In a rehearsal studio built on the grounds of old military barracks outside Vienna’s city center one recent morning, the director Barrie Kosky was asking for a touch of vaudeville.
He was working on his new production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” which opens at the Vienna State Opera on June 16, and was running through a scene with Kate Lindsey and Christopher Maltman, the singers playing the scheming Despina and Don Alfonso.
While Kosky demonstrated a bit of physical comedy, Bogdan Roscic, the general director of the State Opera, walked into the room, and read Mozart’s score over the shoulder of the rehearsal pianist. Once they were finished, he walked over to Kosky.
“Your fabulousness,” Roscic said, addressing him. “Are the taxpayers getting their money’s worth?”
Roscic was joking, of course; his job is to hire directors for their value as artists, not as public utilities. But his question wasn’t crazy. In Vienna, as in much of Europe, opera receives substantial government support, and the leaders of houses are chosen by politicians. If, in the United States, arts administrators like to talk about their work as a civic duty, in Vienna, it absolutely is.
And Vienna is one of the busiest opera destinations in the world. Tourists plan entire trips around the storied, immense State Opera. Not far away, the Volksoper has long offered more varied fare, including musicals and operettas.
Such a rich history, though, can be double-edged. In recent decades, the State Opera and the Volksoper, both repertory houses that present a head-spinning number of titles per season, developed reputations as stagnating under the weight of their traditions. At the State Opera this century, the average age of viewers began to increase by one year each year, suggesting that the audience wasn’t changing. It was just getting terminally older.
Now, Vienna’s opera scene is undergoing a period of rapid, essential evolution. Roscic, 60, took over the State Opera in 2020; at the Volksoper, Lotte de Beer, 42, started as the house’s director two years ago. Both entered with a mission to shake the dust off their companies but have taken different approaches: he with a series of small moves, and she with a new ethos.
What they share is the fundamental challenge of how their houses are structured. Repertory seasons are so relentlessly manic, they leave little room to breathe, much less change.
“It feels a bit,” de Beer said, “like rebuilding a plane while flying.”
The State Opera has one of the broadest repertoires in the world. It presents hundreds of performances a year, of dozens of titles, to an audience both local and international; attendance figures typically range from 99.5 to 100 percent capacity.
Roscic, like many people associated with the house, is proud of its history. Even today, as he pointed out on a recent visit to the theater, the adjustable orchestra pit is unusually shallow, set to a height preferred by Gustav Mahler more than a century ago. (His idea was that the instrumentalists would more easily play with the signers if they could see them, and not just the conductor.)
Roscic, who was born in the former Yugoslavia and moved to Austria as a child, took over the company after a long career in the recording industry; a former academic, he also studied music and philosophy, and wrote a dissertation on the philosopher Theodor Adorno. The primary brief he gave himself at the State Opera, he said, was to truly open the house to the public.
“It’s not one nifty move that makes that happen, though,” he said. “It’s a million little things that you have to be serious about, and energetic about.”
He had a few years to plan for his first season. The State Opera didn’t have a marketing department, so he developed one, and pushed to let the public attend dress rehearsals. He met with Kosky in Berlin, and asked him to direct a new cycle of Mozart’s operas with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (“Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così”); he reached out to the conductor Franz Welser-Möst, the company’s former music director, to bring him back after his public falling out with Roscic’s predecessor, Dominique Meyer; and he hired a new music director, Philippe Jordan.
By the time Roscic’s tenure started, though, any idea about “opening the house” had a formidable obstacle: the pandemic. The theater was closed for months, the longest stretch since World War II. “The lockdown,” he said, “was brutal.”
Still, the house worked out an arrangement to broadcast new productions, performed to an empty hall. Viewership was high, about 500,000 for the first show. So, the State Opera continued, in the end reaching millions.
A major change will come in December, when the State Opera opens a new theater nearby, the Französischer Saal, or French Hall, in the Künstlerhaus. Roscic said that the 250-seat space will be for “people who need a path into the world of opera,” including children. Its first season will contain five world premieres. (By comparison, only one newly commissioned work, “Animal Farm” has played on the main stage since Roscic started.)
Roscic’s time hasn’t been frictionless. Although his term was extended, to 2030, his music director Jordan’s was not. Shortly before Roscic’s extension was announced, Jordan gave a blindsiding interview to the Kurier newspaper in which he announced that he would not be renewing his contract. He blamed the tyranny of Regietheater, or director’s theater, which some conservative artists have complained shifts the power of new productions away from the orchestra pit. The State Opera is not broadly seen as avant-garde, but Jordan said that it was on a path that “leads to inevitable failure in the long run.”
In the local press, Jordan’s interview was described as a hostile way to save face after he had been fired. Roscic suggested as much in a statement at the time, in which he said that Jordan “wanted to extend his contract, but for other reasons this was not possible.” (Jordan declined to be interviewed for this article.)
The State Opera won’t replace Jordan when he leaves next year. Instead, Roscic said, he will regularly engage a small group of conductors, like Welser-Möst, Christian Thieleman and Pablo Heras-Casado.
A future focus, as Roscic looks toward his second term, will be the repertoire. If his choices draw more from the past than the present, they are mostly new to the State Opera: a first “Un Ballo in Maschera,” for example, and “The Fiery Angel.” “Norma” hasn’t been onstage in over 40 years; “Iolanta,” not since the time of Mahler.
“We have to renew the core repertoire,” Roscic said. “That’s the way you shape a house.”
At the Volksoper, de Beer has shaped her house more boldly, with the ease offered by her smaller operation’s scale. Her company caters more to locals and rarely sells at full capacity. When she started, she was given “a clear assignment,” she said, “to raise the quality while keeping the quantity of shows.”
De Beer came to Vienna from the Netherlands, where she had established herself as one of her generation’s most promising opera directors. (She also worked at prestigious houses like the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and the Paris Opera.) Today, the Volksoper looks like an extension of her artistry: collaborative, questioning and, in a field dominated by men, rich with women in positions of power.
Lisenka Heijboer Castañón, her former assistant and a director, whose staging of John Adams and Peter Sellars’s “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” opens at the Volksoper on June 15, described de Beer as “someone who has a deep love for the genre, and for the canon, but also experiences the kind of double feelings a person today might get from that.”
“There are just things that don’t work anymore,” she added. “And I see in Lotte’s work a really genuine attempt to face that.”
De Beer has made moves to evolve the repertoire; “Gospel” is an Austrian premiere, and, for Volksoper’s 125th anniversary, the house commissioned “Lass Uns die Welt Vergessen — Volksoper 1938” (“Let Us Forget the World”), a show about the company’s Nazi-era history. She also continues to direct, two productions per season, including an idiosyncratic treatment of Tchaikovsky’s double bill “Iolanta” and “The Nutcracker” that blended them together and aimed to appeal to audiences of all ages.
“The best version of me is in a rehearsal room,” de Beer said, adding that she is a better manager “if I work in my own house, if I understand the problems by feeling them when I’m onstage.”
Some of her moves have been painful. “If I wanted to up the quality in a way that would be artistically gratifying,” she said, “I had to start by changing many of the ensemble members.” As she made other structural adjustments, some house veterans took to the new environment, while others left. There are still people, she said, who are “struggling and still resisting, and I’m working very hard to take them along with me.” Even guest artists won’t be invited, she said, if “they don’t fit into the philosophy.”
There have been signs that de Beer is on the right track. The average age of audience members is trending downward, while subscribers are on the rise. Not every review has been positive, but that is always the case at a repertory house. Some reviews, like a rave of the family-friendly Disney musical “Aristocats,” have surprised her.
De Beer said she still sees “two departments that are absolutely not where I want them,” and hopes that they will be worked out next season. She is hoping for an extension on her contract, but beyond that, she, like Roscic, is worried about staying too long in her post.
After all, she said, when you’ve accomplished what you set out to do, “you should probably just quit.”
The post When Vienna’s Opera Tradition Got Too Traditional, They Stepped In appeared first on New York Times.
