Otto Schenk, Opera Director and Bulwark of Tradition, Dies at 94
A prominent practitioner of the historically grand productions that were once fashionable at the Met, he was especially well known for his stagings of Wagner.
Otto Schenk, the prolific Austrian director whose lavishly traditional productions for the Metropolitan Opera and the Vienna State Opera thrilled generations of music lovers, died on Thursday at his home on Lake Irrsee in Austria. He was 94.
His death was announced by his son, the conductor Konstantin Schenk.
In a statement on its website, the Vienna State Opera’s general director, Bogdan Roscic, said Mr. Schenk “was able to draw on the intellectual and artistic wealth of the entire history of theater and communicate it brilliantly to a wide audience.”
In Austria, Mr. Schenk’s renown as an actor, particularly as a comedic performer, arguably eclipsed his reputation as a director. But his international reputation rested largely on the operas he produced in a career that spanned almost six decades.
In the United States, his opulent stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas from the late 1970s to the early ’90s garnered 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.
Along with the Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, Mr. Schenk was one of the most prominent practitioners of the historically grand productions that were fashionable at the Met under the long tenures of the general managers Rudolph Bing and Joseph Volpe. In Europe, he remained popular as a bulwark 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 succeeded Mr. Volpe at the Met in 2006, he recruited a new crop of directors to bring more contemporary ideas to the house. Revivals of Mr. Schenk’s 16 productions for the Met — a record for a director — became increasingly infrequent.
In 2014, during a revival of Mr. Schenk’s 40-year-old production of Richard Strauss’s “Arabella,” a headline in Vanity Fair urged readers, “See Otto Schenk’s Masterpieces at the Met Opera While You Still Can.” The same year, The New York Times reviewed several of the director’s still-popular productions at the Vienna State Opera. “Mr. Schenk, who seems to be losing his place at the Met,” the critic James R. Oestreich wrote, “evidently retains his grip at home.”
This renewed appreciation for Mr. Schenk seemed inseparable from the backlash against the Met’s 2012 “Ring” cycle, a tech-heavy staging by Robert Lepage. That production replaced Mr. Schenk’s cycle, which Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times’s chief classical music critic, called “a lushly romantic and reverentially traditional staging.”
Reviewing the Lepage cycle for The New Yorker, Alex Ross wrote, “Pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history.”
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Mr. Schenk’s “Ring” was both critically lauded and an audience favorite — from 1986, when the Met inaugurated the cycle with “Die Walküre,” the second opera in the tetralogy, which was presented in full in the 1989-90 season. Over the next two decades, the Met revived it six times. All three cycles presented during the 2008-9 season were sold out.
At the time Mr. Schenk was tapped to direct the “Ring,” it was common for leading opera companies, especially in Europe, to present Wagner’s works in updated or abstract stagings. Mr. Schenk, working closely with James Levine, the Met’s longtime music director, insisted on playing by the composer’s rules: He preserved the work’s mythic and primordial setting and presented the epic almost like a living picture book, while making the most of Romantic sets by the German stage designer Günther Schneider-Siemssen, a frequent collaborator.
“In this era of daringly trendy reinterpretations of the ‘Ring,’ there ought to be room for a brilliantly untrendy one,” Donal Henahan wrote in a 1987 Times review of “Das Rheingold,” the first opera in the cycle. Reviewing the same production for The Times three years later, Allan Kozinn concluded, “Whether one agrees with this Urtext approach or thinks it is time to move on, one must grant that as naturalistic stagings go, the Met’s is a beauty.”
While Mr. Schenk’s “Ring” had its share of detractors — Martin Bernheimer of The Los Angeles Times called it both reactionary and naïve — it was generally considered a triumph of traditional dramaturgy and stagecraft.
In 1990, the production’s four installments were shown on public television in the United States. “That adds up to 17 hours of 19th-century opera in prime time,” The Times reported of the “staggering” effort, which required a television crew of 30 that worked for about a month at the opera house.
The broadcast, which was later released on video, became a reference recording for a generation of Wagnerians. Many of the featured singers, including James Morris, Hildegard Behrens, Jessye Norman and Siegfried Jerusalem, became identified with their roles; Mr. Levine, the music director, was invited to lead the cycle at the renowned Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany, between 1994 and 1998. And the video recording helped imprint Mr. Schenk’s grand tableaus in the minds of “Ring” lovers for decades to come.
Otto Schenk was born on June 12, 1930, in Vienna. His father, Eugen, was a notary who had converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. His mother, Georgine, was a saleswoman and store manager at the Julius Meinl coffee company in Trieste, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They met during World War I, when Eugen 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 origins, and young Otto was thrown out of a junior branch of the Hitler Youth.
“Suddenly, we were a Jewish household,” Mr. Schenk recalled in a 2020 memoir. Experiencing and witnessing persecution intensified his interest in Jewish culture.
“I became interested in the forbidden ‘Jewish music’ of Gustav Mahler, and Offenbach’s Barcarole became my anthem. Later, I began reading Heinrich Heine, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, and Stefan Zweig, and I discovered the visual worlds of Max Liebermann and Marc Chagall,” he wrote.
“Above all, however,” he continued, “it was Jewish humor that became the plaything of my youth and has remained a pillar of my work to this day.”
After the war, Mr. Schenk spent two semesters at the University of Vienna studying law before switching to the prestigious Max Reinhardt Seminar to train as an actor. He graduated in 1951 and began acting and directing at several of the city’s smaller playhouses. He quickly worked his way up to the Burgtheater, Austria’s leading theater.
Throughout a long acting career that also encompassed television and film — he lent his voice to the elderly widower Carl Fredricksen for the Austrian release of the 2009 Disney-Pixar animated feature “Up” — he always came back to the theater.
During his most active years at the Met, Mr. Scheck between 1988 and 1997 also led the Theater in der Josefstadt, the Viennese playhouse where he had cut his teeth early in his directing career and where he had his longest association as an actor. He appeared in dozens of roles there starting in 1954, including Antonio Salieri in “Amadeus,” Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Vladimir in “Waiting for Godot” and Volpone. His last performance 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 while studying at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. She died in 2022. In addition to their son, Konstantin, he is survived by grandchildren. His older sister, the athlete Bianca Schenk, died 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 won wide recognition directing Alban Berg’s unfinished “Lulu” at the Theater an der Wien, a production conducted by Karl Böhm and starring Evelyn Lear. It was the Austrian premiere of a work now considered one of the 20th century’s operatic masterpieces.
In 1964, Mr. Schenk became a house director at the Vienna State Opera, where his “Lulu” was also performed starting in 1968. He was prolific, averaging a new production per year until the late 1980s.
His bejeweled 1968 staging of Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” and his severe 1970 “Fidelio,” both of which were conducted by Leonard Bernstein at their premieres, are among his six productions still in the company’s repertoire. (In 2014, half a century after his debut there with Leos Janacek’s “Jenufa,” Mr. Schenk directed his final production there, of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.”)
Mr. Schenk’s international star rose rapidly. He furnished productions for La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and Germany’s leading companies in Hamburg, Berlin and Munich. At the Salzburg Festival in Austria, he directed operas and plays as well as acting onstage. For many summers he appeared as the devil, a brief yet scene-stealing role, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Everyman,” a Salzburg Festival tradition.
Mr. Schenk made his Met debut in 1968 with Puccini’s “Tosca,” at the instance of the production’s star, the Swedish dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson. “Traditionalists must have been pleased,” said Harold C. Schonberg, the Times’s chief classical music critic. “It was a good, old-fashioned production, with solid and realistic sets, a general air of gloominess, handsomely costumed.” The production was a hit, and the company revived it eight times over the next decade.
Mr. Schenk’s first Wagner outing at the Met came in 1978 with “Tannhäuser.” That production, which featured sets by Mr. Schneider-Siemssen, was last seen during the 2023-24 season and was as notable for its formidable cast as for the climate protest that erupted on opening night.
After his “Ring,” Mr. Schenk returned to the Met for two additional Wagner operas, “Parsifal” in 1991 and “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” in 1993, setting a high bar for aesthetically heightened literalism on the opera stage. “Otto Schenk has again made a case for traditionally staged Wagner at the Met, following the composer’s detailed direction,” the Times’s Edward Rothstein wrote of the “Meistersinger” premiere.
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 final Met production.
Mr. Schenk defended his unwaveringly traditional approach to opera. “The rendezvous between old works and the present day is what’s exciting,” he said in an interview with the Austrian broadcaster ORF that aired for the 150th anniversary of the Vienna State Opera in 2019. “But if you stick the contemporary on top of old works it doesn’t make the whole thing modern. The text of ‘Lohengrin’ still sounds old-fashioned, even if the performer sings it while wearing a modern costume.”