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 demise was introduced by his son, the conductor Konstantin Schenk.
In an announcement on its web site, the Vienna State Opera’s common director, Bogdan Roscic, stated Mr. Schenk “was ready to attract on the mental and creative wealth of your entire historical past of theater and talk it brilliantly to a large viewers.”
In Austria, Mr. Schenk’s renown as an actor, notably 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 nearly six many years.
In the USA, his opulent stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas from the late Nineteen 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 one of the vital distinguished practitioners of the traditionally grand productions that had been modern on the Met beneath the lengthy tenures of the overall managers Rudolph Bing and Joseph Volpe. In Europe, he remained standard as a bulwark of custom towards stage administrators — together with a lot of his personal technology — who introduced trendy 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 convey extra modern concepts to the home. Revivals of Mr. Schenk’s 16 productions for the Met grew to become more and more rare.
In 2014, throughout a revival of Mr. Schenk’s 40-year-old manufacturing of Richard Strauss’s “Arabella,” a headline in Vainness Honest urged readers, “See Otto Schenk’s Masterpieces on the Met Opera Whereas You Nonetheless Can.” The identical yr, The New York Occasions reviewed a number of of the director’s still-popular productions on the Vienna State Opera. “Mr. Schenk, who appears to be shedding 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 trendy operatic historical past.”
Mr. Schenk’s “Ring” was each critically lauded and an viewers favourite — from 1986, when the Met inaugurated the cycle with “Die Walküre,” the second opera within the tetralogy, which was introduced in full within the 1989-90 season. Over the following 20 years, the Met revived it six instances. All three cycles introduced through the 2008-9 season had been offered out.
On the time Mr. Schenk was tapped to direct the “Ring,” it was frequent for main opera firms, particularly in Europe, to current Wagner’s works in up to date or summary stagings. Mr. Schenk, working intently with James Levine, the Met’s longtime music director, insisted on enjoying by the composer’s guidelines: He preserved the work’s mythic and primordial setting and introduced the epic nearly like a dwelling image ebook, whereas benefiting from Romantic units by the German stage designer Günther Schneider-Siemssen, a frequent collaborator.
“On this period of daringly fashionable reinterpretations of the ‘Ring,’ there should be room for a brilliantly untrendy one,” Donal Henahan wrote in a 1987 Occasions assessment of “Das Rheingold,” the primary opera within the cycle. Reviewing the identical manufacturing for The Occasions three years later, Allan Kozinn concluded, “Whether or not one agrees with this Urtext strategy 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 Occasions known as it each reactionary and naïve — it was typically thought of a triumph of conventional dramaturgy and stagecraft.
In 1990, the manufacturing’s 4 installments had been proven on public tv in the USA. “That provides as much as 17 hours of Nineteenth-century opera in prime time,” The Occasions reported of the “staggering” effort, which required a tv crew of 30 that labored for a few month on the opera home.
The published, which was later launched on video, grew to become a reference recording for a technology of Wagnerians. Lots of the featured singers, together with James Morris, Hildegard Behrens, Jessye Norman and Siegfried Jerusalem, grew to become recognized with their roles; Mr. Levine, the music director, was invited to steer the cycle on the famend Wagner Pageant 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.
“Immediately, 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 grew to become my anthem. 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,” he wrote.
“Above all, nevertheless,” he continued, “it was Jewish humor that grew to become the plaything of my youth and has remained a pillar of my work to this present day.”
After the warfare, Mr. Schenk spent two semesters on the College of Vienna learning regulation earlier than switching to the distinguished Max Reinhardt Seminar to coach as an actor. He graduated in 1951 and commenced performing and directing at a number of of town’s smaller playhouses. He rapidly labored his manner as much as the Burgtheater, Austria’s main theater.
All through an extended performing 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” — he all the time got here again to the theater.
Throughout his most lively years on the Met, between 1988 and 1997, Mr. Schenk additionally led the Theater in der Josefstadt, the Viennese playhouse the place he had minimize 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,” Vladimir in “Ready for Godot” and Volpone. His final efficiency there was as Firs, the senile servant in Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” in 2021.
In 1956, he married the actress Renée Michaelis, whom he met whereas learning on the Max Reinhardt Seminar. She died in 2022. Along with their son, he’s survived by grandchildren. His older sister, the 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 gained extensive 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 of one of many twentieth century’s operatic masterpieces.
In 1964, Mr. Schenk grew to become 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 Nineteen 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 his debut there with Leos Janacek’s “Jenufa,” Mr. Schenk directed his remaining 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 Pageant in Austria, he directed operas and performs in addition to performing onstage. For a lot of summers he appeared because the satan, a quick but scene-stealing function, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Everyman,” a Salzburg Pageant custom.
Mr. Schenk made his Met debut in 1968 with Puccini’s “Tosca,” on the occasion of the manufacturing’s star, the Swedish dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson. “Traditionalists should have been happy,” stated Harold C. Schonberg, the Occasions’s chief classical music critic. “It was a great, old school manufacturing, with strong and practical units, a common air of gloominess, handsomely costumed.” The manufacturing was successful, and the corporate revived it eight instances over the following decade.
Mr. Schenk’s first Wagner outing on the Met got here in 1978 with “Tannhäuser.” That manufacturing, which featured units by Mr. Schneider-Siemssen, was final seen through the 2023-24 season and was as notable for its formidable solid as for the local weather protest that erupted on opening evening.
After his “Ring,” Mr. Schenk 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 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 path,” the Occasions’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 will be his remaining Met manufacturing.
Mr. Schenk defended his unwaveringly conventional strategy to opera. “The rendezvous between outdated works and the current day is what’s thrilling,” he stated 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 for those who stick the modern on high of outdated works it doesn’t make the entire thing trendy. The textual content of ‘Lohengrin’ nonetheless sounds old school, even when the performer sings it whereas carrying a contemporary costume.”
