Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Friedrich Cerha, 96, Who Finished Another Composer’s Masterpiece, Dies

      by

      His skill in completing Alban Berg’s “Lulu” almost 40 years after Berg’s death was considered one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century.Friedrich Cerha, an Austrian composer and conductor who was best renowned for taking on the arduous task of completing Alban Berg’s unfinished “Lulu,” and whose skill in the effort confirmed that work as one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century, died on Tuesday in Vienna. He was 96.His death was announced by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause.Mr. Cerha wrote several stage works, of which three — “Baal,” “Der Rattenfänger” and “Der Riese vom Steinfeld” — were produced by the Vienna State Opera. He composed orchestral, chamber and other music that found rare stylistic range within the broad confines of postwar modernism. He was a crucial figure in the rebuilding of the Viennese new-music scene, cofounding and then conducting its leading ensemble, Die Reihe. And he was a dedicated teacher to his students, who included the composer Georg Friedrich Haas.But at least outside Austria, Mr. Cerha was known less for his own work than for his celebrated contribution to another composer’s masterpiece.Berg had not quite finished orchestrating “Lulu” when he died in December 1935, although the opera, a successor to his earlier “Wozzeck,” had already become a cause célèbre for critics of Nazi cultural policies. He had set “Lulu” aside earlier that year to write his Violin Concerto and returned to it in the fall only to be struck down, partway into its third act, with an infected abscess.From its Zurich premiere in 1937 on, “Lulu” was staged in a two-act form that offered evidence of the work’s stature yet disfigured the composer’s theatrical and musical design. But by the early 1960s, scholars led by George Perle had become convinced that Berg had considered “Lulu” all but complete, and that the available materials, including a short score, made a realization both possible and necessary. Berg’s widow, Helene, banned any such thing, and his publisher, Universal Edition, publicly followed her lead. Privately, it did not.Mr. Cerha, meanwhile, had long been interested in the Second Viennese School, of which Berg was a part. Mr. Cerha had studied with former members of Arnold Schoenberg’s circle and had programmed a work by Anton Webern for the debut concert of Die Reihe, in March 1959. In June 1962, Mr. Cerha saw Karl Böhm lead “Lulu” at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna and found the two-act truncation painful to watch. The next day, he went to the offices of Universal Edition, asked for whatever documents they had and set secretly to work.A scene from Mr. Cerha’s completed edition of Berg’s “Lulu,” staged by the Paris Opera in 1979. Colette Masson/Roger-Viollet, via Granger The task was considerable. Nine hundred or so bars of one of history’s most complex scores were left to orchestrate, and although Berg’s intricate structure meant that material from the first two acts could be reused in the third, some imagination was still needed. It took Mr. Cerha until 1974 to finish it, before making further revisions after Mrs. Berg died in 1976.There was pressure, too — far more than most composers faced in their own work. “Lulu” already had a towering reputation, and its effective banning by the Nazis had kept it a political symbol after the war. When the Paris Opera finally staged Mr. Cerha’s edition, on Feb. 24, 1979, it offered “perhaps the most important and glamorous operatic premiere since the end of World War II,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in a front-page review in The New York Times.Mr. Cerha’s contributions were so successful that he became almost a ghostwriter: He revealed “Lulu” at its full greatness, while shying away from the spotlight.His fellow composers were impressed. Pierre Boulez, who conducted the premiere, said Mr. Cerha had worked “with great care, competence and mastery.” Mr. Perle wrote that “nowhere does one have the impression that a hand other than the composer’s has had to take over.”Gyorgy Ligeti went further, saying in 1986 that Mr. Cerha, a friend, had a “total lack of vanity, which enabled him to enter wholeheartedly into the way of thinking of a congenial yet nevertheless different composer, and to sacrifice thousands of hours, and days, of his own composing.”“No one else,” Ligeti added, “could have done that.”Friedrich Paul Cerha was born in Vienna on Feb. 17, 1926, the only child of Paul and Marie (Falbigel) Cerha. His father was an electrical engineer. Friedrich learned the violin from about age 6 and had written a few compositions by the time of Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.Like his parents, young Friedrich despised Nazism, but was conscripted first to aid the Luftwaffe in air defense and later, in 1944, into the Wehrmacht. He deserted, was caught, was sent to the front and deserted again, this time walking hundreds of miles south from Göttingen, in the middle of Germany, through the Thuringian Forest and into the mountains of Tirol, where he hid at high altitude in a hut at Lamsenjoch.The experience of fascism, and of his freedom from it, left Mr. Cerha with a lifelong reluctance to adhere to aesthetic dogmas, or even to focus solely on music; he painted, and sculpted a stone chapel in woods near his second home in Maria Langegg. After studying in Vienna at the conservatory and the university, from which he earned a doctorate in 1950, he spent three summers at Darmstadt, Germany, the hothouse of the European avant-garde, but did not lastingly embrace a single compositional school over another.“I have never fanatically advocated artistic goals,” Mr. Cerha told Universal Edition’s magazine in 2012. “I always acted from an inner conviction.”The legacy of the war is particularly audible in “Spiegel,” a frightening array of seven soundscapes for orchestra and tape that was arguably Mr. Cerha’s most important work. Dating from 1960-61, its clouds of sound resemble the far shorter, more static works that Ligeti wrote around the same time, like “Atmosphères,” and it made Mr. Cerha famous.But “Spiegel,” which he wrote without regard for practicality and did not premiere as a cycle until 1972, is also quite different, with narrative elements that add up to a terrifying hour-plus portrayal of disastrous force. In “Spiegel VI,” a maniacal march slams into nervous strings and winds, the brass braying grotesquely in the ensuing carnage; in “Spiegel V,” relentless drumrolls herald a consuming darkness — the abyss.“The pieces were invented in a purely musical way,” Mr. Cerha wrote in notes for a recording on the Kairos label. “It was only long after their completion that I understood the degree to which this work was influenced by the horrors of my war experiences and the limitless joy of freedom that I felt as a deserter in the midst of nature.”His wife, Gertraud Cerha, a musician herself, whom he married in 1951, was the keyboard soloist in the 1960 premiere of a serialist piece for harpsichord and ensemble, “Relazioni fragili.” She survives him, as do two daughters, Ruth and Irina, and two grandchildren.For some critics, the “Lulu” experience seemed to draw out a Bergian expressivity in Mr. Cerha’s style, and some of his later works — “Nacht” for orchestra, say, or his “8 Sätze nach Hölderlin-Fragmenten” for string sextet — indeed have a familiar, muted lyricism to them, though others do not. He bridled at the suggestion, however: His own works were his, alone.“That was very strange,” he told Universal Edition of this purported influence. “Before the third act of ‘Lulu’ had its world premiere, nobody ever connected me to Berg, but in the years after, this suddenly happened all the time. People detected a connection to Berg, which is of course nonsense.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Sandra Trehub, Pioneer in the Psychology of Music, Dies at 84

      by

      She showed that basic musical ability is present in infants across cultures, laying a foundation for a growing field of study.Sandra Trehub, a psychologist and researcher whose work helped illuminate how children perceive sound, and how lullabies and music fit into their cognitive and social development, died on Jan. 20 at her home in Toronto. She was 84.The death was confirmed by her son Andrew Cohen.Over a half-century as a psychologist at the University of Toronto, where she began working in 1973, Dr. Trehub produced seminal work in the field that is now known as the psychology of music.“Back then, there were very few people in psychology and neuroscience who were studying music at all as a human behavior,” Laurel Trainor, a psychologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said in a phone interview. “Sandra said, look, music is universal, we spend a lot of time and energy on music — what is its purpose? Why do we do this?”Dr. Trehub’s research found that there are indeed universally shared responses to music among infants, beginning with sing-song-y baby talk by parents across different cultures.She found that infants prefer certain melodic intervals over others and can grasp the contour and shape of a lullaby. She further established that infants and toddlers can — better than adults — notice differences in some elements of music from other countries and cultures, both tonal and rhythmic. That finding suggested that as people get older, their ability to distinguish discrepancies in unfamiliar music decreases while their ability to notice nuance in familiar music increases.“Sandra was the first psychologist to study musical abilities for their own sake in infants,” Isabelle Peretz, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, wrote in an email. Before Dr. Trehub, she added, many researchers thought “that musicality was a pure cultural product which was acquired and possessed by a few select people: the musicians.”It is now widely accepted that music is an important developmental tool for everyone, starting in infancy, and that musical fluency among parents can deeply affect their children’s long-term health and mental development.“Her work helps to legitimize early childhood music education, which basically didn’t exist before the 1980s,” Samuel Mehr, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and director of the Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, said by email.Dr. Trehub’s findings might seem intuitive or even obvious now, he added, but that only highlights the importance of her work. “Every bit of research in the psychology of music over the past 40 years can be traced back to Sandra Trehub,” he said.Sandra Edythe Trehub was born on May 21, 1938, in Montreal. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics at McGill University in Montreal in 1959 and her master’s in psychology there in 1971.After completing her doctorate, also at McGill, she began her career as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Some of her earliest work showed how infants as young as one month old could distinguish between speech sounds; in a paper, she wrote that babies would increase their “sucking rate” on an artificial nipple when new vowels were introduced.Using the same methodology, Dr. Trehub went on to show in another paper how babies can distinguish between sounds in some foreign languages better than adults. That finding, said Janet Werker, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, provided the groundwork for a large body of subsequent research demonstrating that babies are born with the ability to pick up on the basic acoustics of any of the world’s languages. The research has served to heighten the importance of early exposure to foreign languages, with continuing ramifications in education.As Dr. Trehub earned tenure at the University of Toronto, her work shifted from speech to music. She published prolifically in journals, including two influential papers in 1977. One showed that the heart rates of five-month-old infants changed when exposed to different rhythms. The other showed that infants can sense the relationships between notes — they can tell when the same melody is transposed to a different key. Dr. Trehub’s research was inspired in part by her own love of music; two of her favorite singers were Leonard Cohen and David Bowie.Dr. Trehub’s marriage to Norman Cohen in 1957 ended in divorce in 1968. She married Ronald Matthews in 1970; he died in 2007. In addition to her son Andrew, she is survived by two more children, Dana and Ira Cohen; her sisters, Estelle Ebert and Maxine Seidman; 18 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.She also leaves an intellectual lineage of psychologists who studied with her and went on to head some of the most active psychology of music labs in the world.Dr. Trainor, one of Dr. Trehub’s early graduate students, remembered going to talks on the psychology of music in the 1980s and ’90s with little more than 10 people in the audience. Now there are conferences with thousands of researchers.“Part of that is a testament to Sandra, and the quality of her work — she couldn’t be ignored,” said Dr. Trainor.Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who wrote more than 30 articles with Dr. Trehub, agreed. “She was like Joni Mitchell,” he said by phone. “In the end, she really got every credit that she deserved.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Raquel Welch, Actress and ’60s Sex Symbol, Is Dead at 82

      by

      Beginning with a doeskin bikini in “One Million Years B.C.,” she built a celebrated show business career around sex appeal and, sometimes, a comic touch.Raquel Welch, the voluptuous movie actress who became the 1960s’ first major American sex symbol and maintained that image for a half-century in show business, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 82.Her death was confirmed by her son, Damon Welch. No cause was given.Ms. Welch’s Hollywood success began as much with a poster as with the film it publicized. Starring in “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) as a Pleistocene-era cave woman, she posed in a rocky prehistoric landscape, wearing a tattered doeskin bikini, and grabbed the spotlight by the throat with her defiant, alert-to-everything, take-no-prisoners stance and her dancer’s body. She was 26. It had been four years since Marilyn Monroe’s death, and the industry needed a goddess.Camille Paglia, the feminist critic, described the poster photograph as “the indelible image of a woman as queen of nature.” Ms. Welch, she went on, was “a lioness — fierce, passionate and dangerously physical.”Ms. Welch played a Pleistocene-era cave woman in the 1966 movie that skyrocketed her to fame.Universal History Archive/UIG, via Getty ImagesHer Hollywood success began as much with this poster as with the film it publicized.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesWhen Playboy in 1998 named the 100 sexiest female stars of the 20th century, Ms. Welch came in third — right after Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Brigitte Bardot was fourth.The critics were often unkind. Throughout her career, Ms. Welch was publicly admired more for her anatomy than for her dramatic abilities. She even called her 2010 book, a memoir and self-help guide, “Beyond the Cleavage.”But when she had a chance to show off her comic abilities, they were kinder. Ms. Welch won a Golden Globe for her role in Richard Lester’s 1973 adaptation of “The Three Musketeers”; her character was a hopelessly klutzy 17th-century Frenchwoman, torn between two lives — as a landlord’s wife and the queen’s seamstress.Despite a career based largely on sex appeal, Ms. Welch repeatedly refused to appear nude onscreen. “Personally, I always hated feeling so exposed and vulnerable” in love scenes, she wrote in her memoir, noting that even when she appeared in a prestigious Merchant Ivory film (“The Wild Party,” 1975), the filmmakers, those acclaimed arbiters of art-house taste, pressured her to do a nude bedroom scene, to no avail.Ms. Welch won a Golden Globe for her role in Richard Lester’s 1973 adaptation of “The Three Musketeers.”Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images“I’ve definitely used my body and sex appeal to advantage in my work, but always within limits,” she said. But, she added, “I reserve some things for my private life, and they are not for sale.”Jo-Raquel Tejada was born in Chicago on Sept. 5, 1940, the oldest of three children of Armando Carlos Tejada, a Bolivian-born aeronautical engineer, and Josephine Sarah (Hall) Tejada, an American of English descent. They had met as students at the University of Illinois.When Raquel was 2, the family moved to Southern California for her father’s work in the war effort. At 7, encouraged by her mother, she enrolled at San Diego Junior Theater, where her only early disappointment was being cast in her first play as a boy. She began ballet classes the same year and continued to study dance for a decade.After graduating from La Jolla High School in San Diego, where her nickname was Rocky, she received a scholarship — thanks to success in local beauty pageants — to study theater at San Diego State College. But she dropped out at 19 to marry her high school boyfriend, James Wesley Welch. Because of her local celebrity, she landed a job as the “weather girl” on KFMB, a San Diego television station.Ms. Welch and Stephen Boyd in “Fantastic Voyage” (1966).20th Century Fox/Everett CollectionThe birth of her two children complicated her career plans, but she soon left her husband — “the most painful decision of my entire life,” she called it — and moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. (They divorced in 1964.)She had hoped to move to New York instead, she recalled. But the trip would have been prohibitively expensive, and, anyway, she didn’t own a winter coat.It was not long before she had a contract with a major studio, 20th Century Fox. She had early hopes of making her big-screen debut in a James Bond movie; the producer Albert R. Broccoli wanted her for “Thunderball.” But that dream was quashed when she was cast in “Fantastic Voyage” (1966), a science fiction film about scientists reduced to microscopic size to travel inside a diseased human body. Then came “One Million Years B.C.,” and that did it.“There’s a certain thing about that white-hot moment of first fame that is just pure pain,” Ms. Welch said in an interview with Cigar Aficionado magazine in 2001. “It’s just not comfortable. I felt like I was supposed to be perfect. And because everybody was looking at me so hard, I felt there was so much to prove.”She appeared in some two dozen films over the next decade, perhaps most notably “Myra Breckinridge” (1970), based on Gore Vidal’s campy novel, in which she played a glamorous transgender woman, and “The Last of Sheila” (1973), a semi-campy murder mystery with a luxury-yacht setting and a script by Stephen Sondheim.Ms. Welch as a transgender woman in a scene from the 1973 movie “Myra Breckinridge.” At right is the film critic and sometime actor Rex Reed. Some of her most memorable roles were small ones. In “Bedazzled” (1967), Stanley Donen’s Faustian fantasy with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, she played Lust, one of the Seven Deadly Sins; in “The Magic Christian” (1969), with Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, her character’s name was Mistress of the Whip.Ms. Welch had love scenes with the former football star Jim Brown in “100 Rifles” (1969), a western set in Mexico. She followed “The Three Musketeers” with its 1974 sequel, but those films never led to the sophisticated comedy opportunities she had hoped for. (She did, however, have a memorable chance to display her comedic side years later, when she played herself in a 1997 episode of “Seinfeld.”)After “Mother, Jugs and Speed” (1976), a farce about ambulance drivers (which also starred Bill Cosby and Harvey Keitel), her screen acting was limited mostly to television guest appearances.But she had already discovered the joys of stage work. Inspired after seeing Frank Sinatra’s nightclub act, Ms. Welch made her club debut, singing and dancing, at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1973. Eight years later she made her Broadway debut, hired as a two-week vacation replacement for Lauren Bacall in the hit musical “Woman of the Year.” Her reviews were so admiring (Mel Gussow’s in The New York Times ended by writing, “One hopes that Miss Welch will soon find a musical of her own”) that she returned the next year for a six-month stint in the role.“The first minute I stepped out on that stage and the people began applauding,” she told The Times later, “I just knew I’d beaten every bad rap that people had hung on me.” She returned to Broadway in 1997, replacing Julie Andrews for seven weeks in “Victor/Victoria.”Ms. Welch was a presenter at the 2010 Tony Awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in New York. She appeared on Broadway twice, in “Woman of the Year” and “Victor/Victoria.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn 1987, Ms Welch published “The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program,” which included exercises based on the principles of hatha yoga. She released a companion video with the same title.Few thought of Ms. Welch as a Latina actress, but she embraced that identity late in her career, starring as a melodramatic Mexican American aunt on “American Family,” a PBS series (2002). She learned to speak Spanish in her 60s; her father had not allowed the language to be spoken at home when she was growing up.Her last film was “How to Be a Latin Lover” (2017), a comic drama about an aging gigolo, played by Eugenio Derbez. She played his new target — a disarming, too-glamorous-to-be-true grandmother. Her final television appearances were on “Date My Dad” (2017), a Canadian American series, in a recurring role as the leading man’s Mexican mother-in-law.Ms. Welch was married and divorced four times. After Mr. Welch, her husbands were Patrick Curtis (1969-72), a producer; André Weinfeld (1980-90), a French director and producer; and Richard Palmer (1999-2008), a restaurateur.In addition to her son, Ms. Welch is survived by her daughter, Tahnee Welch, and a brother, Jimmy Tejada.In her late 70s, Ms. Welch was still followed by photographers, and reporters were still commenting on her appearance. In 2001, she answered questions about fashion and style in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.“Style has to have substance,” she said. “It has to have fire.” Praising synergy, instinct, imagination and attitude over trendiness and fashion-magazine dictates, she concluded, “It’s about being yourself on purpose.”Michael Levenson More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Hugh Hudson, Director of ‘Chariots of Fire,’ Dies at 86

      by

      His first film — about two runners, one Christian, one Jewish, who compete at the 1924 Summer Olympics — won four Oscars, including for best picture.Hugh Hudson, a director whose first feature film, “Chariots of Fire,” won four Oscars in 1982, including for best picture, died on Friday in London. He was 86.His family announced the death to the British news media but did not cite a cause.“Chariots of Fire,” based on the true story of two British sprinters who competed at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, was nominated for seven Oscars and won four, including for the composer Vangelis’s musical score and for the screenplay by Colin Welland, as well as for costume design. Mr. Hudson was nominated for best director but lost to Warren Beatty, the director of “Reds.”“Hugh Hudson was the fulcrum around which ‘Chariots of Fire’ was built,” David Puttnam, the film’s producer, wrote on Twitter after Mr. Hudson’s death.Mr. Hudson had an affinity for the leading characters of his film: Eric Liddell, a devout Christian who resisted pressure to run in the 100-meter race at the Olympics because the heats took place on Sunday, the Sabbath; and Harold Abrahams, the son of a Lithuanian Jew who vowed to use running to fight antisemitism. Each man won a gold medal — Mr. Liddell for the 400-meter race, which was held on a weekday, and Mr. Abrahams for the 100-meter sprint.“I think David Puttnam chose me because he sensed that I’d relate to the themes of class and racial prejudice,” Mr. Hudson told The Guardian in 2012. “I’d been sent to Eton” — the prestigious all-boys boarding school — “because my family had gone there for generations, but I hated all the prejudice.”To play Liddell and Abrahams, Mr. Puttnam refused to cast stars; instead, he chose Ian Charleson and Ben Cross, who were both best known for their television work.“If I put stars in it, the film would never have been successful,” he told the newspaper The Jewish Chronicle in 2011. “With unknown actors, you look at them afresh.”The most famous sequence in “Chariots of Fire,” which depicts about two dozen young men running on a beach in slow motion, is seen during the opening credits.20th Century Fox, via Everett CollectionThe most famous sequence of the movie is seen during the opening credits: about two dozen young men, clad in white shirts and shorts, running on a beach in slow motion, their faces creased with pain and exhilaration.During the shoot, on the West Sands Beach in St. Andrews, Scotland, Mr. Hudson blasted Vangelis’s “L’Enfant” over loudspeakers. He wanted it to be the film’s theme, but Vangelis promised to compose something original, according to the online publication Art of the Title.The result was an instrumental blend of acoustic piano and synthesizer that provided a lush, pulsating accompaniment to the dramatic scene of young men in training. The song spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, peaking at No. 1.Hugh Donaldson-Hudson was born on Aug. 25, 1936, in London to Michael Donaldson-Hudson, an insurance broker, and Jacynth (Ellerton) Donaldson-Hudson. His parents divorced when he was young. He attended a boarding school before entering Eton, where he dropped “Donaldson” from his surname.He served in the British Army’s Royal Dragoon Guards and worked in advertising in the late 1950s before he started making documentaries and television commercials, some for Ridley Scott Associates. Alan Parker, who also worked for Mr. Scott, hired Mr. Hudson as a second-unit director on “Midnight Express,” his 1978 film about an American student imprisoned for trying to smuggle hashish out of Turkey. Mr. Puttnam was one of that film’s producers.Mr. Hudson’s best-known commercials included one in which Joan Collins splatters herself with a glass of Cinzano white wine, to the delight of another actor, Leonard Rossiter, seated beside her on an airplane; another showed robots building Fiat Stradas in a factory in Turin, Italy, to the music of Figaro’s entrance aria from “The Barber of Seville.”Mr. Hudson followed “Chariots of Fire,” with “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes” (1984), which received three Oscar nominations, including one for Ralph Richardson for best supporting actor. Writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it an “unusually intelligent and serious entertainment for the mass market.”But his next film, “Revolution” (1985), starring Al Pacino as a fur trapper caught up in the American Revolution, was considered a flop.His other films, none of which did well at the box office, included “My Life So Far” (1999), about a family’s life on an estate in Scotland after World War I; “I Dreamed of Africa” (2000), the story of a divorced Italian socialite who moves to Kenya; and “Finding Altamira” (2016), about the discovery of Paleolithic cave paintings in northern Spain in 1879.In 2011, Mr. Hudson made a documentary for BBC Four, “Rupture: A Matter of Life or Death,” about his wife, the actress Maryam d’Abo, who had recovered from a near-fatal brain aneurysm.Ms. d’Abo survives him, as does a son, Thomas, from his marriage to Susan Michie, which ended in divorce.In 2012, “Chariots of Fire” was adapted by the writer Mike Bartlett as a stage play in London, first at the Hampstead Theater and then at the Gielgud Theater on the West End.The stage version was Mr. Hudson’s idea, to coincide with London’s hosting of the Summer Olympics that year. “Issues of faith, of refusal to compromise, standing up for one’s beliefs, achieving something for the sake of it, with passion, and not just for fame or financial gain,” he told The London Evening Standard at the time, “are even more vital today.” More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      De La Soul’s Dave Jolicoeur, a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove, Dies at 54

      by

      The trio expanded the stylistic vocabulary of hip-hop in the 1980s and ’90s, but its early experiments with sampling led to legal troubles, and the group’s longtime exclusion from streaming.David Jolicoeur of De La Soul, the rap trio that expanded the stylistic vocabulary of hip-hop in the late 1980s and early ’90s with eclectic samples and offbeat humor, becoming MTV staples and cult heroes of the genre, died on Sunday. He was 54.His death was confirmed by the group’s publicist, Tony Ferguson, who did not specify a cause or say where Mr. Jolicoeur was when he died. In recent years, Mr. Jolicoeur has openly discussed a struggle with congestive heart failure, including in a music video for the group’s song “Royalty Capes.”De La Soul arrived with the album “3 Feet High and Rising” in 1989, a time when hip-hop was still relatively new to the mainstream. The genre’s public face was often confrontational, with groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A speaking out about the racism, police violence and neglect faced by Black communities in America.By contrast, De La Soul — three middle-class young men from Long Island — presented themselves with hippie floral designs and a music video set in a high school for their song “Me Myself and I.” The group wore baggy, brightly colored clothes, to the sneers and side-eyeing of their classmates in gold chains, black shades and matching B-boy outfits.Mr. Jolicoeur — whose original stage name in the group was Trugoy the Dove, though he was also known as Plug Two, Dove and later, just Dave — had the first lines of the track, riffing on a fairy tale. “Mirror mirror on the wall/Tell me mirror, what is wrong?” he rapped. “Can it be my De La clothes/Or is it just my De La song?”That album, with singles also including “Say No Go” and “Eye Know,” reached only as high as No. 24 on the Billboard 200 chart, but it was an instant classic that pointed to new directions in hip-hop. Later albums included “De La Soul Is Dead” (1991), “Buhloone Mindstate” (1993) and “Stakes Is High” (1996).With its producer, Prince Paul, the group developed an idiosyncratic and freewheeling style of sampling that brought new textures to hip-hop. “3 Feet High” contained pieces of more than 60 other recordings, including not only Funkadelic and Ohio Players grooves — de rigueur in 1980s rap — but also oddities like sounds from old TV shows and recordings of French language lessons.But legal problems related to its samples became the bane of the group. One sample, of the Turtles’ organ-driven psychedelic pop track “You Showed Me” (1968), had not been cleared properly, and the Turtles sued; the case was settled out of court.Ongoing legal problems with sample clearances prevented the group from releasing its music in digital form, which effectively blocked the trio from music’s most important marketplace in the 21st century. Recently, the group finally cleared those samples and was gearing up to release its music in digital form in March.The group’s lighthearted style — whimsical in-jokes, and lyrics that could be irreverent or earnest — delighted fans and captivated critics. It was one of the first in hip-hop to cross over to the collegiate crowd, and took on the reputation of “thinking-person’s hip-hoppers,” as the critic Greg Tate put it in a review of “Buhloone Mindstate” in The New York Times.“With irreverence and imagination,” Mr. Tate wrote, “De La Soul has dared to go where few hip-hop acts would follow, rejecting Five Percenter polemics and gangster rap for reflections on an array of topics: ecology, crack-addicted infants, Black suburbia, roller-skating, harassment by fans, male sexual anxiety and even gardening as a hip-hop metaphor.”Mr. Jolicoeur distilled the group’s worldview into a few lines in “Me Myself and I”: Write is wrong when hype is writtenOn the Soul, De La that isStyle is surely our own thingNot the false disguise of showbizDavid Jolicoeur was born on Sept. 21, 1968, in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island with his family as a child.In Amityville, N.Y., Mr. Jolicoeur joined with high school friends Kelvin Mercer, known as Posdnuos, and Vincent Mason, or Maseo, to form De La Soul. The group’s demo for “Plug Tunin’,” which later appeared remixed on “3 Feet High and Rising,” caught the attention of Prince Paul, the D.J. of the group Stetsasonic, who was then quickly establishing himself as one of the most gifted producers in rap. Their collaboration introduced the abstract, alternative hip-hop it would become known for.“Every last poem is recited at noon,” Mr. Jolicoeur rapped as Trugoy — yogurt backward, for a preferred food. “Focus is set, let your Polaroids click/As they capture the essence of a naughty noise called/Plug Tunin’.”The trio honed its sound and comedic stage presence at school concerts and parties at a space it called “the dugout,” on Dixon Avenue in Amityville. Proudly repping “Strong Island,” De La Soul noted that its proximity to New York City allowed it to keep an eye on the hip-hop stronghold, while the suburbs gave it space to grow and learn.“The island has given us the opportunity to see more things,” Mr. Jolicoeur told The New York Times in 2000. “It broadened our horizons.” He added, “We had the opportunity to soak in a lot more. And that’s why we are who we are today.”De La Soul went on to lead what was known as the Native Tongues, a loose collective of outsider hip-hop groups like A Tribe Called Quest and the Jungle Brothers, which influenced artists like Mos Def and Common.In addition to sampling, De La Soul was formative in the incorporation of skits — spoken dialogue between tracks — on its albums. In a live review from 1989, the Times critic Peter Watrous wrote that the group “seemed on the verge of inventing a new type of performance — part talk show, part rap concert — where their funny conversations and routines were as important as their raps, even if the funniest lines were accusations about Trugoy’s status as a virgin.”The group’s absence from digital services kept it from reaching new audiences for years.“We’re in the Library of Congress, but we’re not on iTunes,” Mr. Mercer told The Times in 2016. Two years earlier, in frustration, the group gave away virtually all of its work, releasing it online to fans at no charge. Its 2016 album, “And the Anonymous Nobody,” was financed by a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $600,000. The album was largely sample-free.Still, the group retained a strong following among fans and fellow artists. In 2005, De La Soul was featured on “Feel Good Inc.,” a hit by Gorillaz, the multimedia project created by the British singer-songwriter Damon Albarn and the visual artist Jamie Hewlett. Mr. Jolicoeur co-wrote the song with Mr. Albarn. The song went to No. 2 in Britain and No. 14 in the United States.In the group’s interview with The Times in 2016, Mr. Jolicoeur spoke about the urgency the trio felt about getting its older work back before the public.“This music has to be addressed and released,” he said. “It has to. When? We’ll see. But somewhere it’s going to happen.”Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      Carlos Saura, a Leading and Enduring Spanish Director, Dies at 91

      by

      Called “one of the fundamental filmmakers in the history of Spanish cinema,” he began making movies under Franco, often hiding his messages in allegory.Carlos Saura, a Spanish director who began making films during the regime of Francisco Franco and was still making them at his death, exploring Spanish identity through allegory-rich storytelling and, later, vividly capturing flamenco and other art forms, died on Friday. He was 91.The Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Spain said he died at his home but did not say where. The next day, the Goya Awards, Spain’s annual film awards, had planned to present him with the Honorary Goya Award in recognition of his “having shaped the history of modern Spanish cinema,” as the organization put it when announcing the award last October.Instead, he received the statuette a few days before his death, the organization said. It called him “one of the fundamental filmmakers in the history of Spanish cinema.”Mr. Saura was a photographer who began making short films in 1956 and released his first feature, “The Delinquents,” about youths living on the edge in Madrid’s slums, in 1959.Filmmakers under Franco, who came to power during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s and controlled the country until his death in 1975, had to be careful not to run afoul of censors. Mr. Saura became adept at alluding obliquely to Spanish history and the strains the country endured, as he did in his third feature film, “The Hunt” (1966), the story of two middle-aged men who go on what is supposed to be a relaxing rabbit hunt with a business tycoon and his nephew. Things take a brutal turn.When the movie played in Manhattan in 1967, Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times, “The vivid manifestations of wholesale shooting of frightened rabbits as they scoot across the hills of an area that was a famous section of battlefield in the Civil War are unmistakable allusions to that conflict of friend-against-friend and brother-against-brother that so thoroughly affected the politics and society of Spain.”“‘The Hunt,’” he added, “is the toughest Spanish picture I have ever seen, and the most amazingly revealing.”Geraldine Chaplin and Fernándo Fernan Gómez in a scene from “Anna and the Wolves” (1973). Its initial script was blocked by the government. via Everett CollectionMr. Saura and Ms. Chaplin arriving at the International Film Festival in Cannes in 1978. They had a long romantic relationship.Ralph Gatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat kind of filmmaking sometimes got him in hot water with government censors. In 1971, his initial script for “Anna and the Wolves” was blocked by the Information Ministry. It told the story of a young governess who takes a job in a broken-down mansion inhabited by three brothers, each of whom pursues her.“They represent for me the three monsters of Spain,” Mr. Saura told The Times in 1971, “perversions of religiosity, repressed sexuality and the authoritarian spirit.” Of having his script blocked, he said, “They have made dust of me.”He eventually made the movie, however; it showed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973. The movie starred Geraldine Chaplin, a daughter of Charlie Chaplin, who had appeared in several other Saura films and had a long romantic relationship with him. Her character meets a gruesome end.“The ending, when she is raped, shot and tortured by her respective assailants, is an unmistakable indictment of Spain’s stifling social conventions,” the film critic Alexander Walker wrote in The Evening Standard of London, “and a brave one to have made on the home ground.”The year after Franco’s death, Mr. Saura won a special jury award at Cannes with another film that looked to the past, “Cría Cuervos,” about a girl (played by Ana Torrent, who went on to a long career) with a trauma-filled childhood. (Ms. Chaplin played her as an adult.) Vincent Canby, writing in The Times, called the movie “funny and heartbreaking and bursting with life.”Mr. Saura soon began to focus on cultural subjects, especially dance, whose beauty and excitement he had a knack for capturing on film. “Blood Wedding” (1981), “Carmen” (1983) and “El Amor Brujo” (1986) all featured the flamenco dancer Antonio Gades. “Flamenco” (1995) was a music- and dance-filled documentary, as was “Flamenco Flamenco” (2010). “Tango” (1999) was a musical drama built around that dance genre.A scene from Mr. Saura’s musical drama “Tango” (1999). He was noted for capturing dance on film. Graciela Portela/Sony Pictures Classics“It’s no slight to the lovers seen in Carlos Saura’s thrilling ‘Tango’ to say that the kissing seen here is less torrid than the dancing,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The Times.Marvin D’Lugo, a professor at Clark University and the author of “The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing” (1991), drew a connection between the director’s work during the Franco years and after them.“Saura’s great theme was the painful memories of the Civil War visited on contemporary Spaniards,” he said by email. “A photographer before he was a filmmaker, his particular genius, and what brought him to international acclaim early on, came from his unique ability to visually translate trauma onto the bodies of his characters. This is as much a cultural as a political narrative thread, and it guided him in the post-Franco years as he shaped the plots of his dance films around the images of bodies now creatively submitting to artistic design.”Carlos Saura Atarés was born on Jan. 4, 1932, in Huesca, in northeastern Spain. His mother was a pianist, and his father worked in the Interior Ministry. After the Civil War he was separated from his parents for a time, living with his maternal grandmother, but the family eventually reunited in Madrid.He studied engineering at the University of Madrid but was also having some success as a photographer, particularly with portraits of ballet and flamenco dancers, and in 1952 he switched to the recently created National Film School.Mr. Saura’s most recent film, “Las Paredes Hablan,” a documentary about art, was released a week before his death.His survivors include his wife, Eulàlia Ramón, and several children.Mr. Saura made a sequel of sorts to “Anna and the Wolves” called “Mama Turns 100,” released in 1979. The contrast was notable: “Anna,” made during the Franco years, was a drama; “Mama,” looking in on some of the same characters, was more of a comic drama. It was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film.It was as close as he came to realizing one dream.“I often think it would be fantastic, a magnificent experience, to make the same picture over and over, year after year,” he told LA Weekly in 1984, “to watch it evolve — to see things differ.” More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Sandra Seacat, Much Admired Acting Coach, Dies at 86

      by

      She helped Laura Dern, Marlo Thomas, Mickey Rourke and many others overcome fears, find their characters and discover “the joy of acting.”Sandra Seacat, who had a modest career as an actress and a formidable one as an acting coach, putting her own spin on techniques she had learned under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio to help Laura Dern, Marlo Thomas, Mickey Rourke and numerous other stars achieve some of their best performances, died on Jan. 17 in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her husband, Thurn Hoffman, said the cause was primary biliary cholangitis, an autoimmune disease.Ms. Seacat joined the Actors Studio in the early 1960s, when Mr. Strasberg was the artistic director and imparting the rehearsal and acting techniques often called simply the Method. Before long she began leading classes, and her reputation as an acting coach started to grow.By the early 1980s she was applying the psychiatrist Carl Jung’s theories about dreams and the unconscious to her coaching, helping students use their dreams to illuminate their own feelings and the characters they were developing, a technique called “dream work.”“The artist is a shaman, a wounded healer,” Ms. Seacat said in a 2015 video interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “We have wounds that we want to bring forth through the material. It’s joyful, it’s painful, but not painful in a bad way. And when you do that you also heal people in the audience.”Actors who worked with her echoed that sense.“The work was our bond,” Marlo Thomas, for whom Ms. Seacat was a coach, teacher and mentor for more than 40 years, said by email. “She taught me to seek the truth in myself, to heal my wounds and those of the audience. She changed me as a human being, teaching me to cast off my protective armor and see the world as a baby might see it, feeling and experiencing it for the first time.”Ms. Thomas’s career had for years been defined by her role in the 1960s sitcom “That Girl,” but Ms. Seacat helped her branch out, leading to more substantial parts and an Emmy Award for outstanding lead actress for her role as a woman who had spent years in a mental institution in the television movie “Nobody’s Child” (1986).Peggy Lipton had also achieved some 1960s TV fame, as one of the stars of the crime show “The Mod Squad,” but she then stepped away from acting for years to raise her children. By the late 1980s she was thinking about returning, but, she told The Los Angeles Times in 1993, “it was very scary.”She joined one of Ms. Seacat’s classes, nervous at first. “I used to sit under the table near the door,” she said, “so if she ever called on me I could get out.”But, she said, Ms. Seacat eventually helped her break through the fear. Ms. Lipton, who died in 2019, went on to accumulate dozens more TV and film credits, most memorably as the diner owner Norma Jennings on the trendy series “Twin Peaks” and its sequels.Mickey Rourke had done little acting — he had been an amateur boxer — before he arrived in New York in the 1970s and eventually began working with Ms. Seacat. He has often credited her with helping him to get serious about the craft of acting, leading to attention-getting roles in the 1980s in “Body Heat,” “Rumble Fish,” “Angel Heart” and other movies. She was responsible for “channeling all it was that was messing me up into something creative and challenging,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1984.Younger stars also benefited from her coaching, among them Andrew Garfield, who played the title character in “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012) and its sequel and earned an Emmy nomination for his lead role in the mini-series “Under the Banner of Heaven” last year (in which Ms. Seacat played his character’s mother).“She was a revolutionary, a culture-changing teacher of acting and storytelling,” Mr. Garfield said in a statement. “She is a beacon for all of us of what a life of deep meaning and beauty can look like.”Ms. Seacat and the actress Laura Dern in an undated photo. “Sandra gave me the greatest gift an actor could ever ask for,” Ms. Dern said. “Sandra gave me the joy of acting.”Katie Jones/Variety, via Penske Media, via Getty ImagesSandra Diane Seacat was born on Oct. 2, 1936, in Greensburg, Kan., in the midst of the Dust Bowl, to Russell and Lois (Cronic) Seacat.After graduating from Northwestern University, Ms. Seacat moved to New York and began her acting career. In 1959 she married Arthur Kaufman, and some of her early credits are under the name Sandra Kaufman.Once she was admitted to the Actors Studio — she said she auditioned while pregnant — she appeared in various productions, including “Three Sisters” on Broadway in 1964, in which she had a small role. She had small roles in two other Broadway productions as well, “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1973 and “Sly Fox” in 1976.Ms. Seacat also took occasional roles on television and in films throughout her career. She directed one feature film, the 1990 comedy “In the Spirit,” which had a star-studded cast that included Ms. Thomas, Olympia Dukakis, Elaine May, Melanie Griffith and Peter Falk.“‘In the Spirit’ is a flat-out New York comedy, with all of the pluses and minuses that go with that territory,” Bob Strauss wrote in his review in The Los Angeles Daily News. “Director Sandra Seacat, one of the industry’s most respected acting coaches, lets her cast get away with Method murder. But the performers’ mannered joy is also infectious; even when the jokes don’t work, you smile along just to feel part of the party.”Ms. Seacat’s marriage to Mr. Kaufman ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Michael Ebert. She married Mr. Hoffman in 1982. In addition to him, she is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Greta, and a sister, Serena Seacat.The long list of other stars Ms. Seacat worked with includes Jessica Lange, Rachel Ward, Ryan Gosling and Laura Dern.“Sandra gave me the greatest gift an actor could ever ask for, which was beyond a method or a craft or anything anybody talks about,” Ms. Dern said in the 2015 Hollywood Reporter video. “Sandra gave me the joy of acting.” More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

      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