Opera director and bulwark of tradition Otto Schenk dies at age 94

Otto Schenk, the prolific Austrian director whose lavish, traditional productions at the Metropolitan Opera and the Vienna State Opera thrilled generations of music lovers, died Thursday at his home on Austria's Lake Ilsee. He was 94 years old.

His death was announced by his son, conductor Konstantin Schenk.

In a statement posted on the Vienna State Opera's website, general director Bogdan Rosic said Schenk had “drawn the intellectual and artistic wealth from the entire history of theater and brought it to a wide audience with great success.” I was able to convey this to him.''

In Austria, Mr. Schenck's reputation as an actor, particularly as a comedic actor, has probably overshadowed his reputation as a director. But his international reputation rests primarily on the operas he produced during a career spanning almost 60 years.

In the United States, he achieved lasting acclaim with his lavish productions of Richard Wagner's operas from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Many productions are available on home video, including “Parsifal,'' “Die Meistersinger,'' “Tannhäuser,'' and perhaps the most famous four-part opera cycle, “The Ring of the Nibelungen.''

Along with Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, Schenck is one of the most prominent practitioners of the historical grandeur that became popular at the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the long tenures of general managers Rudolph Bing and Joseph Volpe. there were. In Europe, he remained popular as a bulwark of tradition against stage directors (including many of his contemporaries) who brought modern, avant-garde sensibilities to theater and opera.

When Peter Gelb replaced Volpe at the Met in 2006, he hired a new director to bring more contemporary ideas to the Met. Reproductions of Mr. Schenck's 16 works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are becoming increasingly rare.

In 2014, during a revival of Richard Strauss' 40-year-old production of Arabella, Vanity Fair headlined “See Otto Schenck's masterpiece at the Metropolitan Opera while you still can''. called out to readers. In the same year, the New York Times reviewed some of the director's most popular works at the Vienna State Opera. “Mr. Schenck seems to be losing his place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he clearly retains the lead at home,” wrote critic James R. Oestreich.

Alex Ross reviewed the Lepage cycle in The New Yorker, writing, “pound by pound, ton by ton, it is the most witless and wasteful work in modern opera history.”

Mr. Schenck's “Ring'' was praised by critics and popular with audiences, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art began the cycle in 1986 with the second opera in the tetralogy, “Die Walküre.'' It was fully unveiled in the 1989-90 season. Over the next 20 years, the Metropolitan Museum of Art revived it six times. All three cycles introduced during the 2008-9 season were sold out.

At the time Schenck was selected to direct “Ring,'' it was common for major opera companies, especially in Europe, to perform Wagner's works with cutting-edge or abstract productions. But Schenck, working closely with James Levine, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's longtime music director, insisted on playing by the composer's rules. He presented the epic as a living picture book, preserving the work's mythical and primitive setting and maximizing its romantic atmosphere. The set design was created by German stage designer Günther Schneider-Siemsen, with whom he frequently collaborates.

“In this era of boldly trendy reinterpretations of The Ring, there must be room for something gloriously untrendy,” wrote Donal Henaghan in a 1987 review for The Times, starting with the series. I wrote about the opera “Das Rheingold.'' Three years later, Allan Corzine reviewed the same work in the Times, writing, “Whether you agree with this Urtext approach or think it's time to take the next step, the Met's naturalistic direction is moving forward.'' We must admit that it is beautiful.''

Mr. Schenck's “Ring'' had its share of detractors, with Martin Bernheimer of the Los Angeles Times calling it reactionary and naive, but was generally praised for its combination of traditional dramaturgy and performing arts. It was considered a victory.

In 1990, four installments of the film were aired on public television in the United States. The Times reported that “there will be a total of 17 hours of 19th-century opera broadcast in prime time” and described it as a “remarkable” effort, with 30 television crews working at the Opera House for about a month. .

This broadcast was later released on video and became a reference recording for generations of Wagnerians. Many of the singers who appeared in the film became identified with their characters, including James Morris, Hildegard Behrens, Jessye Norman, and Siegfried Jerusalem. Music director Mr. Levine was invited to conduct this cycle at the famous Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany from 1994 to 1998. And video recordings helped imprint Mr. Schenck's spectacular tableaux in the minds of Ring enthusiasts for decades. To come.

Otto Schenk was born on June 12, 1930 in Vienna. His father Eugen was a notary who converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. His mother, Georgine, was a saleswoman and manager at the Julius Meinl Coffee Company in Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The two met during World War I when Eugen was stationed there.

After the Anschluss incident in 1938, Eugen married an Aryan woman and thus avoided deportation or worse, but he and his family faced discrimination. He was stripped of his job because of his Jewish background, and young Otto was kicked out of the lower branch of the Hitler Youth.

“Suddenly we became a Jewish family,” Schenck recalled in his 2020 memoir. Experiencing and witnessing persecution sparked my curiosity about Jewish culture.

“I became interested in the forbidden 'Jewish music' of Gustav Mahler, and Offenbach's Barcarolle became my anthem,” he wrote. “Then I started reading Heinrich Heine, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, and discovered the visual world of Max Lieberman and Marc Chagall.”

“But above all, it was Jewish humor that became the plaything of my youth and remains a pillar of my work to this day,” he continued.

After the war, Mr. Schenck spent two semesters studying law at the University of Vienna, then transferred to the prestigious Max Reinhardt Seminar to train as an actor. He graduated in 1951 and began acting and directing in small theaters around the city. He immediately headed to the Burgtheater, Austria's premier theater.

Throughout his long acting career, which has included appearances on TV and in movies (he lent his voice to the elderly widow Carl Fredriksen in the Austrian release of the 2009 Disney Pixar animated film “Up”), Mr. Schenck has always been in theaters. I'm back.

During his most active period at the Met, from 1988 to 1997, he also directed the Vienna theater Josefstadt. It was there that he developed his talent early in his career as a director and where he had his longest relationships as an actor. He appeared in dozens of roles there starting in 1954, including Antonio Salieri in Amadeus, Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot. His last performance there was in 2021 as Firth, an elderly servant in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

In 1956, Mr. Schenck married actress Renée Michaelis, whom he met while studying at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. She passed away in 2022. In addition to his son, he has a grandson. His older sister, Olympic athlete Bianca Schenk, died in 2000.

Schenck's opera career began in 1957 with a performance of Mozart's “The Magic Flute'' at the Salzburg State Theater. Five years later, he became widely known when he directed Alban Berg's unfinished Lulu at the Theater an der Wien, conducted by Karl Böhm and starring Evelyn Lear. This was the Austrian premiere of what is now considered one of the masterpieces of 20th century opera.

In 1964, Mr. Schenck became house director of the Vienna State Opera, and from 1968 his “Lulu” was also performed. He was prolific, producing a new work a year on average until the late 1980s.

His bejeweled production of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in 1968 and the grueling 1970 Fidelio were both conducted by Leonard Bernstein at their premiere and remain in the company's repertoire. It is one of the six works of . (In 2014, half a century after making his debut at the Vienna State Opera in Leos Janáček's “Jenůfa,'' Mr. Schenck directed Janáček's “The Cunning Little Woman,'' his last production there.)

Mr. Schenck quickly emerged as an international star. He has directed for La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London, and Germany's top theater companies in Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich. He directed operas and plays at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, and was also active on stage. During the summer, he appeared as the Devil in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Everyman, a Salzburg Festival tradition, in a brief but scene-stealing role.

Mr. Schenck made his Metropolitan Museum debut in 1968 in Puccini's “Tosca,” alongside the production's star, Swedish dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson. “Traditionalists must have been delighted,” wrote Harold C. Schoenberg, the Times' chief classical music critic at the time. “It was a good old-fashioned production, with solid, realistic sets, a generally dark atmosphere, and great costumes.” The production was a hit, and the company revived it eight times over the next 10 years. I did.

Schenck's first appearance in a Wagner work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was in 1978's “Tannhäuser.'' The production, set by Schneider-Siemsen, was last performed in the 2023-24 season and attracted as much attention for its formidable cast as the climate protests that erupted on the balcony on opening night.

After “Ring,'' Mr. Schenck returned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for two more Wagner operas, 1991's “Parsifal'' and 1993's “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,'' which brought aesthetic literalism to the operatic stage. We have set a high bar for “Otto Schenk reasserted a traditional production of Wagner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, following the composer's meticulous instructions,” Edward Rothstein of the Times wrote about the premiere of Meistersinger.

Mr. Schenck announced in 2006, when he directed Donizetti's “Don Pasquale” for star Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, that it would be his last Met production.

Mr. Schenck defended an unwaveringly traditional approach to opera.

In an interview with Austrian broadcaster ORF, which was broadcast as part of the Vienna State Opera's 150th anniversary program in 2019, he said, “What's exciting is the encounter between old works and modern times.'' It works, but it doesn't make it all modern. The lyrics of Lohengrin still sound old-fashioned, even when the performers wear modern costumes. ”