The rebellious debutant: firebrand stage director Andrei Serban bows at the Met with Benvenuto Cellini.(Interview)

It was the frantic summer of 1999. San Francisco Opera was reviving Nikolaus Lehnhoff's relatively realistic, somewhat tired production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. But Lehnhoff wasn't coming back to rewarm the staging scheme. Contrary to custom, the directorial duties were not passed to some faithful assistant who would follow the prompt book while serving as traffic cop. The management opted for novelty and turned to Andrei Serban.

Andrei Serban? Andrei Serban! Yes, the big-name director from Bucharest, a pensive provocateur of sorts, internationally celebrated I and sometimes derided--for modernist productions of the world's most demanding plays and operas. He admitted that he had never even seen the cycle before. He knew rehearsal time would be scarce, and he understood that any innovation might be compromised by the inherited decors. But Serban (pronounced Shair-bahn) enjoys challenges that appear thankless. "I have a perverse disbelief in the word 'impossible,'" he explained.

In this Ring, Siegfried was not the only participant unacquainted with fear. The results--illuminating at best, fuzzy at worst--suggested a fascinating yet frustrating work in dubious progress.

"I had never done anything like this before," Serban recalls, "and I'll never do anything like this again. I was crazy. My aim was to simplify. I wanted an empty space, a pure space, fewer details. But I discovered that I had nothing to replace the elements I wanted to take away. I had accepted the challenge because I wanted to learn the Ring and then do my own production someday. So far, no one has invited me." Candid almost to a fault, he shrugs a good Romanian shrug.

At the time of our meeting, he was preoccupied with another sprawling Romantic opus, Hector Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini. The Met premiere serves as Serban's belated company debut. "I was hired only eight months before the opening," he says, "so I came to this very late. I think someone else had been signed before me, and it didn't work out. Sometimes having to work fast is an advantage. It forces one to move and reduces the agony that comes with having too much time to think things over."

He savors the importance and convenience of this engagement. "I've been living in New York for twenty-five years, and I always wanted to work here. The Met is the Met. As Woody Allen said when asked why he always shoots movies in Manhattan, 'I want to sleep in my own bed.' I was very happy when they called. And I've always been in love with Berlioz."

Serban isn't the sort of director who tells stories in traditional ways within a window-dressing milieu. Obviously a proponent of Regietheater (which doesn't have to be either European or trashy), he invariably focuses subtext as he defines psychological, sociological, even political motivation behind the action. In the circumstances, one has to wonder if his Cellini will really resemble a historic figure of sixteenth-century Rome.