Latest news with #KomischeOper
New York Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
With a Different Ending, ‘Don Giovanni' Becomes a Requiem
Partway through the dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov's new production at the Komische Oper in Berlin that pairs Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' and Requiem, text is projected across an abstract set piece representing a graveyard. 'Here,' it says, 'the dead teach the living.' At this point in the opera, the statue of a murdered man is about to come to life to confront his killer. But there is perhaps another meaning to be found in the text. 'It's a requiem,' Serebrennikov said in an interview, 'for all of us.' His production, which runs through May 23 before returning next season, follows a pre-20th-century performance tradition of dispensing with the final sextet of 'Don Giovanni,' a pat moral lesson sung after its title character is dragged to hell. Instead, the hellfire blaze of D minor and major leads directly into the soft, D-minor chords of the Requiem. That work was left unfinished at Mozart's death, in 1791. Serebrennikov, together with the choreographers Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev, stages the roughly 20 minutes of music that Mozart completed as dance theater. Don Giovanni's soul, embodied by the former Pina Bausch dancer Fernando Suels Mendoza, struggles against and finally accepts death as the chorus and soloists perform last rites. 'The Requiem is not only a funeral Mass,' Serebrennikov said. 'It was written, like 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead,' not just for those still living, but also for the dead: to help them find a condition for themselves after death.' Serebrennikov's production — the final in his cycle of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas at the Komische Oper — opens with Don Giovanni's funeral, and transforms the plot into a nonlinear series of scenes set in the bardo, the Tibetan transitional space between life and death. He leans into the enigmas of the title character and the work as a whole, starting with its label as a 'dramma giocoso': 'funny tragedy,' Serebrennikov said, 'the mixture of all genres, all intentions.' Hubert Zapior, who sings the title role, said in an interview that the process of working on a Serebrennikov show involves 'struggle' against preconceptions and the expected. The reward, he said, is getting to 'make the character new, and interesting, giving it a whole new quality.' James Gaffigan, who took up the music directorship of the Komische Oper in 2023, said, 'I never would have taken this job at this house if I didn't like these sorts of things.' Referring to the liberties the production takes with 'Don Giovanni,' he added: 'Would I choose to do it all the time? Not necessarily. But when you have someone as brilliant as Kirill, I want to make this work.' (As if to illustrate the point, Gaffigan's office is decorated with a large red neon sign that says 'Yes.') Serebrennikov sought to broaden Don Giovanni's tastes as a seducer. To that end, Donna Elvira has been transformed into Don Elviro, sung by the male soprano Bruno de Sá. That role, a character often written off as a harridan, requires ferocious energy and includes both sustained high singing in two enormously difficult solo arias as well as low notes in ensemble singing. 'It's a weird range for any soprano, or mezzo-soprano,' de Sá said. 'But I think I've never had this deep a connection with a character. He's so misunderstood. He just has a broken heart.' In a traditional production, de Sá would readily go on as Elvira in drag, the way that mezzo-sopranos strap down their chests to play trouser roles. 'But the fact that it's a man in this show brings something else,' he said. The Catalog Aria, in which a mourning Elvira learns from Leporello about his master's many conquests, 'becomes a whole different universe.' 'But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if it's a man, or a woman, or a trans person,' he added. 'Human emotions are always there.' Gaffigan said that the idea works for the opera. 'How great is it that Don Giovanni's not just seducing women, he's seducing everyone?' he said. 'This is not a check box to say, 'Let's do something crazy.'' Critics have mostly agreed. In Die Deutsche Bühne, Joachim Lange described the 'casually irreverent creativity' of Serebrennikov and the production, writing that the show 'sounds more cerebral than it appears onstage' and that 'Serebrennikov manages to tease out the humor of the whole thing in almost every scene.' Ulrich Lange, writing in the Tagesspiegel, praised de Sá's 'heart-piercing' singing and the orchestra's 'sharp Mozart sound.' The Komische Oper, predicated like all repertory companies on the uneasy relationship between the living and the dead, is on track to sell 92 percent of its tickets this season, an enviable figure for any house. In 2024, it was named Opera House of the Year at the International Opera Awards in Munich. But the state of Berlin, which is the house's largest funder by far, is sharply cutting culture spending, threatening the ongoing renovation of the company's longtime home theater and its annual operating budget. This season, those cuts have already led to the cancellation of one premiere, of an East German operetta adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 'The Importance of Being Earnest.' In Serebrennikov's production, Leporello holds up a sign in the second act of 'Don Giovanni' dryly noting that a tenor's aria 'was unfortunately cut due to the slashing of Berlin's culture budget.' On opening night, audience members cheered and applauded. 'We're not safe in any way, shape or form,' Gaffigan said. 'We're fighting for our survival. From year to year, we don't know what's going to happen.' In an emailed statement in German, Christopher Suss, a spokesman for the city's cultural department, said that 'there will be no halt to construction' on the house's renovation project and emphasized that 'the closure of this unique opera house is out of the question.' He wouldn't comment on further cuts because the city's budget is in the process of being negotiated. On Friday, Berlin's top culture politician, Joe Chialo, resigned his post; his resignation letter laid out his opposition to forthcoming planned cuts that, he warned, would 'lead to the imminent closure of nationally renowned cultural institutions.' 'I have never seen anything like it, where a company is doing so well, and we're terrified for our own existence,' Gaffigan said. 'Doing as well as we are doing, I thought the Komische Oper would always be there. And one night you wake up and realize, 'Maybe not.''
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Touching the soul is all that matters!' The outrageous genius of Barrie Kosky and his Wagner phantasmagoria
From the Muppet Show to Kafka, Yiddish theatre to Vivaldi, pop music to Wagner – Barrie Kosky's enthusiasms ricochet at a speed that leaves you dizzy as well as, in their rampant variety, a touch envious. This 58-year-old Australian theatre and opera director sees all art, all life, as one. His love of clowns, cabaret and musicals is as intense as his passion for theatre and grand opera. 'Whether it touches the soul is all that matters,' he says, his loquacious personality expanding into a small side office at the Royal Opera House in London before a rehearsal. His new staging of Die Walküre, the second opera in Wagner's Ring cycle, openson 1 May . Kosky was born in Melbourne but has been based in Berlin for the past 20 years, where he was artistic director of the Komische Oper and still has an association there. He is funny, clever, outrageous but above all serious. His productions may shock, though that is never his intention. Dressing his Carmen up in a gorilla suit for a production that now has cult status in Frankfurt and Copenhagen – but did not catch light with audiences in London – was part of a studied aesthetic: the heroine living her brief life through a set of extreme roles. In his Das Rheingold, the first part of the Ring which opened in 2023, he caused upset in some quarters by having Erda – mother Earth – represented by a naked 82-year-old woman. 'How can Earth, dreaming and witnessing this story, not be in her own bare skin?' he says. 'There is nothing more beautiful than watching older people on stage. It almost reduces me to tears, thinking about what their bodies have experienced, their histories. If people don't like it, that's their problem. After 35 years of working in opera, I am experienced enough to understand that if you put something out there for artistic reasons, there will be negative reactions. People have paid for tickets. They can have any reaction they want. It's never about saying, 'Hey, this will really annoy the Royal Opera audience.'' Describing himself as a cocktail of Russian, Polish, Hungarian and English (his mother was born in Harrow) as well as Australian, Kosky has explored his origins in his work, from youthful endeavours in Australia to a career spanning the world's major opera houses (his widely acclaimed production of Handel's Saul returns to Glyndebourne this summer). From 1991, for six years, he had his own company Gilgul, which investigated Jewish identity and migration through physical theatre. He has just had a huge success with Philip Glass's Akhnaten in Berlin. As he signs off on Die Walküre, he will start work with Cecilia Bartoli, the star Italian mezzo-soprano, on a new piece based on Vivaldi and Ovid for Salzburg, and next he will prepare a German-Yiddish version of Kafka's The Trial for the Berliner Ensemble. His capacious tastes are given full rein in a short memoir published in 2008, called On Ecstasy. In a few heady pages, he describes his childhood yearning for his Polish grandmother's chicken soup, his Hungarian grandmother's love of opera, his gay awakening in the school changing rooms, 'a forbidden zone touched with rapture', and his experience of being dumbstruck by Mahler and emotionally drugged by the 'phantasmagoria' of Wagner. The question is how he continues to be so drawn to that composer, whose writings and works are rife with anti-semitic tropes. This is Kosky's second tilt at the Ring cycle. The first, completed in 2011, was in Hanover. He has also worked at Wagner's festival theatre of Bayreuth in Bavaria, where he directed Die Meistersinger, featuring a giant puppet and a backdrop of the Nuremberg trials. But for a UK audience, his attitude is different. 'I do believe people can appreciate Wagner above all for the music,' he says. 'I have no problem with that. However, as a Jew and as a director, I don't have that luxury. I'm dealing with the text, and how to interpret that text. In Germany, the cultural baggage of Wagner is en-or-mous. Any German audience knows about the association of his music with Hitler. The operas always reverberate with that history. One of the reasons I accepted this Covent Garden Ring is because it enables me, with a non-German audience, to concentrate on other things: on the redemptive power of love and the brilliance of the narrative. Do I believe Wagner anticipated the Third Reich? No, I do not. Do I believe there are elements in Wagner's life and work that are deeply problematic and contradictory and unpleasant? Yes, I absolutely do.' A disturbing aspect of Die Walküre is the incest between the twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, which results in the birth of the cycle's hero, Siegfried. As Kosky points out, in some ancient societies – the Incas, the Egyptians – incest was not taboo. 'But Wagner is not interested in good or evil, or in the norms of Christian morality. He was driven to explore mythic, primal impulses. In these sibling-lovers, he creates two of the most sympathetic characters in any of his works.' But at the same time you cannot escape the idea of pure blood, of race, of eugenics. For Wagner, the greatest of all dramas was Aeschylus's Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia trilogy in which the brother-sister relationship is key. Greek drama shapes Wagner even more than Nordic myth. The orchestra acts as the chorus, commenting with leitmotifs, the musical themes used by Wagner to suggest particular characters. As a trained pianist, Kosky is among those few directors able to steep themselves fully in the score. His joy at working alongside Antonio Pappano, former music director of the Royal Opera who is returning to conduct the successive operas in the Ring, is touching. 'His assistant remarked: 'Tony is a conductor who occasionally directs and Barrie is a director who occasionally conducts in the rehearsal,' because I throw myself around all the time and jig my shoulders to the music. Tony's sense of humour is almost as wicked as mine. We giggle helplessly even though there are definitely no jokes in Walküre. He is a genius musician. I adore everything about this man. He breathes with the stage. You feel it physically. Everyone knows where this inhalation and exhalation is, so all are breathing as one. It's the rarest gift. It's what Tony does better than anyone I've ever worked with.' With rehearsals about to start, Kosky gives a rush of observations about the state and profile of opera: no, he cannot judge, as yet, whether the rise of the political 'alt-right' in Germany has made any impact. Yes, opera ticket prices, despite efforts by opera houses, are still too high, but outside first nights you get different audiences, who save up and are addicted to an art form that combines everything: singing, dance, sculpture, literature, painting. Prices are still less than people pay for a Lady Gaga gig or a top sporting event, 'and this Die Walküre sold out within a fortnight'. Berlin, he notes, even after a reduction, still has arts funding of nearly €1bn, for a city of fewer than 4m people, 'which is unthinkable to someone like you from England or me from Australia'. He reveres the tradition of opera in the UK, saying: 'Britain has produced some of the greatest singers, conductors, directors in the world. But there's an Anglo-Saxon tendency to feel guilty about enjoying opera. In Germany and central Europe, it's part of the DNA.' He remains evangelical about the value of the arts in nourishing the soul. 'I don't expect politicians to get that.' But in Berlin, he adds, a huge number – 45% – of visitors come to experience culture of one kind or other. 'Think what that means in terms of hotels, restaurants, transport. We need to line up our arguments better about the economic value of the arts'. For Kosky the return to the Royal Opera has an element of private odyssey. His Hungarian-English grandfather had a fruit and vegetable stall in Covent Garden. 'I find it very moving to walk through that site every day and think, 'This is where Jo Fischer sold fruit and veg.' That part of the family was involved in Yiddish theatre in the East End. One uncle was a clown, the other a composer. I still have his manuscripts in my apartment in Berlin.' In Kosky's view, that other family – the god Wotan, his Valkyrie daughters and other complicated offspring – is a visceral microcosm of us all. 'You need know nothing about Nordic myth or Wagner's antisemitism or Hitler's abuse of the music,' he says, 'because you are sitting there, on the edge of your seat, wanting to know what happens next.' He is still talking at top speed as he hurries off to the rehearsal room. Die Walküre is at the Royal Opera House, London, 1-17 May, and is live in cinemas on 14 May.
Wall Street Journal
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Opera in Europe: Established but Adventurous
Berlin; Dresden, Germany; Amsterdam New Yorkers who visit Berlin often feel at home—the German city is busy, sprawling, decidedly unquaint, has efficient public transportation, and is packed with culture. Glass-enclosed malls rub up against Prussian monuments; pierced and tattooed Goth teens ride the U-Bahn with commuters. Unlike New York, however, the establishment opera scene matches that modern vibe. During my recent visit, there was nothing cautious or old-fashioned on view at the city's three large opera companies, and the houses were packed. In five days of opera-going, which included a day trip south to the Semperoper Dresden, the only standard repertory title was Richard Strauss's 'Elektra' (1909). And the oldest one, Jacques Offenbach's opera buffa 'Die Schöne Helena' (1864), at the Komische Oper, was by far the nuttiest.
