Otto Schenk, the celebrated Austrian director whose dazzling traditional productions for the Metropolitan Opera and Vienna State Opera delighted generations of music lovers, died Thursday at his home on Lake Ersi in Austria. He was 94 years old.
His death was announced by his son, conductor Konstantin Schenck.
In a statement on the Vienna State Opera’s website, its general director Bogdan Rusk said Mr. Schenk was able to “draw on the intellectual and artistic richness of the theater’s entire history and bring it to a wide audience in a brilliant way.” “
In Austria, Mr. Schenck’s fame as an actor, especially as a comedian, eclipsed his acclaim as a director. But his international fame rested largely on the operas he produced in a career spanning nearly six decades.
In the United States, his spectacular stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas from the late 1970s to the early 90s won him lasting recognition. Many, including “Parsifal,” “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” “Tannhäuser” and, perhaps most famously, the four-part operatic cycle “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” are available on home video.
With an Italian director Franco ZeffirelliMr. Schenck was historically one of the most prominent practitioners of the great productions that were fashionable during the long tenures of General Managers Rudolph Bing and Joseph Volpe at the Met. In Europe, he remained popular as a stalwart of tradition against stage directors – including many of his own generation – who brought modern and avant-garde sensibilities to theater and opera.
When Peter Gelb replaced Mr. Volpe at the Met in 2006, he recruited a new crop of directors to bring more contemporary ideas to the house. Mr. Schenck’s revival of 16 productions for the Met fell short.
In 2014, during a revival of Richard Strauss’s 40-year-old production of “Arabella,” a headline in Vanity Fair urged readers, “See Otto Schenk’s masterpiece at the Met Opera while you still can.” That same year, The New York Times reviewed the director’s still popular productions at the Vienna State Opera. “Mr. Schenck, who is losing his place at the Met,” wrote the critic James R. Oestreich, “apparently retains his grip on the house.”
Evaluating the Lepage cycle for The New YorkerAlex Ross wrote, “Pound for pound, ton for ton, this is the most mindless and wasteful production in modern operatic history.”
Mr. Schenk’s “Ring,” a critically acclaimed and audience favorite, began in 1986, when the Met opened the cycle with “Die Walküre,” the second opera in the tetralogy. It was fully featured in the 1989–90 season. Over the next two decades, Matt revived it six times. All three cycles offered during the 2008-9 season were sold out.
At the time Mr. Schenck was tapped to direct “Ring,” it was common for leading opera companies, especially in Europe, to present Wagner works in updated or abstract stagings. But Mr. Schenk, working with James Levinthe Met’s longtime music director insisted on conducting according to the composer’s principles: he preserved the work’s mythological and archaic setting and made the most of German stage designer Gunther Schneider-Samson’s romantic sets, almost a living Presented the epic like a picture book. , a frequent contributor.
“In this age of boldly modern interpretations of ‘color,’ there must be room for the brilliantly untrendy,” wrote Donal Henahan in a 1987 Times review of the first opera of “Das Rheingold.” Three years later Reviewing the same production for The Times, Alan Cozen concluded, “Whether one agrees with this Urtext approach or thinks it is time to move on, one must admit that e.g. As natural stages go, Matt’s is a beauty.”
While Mr. Schenck’s “Ring” had its share of detractors — Martin Bernheimer of the Los Angeles Times called it both reactionary and vulgar — it was generally regarded as a triumph of traditional dramaturgy and stagecraft.
In 1990, four episodes of the production were shown on public television in the United States. “It adds up to 17 hours of 19th-century opera in prime time,” The Times reported, calling it a “stunning” effort in which 30 television crews worked at the opera house for nearly a month. What did
The broadcast, later released on video, became a reference recording for a generation of Wagnerians. Many prominent singers, including James Morris, Hildegard Behrens, Jesse Norman and Siegfried Jerusalem, recognized for their characters. Music director Mr. Levin was invited to lead the cycle at the prestigious Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany between 1994 and 1998. And video recordings helped to imprint Mr. Schenck’s great tableaus on the minds of “color” lovers for decades. to come
Otto Schenk was born on June 12, 1930 in Vienna. His father, Eugene, was a notary who converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. His mother, Georgine, was a saleswoman and store manager at the Julius Meinl Coffee Company in Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They met during World War I, when Eugene was stationed there.
After the Anschluss in 1938, Eugen’s marriage to an Aryan woman protected him from deportation or worse, but he and his family faced discrimination. He was stripped of his job because of his Jewish ancestry, and young Otto was kicked out of a junior branch of the Hitler Youth.
“Suddenly, we were a Jewish family,” Mr. Schenk recalled in a 2020 memoir. Experiencing and witnessing persecution led to curiosity about Jewish culture.
“I became interested in the forbidden ‘Jewish music’ of Gustav Mahler, and Offenbach’s Barcarolle became my anthem,” he wrote. “Later, I started reading Heinrich Heine, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, and Stefan Zweig, and I discovered the visual worlds of Max Liebermann and Marc Chagall.”
“However, above all,” he continued, “it was Jewish humor that became the pastime of my youth and remains a pillar of my work to this day.”
After the war, Mr. Schenk spent two semesters studying law at the University of Vienna before attending the famed Max Reinhardt Seminary to train as an actor. He graduated in 1951 and began acting and directing in small playhouses in the city. He quickly worked his way up to Austria’s leading Theater Berg Theater.
During a long acting career that also spanned television and film — he lent his voice to elderly widower Carl Fredrickson for the Austrian release of the 2009 Disney-Pixar animated feature “Up” — Mr. Schenk has always been in the theater. come back
During his most active years at the Met, between 1988 and 1997, he also led the theater at Der Josefstadt, the Vienna playhouse where he cut his teeth early in his directing career and where He had the longest association as an actor. He appeared in dozens of roles there beginning in 1954, including Antonio Salieri in “Amadeus,” Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Vladimir in “Waiting for Godot.” His last performance there was in 2021 as Furze, an elderly servant in Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard”.
In 1956, Mr. Schenk married the actress Renee Michaelis, whom he had met while studying at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. He died in 2022. In addition to his son, he is survived by grandchildren. Her older sister, an Olympic athlete Bianca Shankdied in 2000.
Mr. Schenk’s career in opera began in 1957 with a production of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” at the Salzburg State Theater. Five years later he gained wider fame by directing Alban Berg’s unfinished “Lulu” at the Theater an der Wien, a production directed by and starring Carl Bohm. Evelyn Lear. It was the Austrian premiere of a work now considered one of the operatic masterpieces of the 20th century.
In 1964, Mr. Schenk became house director at the Vienna State Opera, where his “Lulu” also premiered in 1968. By the late 1980s they were prolific, averaging a new production each year.
His 1968 jewel-toned Richard Strauss film “Der Rosenkaulier” and his intense 1970 film “Fidelio,” both premiered by Leonard Bernstein, are among six of his productions still in the company’s repertoire. I am (In 2014, half a century after his Vienna State Opera debut with Leos Janacek’s “Jenufa,” Mr. Schenk directed the final production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.”)
Mr. Schenck’s international star rose quickly. He has presented productions for leading German companies at La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and in Hamburg, Berlin and Munich. At the Salzburg Festival in Austria, he directed operas and plays as well as acting on stage. Several summers he appeared as Satan, a brief but scene-stealing role in Hugo von Hofmannstel’s “Everyman,” a Salzburg Festival tradition.
Mr. Schenck made his Met debut in 1968 with a production of Puccini’s “Tosca,” starring the Swedish dramatic soprano Bridget Nilsson. “Traditionalists must have been delighted,” wrote Harold C. Schoenberg, then the Times’ chief classical music critic. “It was a good, old-fashioned production, with solid and realistic sets, a general atmosphere of melancholy, beautifully dressed.” The production was very successful, and the company revived it eight times over the next decade.
Mr. Schenck’s first Wagner outing at the Met was in 1978 with “Tannhäuser.” That production, which Mr. Schneider-Samson directed, was last seen in the 2023-24 season and was as notable for its formidable cast as for the climate change protests on the balconies. That exploded on opening night.
After his “Ring,” Mr. Schenk returned to the Met for two more Wagner operas, “Parsifal” in 1991 and “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” in 1993, bringing a penchant for an aesthetically heightened literalism to the operatic stage. Set a high bar. Edward Rothstein of The Times wrote of the “Meistersinger” premiere, “Otto Schenck once again makes a case for Wagner at the Met, following the composer’s elaborate direction.”
When Mr. Schenk directed Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” in 2006 as a vehicle for Anna Netrebko, the Russian star soprano, he announced that it would be his last Met production.
Mr. Schenck defended his unflinchingly traditional approach to opera.
He said in an interview with Austrian broadcaster ORF that aired in 2019 to mark the 150th anniversary of the Vienna State Opera, “The juxtaposition between old works and the present is very interesting. The works, the whole thing. Doesn’t modernize the thing. The text of ‘Lohengrin’ still sounds old-fashioned, even if the actor sings it in modern clothes.