“Today if I’m directing The Ring of Wagner, Shakespeare’s King Lear or The Threepenny Opera, I still start directing the work silently. … That means Brünnhilde will stand in one position for five minutes where she will later be singing, so she begins to understand what it’s like in terms of the physicality of doing the role and what the visual image is like. We begin to listen to the silences and how they are structured, and later I add text and music.”