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    Review: ‘Chicago,’ With Nary a Finger Snap

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    Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production of the 1975 musical adds a touch of burlesque and a dash of Bertolt Brecht.The seedy, culturally vibrant and rapidly modernizing Berlin of the 1920s was nicknamed “Chicago on the Spree.” That moniker sprang to mind recently during the premiere of a masterful and muscular new production of “Chicago,” directed by Barrie Kosky at the Komische Oper Berlin.“Chicago,” a “story of greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery,” to quote the prologue, is the longest-running show currently on Broadway, but it got a very mixed reception when it opened there in 1975. Many of those early audience members were uncomfortable with Fred Ebb, Bob Fosse and John Kander’s use of musical showstoppers in the service of an amoral satire, and the show’s jerky and pastiche-like narrative technique.For his production, Kosky has gone back to the original concept of the show as a musical vaudeville with a heavy dose of bile and a dash of Brechtian alienation, while also embracing burlesque elements. Michael Levine’s dazzling set is outfitted with nearly 7000 light bulbs, which intelligently frame the actors, and the action, in frequently changing configurations that suggest a nightclub, a prison cell and a circus ring.Many of the costumes in Kosky’s production give a nod to the musical’s roots in burlesque and vaudeville.Barbara BraunThere are definite echoes of Kosky’s darkly glittering take on “The Threepenny Opera” from 2021. But this “Chicago” is not another radical rethinking of a canonical work, nor is Kosky clearing the cobwebs from an aged classic, as he did previously with “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Candide.” This “Chicago” is simply a damn good show, with an attention to choreography and musical verve rarely found outside Broadway or the West End. The production offered further proof, if any was needed, that Kosky has made the Komische Oper — which has always embraced various forms of music theater — the best place for classic American musicals on the continent.The show, performed in a limber German translation by Helmut Baumann and Erika Gesell, is impeccably cast. Katharine Mehrling, an acclaimed chanteuse and regular Kosky collaborator, brings the right mix of naïveté and tenacity to the role of Roxie Hart, the washed-up chorus girl whose trial for murdering her lover catapults her to stardom. As her jail mate and rival vaudevillian Velma Kelly, Ruth Brauer-Kvam gives a sexy, assured performance. She’s also the cast’s truest triple threat, singing, twirling and acting her way through the evening without breaking a sweat.Jörn-Felix Alt brings a rakish, matinee-idol charm to his performance as Billy Flynn, the shyster lawyer who orchestrates media circuses for his female clients. Andreja Schneider makes a sassy, straight-shooting Mama Morton, the crooked warden of Cook’s County Jail, while Ivan Tursic doesn’t overdo the pathos as Roxy’s chump of a husband, Amos.The music, performed in its original 1975 orchestration, sounds fantastic played by a full orchestra — a luxury you rarely get on Broadway. The conductor Adam Benzwi shapes the music with precision and vitality, and his band gives the changing temperatures and moods the score requires.Jörn-Felix Alt, center, brings a rakish, matinee-idol charm to his performance as the lawyer Billy Flynn.Barbara BraunHandsome and sleek, the staging is as stripped-down as some of Kosky’s other recent productions, but he also knows when to pull out the stops. Mehrling makes her bold entrance in “All That Jazz,” trailed by a dozen dancers hiding behind red ostrich feather fans. Kosky brings back the razzle-dazzle in the final number, “Nowadays,” when Roxy and Velma are outfitted in the sparkliest suits legally permitted onstage. In between, Victoria Behr’s costumes provide plenty of other fresh and smoothly executed ideas, including orange silk robes for the prisoners and surreal touches like masks of oversized heads and cartoon lips.The choreographer Otto Pichler, credited as a co-director, crafts sparkling dance numbers for the soloists and his 12-person troupe with nary a finger snap, twist or slow-motion hip roll in sight. This is a welcome choice, since anything that is overdone — even a style as vivid as Fosse’s — can become fossilized.After the Komische Oper opened its season with a monumental production staged in an airport hangar, “Chicago” is the company’s first show at the Schiller Theater, its temporary home, in the west of Berlin, while lengthy renovations to its historic house continue.Luring audiences to the other side of town this season doesn’t appear to be an issue: Even before opening night, virtually the entire run of “Chicago” had sold out.ChicagoThrough Jan. 27, 2024, at Komische Oper Berlin; komische-oper-berlin.de. More

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      Review: This London ‘Ring’ Is on the Met Opera’s Radar

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      It’s not stage-filling spectacle, but Barrie Kosky’s version of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” the start of a four-opera epic, is eerie, vivid and intense.Two years ago, the Metropolitan Opera went shopping for a new “Ring” in London and came home empty-handed.English National Opera’s first installment of Wagner’s four-part epic of gods and humans, lust and power, was judged a bit too scrappy and bare to transfer to the grand Met. And anyway, the English company was soon reeling from cuts to its government funding, putting the completion of the cycle in jeopardy.The Met would like to bring a “Ring” to New York in four seasons — a blink of an eye given opera’s glacial planning cycles and Wagner’s technical and casting complexities. So its leadership has another London option under consideration: a production directed by Barrie Kosky that opened on Monday at the Royal Opera, the city’s bigger and older company.Eerie, vivid and intense, Kosky’s version of “Das Rheingold,” the first “Ring” opera, is a show that an opera house on either side of the Atlantic could be proud of, accessible and stimulating for Wagner newcomers and connoisseurs alike. The story is crystal clear, and its emotional and political stakes are taken seriously, without oversimplification or overstatement.It would also finally bring to the Met one of opera’s finest, most rangy and resourceful directors. (A collaboration on Prokofiev’s “Fiery Angel” was spiked during the pandemic.) Kosky, who was born in Australia, was celebrated during his recently ended tenure at the helm of the Komische Oper in Berlin, for his revivals of long-forgotten operettas and his giddy disregard for distinctions between high and low art, between “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Moses und Aron.”His signature style is zany, high-spirited and high-kicking, but he can do sober and austere when the piece calls for it, like a starkly savage “Kat’a Kabanova” at the Salzburg Festival last year. His Royal Opera “Rheingold,” though not without shots of bitter humor, is in this vein.The work’s single, two-and-a-half hour act is all played atop, around and inside a huge hollow tree trunk, collapsed on its side. This is a dying world, Kosky suggests — and to that end he puts Erda, the earth goddess who intones a climactic warning, onstage almost throughout, in the form of a silent actress: elderly, naked, frail, vulnerable. (For that climactic monologue, the singer is hidden from the audience.)Katharina Konradi with the magic gold, whose theft from the Rhine sets the “Ring” in motion.Monika RittershausThe gold whose theft from the Rhine sets the “Ring” in motion, and from which the central ring of power is forged, is here a shiny, syrupy fluid that flows from the tree. It evokes, appropriately, a union of metal and river, as well as the fossil fuels on which the global economy is disastrously based. Its associations range bodily and geologic — lava, milk, semen, blood, honey — and characters lick it greedily from their hands.Kosky and his set designer, Rufus Didwiszus, have imagined Nibelheim, the inferno in which the stolen gold is worked on, as a steampunkish industrial monstrosity, with clamps gripping the tree. Erda, her torso popping out of a knot in the trunk, is connected to tubes that pump the iridescent batter from her body and drain it into pails. This society is built from — and rotted by — the devaluation of women (particularly the old) and environmental exploitation.Victoria Behr’s costumes are contemporary, and there are hints of British flavor: These wealthy, self-serving gods have a taste for nostalgic old-money activities like polo. But this is a basically placeless, timeless production; its primary location, the theater. Kosky emphasizes this by having the audience enter, curtain up, to see the unadorned expanses around the stage. Stagehands do their work visibly, and Alessandro Carletti’s lighting draws attention to its equipment.Kosky uses steam, lights, loudspeakers and knobby holes in the tree to conjure, in charmingly old-fashioned ways, the magic effects and transformations of Wagner’s libretto. But this staging mostly lacks proscenium-filling spectacle — and it was a similar lack that made English National Opera’s “Ring” a no-go for the Met.The transitions between the scenes in “Das Rheingold,” from the heights of mountains to the bowels of the earth and back again, are played at the Royal Opera with the curtain closed, as if Kosky is thumbing his nose at expectations that he is supposed to provide more of a scenic extravaganza. Instead, those interludes are simply showcases for Antonio Pappano, starting his swan-song season as the company’s music director, and the orchestra.You could call this meager. But on Monday, it felt more like focused modesty.Christopher Purves, center, as Alberich transforms the tree into an industrial monstrosity pumping golden fluid from Rose Knox-Peebles, left, as Erda.Monika RittershausWork that’s powerful in the 2,200-seat Royal Opera House won’t necessarily make the same impact in the Met, nearly double that size. But the last New York production of the cycle, directed by Robert Lepage on a preposterously expensive, 45-ton high-tech set, was, when it opened in 2010, an artistic embarrassment for the company as well as a depressing example of empty-headed excess at a time of financial crisis.The “Ring,” given its size and prominence, is a symbol of an opera house’s values, and the lean vitality of Kosky’s vision, which will unfold in London over the coming years, seems right for an era of budget and programming cuts.At the Royal Opera, Pappano and the orchestra match Kosky with fiery but never overblown playing, especially from the lush yet biting strings, their intimacy startling. This is a “Rheingold” that, first and foremost, supports its singers.Wotan, the king of the gods, and Alberich, the dwarf who steals the gold from the Rhine, are here almost brotherly figures, both with bald heads and sturdy bodies, and they share certain qualities, too. Christopher Purves’s Alberich has aristocratic reserve, while Christopher Maltman’s booming, tight-smiling Wotan is capable of feverish aggression; it is shocking but not surprising when he cuts off Alberich’s finger to take the ring.Yet the tenderness with which Maltman embraces the fragile Erda, as the voice of the goddess is heard warning him to give up the ring, is just as indelible, and feels just as true. As Fricka, Wotan’s wife, Marina Prudenskaya sings with slicing anxiety; Sean Panikkar is a charismatically grinning, cackling playboy as Loge, the anarchic fire god; Insung Sim is unusually agonized as the giant Fasolt.This is not an ostentatious production. But the finale, which shouldn’t be given away, is proscenium-filling spectacle, and vintage Kosky, in that it uses one of theater’s simplest, most traditional devices with unforgettable showman flair, conveying all the glittering glamour and fundamental emptiness of the gods’ ascent to their new home — a triumph as hollow as the giant tree.Das RheingoldThrough Sept. 29 at the Royal Opera House, London; roh.co.uk. More

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      A Lot of Opera Is Now Streaming. Here’s Where to Start.

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      Naxos, which collects videos of productions throughout Europe, has begun to make its catalog available on Amazon Prime Video.Opera isn’t so different from film and television in its glut of streaming platforms — which can be just as challenging, and expensive, to navigate.Established entities like Medici.tv and Met Opera’s On Demand run on subscription models. Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage+ works similarly, and is the only platform for streaming the most recent staging of Wagner’s “Ring” from his home court at the Bayreuth Festival. Building your own digital library of opera on video is more frustrating. The Met, for example, only allows nonsubscribers to rent, but not purchase, individual productions for $4.99.Enter the Naxos label, which has been smartly acquiring the rights to a wide variety of opera productions in recent years and releasing video recordings on DVD and Blu-ray. And now that catalog, which includes shows from Europe’s major houses, is beginning to emerge for digital purchase ($19.99) and rental ($5.99) on Amazon Prime Video. Here are five of Naxos’s best offerings.‘Tosca’ (Dutch National Opera, 2022)Barrie Kosky is one of the most sought-after directors on the international circuit. He’s made his name with comedic and serious rarities alike, but this recent take on Puccini’s bloody shocker shows that his punchy style can work well with the classics, too.There is a notable lack of scenic decoration during the first act’s machinations and romances; we don’t even see what the painter Cavaradossi is working on. But Kosky caps the act with an imagistic coup — and it’s as potent a portrait of Scarpia’s villainy as you’ll find anywhere. Urgently conducted by Lorenzo Viotti and well sung by a youthful cast, Puccini’s thriller here moves with a swiftness that anticipates the slasher flick. And it comes in under two hours.‘Atys’ (Opéra Comique, 2011)Now for something luxurious from the French Baroque. The mythological story told here, with a score by Jean-Baptiste Lully, so entranced Louis XIV that his affection became synonymous with the music. Then the work largely dropped into obscurity, until a 1980s production at the Comique put it back on the map. And in 2011, when a wealthy philanthropist paid for an international touring revival of this sturdy staging, high-definition cameras were ready.The conductor William Christie and his ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, perform the score with a courtly edge that enhances the power (and vengefulness) of Stéphanie d’Oustrac’s take on the goddess Cybèle. And Christie’s players likewise lend a glow to the lovestruck (or mad) exultations present in Bernard Richter’s portrayal of the title character.Sara Jakubiak and Josef Wagner in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Das Wunder der Heliane.”Monika Rittershaus‘Das Wunder der Heliane’ (Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2018)Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s operas have generally struggled to catch on in the repertory, even after getting a quick start during the composer’s starry, youthful ascent in the 1920s. But in recent years, we’ve been gifted with sumptuous recordings of the composer’s lush music dramas — including Simon Stone’s production of “Die Tote Stadt” (documented on a Blu-ray from the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, but not yet streaming).“Das Wunder der Heliane” is even better than Korngold’s rightly famous film scores that followed his move the United States and went on to influence the likes of John Williams. This recording is nearly three hours of orchestral delirium, thanks to the work of the Deutche Oper’s orchestra, under Marc Albrecht. Also no slouch: the American soprano Sara Jakubiak, who proves blazing in the title role. The staging is spare, but the music and acting crackle.‘Mathis der Maler’ (Theater an der Wien, 2012)First came Paul Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony — a nearly half-hour work that drew the ire of Third Reich, and the defense of Wilhelm Furtwängler. Then came the full opera, which premiered in Switzerland in 1938. The stage show winningly incorporates the music of the symphony throughout, but has never dislodged the concert piece in the repertoire, in part because of the prohibitive cost of staging a three-hour opera about the role of art in wartime.In Hindemith’s libretto, the title painter has to choose whether to engage in the 16th-century’s “Peasant’s War.” The seriousness of the subject matter may seem forbidding, but the imagination of Hindemith’s sonic language — dissonant at times, but always rapturous and conceived with care — is so riveting, it actually sells the philosophical material. A straightforward but memorable staging by Keith Warner is likely the only chance many will have to see this work, so its inclusion in Naxos’s catalog is a cause for celebration.Tansel Akzeybek and Vera-Lotte Boecker in Jaromir Weinberger’s “Frühlingsstürme.”Oliver Becker‘Frühlingsstürme’ (Komische Oper, 2020)Now how about an immersion in Weimar operetta? Here, you can take in the last operetta to open during the Weimar Republic, which premiered in January 1933, soon before Nazis did their best to erase a theatrical tradition that was Jewish, gender-fluid and influenced by Black American music of the period.Once again, Barrie Kosky is the director. This was hardly the best operetta production during his long and celebrated decade of leadership at the Komische Oper. It’s not even the best show by Jaromir Weinberger that the theater has put on. (That would be “Schwanda the Bagpiper,” as directed by Andreas Homoki in 2022.)But “Frühlingsstürme” remains a valuable document of Kosky’s efforts to revive Weimar-era works. His playful staging brings a snazzy panache to the comic reversals of fortune and mistaken-identity gambits. You can listen to excerpts that a star singer like Jonas Kaufmann is keen to include in a show-tunes sampler, but the entire show has a fizzy intoxication that excerpts can’t match. More

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      Review: ‘La Cage aux Folles’ Brightens Up Berlin

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      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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      Jakub Hrusa Set to Lead Royal Opera House

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      The young Czech conductor will replace Antonio Pappano, who is heading to the London Symphony Orchestra.Jakub Hrusa leading the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall, in New York, in 2019.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLONDON — Jakub Hrusa, a rising Czech conductor, on Tuesday was named the music director of the Royal Opera House in London, one of the highest-profile positions in opera.Hrusa, 41, who has been the chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony in Germany since 2016, will take on the role in September 2025, replacing Antonio Pappano, who announced last year that he was leaving to become the chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra after a successful 20-year tenure at the opera house.There has long been speculation in London’s opera world over who would replace Pappano. Neil Fisher, a critic for the Times of London, rounded up a dozen contenders last year, including Edward Gardner, a former music director at English National Opera, and Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who, until recently, led the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Hrusa was not on the list. But the Czech, who is also the principal guest conductor of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where Pappano is the principal conductor, has long received praise.When Hrusa made his New York Philharmonic debut, in 2017, the critic Anthony Tommasini, in The New York Times, wrote: “With his sweeping arm gestures and choreographic swiveling, Mr. Hrusa is a very animated conductor.” He added, “His approach worked, judging by the plush, enveloping sounds and impressive execution he drew from the Philharmonic players in an auspicious debut.”In a highlight at this year’s Salzburg Festival, Hrusa led a breathless rendition of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova,” directed by Barrie Kosky.Critics have also praised Hrusa’s two performances at the Royal Opera House: a 2018 production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” also directed by Kosky, and a run of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” this spring. In The Times of London, Fisher wrote that Hrusa’s conducting of “Lohengrin” “cannily distills the eeriest sonorities of the score, highlighting its bleak beauty.”Hrusa is not the first relatively lesser known option to become the opera house’s music director. When Pappano took the job, in 2002, he came from La Monnaie in Brussels and had little reputation in London at the time.In a news release, Hrusa, who grew up in Brno, the Czech city where Janacek lived, said he was thrilled to accept the position. “I have always dreamt about a long-term relationship with a house where one can reach the highest standards in opera, and I realized very quickly that I adored the whole team of artists and staff at Covent Garden,” he said.Oliver Mears, the director of the Royal Opera, said in the release that everyone at the house had “been hugely impressed by not only his superlative music and theater-making but also by the generosity and warmth of his personality.”On Tuesday, the Royal Opera House detailed some of Hrusa’s early engagements in the new role. In the 2027-28 season, he will conduct Wagner’s four-part “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” with Kosky directing.Pappano described the all-encompassing role of music director last year in an interview with The New York Times: “With all the competition that there is for people’s attention, for fund-raising, even for survival for classical music institutions,” he said, “the job has become much more than just conducting.”A looming challenge for the Royal Opera could be a cut in its budget. The British government is slashing the amount of funding it gives to cultural institutions in London by a total 15 percent, so that it can give more money to arts organization in poorer regions. Last year, the government gave the Royal Opera House £35.8 million, or about $40 million, equivalent to 43 percent of the house’s total income, including for the Royal Ballet. An announcement on future funding is expected this month. More

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      America’s Most Interesting Opera Destination? The Midwest.

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      Barrie Kosky and Yuval Sharon, two of opera’s finest directors, open new productions in Chicago and Detroit.New York City, despite its bona fides as a cultural capital, can be surprisingly provincial when it comes to opera.As ever-fewer international directors pass through with their productions — events that, once upon a time, could reliably be found at Lincoln Center’s festivals or the Brooklyn Academy of Music — and New York City Opera exists as a shell of its former self, the only major player left in town is the Metropolitan Opera, an increasingly adventurous if still conservative house.It’s a different story elsewhere in the United States. While the Met prepares to start its season next week, two other companies opened new productions on Saturday, with imaginative directors who won’t grace the Met stage any time soon but should: at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, a “Fiddler on the Roof” by Barrie Kosky, and at Detroit Opera, a version of “Die Walküre” by Yuval Sharon.I saw both over the weekend, which made for an unlikely pairing: “Fiddler,” Bock and Harnick’s golden-age musical, on Saturday, and the third act of “Walküre,” from Wagner’s “Ring,” on Sunday. But while there were subtle thematic connections between the two, they were more notable for simply happening — the latest examples of conceptual daring and directorial promise beyond New York City limits (among others this season, like productions of Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers” in Houston and Dylan Mattingly’s “Stranger Love” in Los Angeles).Kosky’s “Fiddler” staging reveals the musical as the masterpiece that it is: perennially relevant, smartly constructed and richly complicated.Todd RosenbergKosky’s “Fiddler” is an import from the Komische Oper in Berlin, the house he ran for a decade before stepping down this year. It’s both a preview — he will direct one musical each of the next five seasons — and a glimpse at his range as one of Europe’s leading directors, an artist capable of shattering minimalism, in productions like “Kat’a Kabanova” at the Salzburg Festival in August, and archaeological curiosity, in the obscure operettas he has reintroduced to Germany.There are hallmarks of his showman style throughout this “Fiddler,” but perhaps the most Koskyesque accomplishment here is his revealing of the musical as the masterpiece that it is — perennially relevant, smartly constructed and richly complicated — rather than what many critics have seen as borscht belt kitsch. His staging, in which no emotion is ever forced, is funny only in the way that life can be: dark humor in the face of absurdity, joy at a harmless misunderstanding.Most natural, perhaps, is the way in which Kosky’s take on the musical — unaltered, but for welcome Yiddish additions — unfolds as an act of memory, at once melancholy and warm. It begins with something like a summoning of the past: A child (Drake Wunderlich) rolls across the stage on a scooter, beats emanating from his headphones. At the center is a wardrobe; and inside is a violin, on which the boy begins to play the show’s opening theme. He pauses, and the tune continues with a whistle from within.Out from the wardrobe steps Tevye — Steven Skybell, who played the role in the recent Yiddish-language “Fiddler” Off Broadway and who again lends the character the sculptural dimensions of a Shakespeare protagonist — then the rest of the villagers from Anatevka. Among them are a wealth of sympathetic, skilled performers: Debbie Gravitte as a resilient Golde; Lauren Marcus, Austen Danielle Bohmer and Maya Jacobson as her and Tevye’s pathbreaking daughters; Drew Redington as a meek then audacious Motel; Adam Kaplan as a brazen yet desperate Perchik; Michael Nigro as a honeyed Fyedka; and more.Many more: This is a “Fiddler” beyond Broadway proportions, with a cast large enough to fill out a shtetl and a full orchestra, conducted with committed enthusiasm and dancelike flexibility by Kimberly Grigsby. Yet while the forces were operatic, the scenic design, by Rufus Didwiszus, wasn’t; the first act sprang out of and around a unit set of wardrobes and dressers stacked like a barricade, some of their doors and drawers opened to reveal lingering clothes, as if they had been hastily emptied and gathered in a public square. You could imagine it as a memorial.To what? Take your pick. “Fiddler” is specific, a tale of change coming rapidly to the traditions of Anatevka in the early 20th century; yet it has resonated time and again, whether for its themes of rigidity amid progress or for its depictions of intolerance and exile. The last Broadway revival, in 2015, was haunted by the Syrian refugee crisis. This year, it’s impossible to see the show’s characters — inhabitants of present-day Ukraine — haphazardly packing up their lives for an unknown future and not think of the war there.Yuval Sharon’s “The Valkyries,” at Detroit Opera, is presented on a bifurcated stage in which singers perform in front of a green screen, below a video produced live.Mary Jaglowski/Detroit OperaAnd yet Kosky’s staging is also entertaining. Otto Pichler’s choreography, a nod to and break from Jerome Robbins’s original, left the audience on Saturday roaring. And the production’s nearly three hours breeze by. It is the finest “Fiddler” I’ve seen, one that could be adapted with ease and success on Broadway — where, in addition to the Met, Kosky belongs.Sharon is also woefully absent from New York’s stages. The brightest director in the United States, he put on a drive-through “Götterdämmerung” in a Detroit parking garage when live performance was virtually nonexistent during the pandemic and, as artistic director of Detroit Opera, has made that city an opera destination — along with Los Angeles, where his company the Industry has created the most innovative, original productions of recent years.His excerpt from “Die Walküre” — the 85-minute third act, called here “The Valkyries” — reflects Wagner’s ambitions for the work’s stage magic, but also the state of opera performance in our time, by presenting it as a sci-fi movie filmed against a green screen and rendered live with the help of Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson from PXT Studio. Yet a casual audience member could also enjoy it at face value, a self-contained drama with the subtlety and punch of short fiction.The production places the “Ring” in the metaverse, with Valhalla as a digital creation whose back story is recounted by Sigourney Weaver in a video introduction. Having a queen of sci-fi make this cameo is among the show’s campy touches, like Carlos J. Soto’s winking costumes, which suggest “Tron” and its low-budget cousins of the 1970s and ’80s.On the bifurcated stage, singers (accompanied by Andrew Davis leading a reduced but undiminished orchestration by David Carp, to accommodate the theater’s smaller pit) perform in front of the green screen — on green props, and supported by stage hands in green body suits, who, for example, wave capes during the “Ride of the Valkyries.” At the same time, the film, which reflects changes in scale and placement on a digital landscape, is shown above. The singers, especially the soprano Christine Goerke, still earning her title as a reigning Brünnhilde, rise to the challenge of the close-ups with actorly delivery; she, facing an indefinite slumber atop a mountain as punishment, sobs with audibly shallow breathing.At quick glance, Sharon’s production has the appearance of window dressing; the action ultimately unfolds in a conventional way. But, as ever, the medium is the message.“The Valkyries” could be seen as a meditation on opera in the 21st century: the proliferation of video in stagings, as well as pandemic-era livestreams and the genre of studio productions that grew out of them. What, now, is a live performance? Sharon provokes a tension of perception, with the eye and ear unsure of whether to focus on the singers or the screen. What is lost, and gained, in their interplay? He doesn’t offer an answer so much as lay out a balance sheet that the audience is left to settle.If Sharon does make a case, it’s for the durability of an opera’s essence. No matter the format, “Walküre” is a rending portrait of love, family and regret; Sunday’s performance wasn’t any different. And, as in “Fiddler,” the emotional core of “The Valkyries” was drawn out in a way that was unforced and honest, yet stylistically distinct. New York would be lucky to have either show. More

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      At the Salzburg Festival, Riches, Retreads and Notes of Caution

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      Classical music’s pre-eminent annual event had more revivals than usual, but also a breathless new staging of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova.”SALZBURG, Austria — The premiere of a new production of Janacek’s opera “Kat’a Kabanova” had just ended at the Salzburg Festival here last week. When the lights went up, Kristina Hammer, the festival’s new president, was wiping tears off her cheeks.It was hard to blame her for crying. “Kat’a” is a breathless tragedy about a small-town woman trapped in a loveless marriage and driven to suicide after having a brief affair. Janacek’s music stamps out her ethereal fantasies with the brutal fist of reality.Barrie Kosky’s staging was the highlight of a week at Salzburg, classical music’s pre-eminent annual event, which runs through Aug. 31. Kosky has pared down this pared-down work even further, to its core of quivering human beings.The only set is rows of uncannily realistic models of people, standing, wearing street clothes, and facing away from us — and away from Kat’a and her pain. (I admit: I was fooled into thinking these were many dozens of very still extras.) Behind them loom the stone walls of the Felsenreitschule theater, whose vast stage has rarely seemed bigger or lonelier than when the soprano Corinne Winters races across it, running with nowhere to go.David Butt Philip and Winters in “Kat’a.” Behind them are uncannily realistic models of people standing in street clothes.Monika RittershausJittery and balletic, ecstatic and anxious, Winters has a child’s volatile presence, and her live-wire voice conveys Kat’a’s wonder and vulnerability. She is the production’s center, but the entire cast is powerful; Winters’s interactions with Jarmila Balazova’s headstrong Varvara make years of friendship between the characters easy to believe. The conductor Jakub Hrusa confidently paces the work as a bitter, intermission-less single shot, even if the Vienna Philharmonic — the festival’s longtime house band — sounded a bit thin and uncertain in what should be heated unanimity.There is a kind of familial resemblance between Kat’a and Suor Angelica, the agonized young nun at the center of one of Puccini’s three one-acts in “Il Trittico,” directed here by Christof Loy, with the Philharmonic conducted with sensual lightness by Franz Welser-Möst. Like Winters, the soprano Asmik Grigorian, who stars in all three acts, is an intense actress with a voice of shivery directness. (This is the vocal taste at the moment in Salzburg; the days in which Anna Netrebko’s plush tone ruled here seem over.)Spare yet detailed, unified by an airy buff-color space with shifting walls, Loy’s staging reorders the triptych, beginning rather than ending with the comic “Gianni Schicchi,” which now precedes the grim adultery tale “Il Tabarro,” with Roman Burdenko as a firm Michele.In “Suor Angelica,” Asmik Grigorian, left, faces off against Karita Mattila in a blazing confrontation of dueling pains.Barbara Gindl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Suor Angelica,” the closer, is the reason to see this “Trittico”; it’s the only one of the three roles in which Grigorian’s lack of tonal warmth plays fully to her advantage. Her face-off against the veteran soprano Karita Mattila — not an alto, as the role of Angelica’s aunt really requires, but properly imperious — is a blazing confrontation of dueling pains. And Grigorian’s final scene, which milks the unexpected poignancy of her simply changing in front of us from her habit into a sleek black cocktail dress and letting down her hair, is just as wrenching.A woman is also on the verge of a breakdown, but far more amusingly, in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” Now that the star mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli runs the springtime Whitsun Festival here, every summer includes a production vehicle for her. But there were snickers when it was announced that Bartoli, at 56, planned to play Rosina, usually sung at the start of careers. (Bartoli made her professional stage debut in the role, 35 years ago.)But her voice — and her rapid-fire coloratura — are remarkably well preserved, and her enthusiasm is irresistible. Directed by Rolando Villazón, the show is a love letter to the movies, like “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” which has characters walking on and off screen. Here it’s the silent era that comes to life, with Bartoli as a diva whose experience is winked at in a rundown of her pictures, from Joan of Arc to pirates, projected during the overture. But the concept is not held to so stringently that it detracts from the adorably madcap fun.Cecilia Bartoli, right, as Rosina in “The Barber of Seville,” a role usually sung at the start of careers.Monika RittershausThe ensemble Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco plays with silky spirit for Gianluca Capuano, who leads a cast as expertly easygoing as Bartoli — including Alessandro Corbelli, Nicola Alaimo and, as a Nosferatu-esque Basilio, Ildebrando D’Arcangelo. And the existence of a rarely performed mezzo version of the climactic aria “Cessa di più resistere” lets Bartoli trade off verses with the agile young tenor Edgardo Rocha.The other opera in the relatively intimate Haus für Mozart this summer also takes a hint from the movies: Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” framed by the director Lydia Steier like “The Princess Bride,” with a grandfather telling the story to a young child — here, three boys. As when this staging was new, in 2018, this is a clever way of super-compressing the work’s extensive spoken dialogue.Four years ago, the production sprawled in the festival’s largest theater; now it’s been smushed into its smallest. Steier has wisely jettisoned a whole strand of steampunk circus imagery and concentrated more on the plot as a parable of the start of World War I, with “Little Nemo” touches. It’s subtle work as the boys gradually become participants in the action, not merely observers. The Philharmonic played under Joana Mallwitz with an ideal mixture of crispness and roundedness.Not every Salzburg Festival includes a revival of a past show; this year there are two. In 2017, the Iranian-born photographer and video artist Shirin Neshat’s staging of Verdi’s “Aida” was that summer’s most eagerly awaited offering, a rare full production conducted by the Verdian giant Riccardo Muti, and Netrebko’s debut in the title role.Rather in the background was Neshat, her first time doing opera — and a pristine, bland effort. Now, with less starry collaborators, her work has come to the fore, still decorous but deeper. To poetic effect, some of her blurry, languid early videos of slow-moving crowds on Middle Eastern streets and coasts have been added; her photographs also now play a part, and some dancers are covered in Arabic calligraphy, a trademark of her art.Directed by Rolando Villazón, “The Barber of Seville” is a love letter to the movies.Monika RittershausThere are some good ideas, like the ominous, violent renderings of the ballet in Amneris’s chamber and the Triumphal Scene. Also some bad ones: Amonasro, Aida’s father, here seems to be a specter, already dead, at the start of Act III, which makes the plot incomprehensible. Alain Altinoglu’s conducting of the Philharmonic is sensibly paced but, compared to the exquisite colors and textures Muti elicited, otherwise ordinary. (The nocturnal beginning of the Nile Scene is one of many passages less evocative this year than in 2017.)Elena Stikhina’s soft-grained Aida and Ève-Maud Hubeaux’s dignified Amneris were impressive, but Piotr Beczala, a shining Radamès, was the only really glamorous singer. And glamour is, like it or not, part and parcel of the ideal Salzburg experience: an extravagance of imagination and achievement that surpasses what you can get at the Met or the Vienna State Opera.There was grumbling among Salzburg watchers about the two revivals and the not-quite-new “Barber,” which premiered in June. An almost $70 million budget for just three truly new stagings?This was clearly a note of caution as the pandemic wears on. “I’m convinced it is the right thing artistically, and from the economic side,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, said when the season was announced last year.But the economic part seems truer than the artistic. “Flute” and “Aida” were improved — the Mozart was tighter, the Verdi more nuanced. The question is whether opera’s most famous and rich summer festival needed repeats of two repertory standards — works that can be seen all over the world during the regular season — in performances that, while solid, weren’t much more distinguished than what you’d get in any major house.It is a telling bit of weakness as Salzburg faces renewed competition, especially from the growing Aix-en-Provence Festival in France — and even from the likes of Santa Fe Opera, which this year presented “Tristan und Isolde,” its first Wagner in decades, and a world premiere (“M. Butterfly”). For all its resources, Salzburg has of late abandoned major commissions in favor of bringing back underappreciated modern works.Aix and Salzburg went head-to-head this summer, both offering productions by the in-demand auteur Romeo Castellucci. It was a showdown that Salzburg soundly lost. Aix got a huge, haunting staging of Mahler’s Second Symphony as the exhumation of a mass grave. Here in Austria, though, as Joshua Barone wrote in The Times, Castellucci’s double bill of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Orff’s “De Temporum Fine Comoedia” was a grim, murky slog, played sludgily by the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra under Teodor Currentzis.But even an expanding Aix lacks the scope of Salzburg’s concert schedule, which begins with a long Ouverture Spirituelle mini-festival and offers an enviable, overlapping array of often superb orchestral programs and recitals.Though less widely publicized, the weekend Mozart Matinees featuring the Mozarteum Orchestra often present the most joyful, vibrant playing of the festival. Marco BorelliThis year the concerts didn’t all satisfy. The pianist Grigory Sokolov’s pillowy touch was alluring in Beethoven’s “Eroica” Variations and Brahms’s Op. 117 pieces, but smoothed Schumann’s “Kreisleriana” into slumber. The tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s voice rarely came alive in a recital whose halves were dully drawn from his two most recent albums.But it was touching to see the superstar pianist Lang Lang show his respect for Daniel Barenboim by joining that conductor and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra for Manuel de Falla’s “Nights in the Gardens of Spain,” not at all a virtuoso showpiece. And while the Vienna Philharmonic under Andris Nelsons made a muddle of Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Yefim Bronfman, the orchestra sounded sumptuously ripe in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.More memorable was a less exalted, less widely publicized concert: one of the festival’s 11 a.m. weekend Mozart Matinees featuring the Mozarteum Orchestra. These mornings often have the most joyful, vibrant playing of the festival, and last week’s program was no exception, led with verve by Adam Fischer.The Mozart Matinees are well attended and happily received. But they still feel like a Salzburg secret. More

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      After 10 Years, Barrie Kosky Leaves His Opera House Dancing

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      To say goodbye to a transformative tenure at the Komische Oper in Berlin, this director staged an “All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue.”BERLIN — It’s difficult to pinpoint the most outrageous moment of “Barrie Kosky’s All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue,” which opened at the Komische Oper here on Friday. Is it the 1960s-era pilot and flight attendant in drag belting “My Way” (sorry, “Mayn Veg”) under a shower of golden confetti? The subtle camp of an imaginary Choir of Temple Beth Emmanuel singing with straight-faced sincerity? The “message from our sponsors” advertising “delectably light, always right, gefilte fish in jars”?But maybe the evening is less about those moments than about Kosky himself: the Australian-born director who has become an essential figure of the Berlin, not to mention European, opera scene, an erstwhile foreigner who speaks in a fluid blend of German, English and Yiddish and has risen to being addressed on Friday by Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture commissioner, as “lieber,” or dear, Barrie.So much of the “Revue” embodies the ethos of the house he has built during the decade of his leadership, which comes to an end this summer. Queer, Jewish, entertaining and executed at a high level, the show is a quintessential production of the Komische Oper, the city’s most reliably interesting and revelatory opera company.Under Kosky — a showman through and through, who operates with a young idealist’s belief in the power of theater and a brazen disregard for divisions between so-called high and low art — the Komische Oper has been the kind of place where you could see Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron” one night and Mozart the next, followed by a Broadway musical, a Weimar-era operetta and, for good measure, something Baroque.Thankfully, that spirit will survive once he leaves and the house is jointly led by Susanne Moser and Philip Bröking. And, as Kosky said during a curtain call speech on Friday, the “Revue” is “kein Abschied”: no farewell. At 55, and more comfortable working as a freelancer than taking on a new house, he will remain at the Komische in an advisory role and direct one musical each of the next five seasons. His first? Jerry Herman’s “La Cage aux Folles,” given a grand treatment and sharing the calendar, in typical fashion, with Luigi Nono’s avant-garde, borderline strident “Intolleranza 1960.”“That must be the only time in history that the words ‘Nono’ and ‘Jerry Herman’ are in the same sentence,” Kosky said in a recent interview. “It’s even the same orchestra and the same chorus. My God, I mean, that’s just sensational.”Compare this atmosphere with those of the city’s two other major houses: the respectable but relatively stuffy Deutsche Oper and the Berlin State Opera, a company hopelessly wed to a core repertory heavy on Strauss and Wagner. The Komische, fittingly, attracts a varied audience that Kosky — true to my experience over the years — described as “five leather queens” next to “two tattooed lesbians” next to “grandpa and grandmother” next to “four Japanese tourists.”Kosky at the Komische Oper, the company he has run for 10 years, and where he will remain in an advisory role after he steps down this summer.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesKosky’s crowning achievement may be the degree to which he has elevated and restored operetta — a genre “stopped dead in its tracks” by the Third Reich, he said, and “Aryanized” in post-World War II performance — on the Berlin stage. He has either directed or invited guests to mount productions of long-neglected works including Paul Abraham’s “Ball im Savoy,” Oscar Straus’s “Die Perlen der Cleopatra” and Jaromir Weinberger’s “Frühlingsstürme,” which is considered the last operetta of the Weimar Republic.“These pieces were a fundamental, important part of the landscape of Berlin culture before 1933,” he said. “And we’re not just talking about Jewish composers. We’re talking about Jewish librettists, we’re talking about Jewish choreographers, we’re talking about Jewish singers.”It can be tricky to stage an operetta convincingly and compellingly; Kosky and his team have performed some dramaturgical surgery as part of their rescue missions. But above all, he has avoided linking his productions with history. Absent are Nazi intrusions or attempts at “setting the thing in Buchenwald, which a German director might probably do,” he said.“You know, it doesn’t work if you’re going to batter people,” Kosky added. “I feel the audiences have been enabled in the last 10 years to sit here and enjoy it without guilt. What I’ve tried to tell the German audiences, and the Berlin audiences, is, listen: The best way you can honor these people that your grandparents or parents killed or sent into exile is enjoy it.”So he has aimed for humor, charm and, of course, a little subversiveness. And operetta allows him to be “completely ludicrous,” as he said. “I can put in my Mel Brooks Barrie Kosky moments, and then I can be very heartbreakingly real the next moment, and it’s authentic to the pieces. I think most German directors don’t do that. They haven’t watched ‘The Muppet Show.’ I always say to people, if you want to understand my work, it’s basically a combination of the Muppets and Franz Kafka.”For now, Kosky plans to step away from operetta and make room for others: “I’ve opened the sweets shop, and I’ve said, ‘Look, guys, look at these delicious, fabulous things. And I’ve given you the keys. Take over the shop.’”Hence his future directing musicals, which after “La Cage” will include “Chicago” and “Sweeney Todd.” He is committed to opera projects throughout Europe in the coming years, but he would gladly take on Broadway as well. That, however, would entail getting a foothold where he has been woefully underrepresented. Productions by Kosky have traveled to Los Angeles and Houston; in September, his Komische “Fiddler on the Roof” will open at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. But aside from a co-directed, not-truly-his staging of “The Magic Flute” that appeared at the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2019, his work hasn’t found the audience it deserves in New York. (The Metropolitan Opera had planned to present his “Fiery Angel” in fall 2020, but it’s now in pandemic purgatory.)Dagmar Manzel, one of the house’s stars, in a sober turn from her comedic roles, such as the title character of “Die Perlen der Cleopatra.”Monika RittershausFirst, though, Kosky needs to finish the run, through July 10, of the “Revue,” an original creation he arrived at after not wanting his final production to be something expected, like an operetta, and after the pandemic upended his plans for a Stravinsky marathon. Few directors would, or could, dream up the result: a tribute to the Yiddish entertainment common at resorts in the Catskill Mountains during the mid-20th century.“The list of performers who were there — it’s like a who’s who of American culture, all going to this Jewish utopian, sort of summer kibbutz,” Kosky said, mentioning the likes of Joan Rivers, Danny Kaye and Brooks. “I mean, what was the Catskills if not a kibbutz without politics?”Paced like a playlist — with the accompanying ups, downs and, at times, lulls — the show features popular music arranged and conducted by Adam Benzwi (called Adam Benski from the stage) and follies-like choreography, with an eye for physical comedy, by Otto Pichler. Company members and guest stars appear in different guises, none more surprising than Dagmar Manzel in a rendingly sober turn from her riotous Cleopatra earlier last week.Throughout, Kosky — who also hosts the show through prerecorded introductions — is committed to the bit in a delicate balance of irony and camp. Both men and women sing in drag; borscht belt humor (“below the girdle”) abounds; and the performers assume personas on a Marvel Cinematic Universe scale. There’s the “mezzo from Minsk” Sylvie Sonitzki, a boy band of orthodox Jews, and don’t forget the temple choir. In an ending out of something like Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Kosky brings out everyone, an enormous ensemble backed by an enormous orchestra, for a spectacle that, joyous and celebratory, sends off the audience with a command: “Dance!”Kosky couldn’t have said goodbye any other way. More

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      Exhibit at German History Museum Reckons With Wagner’s Legacy

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      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