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    Review: ‘Die Monosau’ Revives Chaotic Energy in Berlin

    Chaos also plays a role in a new play at the Volksbühne theater that delivers on its pledge of a director-free evening.Theatergoers at the opening night of “Die Monosau” at the Volksbühne in Berlin on Friday, were promised a “guaranteed director-free evening,” and that is exactly what they got.The play was inspired by texts that the German artist and enfant terrible Jonathan Meese penned in the 1990s, but the production is attributed to no one in particular. Or rather, the program cryptically credits the acronym “K.U.N.S.T.” (the German word for “art”) as director. It remained vague, however, whether this was a collective name for the artists who had brought this work to freakish, twitching life, or whether this was an abstract affirmation of the cosmic power of art.Whatever the case, “Die Monosau” blew into the Volksbühne like a revitalizing gust of badly needed oxygen. Through its dynamic performances, gleeful anarchy and insistent embrace of nonsense and mayhem, “Die Monosau” restored a chaotic energy to a venerable company that has stumbled repeatedly in recent years.In a country that deeply venerates theater directors — and especially at the Volksbühne, a house where, historically, cults of personality have formed — it was refreshing, and unexpected, to find a collaborative model of artistic authorship that succeeded.How much exactly did Meese contribute? His artistic fingerprints were all over the production in the fiendishly rambling texts and the staging that burst with high, low and pop cultural references (from Wagner to James Bond to the campy 1974 sci-fi flop “Zardoz”) and plain silliness. Despite the various scenery flats of mountains and waves, the inflatable plastic furniture and a frequently rotating stage, the production remained uncluttered and gave space to the seven actors, among them several Volksbühne veterans, who let loose with a series of delirious monologues that were often near incoherent, but grandly, epically declaimed.Between them, there were lusty renditions of songs and sitcom-like sketches that were often confounding and exhilarating in equal measure. What it all meant was impossible to say, but the fiercely committed cast, supported by their hard-working onstage prompter, Elisabeth Zumpe, and backed by a three-piece band, ensured that the evening had sustained theatrical power and musical flow.At the start of the performance, Martin Wuttke delivered a mock-epic speech in the chiseled tones of a grand thespian. Later in the evening, he executed a Hitler salute before falling into the orchestra pit: a reference to both Meese, who was taken to court in 2013 for making the banned gesture during a performance (he was later acquitted), and to Wuttke himself, who is best-known internationally for playing the führer in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” Franz Beil, dressed in a ridiculous white costume, made a memorable appearance as a mussel having a manic episode. Susanne Bredehöft started out as some version of Jane Fonda’s Barbarella and spent the second half of the evening nude and smeared in golden paint, like Jill Masterson’s corpse in “Goldfinger.” Between cigarettes, Kerstin Grassmann, a tough, gruff Berlin actress, belted out the shmaltzy 1969 West German hit “Mr. Paul McCartney.”An increasingly unhinged monologue, delivered by the Belgian actor Benny Claessens about a gang of friends in swinging London, sounded a lot like the drivel a crazy person on a park bench might spout, but the alacrity of Claessens’s rendition turned his confusing and lurid narration into a gripping display of verbal athletics. As for Meese, he was not onstage. Not in the flesh, at least. He appeared periodically, Oz-like, as a video projection on a floating egg, making oracular pronouncements, from claiming, “The weapon is good; the penis is bad,” to predicting that 2023 will be the year when Germany becomes a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. I was disappointed that he didn’t take a bow at the curtain call. Perhaps he was being modest.In the end, “Die Monosau” was not so much a renewal of the Volksbühne as a throwback to an era of artistic pell-mell at the theater, albeit one without any ideological underpinning or much dramaturgical focus. There was no theory here and nothing to deconstruct. It was anarchistic without being revolutionary, explicit and in-your-face without being provocative. This isn’t a show that will change the world, let alone the world of theater. As a 130-minute freak out sustained by the high-wire performances, it was thrilling, at times exhausting, at times baffling, but almost always interesting. Most crucially, it was joyfully, mischievously entertaining, a performance whose wheels spun in a wonky, wild way that has been all too rare at the Volksbühne in recent memory.Die MonosauThrough March 19 at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin; volksbuehne.berlin. More

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    Jürgen Flimm, Director of Festivals and Opera Houses, Dies at 81

    He left his mark in Hamburg, Berlin, Salzburg and elsewhere. He also directed a memorable “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.Jürgen Flimm, who led some of Europe’s most important theaters, opera houses and performing arts festivals over the last 40 years, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Wischhafen, Germany, northeast of Hamburg. He was 81.His death was announced by the Berlin State Opera, where he had been general manager from 2010 to 2018. His wife, the film producer Susanne Ottersbach Flimm, said the cause was heart failure following pneumonia.Mr. Flimm’s Berlin appointment was his last in a long career that also included directorships at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. He also staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 2000.He directed acclaimed productions outside the German-speaking world as well, including at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.A dress rehearsal for Mr. Flimm’s 2000 production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” one critic wrote of the production, “but the shock was considerable.”Jürgen Flimm was born in Giessen, Germany, on July 17, 1941, to Werner and Ellen Flimm, who were both doctors. His family had fled there after bombs began falling on Cologne, where they had been living, and where they resettled after the war.In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mr. Flimm recalled his childhood. His father was a surgeon who, Mr. Flimm said, used the family’s apartment to see patients: “Every morning I put up my bed and our living room became a waiting room: patients everywhere.” His mother was a general practitioner, but like so many German women in the immediate postwar period, a time of general deprivation, she scrounged to bring home butter and meat. As a child, Jürgen sold old newspapers to fishmongers. While his older brother, Dieter, played drums in jazz bands around the city, Jürgen invented dialogue for his puppets in the attic. Dieter Flimm eventually founded an architecture studio and worked as a set designer and a musician. He died in 2002.Their father, who loved theater, would attend performances as a doctor on duty, and Jürgen often accompanied him. “I secretly hoped that an actor would get sick, so I’d be able to go backstage and see what went on there,” he said, although his father disapproved of his sons’ artistic proclivities and would have preferred for them to study medicine.Jürgen enrolled at the University of Cologne, where he studied theater, German literature and sociology. He abandoned his studies to become an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele theater in Munich, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. He received an acting degree from the Theater der Keller in Cologne.In 1969 Mr. Flimm married the actress Inge Jansen, a colleague at the Kammerspiele. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mr. Flimm remained close to Ms. Jansen’s five children from her previous marriage, four of whom are still living. Ms. Jansen died in 2017.Mr. Flimm married Susanne Ottersbach. The couple lived in a two-story thatched house built in 1648. She is his only immediate survivor.He directed his first production at a theater in Wuppertal in 1971 and held positions at theaters in Mannheim and Hamburg in the 1970s, while also building up his résumé as director in Zurich, Munich and Berlin.He directed his first opera in 1978, the German premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1975 “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” in Frankfurt. The work remained dear to Mr. Flimm’s heart: Decades later, he programmed it, in an acclaimed production by the British director Katie Mitchell, in both Salzburg and Berlin.In 1979, Mr. Flimm returned to Cologne to lead the city’s main theater, the Schauspiel Köln. During his six years as artistic director there, he programmed works by the influential choreographer Pina Bausch and the fanciful French-Argentine director Jérôme Savary.He moved to Hamburg in 1985 to lead the Thalia Theater, which he is widely credited with putting in the international spotlight by inviting avant-garde artists like the American director Robert Wilson.From left, the director Robert Wilson, the author William S. Burroughs and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits at the premiere of their work “The Black Rider” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. It was the most lauded production during Mr. Flimm’s tenure there.Frederika Hoffmann/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1990, Mr. Wilson’s “The Black Rider,” a collaboration with the singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the author William Burroughs, became the most lauded production of Mr. Flimm’s tenure in Hamburg. Despite some famously sour reviews (the German magazine Der Spiegel likened it to “a version of ‘Cats’ for intellectuals and snobs”), it was a hit and toured worldwide.Mr. Flimm left the Thalia in 2000. That summer, his “Ring” cycle had its premiere at Bayreuth.“It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, “but the shock was considerable.” While praising some aspects of the cycle, Mr. Ross concluded that it ultimately left a very mixed impression.“The production felt unfinished,” he wrote, “and the flurry of painted curtains during the ‘Götterdämmerung’ apocalypse suggested that in the end it had simply run out of money.”Mr. Flimm made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” that October. This time Mr. Ross raved, concluding his review by saying that “Flimm is a smart director, and the Met should give him anything he wants.” The production was revived three times between 2002 and 2017.Mr. Flimm’s follow-up at the Met, a 2004 production of “Salome” that was a vehicle for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, was more polarizing. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted that Mr. Flimm received some loud boos on opening night. But, he noted, “the bravos won out, and rightly so.”In 2005, Mr. Flimm became artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a multidisciplinary arts festival in the rust belt of Germany. He stayed an extra summer past his three-year contract after his designated successor, the German theater director Marie Zimmermann, took her life in April 2007.His time there dovetailed with the start of his artistic directorship at the Salzburg Festival, where he had previously served as head of drama from 2002 to 2004. During his first summer, he commissioned a new staging of “Jedermann,” the morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition, from the young Bavarian director Christian Stückl. The production was a hit and remained a festival mainstay for a dozen years.Mr. Flimm ascended to the festival’s leadership in 2007. It was a tumultuous time: Gerard Mortier had taken the festival in a radically new direction throughout the 1990s, and after his departure in 2001, it had struggled to hold on to an artistic director.The four seasons Mr. Flimm spent as Salzburg’s leader were regarded as successful artistically, but he made clear that he was not interested in staying for the long run. In 2008, he announced that he would step down at the end of his term to head the Berlin State Opera.In September 2010, shortly after Mr. Flimm arrived in Berlin, four steamers sailed down the river Spree, conveying 500 members of the opera company westward to the Schiller Theater, where it planned to spend three seasons during renovations to its historic home. Instead, the construction dragged on for seven years.Mr. Flimm imported a number of acclaimed productions to Berlin that had first been seen at Salzburg. One of his original productions in Berlin was a 2016 staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which featured an abstract set designed by Frank Gehry that reportedly cost 100,000 euros.In addition to his work in theater, Mr. Flimm taught at the University of Hamburg and was a guest lecturer at Harvard and New York University. Among his many honors was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German government’s highest, which he received in 2002. In a 2011 interview with the Bavarian radio station BR, Mr. Flimm was asked what accomplishments he was particularly proud of. Among those he mentioned was his 2000 “Fidelio.”“After the premiere,” he said, “I stood on the balcony of the Met, looked out into Manhattan and thought to myself, ‘Not bad, Jürgen!’” More

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    Review: ‘La Cage aux Folles’ Brightens Up Berlin

    The vivid characters and the infectious melodies of the 1983 musical prove remarkably durable in Barrie Kosky’s madcap production at Komische Oper Berlin.BERLIN — In Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s “La Cage aux Folles,” the habitués of the show’s titular nightclub are enumerated as a “girl who needs a shave,” “both the riffraff and the royalty,” “eccentric couples” and “a nun with a Marine.” That description seemed to fit the fashionable and eclectic opening night audience of the Komische Oper Berlin’s new production of the Tony Award-winning 1983 musical.Barrie Kosky’s decade-long reign running the Komische, one of this city’s three world-class opera companies, was a near breathless succession of musical and theatrical high jinks. When Kosky stepped down from his role as the Komische’s artistic director over the summer, his parting gift to the house was a glitzy and unexpectedly moving Yiddish revue. “La Cage,” Kosky’s first production as guest director, premiered on Saturday night and remains in repertory through June 9.Although Kosky has already directed several musicals at the house, this production did mark something of a departure for the company. The “La Cage” score is on the weaker end of the house’s musical theater repertory, which includes “Kiss Me, Kate,” “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” Even so, it was a thrill to hear Herman’s old-fashioned Broadway songs, tunes that swing between razzle-dazzle and sentimentality, performed by a full orchestra. (The most recent Broadway revival of “La Cage,” from 2010, was rescored for eight musicians.) The chameleon-like Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin (the same week as the “La Cage” premiere they also performed works by Mozart, Dvorak and Prokofiev) played with polish and panache for the conductor Koen Schoots.Stefan Kurt, right, as Zaza. Kurt’s mix of elegant wit, dramatic flair and emotional vulnerability was never less than captivating.Monika RittershausHerman and Fierstein’s musical is based on Jean Poiret’s 1973 farce about a gay owner of a nightclub and his lover, a drag queen and the revue’s star, whose (heterosexual) son brings his fiancée’s ultraconservative parents for dinner. The production has incredible staying power. Even if the musical no longer feels as revolutionary as it did when it was first performed nearly 40 years ago — the original production is widely considered a milestone in gay theater history — the show’s premise, the vivid characters and the infectious melodies are remarkably durable, or, at least, proved so in Kosky’s madcap production.This energetically choreographed, outrageously costumed and boldly designed staging gave full evidence of Kosky’s shrewd theatrical instincts. One of the first things we see onstage, during the overture, are a number of large silver cages occupied with extras decked-out in colorful plumes and wearing bird masks. The 13-strong “Cagelles,” as the nightclub dancers are called, spend most of the evening energetically twirling, tapping, can-canning and step-dancing clad in pink feathers, fake gold brocade, lace stockings or sparkly underwear. (I’d like to petition the Tonys to consider the choreographer Otto Pichler, assisted here by Mariana Souza, and the costume designer Klaus Bruns as overseas awards candidates.)In contrast to the plumage on display, Rufus Didwiszus’ sets are comparatively simple, even minimal at times, with one notable exception: the gay couple’s apartment. The flamboyant room boasts a sexually explicit illustration by Tom of Finland, large white porcelain vases and couches that are shaped like male genitalia. In addition, there’s an outdoor bistro under a starry set and a series of eclectic curtains with large, neon images of hummingbirds, flamingos and cockatoos that provide trippy backdrops to the kinetic dance numbers.Images of birds and plants provide colorful backdrops to the kinetic dance numbers.Monika RittershausBut “La Cage” requires more than theatrical pizazz. For the piece to work, the camp needs to be counterbalanced by heart, and the cast Kosky has assembled bring both to the stage. The Swiss actor Stefan Kurt, best-known here for his work with Robert Wilson, was captivating as Albin, the drag queen who performs as Zaza. Kurt played him with a touch of Quentin Crisp and a dash of Norma Desmond, but made the role his own by refusing to copy what other actors have done with it. Kurt is not a classical trained singer, and his vocal performance was not as polished as many of the others. But his mix of elegant wit, dramatic flair and emotional vulnerability was never less than captivating.Peter Renz, a former tenor engaged at the Komische, returned to play the dilemma-stricken Georges, the nightclub owner whose loyalty is divided between his lover and his son. He sang with warmth and beauty and acted with the brittle sang-froid of someone trying to maintain sanity in a madhouse. As the couple’s assistant, Jacob, Daniel Daniela Yrureta Ojeda, a Venezuelan dancer who has appeared here in several other Kosky productions, brought impressive physical antics and impeccable comic timing to a wonderfully scene-chewing role. Nicky Wuchinger was comparatively stiff as Georges’ son Jean-Michel, a fairly colorless role, although he crooned and harmonized well with Maria-Danaé Bansen, another young Berliner who lithely danced her way through the production as his fiancée Anne.Helmut Baumann, a local musical theater legend who originated the role of Zaza in “La Cage’s” German premiere in 1985, was cast here as the restaurateur Jacqueline. His entrance won applause from the opening night crowd, which was one of many times throughout the evening that the performance was punctuated by the audience’s vocal enthusiasm. One couldn’t really blame them. With this production, Kosky has turned his former opera house into an inviting place to perch for an evening. It’s the giddiest, most thrilling, most fabulous show in town.La Cage aux FollesThrough June 9. Komische Oper Berlin; komische-oper-berlin.de. More

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    Daniel Barenboim, Star Conductor, Withdraws from ‘Ring’ Cycle in Berlin

    “I must now give priority to my health and concentrate on my complete recovery,” the conductor said.A new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Berlin State Opera, featuring the eminent conductor Daniel Barenboim, was one of the most highly anticipated events on the classical music calendar this season.But on Tuesday, the production, which opens in October, suffered a setback when Barenboim, who has been grappling with a variety of health issues in recent years, announced he was withdrawing.“I am deeply saddened not to be able to conduct the new ‘Ring,’” Barenboim, 79, said in a statement. “I must now give priority to my health and concentrate on my complete recovery.”The Berlin State Opera, in a statement, said that the conductor Christian Thielemann would take over for the first and third planned “Ring” cycle this fall, and the conductor Thomas Guggeis for the second. The production, which runs through early November, is being staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov.It was the latest setback for Barenboim, a titan in classical music, who has withdrawn from performances lately.“I am still struggling with the consequences of the vasculitis I was diagnosed with in the spring, and with this decision I am following the advice of my attending physicians,” he said in the statement.Matthias Schulz, director of the Berlin State opera, said it was “extremely sad” that Barenboim could no longer take part. In a statement, he called the production “a unique undertaking that is very close to his heart and that of the entire house.”“Preparations have been underway for many years, and we have done everything in our power to make the ‘Ring’ with Daniel Barenboim possible, especially in the year of his 80th birthday,” Schulz said.As music director of the State Opera and principal conductor for life of its orchestra, the Staatskapelle, Barenboim is a towering figure in the European cultural scene. He is also a founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble of young musicians from around the Middle East, and he helped create a conservatory, the Barenboim-Said Akademie, as well as a concert hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin.In his statement, Barenboim said the Berlin State Opera was “very close to my heart.” He praised the conductors who will replace him.“I wish them and everyone involved all the best with this production,” he said. More

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    Is the Future of American Opera Unfolding in Detroit?

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Last September, as cultural organizations began their fall seasons in a state of crisis, unsure if audiences would venture from their homes in the midst of a pandemic, Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of the Michigan Opera Theater, decided to mount a show called “Bliss.” A restaging of a marathon piece by the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, “Bliss” requires its performers to replay the final three minutes of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” without pause for 12 hours. Sharon’s production took place in what was once the Michigan Building Theater, a former Detroit movie palace that closed in 1976; infamously, when architects determined that demolishing the theater would make an adjoining office building structurally unsound, the interior was gutted and transformed into a multilevel garage. The sight of cars parked beneath moldering Renaissance-style plasterwork and traces of long-gone balconies has long proved irresistible to Detroit ruin photographers, but no one before Sharon had ever staged a live performance among them. The production was pay-what-you-like, and those of us in the audience reached the performance space by walking up a ramp. Looking over its edge, I spotted a dusty Jeep parked on a lower level with the words LIONS SUCK traced on the windshield. A pair of low stages, minimally dressed to set a banquet scene, had been assembled, and the rest of the space was hauntingly lit, with an orchestra on the same level as the audience, whose members were free to sit or orbit at their leisure, entering or leaving at any part of the show, which began at noon and ended at midnight. Sharon paced the perimeter in a bow tie, a colorful jacket and yellow sneakers. Now 42, Sharon is the most visionary opera director of his generation. He founded an experimental company, cheekily named the Industry, in Los Angeles in 2012, and was met with near-immediate acclaim for stagings so wildly inventive they often dispensed with stages altogether. A 2013 production of “Invisible Cities,” the composer Christopher Cerrone’s adaptation of Italo Calvino’s imaginary travelogue, took place in Los Angeles’s Union Station, one of the busiest passenger railroad terminals in the country; performers moved around the space as concertgoers listened on wireless headphones (and commuters raced for their trains). A 2015 opera inspired by Julio Cortázar’s “Hopscotch” — a novel whose chapters can be read sequentially or by “hopscotching” around the book — recreated the format in Los Angeles traffic: Audience members would enter one of 24 limousines, each of which also contained performers, and proceed along one of three routes, occasionally changing cars or stopping at key landmarks to witness vignettes. Other Sharon productions have combined live singers with green screens and digital animation, stuck performers inside a giant glass vitrine and redeployed defunct air-raid sirens to broadcast music onto city streets. In 2017, Sharon was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant; the following year, he became the first American to direct at Bayreuth, the Wagnerian opera festival founded by Richard Wagner himself in 1876. The conductor Gustavo Dudamel — the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where Sharon served a three-year residency as artist-collaborator — told me in an email that Sharon was a “creative genius” who “understands the heart of every piece and takes us there through a vision that is incomparable.” And yet Sharon’s boldest venture may have been the announcement, in 2020, that he would be accepting a position as artistic director of the Michigan Opera Theater — since renamed, at Sharon’s insistence, Detroit Opera. It’s hard to overstate the unlikelihood of a director as innovative and internationally celebrated as Sharon taking the reins of a decidedly regional (and in certain respects conservative) opera company like Detroit’s. But today, nearly two years into his five-year contract, Sharon has already radically elevated Detroit Opera’s status in the larger cultural ecosystem. His first production in Detroit — a drive-through, socially distant version of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” in a downtown parking structure — received a rave from Alex Ross in The New Yorker: The piece “would have been a triumph in any season,” Ross wrote, but it “felt borderline miraculous” in 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic. Sharon went on to commission a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which had never received a full revival since its premiere at New York City Opera in 1986. Davis told me he’d taken meetings at the Metropolitan Opera over the years to discuss possible productions, but nothing had ever come of the talks; after the Detroit production was announced, though, “Yuval said the Met called him,” and arranged to bring the production to New York in 2023. I came early to “Bliss,” then returned again closer to the finish, grabbing a chair near Corey McKern, the baritone playing the philandering Count Almaviva. For the last 11 hours or so, the count had been begging forgiveness from his wife, and now McKern sat slumped on some steps at the edge of the stage. Kjartansson originally staged “Bliss” in 2011, but a decade later, its purgatorial repetition had become a perfect metaphor for our daily lives during the pandemic; the endless loop of penitent toxic maleness also had an amusing new resonance. On a personal level, more than whatever conceptual power the piece held, more than the ways in which repetition deepened and complicated the beauty of Mozart’s music, even more than the athleticism of the singers or the novelty of hearing them, unamplified, from only a few feet away, I was struck by the space itself. I’m a former resident of the city, and Detroit’s ruins were not new to me; to be frank, I’d been skeptical of the decision to stage the performance in the former Michigan Building Theater at all. So I was surprised to find myself tearing up during the final burst of applause at midnight. Had it been the amazing feat of endurance I’d just witnessed? The fact that this was one of the first live musical performances I’d seen in over a year? Or was it because we hadn’t been invited into this space simply to gawk at a memento mori, but rather to transform it into something transcendent, or at least to try?Mark Williams, the chief executive of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, told me that when he heard about Sharon’s move to Detroit, he was not surprised. He and Sharon had worked together at the Cleveland Orchestra, where Sharon directed a pair of acclaimed opera productions. But Sharon’s ambitions, Williams said, were bigger than guest directing; he was “the sort of person who would want to come into a space where he could really effect change, rather than going into a more established space and becoming more of a caretaker. So when he told me about Detroit, I thought, Gosh, that makes perfect sense. I believe that Yuval and Detroit Opera could really become the company that is showing America what opera can be.” As a deep partisan of the city, I say with all fondness: The future of American opera unfolding in Detroit was not a plot twist I saw coming. And yet, Sharon countered, Detroit might actually be “the perfect place to really push for what the future of opera can be.” He is not interested in a universalist, one-size-fits-all approach, where “La Bohème” ends up the same in Detroit as it does everywhere else: “No, it’s got to be totally of Detroit in the end. That, to me, is the path forward.” Couldn’t — shouldn’t, Sharon insisted — opera in Detroit look and feel and sound like nothing else in the country?In person, Sharon has the air of a convivial host. Boyish and elfin, with a slight frame and probing blue eyes, he’s a hugger, an easy laugher, a hoarder of both apt quotes by heavyweight European thinkers (Brecht, Barthes, Adorno, Kierkegaard, Peter Sloterdijk) and gossipy anecdotes (e.g. the one about the famous opera diva who phoned her agent in Europe so he could call the driver of her limo and have him lower the air-conditioning) — someone who “knows what he wants but is very polite, the opposite of an authoritarian director,” according to Matthias Schulz, the director of the Berlin State Opera, who sounded, when we talked, at once impressed and slightly puzzled by this approach.Earlier this year, Schulz invited Sharon to Berlin to revive his production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” which he first presented in 2019. “The Magic Flute” is Sharon’s favorite opera, and in his staging the singers are puppets dangling from strings in a children’s theater, with Tamino, the hero, costumed to resemble the manga character Astro Boy. (“The original version had tons of flying,” Sharon says. “We’re cutting that back.”) A few days before that revival opened, I met Sharon in front of Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where he arrived on a lime-green rental bicycle. He spent time in the city in the early aughts, when the KW, housed in an abandoned margarine factory, was among his favorite haunts. “I didn’t even check what was on,” he said as we entered, pulling a black N95 mask from the pocket of a sharp coat assembled from expensive-looking shingles of rough-hewed wool. “I always love what they do here.” It turned out that in the first gallery we were greeted by a quartet of stylized marionettes by the Austrian artist Peter Friedl. “Wow,” Sharon said. He pulled out his phone and snapped a photograph. Critics of his “Magic Flute,” he noted, didn’t like the marionette concept. He chuckled. “They thought of it as childish. I think it’s childlike. There’s a distinction!”Sharon’s 2019 production of ‘‘The Magic Flute’’ at Berlin State Opera.Monika RittershausThe original 2019 production was plagued with difficulties. The flying devices barely worked, and the original conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, dropped out three weeks before the opening for an emergency knee surgery. Audience members booed at the premiere. A zero-star review in The Financial Times began: “There are natural catastrophes, such as floods and earthquakes. And then there are man-made catastrophes, such as Yuval Sharon’s new production of Die Zauberflöte at Berlin’s Staatsoper.” Sharon has since acknowledged that the opening was “a disaster” — but the production did find its footing, and actually became popular, hence Schulz’s desire for the streamlined revival, which has become part of the Staatsoper’s repertory. “Matthias told me it became a cult favorite,” Sharon said, “which I think is a nice way of saying critics hated it but audiences like it.”I’d been scheduled to attend a rehearsal two nights earlier, but just before I left my hotel, I received an apologetic email saying one of the cast members felt uncomfortable having a journalist in the house. I would only be allowed to watch an hour of the proceedings from high in a balcony, far from everyone. Later I learned the context of my banishment from Sharon, who arrived in Berlin the day before: After a quick stop at his hotel he headed straight to the opera house, where the first thing he heard, from the same cast member who objected to my presence, was: This production is [expletive]. What are we doing? Sharon recounted the story with good humor, but he was obviously annoyed. “I was like, OK, you go sing your part, and I’ll deal with people who want to be here,” Sharon said. He sighed. “You can’t win ’em all. A big part of being a director is realizing that. And you know, watching it again? I thought, I still like all of this! If you asked me to do ‘The Magic Flute’ today, this is the production I’d do.”On opening night, I sat next to a girl who couldn’t have been older than 10 and had brought along a pair of opera glasses. The technical and conceptual audacity of Sharon’s productions tend to reap the most attention, but I’ve often come away from his work remembering smaller moments, funny or surreal, that grasp the emotional heart of the operas he’s deconstructing. In the case of “The Magic Flute,” one such moment came near the end, after Tamino rescues Pamina — and then, suddenly, the pair re-emerge in modern dress, the setting having shifted to a pristine replica of a 1960s suburban kitchen, jarringly rerouting the lovers’ fable-like quest narrative into a scene from a David Lynch movie, a version of Ever After both sinister and deflatingly mundane.The tenor George Shirley in rehearsal for ‘‘La Bohème.’’Dan Winters for The New York TimesThe standing ovation the show received would seem to justify Sharon’s self-confidence. But the skeptical cast member’s question gets at a nagging tension that hovers in the background whenever a provocateur like Sharon enters a more tradition-bound establishment — and there are few arts establishments more tradition-bound than opera, an endeavor that, perhaps for this very reason, seems perpetually in crisis. Devotees fret about aging audiences (the average Metropolitan Opera subscriber in the last season before Covid-19 was 65), cultural irrelevance, overdependence on wealthy donors, elitism, lack of diversity and of course the challenges of presenting what’s known as the “inherited repertoire,” which can make major opera houses feel more like museums displaying beautifully lit but familiar versions of beloved masterpieces. According to Marc Scorca, president of Opera America, many opera houses are financially healthy at the moment, thanks to recent federal stimulus packages — but “underneath that,” he says, “is huge concern about how the audience will rematerialize once Covid is behind us.” Sharon recognizes these challenges as being even more fraught in Detroit, where an already lean budget became leaner during the pandemic — and where, he told me, “the old metrics were, you have a 90-percent-white audience in a city that’s 80 percent Black.” He went on: “They lured me in with the sentiment that said, ‘We absolutely need to change.’ And I said, ‘Well, if change is really what you’re interested in, then, I mean — continuation is not what I’m here to do.’” Detroit Opera’s “Bliss” in the former Michigan Building Theater, which is now a parking garage.Noah Elliot MorrisonThe job in Detroit has been a return of sorts for Sharon, who grew up nearby, in Chicago. His parents, both Israeli, came to the United States when his father, Ariel, a nuclear engineer, attended Northwestern University. After Chernobyl, Ariel started a company that made nuclear-plant emergency simulators, a job that kept him on the road — often to Germany, where, “kind of the way American businessmen would go golfing together, clients there would take him to the opera,” Yuval told me. Ariel had always been an amateur music lover, noodling around on the family’s piano and insisting that Yuval (but, for some reason, neither of his siblings) stick with lessons. The pattern repeated itself with opera: As Ariel became more of a buff, his son, who thought the swords and dragons in Wagner were cool, would become his regular companion at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.The first opera Yuval saw, a production of “La Traviata” on a visit to Germany when he was 12 or 13, didn’t speak to him, but he still remembers a single, dreamlike moment from the otherwise traditional staging. In the final act, as Violetta lay dying in bed while a chorus sang offstage — party music, Sharon says, the moment where the woman realizes the world outside doesn’t care — a clown holding a balloon emerged from beneath her bed and sneaked out a window. “It was the only moment in which the reality of what was happening onstage was broken,” he says. The rest of the production rapidly faded, leaving little impression. But the image of the clown stuck in his mind. By middle school he’d become a self-described “loner kid”; by high school he was watching Bergman’s “Persona” for pleasure. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in literature but hoping to get into film or theater directing. After graduating he moved to Berlin, living in a flat with a coal stove and teaching English part-time. Living in the city was so cheap that he could afford to go out to plays, concerts and operas. Opera had never struck him as the sort of endeavor in which he could play a part; it felt fixed, like going to a museum or reading the Great Books. But in Berlin he saw opera directors with the freedom, thanks in part to state funding, to be wildly experimental, and realized an opera production could be more than a re-creation of something from the past.Sharon moved to New York in 2002. He helped found an experimental theater company, but he soon realized that all of his shows had musical elements. He was becoming more excited about his day job at New York City Opera, where he would eventually run a new-music program called Vox. Meeting composers and workshopping their operas with the orchestra, he found himself most enthusiastic about the pieces that didn’t feel as if they would make sense framed in a normal theater — those composed specifically for amplified voices, say, or incorporating electronic components. But starting a company to produce new opera seemed impossible in New York, and none of the cramped black-box theaters he could afford to rent felt like exciting visual spaces. In 2008 he began spending time in Los Angeles, working as an assistant director to Achim Freyer, a student of Bertolt Brecht’s and one of the avant-garde directors whose work he found inspiring in Berlin. Sharon says he got the job, working on a monumental staging of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, because “they needed someone who could speak German and who loved Wagner enough to make a two-year commitment.” Scorca, of Opera America, remembers the transplanted Easterner raving about how Los Angeles had a special freshness, an absence of cynicism and an openness to the arts. The Los Angeles Opera had been around only since 1986; Freyer’s production was to be the first complete “Ring” cycle ever performed in the city. “There was a whole arts infrastructure really being birthed,” Scorca says. “The Broad Museum hadn’t been built yet. Disney Hall was still relatively new. Something very special was happening, and there was a receptivity to the new that Yuval liked.” And unlike New York, Los Angeles had space to accommodate the scale of Sharon’s creative vision.“We were the new New York,” chuckles Cedric Berry, a bass-baritone who performed in the Industry’s first production, “Crescent City.” Set in a fictional city based on New Orleans after Katrina, the opera, by the Louisiana native Anne LeBaron, had been a favorite of Sharon’s since it was workshopped at Vox, and in some ways became his impetus for starting the Industry. He raised $250,000 from donors and grants and rented a warehouse in the Atwater Village neighborhood. “The music was the hardest piece I’ve ever done,” Berry told me. “But in addition to being an opera, it was an art installation” — Sharon had invited local visual artists to design immersive sets — “so the audience was on the stage, around the stage, you walked through them. My character was building a house. And they had cameras in your face, projecting video onto screens, so you had to be a smart actor, period.” The dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who was starting the LA Dance Project around the same time, recalls looking at a synopsis of the show “and thinking, This is the sort of thing very unlikely to work.” But by all accounts it did. The staging was high-concept; “I never make things easier, I make them more complicated,” Sharon admitted to me, while Berry says that “if it’s not something anyone in their right mind thinks is impossible, Yuval wouldn’t want to do it.” But Sharon remained laser-focused on performance and traditional technique, rooting out what Berry called “ ‘smacting,’ a kind of mock-acting, what people think of when they think of musical theater.” In a rapturous review, the Los Angeles Times classical-music critic Mark Swed described the Industry as “potentially groundbreaking” for the city. Millepied came away such a convert that the LA Dance Project collaborated with the Industry on its next project, “Invisible Cities.” For Sharon, Wagner’s theory of Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art,” makes opera the “ultimate collaborative art form and the ultimate multimedia art form” — even if for Wagner himself the term “meant ‘everything comes from my brain, and it’s all unified.’” Sharon’s own concept for a 21st-century Gesamtkunstwerk is “multivoiced, a polyphony rather than a monotony.” The 2020 Industry production “Sweet Land,” for instance, had two directors, two composers and two librettists. And the polyphony of public space came into play during site-specific Industry productions like “Hopscotch,” injecting some degree of anarchy into the pieces. Berry, who performed the role of Kublai Khan in “Invisible Cities” in street clothes and a wheelchair, told me he was often mistaken by commuters at Union Station for “some random homeless person” who happened to be singing; during one performance, when Berry paused during one of his arias, a woman who had been listening took the opportunity to start belting her own song.Sharon’s “Lohengrin” at the 2018 Bayreuth Festival in Germany.Enrico NawrathOne of the composers for “Sweet Land,” the Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun, told me that Sharon, from the outset of their unorthodox collaboration, encouraged the artists to let their imaginations run wild “as if there were no financial concerns.” Normally, she said, the artistic director of an opera company would be the one raising practical questions: “They’ll say, ‘We can’t do this, and here are a hundred reasons why.’ At the early meetings for ‘Sweet Land,’ that was me. It’s the first time I thought, Wait, am I conservative?” There’s an element of directing that’s practical, Sharon told me — “basically, managing time. But then you need another level, where you’re tapping into the realm of the impossible, what can barely be imagined. Sing in a moving car! Play violin while crossing a busy street!” In “Hopscotch,” an actor on a motorcycle pulled alongside the limousines in moving traffic to deliver lines sent to the vehicles’ speakers via wireless mics — after which, Sharon said, audience members would “start to wonder what else might be part of the show. A helicopter flew by and they assumed that was us!” Bringing the fictional into the everyday world highlights, for Sharon, the porousness of those boundaries, allowing witnesses to imagine transformative change in what might have seemed like an immutable reality. The space housing the Detroit Opera celebrates its 100th birthday this year. Originally called the Capitol Theater, it operated as a movie palace and live venue — Louis Armstrong, Will Rogers and Duke Ellington all performed there in its heyday — until 1985, when it was closed and left abandoned and unguarded for four years, with homeless people taking up residence inside and looters carting off one of the crystal chandeliers. When the Michigan Opera Theater purchased the building for $600,000 in 1989, its section of downtown Detroit had become so ruinous that “everybody thought we were really insane,” the company’s charismatic founder, David DiChiera, told The Times in 1999. But DiChiera started the company only four years after the 1967 Detroit riot, when businesses and residents were fleeing to the suburbs, and he’d made sustaining an opera company in a blue-collar town his life’s work. He cannily tapped automakers, among others, for funding, including for the restoration of what became the Detroit Opera House, which reopened in 1996 with a performance featuring Luciano Pavarotti. His programming leaned to the classical, but he also worked to reflect the demographics of the city, becoming an early advocate of colorblind casting (Kathleen Battle made her professional operatic debut at M.O.T.) and helping commission the 2005 premiere of “Margaret Garner,” an opera with a libretto by Toni Morrison based on the true story that inspired her novel “Beloved.” DiChiera stepped away from the institution in 2017 and died the following year, leaving the company in what the critic Mark Stryker described in The Detroit Free Press as an “artistic holding pattern.” In 2019, Stephen Lord, the principal conductor, resigned following allegations of sexual harassment at other companies. (Lord denied the accusations at the time.) Sharon, meanwhile, was planning to use a portion of his MacArthur grant to take a yearlong sabbatical in Japan; he’d been studying Japanese and had purchased a plane ticket for April 1, 2020. (“I know,” he said, after telling me the date. “It’s funny. It was like, April Fools!”)Gary Wasserman, a Detroit philanthropist and longtime supporter of the Michigan Opera Theater, had been following Sharon’s career for years; he told me he considered “Hopscotch” one of the most memorable theatrical experiences he’d ever had, comparing its intricacy to a fine watch. He caught a performance of “Sweet Land” before the pandemic, hoping he could lure Sharon to bring it to Michigan. After the pandemic arrived and the possibility of upcoming productions vanished, an M.O.T. board member asked him if Sharon might consider coming on as artistic director. Sharon flew to Detroit in June. He knew that if he accepted the job, he wanted to announce a fall production immediately — but performing inside the theater remained impossible. It was only when Sharon asked about the company’s other assets that he was told about the parking structure across the street. “Twilight: Gods,” mounted that fall, was Sharon’s drive-through abridgment of the final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle — normally five or six hours, pared by Sharon to a slim 65 minutes or so, with groups of eight cars at a time moving from level to level to watch different scenes unfold while listening to the music via FM radio. It was an unambiguous triumph. “The last part of the Ring cycle is about a world order that’s collapsing, and the need, in a way, for it to collapse,” Sharon told me. Brünnhilde throws fire into her father’s hall “to literally burn it down, with the hope that a future humanity will arise that will be better. It’s, on one hand, pessimistic. On the other hand, I felt like it was what we were living through anyway.” The great dramatic soprano Christine Goerke came onboard to sing Brünnhilde; her steed, appropriately enough, became a Ford Mustang. Sharon and M.O.T.’s chief executive, Wayne Brown, personally greeted each car. Some theatergoers arrived in jeans or sweats, others in evening attire. Brown told me one group of attendees hung a chandelier in their car and brought flutes of Champagne. The meeting point for “Hopscotch,” a mobile opera directed by Sharon in 2015, in which 24 cars carried audience members throughout Los Angeles.Joshua LiptonOne thing that made Sharon’s work at the Industry so exciting was the way in which it seemed to exist in dialogue with the sprawling, messy history of the city around it. It’s still too early to say how Sharon’s vision will intersect with Detroit, but there have been strong hints. He tapped a local writer, Marsha Music, to narrate “Twilight: Gods” and give the story a Detroit voice. The production of “X,” of course, had resonance thanks to Malcolm (a.k.a. Detroit Red) and the Nation of Islam’s Michigan roots. “Blue,” a 2019 opera by the composer Jeanine Tesori and the librettist Tazewell Thompson about police violence, was performed last year at the riverfront Aretha Franklin Amphitheater, which Marsha Music called “historically a Black performance space,” marveling that, at least on the night she attended, “When the people walked up in there, it looked like Ebony Fashion Fair.” The nearly sold-out run of “X” was especially popular; three-quarters of its single-ticket sales were to new audience members, with more than double the usual number coming from Detroit residents.In April, Sharon directed the company’s first show back in the Detroit Opera House since the start of the pandemic: the inherited-repertoire favorite “La Bohème.” Sharon being Sharon, his version unfolded in reverse order, opening with Act IV, in which Mimì dies, and ending with Act I, in which she and her lover, Rodolfo, first meet. Detroit has died and been reborn so many times that Sharon’s reworking of the classic felt like an oblique nod to the city. Beginning with the sorrow that would befall these young people created a fantastic dramatic tension as the story proceeded, but an odd feeling of hope persisted as the story moved from the end of the affair to its blooming: Tragedy may be inevitable, but the lovers’ time together felt entirely worthwhile. The final scene from Sharon’s production of “La Bohème.”Andrea Stinson Photography/Detroit OperaNot everyone loved the idea. Sharon, when I saw him at the dress rehearsal, was delighted by a write-up on the website of The Daily Mail, the British tabloid, bearing the headline, “Detroit gives tragic classic opera La Bohème a woke reboot: City will stage production in REVERSE order to avoid ending where main character dies so audience leaves feeling ‘hopeful and optimistic.’” He began reciting various angry comments to me (“Excellent idea by the woke left”), cackling so loudly that a tech guy preparing to film the rehearsal shushed us. Taking a seat in the mostly empty house, Sharon leaned back to watch the run-through while an assistant director typed his murmured notes into a laptop: His beard looks too trim, make it messier. A couple of words in this supertitle are wrong. Move that stool out of the shadow or it’ll be too dark. And, when one of the characters stood in a particular position with his arm raised: Oh, no — that looks like the poster from “Hamilton!”At the gala opening two days later, a string quartet played songs by Taylor Swift and Daft Punk. The opera itself flew by, per Sharon’s design: “I wanted it to feel like Japanese calligraphy, where you can’t remove your brush from the page,” he said in a talk before the show. “That’s what I’d like this production to feel like: one brush stroke, quick. Like being young.” The minimalist set, by John Conklin, allowed Sharon to eliminate intermissions, which are usually necessary for scene changes, and the relative simplicity of the staging gave him time to focus on the performers, who now had to be prepared to sing the most difficult arias at the end of the evening; Edward Parks and Brandie Inez Sutton, playing the comic-relief lovebirds Marcello and Musetta, stole the show.“The challenge, when we do ‘La Bohème’ and more standard repertoire,” Sharon told me last fall, “will be, how do we bring an improvisatory spirit into something that feels more fixed?” — a spirit closer to that of “Bliss,” wherein the discipline required of the performers also came with enormous freedom. “For me, that’s one of the big experiments of coming into an environment like an opera house, and why ‘La Bohème,’ for me, is one of my biggest experiments.” Not merely doing it backward, he went on, but trying to figure out how to make an opera written in the 19th century feel as if it were being invented right there on the spot. “That discovery, in each and every repetition,” Sharon said. “That’s what you want to try and find a way to capture.” As his production neared its finish (technically the start), even throwaway lines accrued unexpected weight, landing sudden, sharp blows. In the conclusion of Act I, Mimì agrees to join Rodolfo at the Café Momus: “E al ritorno?” he asks. And when we come back? “Curioso,” she replies. Let’s see.Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a feature about a biker shootout in Waco, Texas. More

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    How Manuel Solano Found Joy by Playing Music

    5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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    Exhibit at German History Museum Reckons With Wagner’s Legacy

    A new exhibition at the country’s national history museum examines the strong feelings stirred by its most famous 19th-century composer.BERLIN — Few composers inspire such a mix of appreciation and disgust as Richard Wagner. Especially here in Germany — where Wagner’s work is understood as a combination of national cultural jewel and national political embarrassment — the composer’s work is laden with meaning and interpretation.Along with his music dramas, Wagner’s legacy includes his antisemitic and nationalist political writings, and the Nazi dictatorship celebrated his musical works as a symbol of the pure German culture they hoped to promote. Hitler was a regular at the Wagner festival at Bayreuth, where he was welcomed warmly by the composer’s descendants, and the regime used Wagner’s music in rallies and at official events.“You can’t have a naïve and beautiful production of a Wagner opera in Germany,” said Michael P. Steinberg, a cultural historian at Brown University who, along with Katherina J. Schneider, co-curated an upcoming exhibition on the composer at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. “It’s impossible.”That show, “Richard Wagner and the Nationalization of Feeling,” opens April 9 and runs through September. The first exhibition dedicated to a composer at Germany’s national history museum, it explores the relationship between Wagner’s politics and his artistic output and influence.“If Wagner had only written his 3,000 pages of prose, he would be remembered as a kook, a second-rate maniacal thinker,” Steinberg said.Instead, Steinberg added, he is mostly remembered for the opus of music dramas that made him “without doubt the most transformational composer of the mid-19th century, without whom one cannot understand European art music after him.”Wagner was a “technician of emotions,” he said, who orchestrated collective experiences of feeling that embedded his ideas in his art. That means the music and the poisoned politics can’t be separated, Steinberg said. “The ideas come out on the stage in subliminal ways,” he added, “through worlds of feeling that are transmitted through music and text.”For this reason, he and Schneider have organized the show according to a series of emotions through which they argue the composer’s legacy can be understood: from the alienation Wagner felt as an 1840s revolutionary; to the sense of belonging as he began to be institutionally accepted; to the eros that characterizes the seductiveness of his work; and, finally, the disgust and loathing that animated the composer’s prejudices.These feelings, the curators argue, were “national” ones because the popularity of Wagner’s music helped embed them in the German national consciousness, especially after the unification of Germany in 1871.“During the Break,” a portrayal of the Richard Wagner Festspielhaus in Bayreuth by Gustav Laska, 1894.Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth – Leihgabe der Oberfrankenstiftung, BayreuthTo support their case, they have assembled objects lent from collections across Europe, as well as artifacts from the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s own collection, combined with video clips from performances and stagings, and interviews with notable Wagnerian artists.The curators also commissioned a new audio installation from Barrie Kosky, the director of the Komische Oper in Berlin, whose Jewishness is a major part of his artistic identity. He has spent the last few years pursuing what he calls a “public cultural exorcism” of his own Wagner demons, exploring the composer’s antisemitism through a series of acclaimed productions that culminated with an acclaimed staging of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at Bayreuth, which ended with the composer literally on trial.His point of departure for the installation, he said in an interview, was Wagner’s infamous essay “Jewishness in Music.” The essay, an antisemitic screed that argues Jewish composers could only imitate, and never truly create, also lingers on the composer’s visceral hatred for the Jewish “voice.” Arguing that art music arose from race-based folk cultures, Wagner describes Jewish folk music as a “sense-and-sound confounding gurgle, yodel, and cackle.”Kosky said he heard echoes of those hated sounds in the music for Wagner characters who embody antisemitic archetypes: the pedantic critic in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” for instance, or the gold-hungry dwarves in the “Ring” cycle.Kosky’s sound installation plays out in a small dark room at the museum. Visitors hear jumbled-together recordings of synagogue music, excerpts from old recordings featuring the “Jewish” Wagner characters and sentences from “Jewishness in Music,” read by a woman, in Yiddish. Kosky called the effect “deliberately nauseating.”The entrance to Barrie Kosky’s installation “Schwarzalbenreich” in a chapter of the exhibition called “Ekel“ (“Disgust”).Deutsches Historisches Museum; David von BeckerKosky said he would continue to direct the composer’s music dramas, even though there was antisemitism in them. Having completed his “exorcism,” he added, he felt personally and artistically free to approach the composer’s work from new perspectives.“It’s the combination of things: the music, text, and cultural specificity of what he is using that makes Wagner’s work, to me, so deeply problematic and fascinating,” Kosky said.Mark Berry, who leads the music department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has published widely on politics and religion in Wagner’s work, said Wagner had become something of a scapegoat in German attempts to come to terms with the country’s past. It was, he added, as if guilt about the murderous consequences of German antisemitism could be outsourced to one man who died long before the Nazis came to power.“Clearly there are romantic nationalist elements in Wagner’s thought,” he said, “as there were in just about any German artist of that time. If one looks at his theoretical writing, however, he is adamant that the time of national characteristics in art is over, that this is to be an age of artistic universalism.”Yes, Berry said, there were antisemitic tropes in Wagner’s music dramas, and antisemitic politics in his essays. But, he added, that doesn’t make the music itself antisemitic, and Wagner wasn’t the main conduit by which antisemitism became prominent in the German national mood, and the basis of genocidal state policy.Daniel Barenboim, one of the most prominent Jewish figures in classical music in Germany and the music director of the Berlin State Opera, has written that Wagner can hardly be held “accountable for Hitler’s use and abuse of his music and world views.” He declined to be interviewed, but in an article on his website, he describes Wagner as “a virulent anti-Semite of the worst kind whose statements are unforgivable.”The show features objects lent from collections across Europe, as well as artifacts from the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s own collection.Deutsches Historisches Museum; David von BeckerIn that article, Barenboim, who will conduct a new “Ring” in Berlin this October, asks: why allow Hitler to have the last word on Wagner when so many Jewish artists — singers, conductors, directors — have made careers from the composer’s work, and his work has inspired so many Jewish composers?That same essay opens with a meditation on the storm scene that opens Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre,” with Barenboim laying out the precise, almost mathematical structure through which Wagner sketches the feeling of being in a forest and a snowstorm, and the emotions of an alienated outsider on the run. The phrases swell and recede before an explosion in the winds and brass and an abrupt roll of the timpani. In the audience, your heart skips a beat. These are the techniques by which Wagner manipulates emotion — on the scale of a phrase, or a melody, or an opera, or a nation. More

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    At the FIND Festival, Different Ways of Staging the Real

    At Berlin’s FIND festival of new international drama, several productions use transcripts to explore questions of state power and identity.BERLIN — Outside a small stage at the Schaubühne theater here on Tuesday evening, a sign cautioned that the Chilean production “Oasis de la Impunidad” (“Oasis of Impunity”) featured strobe lights and onstage nudity.In retrospect, that caveat seemed comical, a bit like warning viewers that a Tarantino film might be somewhat bloody. Over the play’s 90-minute run time, the audience sat in stunned silence as a band of eight performers enacted a macabre and ritualistically precise examination of violence’s corrosive effect on the individual and the social body. Scenes of torture and violence, including sexual violence, tumbled forth with balletic elegance. The production’s delicacy of feeling and theatrical finesse were disturbingly at odds with the horrors it depicted.Created by the director Marco Layera and his company La Re-Sentida, “Oasis de la Impunidad” is a harrowing artistic response to Chile’s recent wave of social unrest, which has been described as the country’s worst since the end of the Pinochet regime. Like the other standout productions at the Schaubühne’s Festival International for New Drama, or FIND, “Oasis” takes nightmarish and surreal contemporary events as starting points for provocative theatrical explorations.In late 2019, Chile was convulsed by social unrest after a fare hike on the Santiago subway inspired mass demonstrations and riots against rising inequality. The government declared a state of emergency and deployed the army to restore law and order. In the first weeks of unrest, 18 people were killed and nearly 3,000 detained, including hundreds of women and children, according to a report issued by the National Institute for Human Rights. Since then, there have been numerous reports of security forces torturing and raping protesters.To develop “Oasis,” Layera held a series of theater labs and workshops in Chile. Two hundred people participated, including many survivors of state-sponsored repression and brutality. The resulting show, described as “an investigation into the origins and mechanisms of violence,” is a series of sinister and menacing episodes laced with dark comedy.At the Schaubühne, the actors, a mix of professionals and nonprofessionals, pulled on their genitalia, pinched their teeth and flesh with tools, erupted into paroxysms of hysteria and grief, and lovingly exhibited broken, bloodied bodies in a fun house of horrors. After its world premiere in Berlin, the show will travel to Santiago, Chile, in late May.Toward the end of the performance, an actor pushed through a row of spectators with an apparently passed-out, naked woman limply dangling from his shoulder and slumped her down on an empty seat. She remained there motionless until well after the curtain call. Several audience members stayed with her, cradling her head, until she revived once the theater had emptied out. It was a measure of the production’s success that it was far from clear what was real and what was simulated. By forcing the audience to confront aestheticized violence at such close range, “Oasis de la Impunidad” raised uncomfortable questions about power, art and ethics.Katherine Romans in “Is This A Room,” directed by Tina Satter.Gianmarco BresadolaThe struggle between the individual and the repressive force of the state was also at the center of “Is This a Room” by the American director Tina Satter, also showing at FIND. The play’s text is the verbatim, unedited transcript of an F.B.I. interrogation: In 2017, Reality Winner, a 25-year-old Air Force veteran, linguist and intelligence specialist, was arrested for leaking a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the news website The Intercept. She was sentenced to more than five years in prison. Satter’s production dramatizes the hour on June 3, 2017, when F.B.I. agents surprised Winner at her home in Augusta, Ga., with a search warrant.This short, absorbing production was one of the most daring and adventurous plays on Broadway last year (it had earlier runs both Off and Off Off Broadway), and it arrived at FIND as part of its international tour, with its small cast intact from Broadway, with the exception of Katherine Romans stepping in as Winner. (Emily Davis originated the role.) Itchy footed and garrulous, Romans is convincing as the whistle-blower, who seems more worried about the well-being of her pets and the fate of her Yoga music playlist on her phone than spending years behind bars. She chitchats with the F.B.I. agents, who, like her, seem to be sizing up the situation second by second, about her professional ambitions, the languages she knows and her enthusiasm for CrossFit.At the Schaubühne, the actors performed from Parker Lutz’s simple, unfurnished set with the audience seated on either side of the oblong stage. Watching as Winner’s life comes crashing down around her in the space of an hour, one marvels at how perfect the dramatic timing is and how the revelations generated by the twists and turns of the interrogation build to something like catharsis. Even the non sequiturs, including the title question, uttered by a character identified by the transcript as “unknown male,” are beautifully timed and add a note of mystery as well as comic relief to this clammy production.Another FIND offering, Marcus Lindeen’s “L’Aventure invisible” (“The Invisible Adventure”), was also based on verbatim sources. That production — taking its dialogue from interviews, rather than an interrogation transcript — was more immersive than “Is This a Room,” but less convincing as a work of drama.From left, Isabelle Girard, Tom Menanteau and Franky Gogo in “L’Aventure Invisible.”Gianmarco BresadolaThe most immediately striking aspect of “L’Aventure invisible” was its physical format. The audience and performers sat together in a small wooden arena. The round seating area suggested an anatomical theater or amphitheater. The actors, facing one another, were easy to spot even before the performance began because they were the only three people not wearing medical masks.Once the house lights went down, they assumed the personas of people whose experiences suggest that identity is an unstable notion subject to profound and unexpected transformations: Jérôme Hamon, the first person to get two full face transplants; Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who suffered a massive stroke and had to completely reinvent herself at 37; and Sarah Pucill, who made a film about the French Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun, a gender-nonconforming pioneer.The dialogue is drawn from interviews Lindeen conducted with the trio, and in “L’Aventure invisible,” the three actors take turns questioning one another. While much of what they recount is fascinating, the format felt contrived and was occasionally awkward, with cookie-cutter interview prompts (“How did that make you feel?” or “And then what happened?”) that broke up the lengthy monologues.The actors brought the French text to life in serious, mostly understated performances (the audience could view subtitles in English or German on their smartphones). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hamon’s testimony is the most riveting. Tom Menanteau, the young actor playing Hamon, calmly described the degenerative disease that used to disfigure him, and how he now lives with the face of a dead man, 21 years his junior.When fact is stranger — and more frightening — than fiction, how can theatermakers stage the contemporary in artistically sensitive and politically urgent ways? That is the question this year’s FIND invites us to consider.FIND 2022 continues at the Schaubühne through April 10. More