LouisaMuller

Press

• Verdi's La Traviata

  Garsington Opera

  May 2026 - Jun 2026

  • Against this cruel backdrop, director Louisa Muller conjures performances of telling subtlety from the principals

    • Daily Telegraph
    • 28 May 2026

  • Gripping and genuinely moving staging opens Garsington’s summer season: Louisa Muller’s richly detailed production of Verdi’s tragedy is elevated by Madison Leonard’s magnetic Violetta...

    • Guardian
    • 28 May 2026

  • Louisa Muller's 1939 Paris setting frames a Violetta of rare emotional depth... Verdi’s La traviata may seem over-familiar, but in Louisa Muller’s stunningly beautiful, fabulously well sung and snappily directed production it comes up as if it were being performed for the first time. Some updated stagings work, and some don’t – this one, set in 1939 in a Paris on the brink of war, works brilliantly

    • MusicOMH
    • 28 May 2026

  • Louisa Muller’s direction had the same feeling of rightness, not least because of its attention to the finest of details. Every line sung was accompanied by body language to enhance it; every character played their part in the drama whether singing or watching the action from the background. Muller doesn’t add many large items to the scenario of the standard stage directions, but where she does, they have impact. The prelude opens with Violetta (or presumably her ghost) watching a freeze-frame of her deathbed, from which she drifts to another freeze-frame of her party, which comes to vibrant life at the change in the music. The carnival festivities in Act 3 don’t just sit outside Violetta’s window: they invade her bedroom and surge through her fevered mind.

    • Bachtrack
    • 28 May 2026

  • All this is updated by the director Louisa Muller (in a co-staging first seen at Santa Fe Opera) to 1939 Paris, perhaps to add an extra layer of hedonistic fatalism to the whirling party scenes. And she certainly deploys the superbly drilled Garsington Chorus with much visual wit and razor-sharp movements (choreography by Matthew Steffens). The revellers are sometimes transformed into a voyeuristic mob, feeding voraciously off Violetta’s humiliation and Alfredo’s callousness, and sometimes frozen into statues among whom Violetta wanders as if trying to recapture the past, but failing... an all-round impressive show.

    • The Times
    • 28 May 2026

• Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro

  Opera North

  Jan 2026

  • Most important of all, the audience laughter comes naturally in response to the action onstage and often before they have time to read the English translations. This is a good-hearted and genuinely amusing production.

    • The Opera Critic

  • Louisa Muller’s new Opera North production blew the cobwebs off Le nozze di Figaro, with the excellent performers doing full justice to Mozart’s masterpiece.

    • Seen and Heard International

  • Louisa Muller’s production is detailed in its business – I like touches such as the use of mobile phones to summon those who need to be summoned, the fact that Figaro has not forgotten his barber skills when it comes to getting Cherubino ready for military duty, and the idea that the Countess is pregnant and that she and Susanna are busy creating a nursery as we hear the sublime letter duet.

    • the arts desk

• Britten's Turn of the Screw

  Garsington Opera

  Jul 2022

  • Although Muller directs with an impressively light touch, her staging is bursting with the sort of connective, proliferating detail that hooks the audience into the story, and she fields the many directorial cues Britten wrote into his score with a disarming elegance. Of the many productions I've seen of this work, I reckon that, for subtlety and layers of meaning, Muller's is in a league of its own.

    • Peter Reed, Opera Magazine
    • 01 September 2022

  • Louisa Muller directed the production in 2019 and returned to revive it here, preserving the ambiguity – did the Governess see these things or imagine them? Are we viewing her fantasies, like Macbeth’s dagger “proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain”, driven by a frustrated attraction to the employer she must never contact? Muller’s production bears both interpretations, as it should. She has a sure touch for an eerie detail. In the Prologue the guardian’s intimate stroking of the face of the woman to whom he has just subcontracted the raising of his “poor little things”, is the subtlest of transgressions. It is a chilling moment when Miles repeats the exact gesture in Act 2, still more unsettling in the combative context their relationship has assumed.

    • Roy Westbrook, Bachtrack
    • 03 July 2022

• Britten's Turn of the Screw

  Garsington Opera

  Jul 2019

  • ‘A deliberate, powerful and horribly successful study of the magic of evil,’ is how one critic described Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw on its publication in 1898. The same words very much apply to Louisa Muller’s new Garsington staging of Britten’s opera, a beautiful, unsettling piece of theatre that sifts through the work’s ambiguities with a subtlety that in itself has something of the complex finesse of James’s prose…A truly great achievement, devastating and unforgettable.

    • Tim Ashley, The Guardian
    • 03 July 2019

• Wagner's Das Rheingold

  New York Philharmonic Orchestra

  Jun 2017

  • …the Philharmonic, Mr. Gilbert and the director Louisa Muller have stripped the work to its sinews. It is a stark vision—you might be reminded of Ivo Van Hove's scorched-earth approach to classic plays—that pares away almost everything but the music and the characters.…it was a remarkable evening of music theater.

    • Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times
    • 02 June 2017

• Britten's The Rape of Lucretia

  Wolf Trap Opera

  Jun 2016

  • …an intense wallop of a well-sung production.…this opera, as presented and gently updated by director Louisa Muller, was at times downright monumental in its statements, with even its whispers sheathed in iron.

    • Anne Midgette, Washington Post
    • 12 June 2016

  • Louisa Muller's staging was simple and dramatically effective, with Erhard Rom's set evoking the marble and rusticated stone of a Roman setting, while the costumes of the soldiers suggested a modern American present.

    • Charles T. Downey, Ionarts
    • 12 June 2016

• Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles

  Wolf Trap Opera

  Jul 2015

  • It is a dazzling thing all around.…The opportunity to hear a modern work of this stature comes along all too rarely, a production of this quality still rarer.

    • Robert Battey, Washington Post
    • 13 July 2015

  • Chances are that Wolf Trap Opera will be using its production of John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles as a touchstone for a long time to come. The venture was satisfying on every level.…The complex layers…inspired deftly detailed stage direction from Louisa Muller, who kept the action fresh and involving.

    • Opera News
    • 12 July 2015

  • Directed by Louisa Muller, this production is as silly as it is masterful, and is perfect for people who are new to the Opera...

    • Julia Amis, DC Theater Arts
    • 14 July 2015