For decades, Stefan Herheim worked as a freelance opera director on the highest-profile stages of Europe, with a reputation for complex, entertaining productions that combined bold spectacle with thought-provoking ideas. Then, three years ago, he decided to put down roots.
He took on the position of artistic director at Theater an der Wien, a renowned theater in Vienna that once hosted the premieres of works by Beethoven and operettas like “Die Fledermaus” and “The Merry Widow.”
“It was time I tried,” Herheim, 55, said in an interview, “to build up something with a bigger continuity than what I ever achieved going from house to house.”
His first order of business was to oversee a two-year, 80-million-euro (about $91.1 million) renovation that the theater, built in 1801 and last renovated in 1962, needed badly. After some delays, Theater an der Wien’s main stage reopened in January. And on Friday, Herheim’s the season concluded with “Voice Killer,” a new opera by Miroslav Srnka based on the true story of an American soldier who becomes a murderer while stationed in Australia during World War II.
In late May, Herheim sat in his office with a canned energy drink in hand while a rehearsal for “Voice Killer” unfolded several floors below. His face bright with excitement, he described the music in Srnka’s opera as “a psychotic room you’re entering where the sound takes you somewhere you’ve never been.”
An exploration of femicide, the darker aspects of the human psyche and the repercussions of violence, “Voice Killer” is an unusual pick for an old opera house. But it is exactly the kind of work Herheim can commission as the artistic head of a stagione theater, where only one production is presented at a time, for a limited run.
“We don’t have to produce something that’ll survive for 10 years in repertoire,” Mr. Herheim said. “We can take more risks. More than half the shows we’re doing are titles people have hardly ever heard of. We go far beyond the classical standards.”
The purpose of storytelling in shows like “Voice Killer,” he added, is to help viewers wrestle with issues and questions that feel too big to handle in their daily lives. A theater can force audience members to slow down and process, at least for a little bit.
Staring down audiences — even literally — has been something of a signature move for Herheim since he made a name for himself, beginning at the Salzburg Festival in 2003, with a version of Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio” that caused such a scandal, viewers loudly booed and some people tried to return their tickets before seeing the opera. The festival asked Herheim to return for the next performance and every one after to explain himself to audience members.
Rather than ending his budding career, the production boosted it.
“After Salzburg, I became this guy who was interesting to some opera houses, who said, ‘We want that exact agenda, he’s provocative, he’s wild, he’s exciting,’ and all the other opera houses saying, ‘No way,’” Herheim said. “Immediately, I had very exciting possibilities, and I worked like crazy, playing with layers and bringing back the excitement of colorful theater with huge costumes and ballet. I represented something new in that time that hit a core desire or need.”
He worked intensely for years, becoming known for his productions of operas like “Parsifal” at the Bayreuth Festival from 2008-12, “Rusalka” at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2008, “Die Meistersinger” at Salzburg in 2013, “Pelléas et Mélisande” at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2018 and Wagner’s four-opera “Ring” at the Deutsche Oper Berlin several years ago.
During those years, Herheim said, “I just came home to fill the washing machine and pack a suitcase.”
Elisabeth Sobotka, the artistic director of the Berlin State Opera, initially encountered Herheim’s work in 2001 at the Landestheater Linz in Austria, where he directed Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”
“From the very first moment, I was intrigued by the energy and the force that comes at you from the stage,” Sobotka said. “When you see his productions, you know that he’s coming from the music, and really digging into the story, but also the background, the entire cosmos of the opera.”
Heidi Bruun Nedregaard is an assistant director who has worked with Herheim on and off for the past two decades, including this spring in Oslo, where he revived his 2022 production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” — which he first staged for Theater an der Wien. She noted the level of detail Herheim incorporates into his work.
“It’s amazing all the movements and thoughts that he manages to push into 20 seconds of music,” she said. “There’s so much going on all the time. My pages are so full of notes.”
He finds playful ways to communicate complex ideas, she said, a skill that could be partially borne out of the diversity of his inspirations and references, including “The Matrix,” Milos Forman films and “Chicken Run.”
“‘Chicken Run’ had a huge impact on me,” Herheim said while walking through Oslo, his hometown, on a brisk, sunny afternoon in which the fjord shone behind him. “I quote that movie all the time in the rehearsals, just like, the stupidity and the fun of sweet characters being so human.”
With such an intense career, Herheim has frequently felt burnout. Nedregaard said that in the past, he could slide into shouting.
“He’s got a temper,” she said. “At the times when he used to scream, it was not out of power. It was the same fire in him: ‘Why can’t everyone understand what I mean?’ It’s this intense need to get through with his art.” (In recent years, she added, he has matured and become nicer.)
Herheim said that every five years, he has “a kind of crisis” and serious doubt. “Having a purpose like that is a blessing and a curse at the same time,” he added. “It’s a blessing because you don’t question certain things. That’s the only thing you feel makes sense for you. But what does it mean? If you don’t succeed, the fall is so high.”
Periodically, he has forced himself to stop. In 2014, he took a yearlong sabbatical, expecting “to go to India, learn French, fall in love,” he said. “Instead, I just sat in my apartment and stared holes into the walls. I was so tired.”
Herheim first saw an opera in Oslo, when he was 5 years old. Immediately hooked, he insisted that his father, a violist in the Norwegian Opera and Ballet, start bringing him to rehearsals, and began channeling what he saw there and heard at home into his own puppet theater.
“We have Super 8 films with me at 5 or 6 with hand puppets doing ‘Tosca,’” Herheim said. He used items he found around the house to build his sets and make characters. “My family could never find the things they were looking for in the kitchen or in the workshop. It was a huge problem.”
At 18, he created a theater company with friends; they traveled around Norway, performing opera with marionettes. Simultaneously, he picked up various odd jobs, like acting and working as an assistant stage designer.
His other passion was Catholicism, which to him was always linked to music and performance. He was an altar boy and a member of a boys’ chorus that sang at the Vatican for several weeks every summer. At home, he owned incense, dressed up as a priest to play pretend mass, and asked for a golden chalice for his birthday.
These days, Herheim describes himself as “a cultural Catholic” and refers to the theater as his church. But the unknown and the mysterious remain sources of inspiration.
“It sounds a bit crazy, but I do trust my subconsciousness, and I do try to listen to what I tell myself when I sleep in my dreams,” he said. “I’m not esoteric in any way. Actually, I’m quite skeptical toward many of these kinds of methods. But I do very much accept the other side, the unconscious side, and then let it influence my way of being.”
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