Otto Schenk, the prolific Austrian director whose lavishly conventional productions for the Metropolitan Opera and the Vienna State Opera thrilled generations of music lovers, died on Thursday at his house on Lake Irrsee in Austria. He was 94.
His loss of life was introduced by his son, the conductor Konstantin Schenk.
In an announcement on the Vienna State Opera’s web site, its normal director, Bogdan Roscic, mentioned Mr. Schenk “was ready to attract on the mental and inventive wealth of the complete historical past of theater and talk it brilliantly to a large viewers.”
In Austria, Mr. Schenk’s renown as an actor, significantly as a comedic performer, arguably eclipsed his acclaim as a director. However his worldwide popularity rested largely on the operas he produced in a profession that spanned virtually six many years.
In america, his opulent stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas from the late Seventies to the early ’90s garnered him lasting recognition. Many, together with “Parsifal,” “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” “Tannhäuser” and, maybe most famously, the four-part operatic cycle “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” can be found on house video.
Together with the Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, Mr. Schenk was some of the outstanding practitioners of the traditionally grand productions that had been modern on the Met below the lengthy tenures of the final managers Rudolph Bing and Joseph Volpe. In Europe, he remained fashionable as a bulwark of custom in opposition to stage administrators — together with a lot of his personal technology — who introduced fashionable and avant-garde sensibilities to theater and opera.
When Peter Gelb succeeded Mr. Volpe on the Met in 2006, he recruited a brand new crop of administrators to deliver extra modern concepts to the home. Revivals of Mr. Schenk’s 16 productions for the Met turned more and more rare.
In 2014, throughout a revival of his 40-year-old manufacturing of Richard Strauss’s “Arabella,” a headline in Vainness Truthful urged readers, “See Otto Schenk’s Masterpieces on the Met Opera Whereas You Nonetheless Can.” The identical yr, The New York Instances reviewed a number of of the director’s still-popular productions on the Vienna State Opera. “Mr. Schenk, who appears to be dropping his place on the Met,” the critic James R. Oestreich wrote, “evidently retains his grip at house.”
Reviewing the Lepage cycle for The New Yorker, Alex Ross wrote, “Pound for pound, ton for ton, it’s the most witless and wasteful manufacturing in fashionable operatic historical past.”
Mr. Schenk’s “Ring” was each critically lauded and an viewers favourite, starting in 1986, when the Met inaugurated the cycle with “Die Walküre,” the second opera within the tetralogy; it was offered in full within the 1989-90 season. Over the subsequent twenty years, the Met revived it six occasions. All three cycles offered throughout the 2008-9 season had been bought out.
On the time Mr. Schenk was tapped to direct the “Ring,” it was widespread for main opera firms, particularly in Europe, to current Wagner’s works in up to date or summary stagings. However Mr. Schenk, working carefully with James Levine, the Met’s longtime music director, insisted on taking part in by the composer’s guidelines: He preserved the work’s mythic and primordial setting and offered the epic virtually like a dwelling image e-book, whereas profiting from Romantic units by the German stage designer Günther Schneider-Siemssen, a frequent collaborator.
“On this period of daringly stylish reinterpretations of the ‘Ring,’ there should be room for a brilliantly untrendy one,” Donal Henahan wrote in a 1987 Instances evaluate of “Das Rheingold,” the primary opera within the cycle. Reviewing the identical manufacturing for The Instances three years later, Allan Kozinn concluded, “Whether or not one agrees with this Urtext method or thinks it’s time to transfer on, one should grant that as naturalistic stagings go, the Met’s is a magnificence.”
Whereas Mr. Schenk’s “Ring” had its share of detractors — Martin Bernheimer of The Los Angeles Instances referred to as it each reactionary and naïve — it was typically thought-about a triumph of conventional dramaturgy and stagecraft.
In 1990, the manufacturing’s 4 installments had been proven on public tv in america. “That provides as much as 17 hours of Nineteenth-century opera in prime time,” The Instances reported, calling it a “staggering” effort during which a tv crew of 30 labored on the opera home for a few month.
The printed, which was later launched on video, turned a reference recording for a technology of Wagnerians. Lots of the featured singers, together with James Morris, Hildegard Behrens, Jessye Norman and Siegfried Jerusalem, turned recognized with their roles; Mr. Levine, the music director, was invited to guide the cycle on the famend Wagner Competition in Bayreuth, Germany, between 1994 and 1998. And the video recording helped imprint Mr. Schenk’s grand tableaus 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 on 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 girl protected him from deportation or worse, however he and his household confronted discrimination. He was stripped of his job due to his Jewish origins, and younger Otto was thrown out of a junior department of the Hitler Youth.
“Abruptly, we had been a Jewish family,” Mr. Schenk recalled in a 2020 memoir. Experiencing and witnessing persecution fueled a curiosity about Jewish tradition.
“I got interested within the forbidden ‘Jewish music’ of Gustav Mahler, and Offenbach’s Barcarole turned my anthem,” he wrote. “Later, I started studying Heinrich Heine, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, and Stefan Zweig, and I found the visible worlds of Max Liebermann and Marc Chagall.”
“Above all, nonetheless,” he continued, “it was Jewish humor that turned the plaything of my youth and has remained a pillar of my work to at the present time.”
After the warfare, Mr. Schenk spent two semesters on the College of Vienna finding out legislation earlier than switching to the distinguished Max Reinhardt Seminar to coach as an actor. He graduated in 1951 and started appearing and directing on the metropolis’s smaller playhouses. He rapidly labored his means as much as the Burgtheater, Austria’s main theater.
All through a protracted appearing profession that additionally encompassed tv and movie — he lent his voice to the aged widower Carl Fredricksen for the Austrian launch of the 2009 Disney-Pixar animated function “Up” — Mr. Schenk at all times got here again to the theater.
Throughout his most energetic years on the Met, between 1988 and 1997, he additionally led the Theater in der Josefstadt, the Viennese playhouse the place he had lower his enamel early in his directing profession and the place he had his longest affiliation as an actor. He appeared in dozens of roles there beginning in 1954, together with Antonio Salieri in “Amadeus,” Backside in “A Midsummer Evening’s Dream” and Vladimir in “Ready for Godot.” His final efficiency there was as Firs, the senile servant in Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” in 2021.
In 1956, Mr. Schenk married the actress Renée Michaelis, whom he had met whereas finding out on the Max Reinhardt Seminar. She died in 2022. Along with their son, he’s survived by grandchildren. His older sister, the Olympic athlete Bianca Schenk, died in 2000.
Mr. Schenk’s profession in opera started in 1957 with a manufacturing of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” on the Salzburg State Theater. 5 years later he received broad recognition directing Alban Berg’s unfinished “Lulu” on the Theater an der Wien, a manufacturing carried out by Karl Böhm and starring Evelyn Lear. It was the Austrian premiere of a piece now thought-about one of many twentieth century’s operatic masterpieces.
In 1964, Mr. Schenk turned a home director on the Vienna State Opera, the place his “Lulu” was additionally carried out beginning in 1968. He was prolific, averaging a brand new manufacturing per yr till the late Eighties.
His bejeweled 1968 staging of Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” and his extreme 1970 “Fidelio,” each of which had been carried out by Leonard Bernstein at their premieres, are amongst his six productions nonetheless within the firm’s repertoire. (In 2014, half a century after Vienna State Opera debut with Leos Janacek’s “Jenufa,” Mr. Schenk directed his ultimate manufacturing there, of Janacek’s “The Crafty Little Vixen.”)
Mr. Schenk’s worldwide star rose quickly. He furnished productions for La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera Home in London and Germany’s main firms in Hamburg, Berlin and Munich. On the Salzburg Competition in Austria, he directed operas and performs in addition to acted onstage. For a lot of summers he appeared because the satan, a short but scene-stealing function, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Everyman,” a Salzburg Competition custom.
Mr. Schenk made his Met debut in 1968 with Puccini’s “Tosca” alongside the manufacturing’s star, the Swedish dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson. “Traditionalists will need to have been happy,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg, then the Instances’s chief classical music critic. “It was a great, old school manufacturing, with strong and real looking units, a normal air of gloominess, handsomely costumed.” The manufacturing was a success, and the corporate revived it eight occasions over the subsequent decade.
Mr. Schenk’s first Wagner outing on the Met got here in 1978 with “Tannhäuser.” That manufacturing, which had units by Mr. Schneider-Siemssen, was final seen throughout the 2023-24 season and was as notable for its formidable forged as for the climate-change protest within the balconies that erupted on opening evening.
After his “Ring,” Mr. Schenk returned to the Met for 2 extra Wagner operas, “Parsifal” in 1991 and “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” in 1993, setting a excessive bar for aesthetically heightened literalism on the opera stage. “Otto Schenk has once more made a case for historically staged Wagner on the Met, following the composer’s detailed route,” the Instances’s Edward Rothstein wrote of the “Meistersinger” premiere.
When Mr. Schenk directed Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” in 2006 as a automobile for Anna Netrebko, the Russian star soprano, he introduced that it might be his ultimate Met manufacturing.
Mr. Schenk defended his unwaveringly conventional method to opera.
“The rendezvous between outdated works and the current day is what’s thrilling,” he mentioned in an interview with the Austrian broadcaster ORF that aired for the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Vienna State Opera in 2019. “However in case you stick the modern on prime of outdated works, it doesn’t make the entire thing fashionable. The textual content of ‘Lohengrin’ nonetheless sounds old school, even when the performer sings it whereas sporting a contemporary costume.”
