Otto Schenk, the prolific Austrian director whose wealthy conventional productions for the Metropolitan Opera and Vienna State Opera thrilled generations of music lovers, died Thursday at his dwelling on Lake Irsee in Austria. He was 94.
His dying was introduced by his son, conductor Konstantin Shenk.
In an announcement on his web site, the final director of the Vienna State Opera, Bogdan Rostich, stated that Mr. Schenck “was ready to attract on the mental and creative richness of the theater’s complete historical past and convey it brilliantly to a large viewers.”
In Austria, Mr. Schenck’s fame as an actor, particularly as a comedy performer, in all probability overshadowed his repute as a director. However his worldwide repute rested largely on the operas he produced in a profession spanning virtually six many years.
In the US, his wealthy productions of Richard Wagner’s operas from the late Nineteen Seventies to the early Nineteen Nineties introduced him lasting acclaim. Lots of them, together with “Parsifal,” “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” “Tannhäuser” and maybe probably the most well-known four-part opera cycle, “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” can be found on dwelling video.
Along with the Italian director Franco ZeffirelliMr. Schenck was one of many best-known practitioners of the historic grand productions that had been trendy on the Met through the lengthy tenures of normal managers Rudolph Bing and Joseph Volpe. In Europe, he remained widespread as a pillar of custom in opposition to administrators – together with a lot of his personal era – who introduced a contemporary and avant-garde sensibility to theater and opera.
When Peter Gelb succeeded Mr. Volpe on the Met in 2006, he employed new administrators to carry extra modern concepts to the home. Restorations of Mr. Schenck’s 16 productions for the Met have gotten more and more uncommon.
In 2014, through the revival of Mr. Schenck’s 40-year-old manufacturing of Richard Strauss’s Arabella, a Self-importance Honest headline urged readers to “See Otto Schenck’s masterpieces on the Met Opera when you nonetheless can.” That very same yr, The New York Occasions reviewed a number of of the director’s nonetheless widespread productions on the Vienna State Opera. “Mr. Schenck, who appears to be dropping his place on the Met,” wrote the critic James R. Oestreich, “apparently retains his grip at dwelling.”
A evaluate of the Lepage cycle for The New YorkerAlex Ross wrote: “Pound for pound, ton for ton, that is probably the most insane and lavish manufacturing in fashionable operatic historical past.”
Mr. Schenck’s ”The Ring” has been each critically acclaimed and an viewers favourite since 1986, when the Met opened the run with ”Die Walküre,” the second opera within the tetralogy, which was offered in its entirety through the 1989-90 season. Over the subsequent twenty years, the Met revived it six instances. All three cycles offered within the 2008-9 season bought out.
On the time Mr. Schenck was chosen to direct “The Ring,” it was widespread for main opera corporations, particularly in Europe, to current Wagner’s works in up to date or summary stagings. Mr. Schenk, works intently with James Levinethe Met’s longtime music director, insisted on enjoying in response to the composer’s guidelines: he preserved the work’s mythic and primal setting and offered the epic virtually like a dwelling image guide, whereas benefiting from the romantic units of the German scenographer Gunther Schneider-Siemsen, a frequent collaborator .
“On this age of daringly fashionable interpretations of The Ring, there have to be room for a brilliantly unmodern one,” wrote Donal Henahan in a 1987 Occasions evaluate. for “Das Rheingold,” the primary opera of the cycle. Reviewing the identical manufacturing for The Occasions three years later, Alan Kozin concluded: “Whether or not one agrees with this Urtext method or thinks it’s time to transfer on, one should settle for that so far as naturalistic productions go, the Met’s is magnificence.”
Whereas Mr. Schenck’s ”The Ring” had its share of criticism — Martin Bernheimer of The Los Angeles Occasions known as it each reactionary and naïve — it was usually thought-about a triumph of conventional drama and stagecraft.
In 1990 the 4 components of the manufacturing had been proven on public tv in the US. “This provides as much as 17 hours of prime-time Nineteenth-century opera,” The Occasions reported of the “staggering” effort, which required a 30-strong TV crew to work across the opera for a month.
The efficiency, which was later launched on video, turned a reference recording for a era of Wagnerians. Lots of the featured singers, together with James Morris, Hildegard Behrens, Jesse Norman and Siegfried Jerusalem, recognized with their roles; Mr. Levine, the music director, was invited to conduct the well-known Wagner Competition cycle in Bayreuth, Germany, between 1994 and 1998. And the footage helped seal Mr. Schenck’s grand work within the minds of “Ring” lovers for many years to return.
Otto Schenk was born on June 12, 1930. in Vienna. His father, Eugen, was a notary who had transformed from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. His mom, Georgine, was a saleswoman and retailer supervisor for the Julius Meinl espresso firm in Trieste, which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They met throughout World Struggle I when Eugen was stationed there.
After the Anschluss in 1938 Eugen’s marriage to an Aryan protects him from deportation or worse, however he and his household face discrimination. He was stripped of his job due to his Jewish origins, and younger Otto was thrown out of the junior department of the Hitler Youth.
“All of a sudden we had been a Jewish family,” Mr. Schenck recalled in a 2020 memoir. Experiencing and witnessing persecution fueled curiosity about Jewish tradition.
“I got interested within the forbidden ‘Jewish music’ of Gustav Mahler and Offenbach’s Barcarola turned my anthem. Later I began studying Heinrich Heine, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig and found the visible worlds of Max Liebermann and Marc Chagall,” he writes.
“Above all, nonetheless,” he continued, “Jewish humor turned the toy of my youth and stays a pillar of my work to today.”
After the struggle, Mr. Schenck spent two semesters on the College of Vienna finding out legislation earlier than transferring to the distinguished Max Reinhardt Seminar to coach as an actor. Graduated in 1951. and commenced performing and directing in a number of of town’s smaller theaters. He rapidly made his approach to the Burgtheater, the main theater in Austria.
Throughout his lengthy performing profession, which additionally consists of tv and movie, he lent his voice to aged widower Carl Fredriksen for the Austrian premiere of the 2009 Disney-Pixar animated movie Up. – he all the time returned to the theater.
Throughout his most energetic years on the Met, Mr. Schenck between 1988 and 1997 additionally runs the Theater in der Josefstadt, the Viennese theater the place he lower his enamel early in his directing profession and the place he had his longest collaboration as an actor. He appeared in dozens of roles there from 1954, together with Antonio Salieri in Amadeus, Backside in A Midsummer Evening’s Dream, Vladimir in Ready for Godot and Volpone. His final look there was as Firs, the aged servant in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in 2021.
In 1956, he married actress René Michaelis, whom he met whereas finding out at Max Reinhardt’s seminar. She died in 2022. Along with their son, he’s survived by grandchildren. His older sister, athlete Bianca Schenk, died in 2000.
Mr. Schenck’s profession in opera started in 1957. with the staging of “Die Zauberflöte” by Mozart on the Salzburg State Theater. 5 years later, he received widespread acclaim by directing Alban Berg’s unfinished Lulu on the Theater an der Wien, a manufacturing performed by Karl Böhm and starring Evelyn Lear. This was the Austrian premiere of a piece that’s now thought-about one of many operatic masterpieces of the twentieth century.
In 1964 Mr. Schenk turned director of the Vienna State Opera, the place his “Lulu” was additionally carried out from 1968. He was prolific, averaging a brand new manufacturing a yr till the late Eighties.
His bejeweled 1968 manufacturing of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. and his uncooked 1970 Fidelio, each of which had been performed by Leonard Bernstein at their premieres, are amongst his six productions nonetheless within the firm’s repertoire. (In 2014, half a century after debuting there with Leos Janacek’s Jenufa, Mr. Schenck directed his final manufacturing there, of Janacek’s The Crafty Little Vixen.)
Mr. Schenck’s worldwide star is rising quick. He has furnished productions for La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera Home in London and main German corporations in Hamburg, Berlin and Munich. On the Salzburg Competition in Austria, he directed operas and performs, in addition to performing on stage. For a lot of summers he appeared because the Satan, a short however stealthy function in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Everyman, a Salzburg Competition custom.
Mr. Schenck made his Met debut in 1968. with “Tosca” by Puccini on the initiative of the star of the manufacturing, the Swedish dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson. “Traditionalists should have been happy,” stated Harold S. Schonberg, the Occasions’ chief classical music critic. “It was an excellent, old school manufacturing, with strong and life like units, a normal environment of bleakness, lovely costumes.” The manufacturing was successful, and the corporate revived it eight instances over the subsequent decade.
Mr. Schenck’s first Wagner look on the Met got here in 1978. with “Tannhäuser”. This manufacturing, that includes units by Mr. Schneider-Siemsen, was final seen within the 2023-24 season and was as notable for its nice forged because it was for the local weather protest that erupted on opening evening.
After his “Ring,” Mr. Schenck returned to the Met for 2 further Wagner operas, “Parsifal” in 1991. and “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” in 1993, setting a excessive bar for aesthetically elegant literalism on the operatic stage. “Otto Schenck as soon as once more advocated a historically staged Wagner on the Met, following the composer’s detailed directions,” wrote Edward Rothstein of the Occasions in regards to the Meistersinger premiere.
When Mr. Schenck directed Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in 2006. as a car for Anna Netrebko, Russia’s star soprano, he introduced that it might be his final manufacturing on the Met.
Mr. Schenck defended his staunchly conventional method to opera. “It is thrilling the encounter between previous works and immediately,” he stated in an interview with Austrian broadcaster ORF, broadcast for the Vienna State Opera’s a hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 2019. “However in the event you put the trendy on high of the previous, that does not make all the things fashionable. The lyrics to ‘Lohengrin’ nonetheless sound old school, even when the performer is singing it in a contemporary swimsuit.”
