, all the concert halls were closed. Even in 2021, when performances resumed, organisers were “very hesitant” about allowing Sauter in to film. Sometimes, she and her crew would be allowed to set up the camera in the dressing room but would then have to leave before the protagonist went inside.
“Some opera houses are easy…and some are not!”
When Angel performed at LA Opera for the first time in 15 years, the filmmakers could hardly shoot at all. At other venues, Sauter and her crew were given access to certain rooms and corridors but not to others. “There are obviously lots of other singers there who do not want to be filmed…the communication is wild. You always have to double check with everyone.”
The director pays tribute to her producer. Hannah Buhr, a fellow student at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. “She took care of everything. She opened the doors and we were just able to walk through – she saved me!”
The singers may all be prodigiously talented but they still face daunting challenges. For example, Valerie Eickhoff enters gruelling competitions which she doesn’t always win.
“When she got third, it was hard. She sang another competition, the ARD competition in Germany, and she came third there too…competition is lonely,” says Sauter. “You are there by yourself. We were kind of her only partners there. It wasn’t easy. It was ups and downs. She is always under a lot of pressure and she expects from herself perfection.”
Over the four-year shooting period, the filmmakers inevitably grew very close to their protagonists. “We have been there in situations of nervousness and also fear. We went through so much with them, especially with Valerie.”
Sauter herself grew up in a music loving family. When she was a kid, an opera company came to her home town of Friedrichshafen, near Lake Constance in the “very south of Germany.”
It was a moment of epiphany. “They had this production where they needed a child choir singing. I was one of the children in this choir…. don’t know – but seeing Carmen on stage, something happened in my brain that I thought, oh my goodness, this is so cool.”
Later, when Sauter was studying music journalism at Karlsruhe Hochschule für Musik, her teachers told her “OK, part of music journalism is also filming. They gave me a camera. I started to do little portraits of musicians.”
From there, she “jumped into the water” and began to think about directing.
At first, as her filmmaking career took off, Sauter “distanced” herself from music, making documentaries on other subjects instead. She quickly discovered she enjoyed directing. “I don’t want to be an editor. I don’t want to be a cinematographer or sound [technician]. This might seem selfish, but I think I have a vision and I want to make this vision. I don’t want to be part of someone else’s vision,” she says, beginning to sound as driven as her Primadonna protagonists.
Now, she is working on her second feature-length music documentary, Im Rhythmus der Utopie, about the singer Dieter Thomas Kuhn, part of the German ‘Schlager’ tradition (based around sentimental and nostalgic German pop songs). In the meantime, she continues to make short commissioned films on opera.
German distribution of Primadonna Or Nothing (which has funding from SWR and MFG) is being handled by Camino. The film is expected to hit cinemas in the autumn and its director is keen it reaches as wide an audience as possible.
“I hope it is not only interesting for people who like opera. I wanted to give an insight into the world behind the curtain. It plays with a feeling that everyone knows – is it worth it what I am doing, how much am I able to give of myself…”
Primadonna started as a student diploma project. “It doesn’t fill your pockets,” the director reflects on all the work she put into it for very little material reward since then. “No money for me! That is what it is like. You have to prove yourself first and then you can see where you go from there. In a way, I am like Valerie, proving myself!”
