Stefan Herheim, Opera Provocateur, Puts Down Roots in Vienna

For decades, Stefan Herheim worked as a freelance opera director on the highest-profile stages of Europe, with a reputation for complex, entertaining productions that combined bold spectacle with thought-provoking ideas. Then, three years ago, he decided to put down roots.

He took on the position of artistic director at Theater an der Wien, a renowned theater in Vienna that once hosted the premieres of works by Beethoven and operettas like “Die Fledermaus” and “The Merry Widow.”

“It was time I tried,” Herheim, 55, said in an interview, “to build up something with a bigger continuity than what I ever achieved going from house to house.”

His first order of business was to oversee a two-year, 80-million-euro (about $91.1 million) renovation that the theater, built in 1801 and last renovated in 1962, needed badly. After some delays, Theater an der Wien’s main stage reopened in January. And on Friday, Herheim’s the season concluded with “Voice Killer,” a new opera by Miroslav Srnka based on the true story of an American soldier who becomes a murderer while stationed in Australia during World War II.

In late May, Herheim sat in his office with a canned energy drink in hand while a rehearsal for “Voice Killer” unfolded several floors below. His face bright with excitement, he described the music in Srnka’s opera as “a psychotic room you’re entering where the sound takes you somewhere you’ve never been.”

An exploration of femicide, the darker aspects of the human psyche and the repercussions of violence, “Voice Killer” is an unusual pick for an old opera house. But it is exactly the kind of work Herheim can commission as the artistic head of a stagione theater, where only one production is presented at a time, for a limited run.