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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.<\/p>\n
His death was announced by his son, the conductor Konstantin Schenk.<\/p>\n
In a statement on the Vienna State Opera\u2019s website, its general director, Bogdan Roscic, said Mr. Schenk \u201cwas able to draw on the intellectual and artistic wealth of the entire history of theater and communicate it brilliantly to a wide audience.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Austria, Mr. Schenk\u2019s renown as an actor, particularly as a comedic performer, arguably eclipsed his acclaim as a director. But his international reputation rested largely on the operas he produced in a career that spanned almost six decades.<\/p>\n
In the United States, his opulent stagings of Richard Wagner\u2019s operas from the late 1970s to the early \u201990s garnered him lasting recognition. Many, including \u201cParsifal,\u201d \u201cDie Meistersinger von N\u00fcrnberg,\u201d \u201cTannh\u00e4user\u201d and, perhaps most famously, the four-part operatic cycle \u201cDer Ring des Nibelungen,\u201d are available on home video.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Along with the Italian director Franco Zeffirelli<\/a>, 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 Rudolf Bing and Joseph Volpe. In Europe, he remained popular as a bulwark of tradition against stage directors \u2014 including many of his own generation \u2014 who brought modern and avant-garde sensibilities to theater and opera.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 16 productions for the Met became increasingly infrequent.<\/p>\n In 2014, during a revival of his 40-year-old production of Richard Strauss\u2019s \u201cArabella,\u201d a headline in Vanity Fair urged readers, \u201cSee Otto Schenk\u2019s Masterpieces at the Met Opera While You Still Can.\u201d The same year, The New York Times reviewed several of the director\u2019s still-popular productions at the Vienna State Opera. \u201cMr. Schenk, who seems to be losing his place at the Met,\u201d the critic James R. Oestreich wrote, \u201cevidently retains his grip at home.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Reviewing the Lepage cycle for The New Yorker<\/a>, Alex Ross wrote, \u201cPound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Schenk\u2019s \u201cRing\u201d was both critically lauded and an audience favorite, beginning in 1986, when the Met inaugurated the cycle with \u201cDie Walk\u00fcre,\u201d the second opera in the tetralogy; it 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.<\/p>\n At the time Mr. Schenk was tapped to direct the \u201cRing,\u201d it was common for leading opera companies, especially in Europe, to present Wagner\u2019s works in updated or abstract stagings. But Mr. Schenk, working closely with James Levine<\/a>, the Met\u2019s longtime music director, insisted on playing by the composer\u2019s rules: He preserved the work\u2019s 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 G\u00fcnther Schneider-Siemssen, a frequent collaborator.<\/p>\n \u201cIn this era of daringly trendy reinterpretations of the \u2018Ring,\u2019 there ought to be room for a brilliantly untrendy one,\u201d Donal Henahan wrote in a 1987 Times review of \u201cDas Rheingold,\u201d the first opera in the cycle. Reviewing the same production for The Times three years later, Allan Kozinn concluded, \u201cWhether one agrees with this Urtext approach or thinks it is time to move on, one must grant that as naturalistic stagings go, the Met\u2019s is a beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While Mr. Schenk\u2019s \u201cRing\u201d had its share of detractors \u2014 Martin Bernheimer of The Los Angeles Times called it both reactionary and na\u00efve \u2014 it was generally considered a triumph of traditional dramaturgy and stagecraft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1990, the production\u2019s four installments were shown on public television in the United States. \u201cThat adds up to 17 hours of 19th-century opera in prime time,\u201d The Times reported, calling it a \u201cstaggering\u201d effort in which a television crew of 30 worked at the opera house for about a month.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, Jessye Norman<\/a> 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\u2019s grand tableaus in the minds of \u201cRing\u201d lovers for decades to come.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After the Anschluss in 1938, Eugen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cSuddenly, we were a Jewish household,\u201d Mr. Schenk recalled in a 2020 memoir. Experiencing and witnessing persecution fueled a curiosity about Jewish culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI became interested in the forbidden \u2018Jewish music\u2019 of Gustav Mahler, and Offenbach\u2019s Barcarole became my anthem,\u201d he wrote. \u201cLater, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAbove all, however,\u201d he continued, \u201cit was Jewish humor that became the plaything of my youth and has remained a pillar of my work to this day.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 the city\u2019s smaller playhouses. He quickly worked his way up to the Burgtheater, Austria\u2019s leading theater.<\/p>\n Throughout a long acting career that also encompassed television and film \u2014 he lent his voice to the elderly widower Carl Fredricksen for the Austrian release of the 2009 Disney-Pixar animated feature \u201cUp\u201d \u2014 Mr. Schenk always came back to the theater.<\/p>\n During his most active years at the Met, between 1988 and 1997, he 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 \u201cAmadeus,\u201d Bottom in \u201cA Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream\u201d and Vladimir in \u201cWaiting for Godot.\u201d His last performance there was as Firs, the senile servant in Anton Chekhov\u2019s \u201cThe Cherry Orchard,\u201d in 2021.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1956, Mr. Schenk married the actress Ren\u00e9e Michaelis, whom he had met while studying at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. She died in 2022. In addition to their son, he is survived by grandchildren. His older sister, the Olympic athlete Bianca Schenk<\/a>, died in 2000.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Schenk\u2019s career in opera began in 1957 with a production of Mozart\u2019s \u201cDie Zauberfl\u00f6te\u201d at the Salzburg State Theater. Five years later he won wide recognition directing Alban Berg\u2019s unfinished \u201cLulu\u201d at the Theater an der Wien, a production conducted by Karl B\u00f6hm and starring Evelyn Lear<\/a>. It was the Austrian premiere of a work now considered one of the 20th century\u2019s operatic masterpieces.<\/p>\n In 1964, Mr. Schenk became a house director at the Vienna State Opera, where his \u201cLulu\u201d was also performed starting in 1968. He was prolific, averaging a new production per year until the late 1980s.<\/p>\n His bejeweled 1968 staging of Richard Strauss\u2019s \u201cDer Rosenkavalier\u201d and his severe 1970 \u201cFidelio,\u201d both of which were conducted by Leonard Bernstein at their premieres, are among his six productions still in the company\u2019s repertoire. (In 2014, half a century after his Vienna State Opera debut with Leos Janacek\u2019s \u201cJenufa,\u201d Mr. Schenk directed his final production there, of Janacek\u2019s \u201cThe Cunning Little Vixen.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Schenk\u2019s international star rose rapidly. He furnished productions for La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and Germany\u2019s leading companies in Hamburg, Berlin and Munich. At the Salzburg Festival in Austria, he directed operas and plays as well as acted onstage. For many summers he appeared as the devil, a brief yet scene-stealing role, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal\u2019s \u201cEveryman,\u201d a Salzburg Festival tradition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Schenk made his Met debut in 1968 with Puccini\u2019s \u201cTosca\u201d alongside the production\u2019s star, the Swedish dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson. \u201cTraditionalists must have been pleased,\u201d wrote Harold C. Schonberg, then the Times\u2019s chief classical music critic. \u201cIt was a good, old-fashioned production, with solid and realistic sets, a general air of gloominess, handsomely costumed.\u201d The production was a hit, and the company revived it eight times over the next decade.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Schenk\u2019s first Wagner outing at the Met came in 1978 with \u201cTannh\u00e4user.\u201d That production, which had 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-change protest in the balconies that erupted<\/a> on opening night.<\/p>\n After his \u201cRing,\u201d Mr. Schenk returned to the Met for two more Wagner operas, \u201cParsifal\u201d in 1991 and \u201cDie Meistersinger von N\u00fcrnberg\u201d in 1993, setting a high bar for aesthetically heightened literalism on the opera stage. \u201cOtto Schenk has again made a case for traditionally staged Wagner at the Met, following the composer\u2019s detailed direction,\u201d the Times\u2019s Edward Rothstein wrote of the \u201cMeistersinger\u201d premiere.<\/p>\n When Mr. Schenk directed Donizetti\u2019s \u201cDon Pasquale\u201d in 2006 as a vehicle for Anna Netrebko, the Russian star soprano, he announced that it would be his final Met production.<\/p>\n Mr. Schenk defended his unwaveringly traditional approach to opera.<\/p>\n \u201cThe rendezvous between old works and the present day is what\u2019s exciting,\u201d he said in an interview with the Austrian broadcaster ORF that aired for the 150th anniversary of the Vienna State Opera in 2019. \u201cBut if you stick the contemporary on top of old works, it doesn\u2019t make the whole thing modern. The text of \u2018Lohengrin\u2019 still sounds old-fashioned, even if the performer sings it while wearing a modern costume.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n