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." In 1980, Alden was tapped by the
Metropolitan Opera to replace the late
Herbert Graf in its restaging of
Wozzeck as well as the revivals in 1985 and 1988. As John Rockwell noted in
The New York Times, "Alden's staging… (is) indebted to Expressionist films like
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, full of stark silhouettes and lurching zombies." ==Powerhouse years at English National Opera==