Kosky, Barrie (1967- )

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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

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      A Conductor in Demand, and in Control

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      MUNICH — Let’s get this out of the way: Don’t expect Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla to be the music director of a major American orchestra any time soon.“At the moment, I will be much more content to be a simple freelancer,” Gražinytė-Tyla, 35, said in a recent interview at the Bavarian State Opera here, where she was preparing a new production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.”It’s an unusual statement coming from a young conductor in demand, especially one whose current appointment — as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Britain — concludes this spring. Even more unusual since Gražinytė-Tyla, along with the likes of Susanna Mälkki, is often mentioned as a leading contender to fill vacancies on the horizon at top American orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic.But as administrators search for a conductor of her stature, as well as for someone to tip the scale of gender balance in the United States — where there won’t be any female music directors among the country’s 25 largest orchestras until Nathalie Stutzmann starts with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season — Gražinytė-Tyla is a defiant rarity: an anti-careerist who has resisted industry pressure in favor of artistic and personal fulfillment.Her star might be on the rise, but she is keeping it on a short leash. Gražinytė-Tyla designed her calendar this season so that it was dominated by “The Cunning Little Vixen” — both in concert, as in Birmingham, and staged, as in Munich. She has retained a remarkable amount of control over her schedule, ensuring time for family: her partner and two sons in Salzburg, Austria, with a third child on the way. (The Birmingham orchestra recently announced that, because of the pregnancy, she would no longer conduct her planned final concerts in June.)“She’s very in tune with herself,” said Barrie Kosky, who directed the new “Vixen,” which runs through Feb. 15. “She’s very sure her decisions are the right decisions for her. She couldn’t care less about all the tra-la-la.”Born to a family of professional musicians in Lithuania, and finding early success with the baton, Gražinytė-Tyla (pronounced grah-zhin-EE-tay teel-AH) was teed up for the typical life of a conductor: jet-setting hustle and steppingstone appointments — leading, perhaps, to a prestige podium.But she also long had a streak of independence. She began to study music formally at 11 against the wishes of her parents, who wanted to spare her the difficulties of an artistic life. Although experienced as a singer, she wasn’t a trained instrumentalist, so she joined the only school program that was available: conducting. She was a natural and, at 16, took first prize at a Lithuanian competition.Gražinyte-Tyla rehearsing at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. “She’s very in tune with herself,” said the stage director Barrie Kosky.Roderick Aichinger for The New York Times“I remember thinking, Oh no, what am I going to do now?” Gražinytė-Tyla said. “There was this pressure, and I knew it would be so hard to maintain that level. It was a huge challenge, but also a mix of joy and responsibility.”The pressure didn’t end there. Completing her studies, adding Tyla (the Lithuanian word for silence) to her professional name, and winning the Salzburg Young Conductors Award, she was then given a fellowship with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she would go on to serve as an assistant, then associate, conductor. She first appeared with the C.B.S.O. in summer 2015, and by the following January had been appointed its music director.The speed of all that, Gražinytė-Tyla said, “puts you into shape and can give you a good kick to do something fast.” But, she added, it also made her value an introspective pause. “I think it is incredibly important to stay very aware of what is happening inside, because a person shouldn’t be a machine, and shouldn’t be a little part of this big mechanism that says, ‘You go this way and this way.’”“People are different,” she continued. “But I think I need time where I am not studying or conducting or traveling or rehearsing to just be a whole human being.”A breakthrough came during a conversation with the violinist Gidon Kremer. She recalled him telling her that her career would always feel like it had two different doors. Behind one would be record labels, managers, festivals and a variety of conflicting demands; behind the other, “all your dreams are there, and your imagination, and the things you can go for and explore.”She has opened both doors. Insistently private, she speaks strategically, at times even euphemistically, about her home life. Her partner hasn’t been publicly identified beyond having a job with the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg; in the interview, she referred to family time as “human relations.”Yet she did take the job in Birmingham, which has a high profile and a reputation as a star-maker, with such recent music directors as Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons. A recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon followed her appointment. In both cases, she was a first: as a woman on the Birmingham podium and as a female conductor with that storied label. Those milestones were noted publicly, Gražinytė-Tyla said, but only in passing.“This is something that our generation has to be incredibly grateful for,” she said, referring to the struggles of female conductors. “There have been a lot of painful memories for our colleagues in the past, and I have had some small experiences myself, but nothing in the amount that someone in Susanna Mälkki’s generation had to go through.” (Mälkki is 52.)Gražinytė-Tyla was warmly received by the players in Birmingham, said Oliver Janes, a clarinetist with the ensemble. “She has this rehearsal technique where you forget you’ve ever played a piece before,” he added. “And once you’ve completely forgotten how it goes, you feel like you’re starting again.”She also, he said, gave the orchestra — and its public — a jolt. At their first BBC Proms appearance under her direction, they encored with Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty,” and the moment it ended she shouted to the audience inside the vast Royal Albert Hall in London, “See you in Birmingham!”She has released several Deutsche Grammophon recordings with the orchestra, including as part of a benchmark pairing of symphonies by the often overlooked Mieczyslaw Weinberg — a reflection, she said, of her tendency to take a project-based approach to conducting. Just as there will be more Weinberg to come, she is in the midst of a “Vixen” immersion.“I am totally aware that this is a complete luxury,” she said. “Some people see the profession of a conductor as: You have to be incredibly fast and know all the repertoire. These are fantastic qualities. On the other hand, for myself I only can say I believe less and less I could be such a type of conductor.”Over time and multiple performances, she added, “Vixen” has revealed its “incredible jewels and connections” to her. Janes, the clarinetist, said that in Birmingham, she knew every corner of the text, to the point where, “if all the singers went ill, she could do the whole concert and sing every part.”When Kosky started planning the Munich production with Gražinytė-Tyla, he said, she wanted their first conversation to be about text, “which delighted me from the top of my head to my toes.”“I said to her, ‘That’s all the work,’” he added. “The work itself is how the text is propelled by the music. She breathes the text, and she breathes with the music. Without that in Janacek, you’re dead.”“At the moment, I will be much more content to be a simple freelancer.”Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesText was central even at her recent rehearsals with the Bavarian State Opera’s orchestra. Standing at the podium, her small frame belying a deep voice that commands as easily as it lets out booming laughter, she alternated between straightforward notes and explaining scenes in detail — especially in relation to Kosky’s staging. She later did the same when the cast joined for the sitzprobe, the first meeting of the singers and instrumentalists.The tenor Jonas Hacker, singing the role of the Schoolmaster, said that Gražinytė-Tyla’s directions tend to be “very color-motivated” and that she “breaks things down into tiny segments,” which, he added, comes from the score itself: “Janacek tends to be so fragmented, she’ll just take a few bars and figure out really what is the text saying and what its mood is, and really taking the time.”Throughout, Kosky said, he has remained convinced that she is “a theater person, which to me is so fundamental.”“There aren’t many opera conductors in the world,” he added. “You can be a great symphony conductor and be a lousy opera conductor. And there is an absolute shortage of genuinely talented opera conductors. It’s a bit of a worry; get your truffle pig out at the moment. But Mirga is one of them.”Gražinytė-Tyla hasn’t announced future performances beyond a brief revival of “Vixen” during the Munich Opera Festival this summer. But for now, she is confident that whatever follows will not be a long-term post with any orchestra.“The luxury to focus on the ‘Vixen’ — I think it will remain a very important point for me to deal with certain repertoire in the rhythm I feel is the right one, right now, for me,” she said, adding with a hearty laugh: “I’m not sure the big orchestras will be interested in having me if I say I’ll do only ‘Vixen’ for the whole season.” More

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      A New Era Takes Shape at the World’s Opera Capital

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      Serge Dorny and Vladimir Jurowski, the leaders of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, are starting their tenure with Shostakovich’s unruly “The Nose.”MUNICH — Serge Dorny quietly opened a door to the cavernous rehearsal hall of the Bavarian State Opera here one recent evening to see how Shostakovich’s “The Nose” was coming along.Dorny, the company’s general manager as of this season, leaned over an open score for the work, an absurdist satire based on Gogol’s short story about a Russian official whose nose drops off his face and starts a life of its own. Then he took a seat to watch preparations for what would be the first premiere of his tenure, and the first to be conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, the new music director.The singers were taking direction from Kirill Serebrennikov, who was shaping the production by video call — through messages relayed to his co-director, Evgeny Kulagin — because he is not permitted to leave Russia while on probation for corruption, a charge widely believed to be politically motivated.Jurowski sat on a stool, conducting the cast and a nearby pianist. Every so often, Shostakovich’s unruly score would come to a halt as Serebrennikov interjected like the voice of God, booming through speakers but unseen.During one pause, Dorny smiled into a webcam perched to give a view of the rehearsal space. “Hello, dear Serge!” said Serebrennikov, still invisible. Seemingly satisfied, Dorny exited the room as quietly as he had entered.Kirill Serebrennikov, freed from house arrest but not permitted to leave Russia, directed the new production of “The Nose” by video call.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesMore than just “The Nose,” which opened Sunday and is streaming at staatsoper.tv, was taking shape that night: The production is a sign of things to come at the Bavarian State Opera.Its reputation as the world’s opera capital was preserved and strengthened by leaders like Peter Jonas and his successor, the widely beloved Nikolaus Bachler, who left the house this summer. Dorny and Jurowski aspire to maintain their legacy, while also expanding the company’s stable of artists and repertory — starting with “The Nose,” written in the 1920s but never before presented at the Bavarian State Opera.“There are going to be new sounds, new colors and new tonalities — but in a kind of continuity,” Dorny said in an interview. “You should never fill an empty box with the same thing as it used to be.”Some clues as to what to expect from Dorny’s tenure in Munich can be found in his transformative, nearly two-decade run as the leader of the Lyon Opera in France, which included high-profile commissions from the likes of Kaija Saariaho and Peter Eotvos, as well as rarities, innovative takes on standards and additions to the repertory from the 20th century.“In music history since ‘Orfeo,’” Dorny said, “there have been about 50,000 to 60,000 titles, and something like 80 are being played. In order to keep it a lively art form — for opera to not be a mausoleum — we have to widen that.”Dorny is planning to make more use of the Bavarian State Opera’s resident ensemble, which he said had been relegated to minor roles in the past.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesAmong the new productions in Munich this season are Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” and Penderecki’s “The Devils of Loudun.” Dorny teased a future staging of Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre” and said that a premiere by Brett Dean, about Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, would come in the 2023-24 season. Jurowski said he would like to work with Olga Neuwirth and Mark-Anthony Turnage, among other composers.Jurowski added that he is “consciously avoiding the repertoire of Kirill Petrenko,” his predecessor as music director and the shy star of Munich’s recent history, who regularly earned louder ovations than even the house’s most famous singers before he left to become the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.Commuting to Munich from his home in Berlin, where he also leads the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Jurowski has his own musical identity. A champion of 20th-century opera, as well as of composers from his native Russia, he has been less known for the classics of Verdi and (Petrenko’s specialty) Wagner. He said he is happy to cede to guest conductors titles like Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and “La Forza del Destino,” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” and “Lohengrin.”Vladimir Jurowski, the Bavarian State Opera’s new music director, says he will stay away from works closely associated with his predecessor, Kirill Petrenko.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesHe would, however, like to conduct Verdi’s “La Traviata” — but only with the right team, because he sees it as “a Chekhov play with music.” The same goes for “Aida,” which he called “Ibsen with elephants.” (He’ll do it as long as there are no elephants.) Despite his distaste for early Wagner, he would be interested in a “Flying Dutchman” on period instruments. And he would like to collaborate with the Bavarian State Ballet, possibly to commission new choreography for Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty” and “The Nutcracker.”Joining the traditional summertime Munich Opera Festival this season will be an earlier event — called Ja, Mai (Yes, May) — focused on contemporary music. It will include three new productions of works by Georg Friedrich Haas, 68, realized by artists including the directors Claus Guth and Romeo Castellucci and the conductor Teodor Currentzis.“This will be an annual event,” Dorny said, “in which we galvanize all our energies to this very moment where we can give full attention to this repertoire and new work.”“We want to make sure,” he continued, playing on the French word for “last,” “that a world premiere is not a world dernier.”The audience in Munich has historically been game; before the pandemic, the company sold on average an extraordinary 98 percent of its capacity. Opera lovers were also drawn to the famous singers who call the State Opera home, such as Jonas Kaufmann, Anja Harteros and Christian Gerhaher. In an interview last summer, Kaufmann said, “We are now looking into a future that is maybe less, shall we say, written.”Evgeny Kulagin, center, the co-director of “The Nose,” passing on instructions from Serebrennikov to the cast.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBut Dorny has no intention of ignoring the stars of the company’s recent years. “You’re talking about some of the great statesmen of singers,” he said. “At the same time, we also have a responsibility to imagine the future, to avoid the cul-de-sac. It’s important that we create the stars of tomorrow.”To that end, he plans to feature the house’s resident ensemble more prominently. Dorny — who in interviews was invariably diplomatic, beginning any talk of the past with phrases like “This is not meant to be critical” — said that too often, stars had been brought in for principal roles, relegating in-house singers to minor parts. He would prefer “a kind of middle way,” making room for high-profile guests yet prioritizing the ensemble, which he wants to populate with promising voices like the soprano Elsa Dreisig and the baritone Boris Pinkhasovich (currently in “The Nose”).If there was a history Dorny wasn’t interested in speaking about, it was his time in Lyon. Over lunch in his office, he gestured to a stack of boxes and said, “It’s there, still closed, but I don’t necessarily need to unpack.”Daniele Rustioni, Lyon’s principal conductor since 2017, who will lead the new “Troyens” in Munich next spring, described Dorny as someone who “works nonstop” and looks for collaborators who are “super committed.”“I’ve seen this in conductors,” Rustioni said. “Riccardo Muti was really living in the theater, and when I met Tony Pappano, he was the first one coming in and the last to leave. But I’ve never seen that in general managers until Serge.”Shostakovich’s opera, from the 1920s, was being prepared for its first-ever performances at the Bavarian State Opera.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBut Rustioni believes Dorny’s work paid off. “He left the theater in good shape,” Rustioni said, “and you don’t need me to say that he put Lyon on the international map.”The French critic Christian Merlin also said that Dorny had “brought an international standing” to Lyon. “He rejuvenated and modernized it. He established with the audience a relationship of confidence, which made it possible to open up people to other repertoire or aesthetics without the reluctance of the ordinary conservative opera audience. The opera house regained its position in the heart of the city.”Unlike Lyon, though, the Bavarian State Opera is a repertory house; it presents multiple works at once, and with more turnover. Such volume, Dorny said, makes it easier for the company to occupy a central space in Munich’s cultural scene — and makes it more crucial to live up to that potential.He and Jurowski have known each other since the late 1990s; both had posts in Britain, and worked together at the Glyndebourne Festival there. “At the moment it’s a very good relationship which we have to develop and explore even further,” Jurowski said. “But as a starting point, we’re starting on the same artistic platform of a vision.”Jurowski, left, and Dorny have known each other and worked together since the late 1990s.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesThat extends to the State Opera’s orchestra, which Jurowski described as “the oldest and most traditional in Munich, but also the easiest and most open-minded.” For them, playing Strauss and Wagner is “like a press-button thing,” he said, but he also knows they are willing to experiment, such as when he led them six years ago in Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel.” That production was directed by Barrie Kosky, a recurring Jurowski collaborator — including on a new staging in Munich during the pandemic of “Der Rosenkavalier,” which will return next spring.In an interview, Kosky called Jurowski “the most dramaturgical of conductors,” someone who begins work on a production with lengthy discussions, close text readings and constellatory approaches to interpretation. (They had originally been tapped to run the Bavarian State Opera together, but Kosky, who is concluding his tenure at the Komische Oper in Berlin this season, decided to go freelance instead of managing another house; after “Rosenkavalier,” they will reunite for a new production of “Die Fledermaus.”)Kosky, who described Jurowski as a charming cross between an El Greco monk and a Dostoyevsky character, said: “He loves operetta, he loves literature and film and philosophy, and he comes into rehearsals with DVDs of art-house films from 30 years ago. And he infuses all of that, this curiosity about the world, through the music.”More than just a single nose is lost in Serebrennikov’s staging of the opera.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesJurowski said his preparations for “The Nose” involved a lot of conversations with Serebrennikov — especially in person, whenever Jurowski was in Russia for work — long before rehearsals began. “We are completely d’accord,” he added, “in terms of this production,” in which the hapless protagonist is depicted as being alone in having just one nose, while everyone else wears grotesque masks adorned with many of them. Serebrennikov’s staging subtly raises political questions like the one the German critic Bernhard Neuhoff posed in his review of the premiere: “Is it normal to be human when everyone is inhuman?”Speaking by phone after opening night, Dorny said that what Jurowski and Serebrennikov achieved together was “powerful”: a production that offered a fresh visual and metaphorical take on the piece, and a musical performance that was “quite definitive.” He was pleased with the audience’s sustained applause, but even happier overhearing them discussing the opera afterward.“It’s a very good opening piece for the Bayerische Staatsoper,” Dorny said. “It should not just be that you walk out and you forget what you’ve seen, but that you take it with you — that it stays with you. That is what I would like to achieve.” More

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      Review: ‘The Threepenny Opera’ Returns Home, Liberated

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      Barrie Kosky’s new production for the Berliner Ensemble, at the theater where the famous work premiered, knows where to break the rules.BERLIN — “I’m not asking for an opera here,” the notorious criminal Macheath says at his wedding, early in a work that happens to be called “Die Dreigroschenoper” (“The Threepenny Opera”).And in Barrie Kosky’s hauntingly enjoyable new production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s famous “play with music” for the Berliner Ensemble — at the theater where it premiered in 1928 — Macheath then reaches into the orchestra pit in search of nuptial entertainment and steals the “Threepenny” score from the conductor’s stand. He flips through the pages while humming the show’s big hit, “Mack the Knife,” tears them up and throws the scraps into a metal bucket. Then he lights them on fire.The line “I’m not asking for an opera here” dates back to the ’20s, but Weill and Brecht never wrote what follows — nor did their essential collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann, who with this production is finally getting proper billing alongside them after decades of neglect. Yet this kind of ironic gesture toward the art form wouldn’t be out of character for them; coming from Kosky, it’s a subtle tribute, and a blazing declaration of independence.It’s a moment, along with many others in Kosky’s production that epitomizes the adage of knowing rules in order to break them.Kosky clearly understands the work: the social critiques that course through Brecht and Hauptmann’s crass text; the ways in which Weill’s earworm score lodges those ideas in your mind; and how, in its tension between words and music, “Threepenny” dares you to connect with it emotionally amid constant reminders of theatrical artifice.He also seems to know that “Threepenny” is ultimately a problem piece. It may be the defining artwork of Weimar-era Berlin, but more often than not it makes for a joyless night at the theater. Its dizzying layers of satire and style tend to overwhelm directors, who as if operating with a Wikipedia understanding easily succumb to visual clichés, vicious affect and didacticism. The worst productions aspire to the sexily somber Berlin of Sam Mendes’s take on the musical “Cabaret.”But “Threepenny” isn’t, as Kosky said in an interview with The New York Times, “‘Cabaret’ with a little bit of intellectualism.” Indeed, it was quintessentially 1920s Berlin — a timely tale, despite its setting of London’s criminal underworld in the 19th century, that became a pop culture phenomenon known as “Threepenny fever” — but its legacy is far richer and more widespread than that. Especially after the 1950s, once the show found belated success in the United States with a long-running adaptation by the composer Marc Blitzstein.Covers of “Mack the Knife” abounded, and made for one of Ella Fitzgerald’s greatest live recordings; Brecht’s poetic lyrics influenced Bob Dylan; the artist Nan Goldin named her photography collection “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” after one of the show’s songs. And the metatheatrical devices of “Threepenny” are alive and well: In Leos Carax’s new film, “Annette,” emotion and artifice fit snugly together in a deliberate tension you could trace back to Brecht and Weill.Even so, the vitality of “Threepenny” depends on intervention and adaptation; it can never be performed, as it too often has been, as a museum piece. And Kosky never treats it as one. Instead he adds and subtracts, breathing new life into a work that desperately needed it. He sheds the excesses of Act I and eliminates entire characters, for example, to reveal a recognizable but freshly presented story focused on that most fundamental of human dramas: love.Capitalism, and Brecht’s scathing indictment of it, still loom over the show — but more obliquely, as an insidious force behind relationships that renders them slippery and unreliable. In Kosky’s view, it also feeds and thwarts Macheath’s pathological need to be loved, whether by his fellow characters or the members of the audience.Nico Holonics portrayed Macheath with a weariness that betrays the darkness behind his carefree demeanor. Joerg Brueggemann/OstkreuzMacheath, a.k.a. Mack the Knife — performed by Nico Holonics with unflappable joy but a weariness that betrays the darkness behind his carefree demeanor — is not a man to give up his habits, as he is described in the show. He gives away wedding rings as if they were pennies, and smiles as he watches women fight over him. Like Don Giovanni, he never loses faith in his ability to manipulate them, even as they abandon him one by one.He is introduced, as ever, with “Mack the Knife” (following the overture, here lithe yet lyrical in chorale-like passages, conducted by Adam Benzwi). Through a curtain of black tinsel, a sparkling face appears — that of Josefin Platt as the Moon Over Soho, a role created for Kosky’s production — to sing the murder ballad with the rapid vibrato of Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife and a legendary interpreter of his music.Kosky is a showman — just look at the invaluable work he has done to revive Weimar-era operettas at his company here in Berlin, the Komische Oper — and he knows the power of a hit song. So he reprises “Mack the Knife” throughout the evening, at one point having its tune played through one of the souvenir music boxes tourists can buy in his nearby hometown, Dessau.In general, Kosky seems to have more of an affinity for Weill’s music, which he expands with relish, than the text. Where he truly defers to Brecht — his production, after all, is for Brecht’s company — is in the staging, which shatters the fourth wall from the start and continually reminds its audience, in anti-Wagnerian fashion, that what they are seeing isn’t real.Polly Peachum, here a commanding Cynthia Micas, calls for her own spotlight and gestures for the curtain to be raised, revealing a jungle gym of a set (by Rebecca Ringst) that is more dynamic than it at first appears; Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (the darkly charming Tilo Nest), Polly’s father and Macheath’s underworld rival, cues the orchestra; stagehands make no effort to hide their work.The effect, in Brecht’s school of theater, is to temper the audience’s emotional response and trigger an intellectual one — which is crucial to the political success of “Threepenny,” yet is often difficult to reconcile with the seductive grip of Weill’s music. That can get messy, but Kosky’s production comfortably has it both ways; the result may not please purists of Brecht or Weill, but on balance it makes for persuasive, satisfying drama.And by homing in on Macheath, Kosky allows room for psychological richness, particularly with the women in his orbit: Polly; her mother, Celia Peachum (lent the authority of a power broker by Constanze Becker); Jenny (arguably the soul of the show, wistful and bitter as sung by Bettina Hoppe); and Lucy Brown (Laura Balzer, a master of physical and musical comedy). You could also count among them Lucy’s father, the police chief Tiger Brown, here performed by Kathrin Wehlisch in drag — not a gimmick, but a homoerotic treatment of Macheath’s oldest friendship as yet another fragile romance.From left, Cynthia Micas, Constanze Becker and Tilo Nest as the Peachum family.JR Berliner EnsembleAll these relationships fail — usually because of money, in some way. But Macheath is undeterred, by the end looking for his next connection as a brightly lit sign descends from the rafters: “LOVE ME.” That’s another Brechtian touch, a modern take on the projections used in Caspar Neher’s set for the original 1928 production.But what follows is all Kosky. After the winkingly jubilant finale, the Moon Over Soho shows its face again, bleakly sending off the audience with a “Mack the Knife” verse, written by Brecht in 1930, that says some people are in the dark, and some are in the light; and while you can see those in the light, you’ll never see the ones in the dark.Die DreigroschenoperThrough Sept. 4, then in repertory, at the Berliner Ensemble, Berlin; berliner-ensemble.de. More

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      ‘The Threepenny Opera,’ Without the ‘Cabaret’ Clichés

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      Don’t expect bowler hats and dirty negligees in a new production at the Berliner Ensemble, the theater Bertolt Brecht founded.BERLIN — This winter, after live performances had made a modest return in Germany, the coronavirus pandemic brought them to another halt.But at the Berliner Ensemble in January, preparations were underway for a highly anticipated new staging of “The Threepenny Opera.” That “play with music” by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had its 1928 premiere in the company’s house, and became the city’s most famous music theater export — and perhaps the most iconic cultural artifact of Weimar-era Berlin.“I am working behind Bertolt Brecht’s wooden production desk!” said Barrie Kosky, the production’s Australian director, with some astonishment.Although the cast had been rehearsing for eight weeks, no one could say when opening night would be. “The only good thing for me, personally, that’s come out of corona is that I’ve had more time onstage than I’ve ever had to put on a show,” Kosky said.Seven months later, this “Threepenny Opera” is finally set for an Aug. 13 premiere; it will then enter the repertoire of the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and the actress Helene Weigel, his wife. But don’t expect Weimar-era clichés like bowler hats, dirty negligees and tableaus out of Otto Dix or George Grosz.“This piece cannot be ‘Cabaret’ with a little bit of intellectualism,” Kosky said.“We are beyond ‘Babylon Berlin,’” chimed in Oliver Reese, the Berliner Ensemble’s artistic director, who was sitting across from Kosky during the interview.Kosky, 54, is best known for his energetic productions at the nearby Komische Oper, the opera company where he has been the artistic director since 2012. Among his biggest hits there have been deliriously overstuffed, razzle-dazzle stagings of operettas and musicals, including many forgotten works of the Weimar Republic.But now that he’s directing that era’s defining piece, he’s taking a different approach.During a dress rehearsal in January, the actors sang and danced on an industrial set whose welded metal ladders and platforms resembled a treacherous labyrinth or adult jungle gym; there were no references to the decadence of 1920s Berlin. Instead, the sardonic, acid-laced tone of the piece came through in a dark and psychologically probing production that appeared abstract and timeless.Christina Drechsler and Stefan Kurt in Robert Wilson’s production of “The Threepenny Opera,” which the Berliner Ensemble performed more than 300 times.Lieberenz/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesAlan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper in “The Threepenny Opera” at Studio 54 in New York, in 2006.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, which has been home to the Berliner Ensemble since 1949. Bertolt Brecht was the company’s first artistic director.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesThe Berliner Ensemble’s previous “Threepenny Opera” staging, by Robert Wilson, was a stylized tip of the hat to German Expressionism. It was one of the theater’s signature productions and ran for over a decade, with more than 300 performances. (It came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 2011.) But it required many actors from outside the company, which made mounting it a challenge. Shortly after Reese arrived to lead the house in 2017, he approached Kosky about creating a new production cast exclusively with actors from the ensemble.It was an offer Kosky couldn’t turn down.“It was the same antenna that went out when Katharina Wagner rang me,’” Kosky said, referring Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter and the director of the Bayreuth Festival, who invited him to stage “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” there in 2017.“If you’re going to do ‘Meistersinger,’ then where else do you do it but Bayreuth? And if you’re going to do ‘Dreigroschenoper,’ where else do you do it except the Berliner Ensemble?” Kosky said, using the German title of “Threepenny.”With its uneasy blend of genres and source materials — it is based on an 18th-century British popular opera, and Brecht also incorporated lyrics from other poets into the text — “Threepenny” is a tricky work to pull off convincingly. The most recent Broadway production, from 2006, was a coke-fueled 1980s bacchanal starring Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper that was a critical flop.A rehearsal for “The Threepenny Opera” at the Berliner Ensemble with, from left: the actors Kathrin Wehlisch and Denis Riffel; Adam Benzwi, the production’s music director; and Barrie Kosky.Joerg Brueggemann/OstkreuzMuch of what makes “Threepenny” unique, and uniquely challenging for a director, can be traced back its origins. Brecht and Weill spent 10 days in the south of France hashing it out, working with a German translation of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” by Elisabeth Hauptmann — a collaborator and mistress of Brecht’s who, according to the Brecht scholar John Fuegi, was ultimately responsible for 80 percent of the “Threepenny” text.The creators, Kosky said, “didn’t even know exactly what they were writing, because it was written very quickly.” Although Weill later claimed that they had been trying all along to create a “new genre,” both Kosky and Reese felt that much of the show was the result of trial and error. The rushed nature of the collaboration, they said, resulted in something that doesn’t fit any one style.“It is a kind of bastard,” Reese said.“A schizophrenic bastard,” Kosky added. “But that’s the joy of it. It’s a tap dance through theatrical styles.”The rehearsal period for the premiere of “The Threepenny Opera” is the stuff of theatrical legend: calamities worthy of a screwball comedy. But after a month of cast illnesses and walkouts, and faulty sets and props — the barrel organ used for “Mack the Knife,” malfunctioned on opening night — the show opened, and was an immediate hit. All of Berlin was whistling Weill’s melodies, and lines for tickets wound around the block.But despite the fame the play has enjoyed in the 93 years since, Kosky called it a “problematic masterpiece” whose meaning is far from clear. Much of the ambiguity stems from the curious, even lopsided, interplay between the libretto and the score, he said.“Is it a farce with music, as Weill maintained?” Kosky asked. “Or is it a biting anticapitalist satire, as Brecht retrospectively claimed? And what is chief, the text or the music?”Every production of “Threepenny,” he added, “tries to do the impossible: to work out what the conundrum with this piece is, and the contradictions within the text, music and content.”Adam Benzwi, the American conductor who is the production’s music director, said he felt a definite tension between the critical distance that Brecht’s text invites and the emotional immediacy of Weill’s songs. The music, he said, must remain beautiful despite the harshness of the lyrics.“Weill’s music is unique because you immediately feel the pain, excitement and sexiness of urban life,” Benzwi said in a recent phone interview, pointing to the composer’s “melodies that want to be warm in a place that doesn’t allow that, rhythms that want to be happy when describing something terrible.”In January, Kosky said, “If Bertolt Brecht had asked another composer to do the music, we would probably have a much drier, easier piece to understand.”“But,” he added, “Weill opened up an emotional landscape where suddenly you are contradicting virtually everything that Brecht wants, or believes in, in theater.” (It’s a tension that would ultimately lead the dissolution of Brecht and Weill’s partnership in 1931, though they did reunite for “The Seven Deadly Sins” a couple of years later.)Cynthia Micas, as Polly Peacham, and Holonics.JR Berliner EnsembleUnder previous artistic directors, the Berliner Ensemble had developed a reputation for traditional, even worshipful, presentations of Brecht’s plays. Kosky is the latest in a series of innovative directors that Reese has invited to put their own spin on the works of the theater’s genius loci.“We’re trying to establish a new Brecht tradition at this house,” Reese said.“I think you don’t have to stick to the theory anymore,” he added, referring to Brecht’s stage philosophy, which despite its influence on 20th century theater is now approaching 100 years old. Brecht’s most famous technique, the alienation effect, is a push and pull between emotional involvement and critical reflection that is often achieved through ironic or metatheatrical means.Although Kosky is steering clear of Weimar-era imagery for his “Threepenny Opera,” he said he had been inspired by one of the period’s great comic filmmakers, Ernst Lubitsch — but also, perhaps more surprisingly, the much-darker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the enfant terrible of New German Cinema.Kosky said he was trying to bring together “the loneliness and melancholy of those isolated characters in Fassbinder’s films” with the “wonderful, naughty, Lubitsch quickness, irony and lightness.”“It’s a weird combination,” he admitted, adding he was aware that his artistic choices might not please everyone. But he doesn’t mind a bit of controversy.“I’m sure some people will say that I have ignored the savage social satire,” Kosky said, but insisted his production would be “political in a different way,” adding: “This is a piece about love in capitalism, and how love is for sale. It’s about the triumph of bourgeois hypocrisy.”For many, Weill’s score remains the soundtrack of its era, while Brecht’s portrait of a corrupt society captures the spirit of Berlin on the edge of an abyss. Even so, Kosky wants to roll back the show’s local associations in favor of something with broader resonance.“I think people will think my production smells like Berlin,” he said, “but the images that you see could be anywhere in the world.” More

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      A Festival Has a Monumental Premiere (and Some Other Operas, Too)

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      At the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, it was hard for even beloved classics to live up to the elegant intensity of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — I mean it as high praise when I say that at this summer’s edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, none of the operas come close to Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premiered here on July 3.Ushering new work into the world is perhaps an operatic institution’s most difficult task. This is an art form so stubbornly lodged in the past that it always feels like a miracle when a “création,” as the French call it, succeeds.And “Innocence,” which explores the aftermath of a deadly school shooting, does more than succeed. With riveting clarity and enigmatic shadows, and through a range of languages in different registers of speaking and singing, it captures both the promise and darkness of cosmopolitanism itself.It is a victory for Saariaho and her collaborators, and for the Aix Festival and Pierre Audi, its director since 2018. He managed to hold rehearsals with just a piano last summer, when all festival performances were canceled because of the pandemic, and to shift the premiere seamlessly to this year.“I have a long career in commissioning,” Audi told The Times recently. “And this is one of the five greatest pieces that I’ve ever been involved with.”It is hard for even the most beloved works in the repertory, some of which are on offer at Aix through July 25, to measure up to that. It felt symbolic that a moment that was devastating in “Innocence” — a character crushing a handful of cake onto another — returned as a silly, passing bit of slapstick the following evening in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”The carnivalesque staging of Mozart’s “Le Nozzi di Figaro.”Jean-Louis FernandezLotte de Beer’s “Figaro” production is an intentional, endearing mess — an eclectic, attention-deficit explosion practically vibrating through different aesthetics, as though on a candy high. The overture is staged as traditional, raucous commedia dell’arte; the first act is a raunchy multi-cam sitcom, on a set that gradually (and literally) collapses into a demented carnival amid the confusions of the Act II finale, complete with human-height penises strolling around.After intermission, though, the curtain rises on almost nothing — a bed inside a cube defined by white neon bars — and the acting is equally restrained and gloomy. Then the fourth and final act enacts a kind of utopian, queer-feminist knitting collective led by a minor character, Marcellina, the cast draped in garments of Day-Glo yarn. Out of the bed, which has come to be the site of male authority and adultery, an enormous, inflatable fairy-tale tree slowly grows.Thomas Hengelbrock led the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble in a crisp but sensuously phrased reading of the score. Lea Desandre was a bright, alert Cherubino; Jacquelyn Wagner, a Countess cooler than the norm.In the title role of Barrie Kosky’s staging of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Christopher Purves was also different than the norm, at least at the start. In the first scene, Purves’s Falstaff is shown not as the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit, but as a careful master chef, sensitively relishing his creations — and with, at best, a dad bod.Christopher Purves’s incarnation of Falstaff is not the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit. As a careful master chef, he relishes his creations.Monika RittershausWhile Falstaff is often likable, Kosky’s implicit promise is that we’ll admire him, too. This never quite happens, as the production settles into a more well-worn groove, abounding in this director’s trademark vaudevillian touches: men pulling off wigs and dancing in skirts, the works. The title character’s seductions are barely more sophisticated than in a thousand “Falstaff” productions; the merry wives of Windsor’s revenge, little crueler.The conductor, Daniele Rustioni, led the orchestra of the Lyon Opera with a pacing that was genial but less than diamond-precise. The voices, including that of the game, hard-working Purves, were a touch too small for the roles. The test of a “Falstaff” is the effect of the great final ensemble fugue; here the sequence was pleasant rather than cathartic.There was musical catharsis to spare in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” with a supreme cast and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted with lithe flexibility by Simon Rattle. But Simon Stone’s staging — an almost comically realistic evocation of contemporary Paris, from a high-rise apartment to a Métro car — is perplexing, as it purports to explain the brunt of the plot as a woman’s fantasies after learning her husband is cheating.From left, Dominic Sedgwick, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” directed by Stone, who moved the opera to modern-day Paris. Jean-Louis FernandezPerhaps intentionally, but still frustratingly, the production’s line between reality and fantasy keeps getting blurrier, until it’s hard to know who’s really betraying whom, who’s getting stabbed and who survives. But if Nina Stemme’s voice has lost a touch of sumptuousness, she’s never been better as Isolde — singing fearlessly, and ardently invested in the production. Stuart Skelton sings rather than barks Tristan, a tenor’s Everest, and Franz-Josef Selig is a commandingly melancholy Marke.Aix has long been notable for placing smaller pieces, including new ones, amid canonical titans and grand-scale premieres like “Innocence.” In an enormous former ironworks at Luma — the new art complex in Arles, about 50 miles from Aix — “The Arab Apocalypse” was created as part of the festival’s heartening commitment to connecting southern France and the greater Mediterranean world.But based on Etel Adnan’s direly expressionistic poems about the Lebanese civil war, with music by Samir Odeh-Tamimi and a sketched staging-in-the-round by Audi, “Apocalypse” was dreary — the score alternating between shivering and pummeling, the action busy but bland.“Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory” was a grab-bag of early Baroque Italian music, with rich helpings of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Luigi Rossi and more. Silvia Costa tried to corral this gorgeous material into a kind of stylized pageant, a loose trajectory of war, mourning, society-building, more war, more building.From left, Julie Roset, Valerio Contaldo and Etienne Bazola in “Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory.”Monika RittershausHer images were more mystifying than evocative. But the performance, led by Sébastien Daucé, was musically exquisite, with eight superb young singers ideally blending purity and passion, and 13 members of Ensemble Correspondances filling the jewel-box Théâtre du Jeu de Paume with the visceral force of a symphony orchestra.Audi’s ambitions are to expand Aix, implicitly taking on the Salzburg Festival in Austria, which opens at the end of July, and is classical music’s most storied summer event. (While Salzburg is redoubtable, the mood, clothing and ticket prices in Aix are significantly more relaxed.)The program of concerts — which, in Aix, has long been an afterthought to opera, but is a Salzburg powerhouse — will grow, as will the scope of the festival’s productions. With “Tosca,” Aix’s first Puccini, in 2019, it declared that it could cover the red-meat Italian hits. In addition to Luma, Audi has his sights on other unconventional spaces in the region.Commissions are also central to his agenda; “Innocence” is resounding proof. Seeing it a second time, on Saturday, confirmed the initial impression of its intensity and restraint, its emotional pull and intellectual power.The production — like “Tristan,” directed by Stone — keenly depicts both the shocking reality of the central tragedy and its surreal reverberations, which carry years into the future. I question only one directorial intervention: The shooter, a student at the school, is eventually shown onstage, played by a silent actor, even though he is not in the libretto.This dilutes the mystery of the piece, in which all the characters revolve around, and run from, a figure who is absent, a kind of god against whom everyone’s innocence (and culpability) is measured. When he appears in the flesh, the opera’s impact wavers.But only slightly. This is a quibble with a staging that, in general precisely, aligns with an elegant yet savage work. While recalling the starkness of Greek tragedy, “Innocence” is also among the first operatic barometers of our globalized age’s travails. More