Joachim Herz (Intendant)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joachim Herz (born June 15, 1924 in Dresden , † October 18, 2010 in Leipzig ) was a German opera director and director .

Life

Joachim Herz's grave at the Südfriedhof in Leipzig

Joachim Herz, who was born in Dresden, studied Kapellmeister and opera directing with Heinz Arnold at the music academy there, and later musicology at the Humboldt University .

In 1951 he became director of the Dresden-Radebeul State Opera . In 1953 he moved to the Komische Oper Berlin and was there until 1956 a student and assistant to Walter Felsenstein , whose working methods he largely took over. Like Felsenstein, the founder of realistic music theater , Herz also used thorough philological and historical preliminary studies to develop productions with a personal touch.

After a brief interlude at the Cologne City Opera (1956–1957), he joined the Leipzig Opera in 1959 as the opera director . “The most meaningful years of my life”, as Herz would later assess.

Here he opened the new opera house in 1960 with Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg . He attracted particular attention with his Der Ring des Nibelungen , which he completed in Leipzig in 1976 . This benchmark staging provided the main conceptual impetus for Chéreaus Bayreuth's “ Ring of the Century ”. Leipzig remained the musical home of Herz until 1976. His productions could be seen on stage up to eight times a week.

In retrospect, his move back to the Komische Oper in Berlin in 1976 is considered unlucky. With the rise and fall of the city of Mahagonny , he was able to stage a brilliant, socially critical mass spectacle. But he did not want to stay in the shade Felsenstein, still in the GDR - realism persist. His sometimes harsh working style and his carelessness towards the SED bureaucrats met with little approval. His replacement in 1981 was therefore not unexpected.

In 1982 he took over the position of chief director at the Dresden State Opera - from 1985 in the reopened Semperoper , for the opening of which he staged Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz .

In addition to the triangle Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, Herz was staging all over the world at an early stage. He worked at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater as well as at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires , London and Vancouver .

He staged a total of 126 productions and new productions of over 60 operas, many of them became classics.

Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen directed by Herz

Between 1973 and 1976 Joachim Herz staged all four parts of the ring at the Leipzig Opera House . Contrary to the performance practice at the time, which was mainly characterized by the works of Wieland Wagner , Herz sought the conceptual key for the tetralogy in Wagner himself, especially in his social-revolutionary views, which made him a barricade fighter in the 1848 revolution and which he did in many of his Scriptures set out. In 1848 Wagner began with the ring seal. At this time and content coincidence tied heart and interpreted the ring as "a play about the class struggles of the 19th century." "Wagner has this class struggle tragedy of the 19th century now alienated chosen a parable-like shape for it and as alienating costume Norse mythology put over it, from which he also gained crucial moments of conflict in the fable. ”(Joachim Herz) The directing team also drew essential impulses from George Bernard Shaw's ring analysis The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on The Niblung's Ring (published in London in 1889). Shaw was the first to interpret Wagner's tetralogy as a reflection of the socio-economic upheavals of the 19th century.

For the first time, the Leipzig production also applied the principles of realistic music theater as developed by Walter Felsenstein to Wagner's Ring . Both Herz and the conductor of the tetralogy, Gert Bahner , and Rudolf Heinrich , who was responsible for the stage design and costumes, were Felsenstein students. In the preliminary conceptual work (July to September 1972), Herz and Heinrich developed the key points in terms of content and staging and the imagery of their ring interpretation. The gold that Alberich forged into a ring is in its conception "first of all beautiful nature", transforms into artistically treated nature (the ring), which is also suitable as an object of exchange, and finally mutates into the "basis of a universal exchange value". “The ring is a principle: it means the possibility of original accumulation . It means a potentiation of wealth and power. ”(Joachim Herz) Herz and Heinrich gave the ring in their interpretation the shape of a golden fist:“ A denaturation of the human hand that will look like a brass knuckle. ”At the end of the Götterdämmerung it was transformed the ring back in “a gold fabric, a gold web, dreamlike and waving like a veil. The Rhine daughters float away with him in their gondolas to the Schnürboden. "

Characteristic of the visual worlds that Rudolf Heinrich designed is a collage technique from historically guaranteed details, which he alienated with fairy-tale and abstract elements. In this way he created a correspondence between historicity and timeless myth. The Götterburg Walhall was a compilation from the Palais de la Justice in Brussels, the staircase of the Vienna Burgtheater by Gottfried Semper and a glass dome from Turin.

An essential question of the Ring interpretation was what actually goes down at the end of Götterdämmerung: the world as such or the world of Wotan? Herz and Heinrich decided that it is the world of Wotan and his opponent Alberich (who is only the alter ego of the father of the gods, as derived from the musical analysis of both leitmotifs) that will be destroyed here. Consequently, Herz reinterpreted “Siegfried's funeral march” in Wotan's abdication: the father of the gods (who actually does not appear in this opera) walks through a deserted line of eagle pylons and greets them. The final image of the Leipzig production showed the men and women who were not defined by Wagner on an empty stage. “Finally, there is Tabula Rasa: the old has been erased. Now a new one begins. How this new thing should look like cannot be shown at this point. Wagner didn't know. "(Joachim Herz)

Premieres and casts

  • Das Rheingold , premiere on April 7, 1973. With Rainer Lüdeke (Wotan), Sigrid Kehl (Fricka), Karel Berman (Alberich), Günter Kurth (Loge) and others. a.
  • Die Walküre , premiere on February 9, 1974. With Günter Kurth (Siegmund), Els Bolkestein (Sieglinde), Fritz Hübner (Hunding), Sigrid Kehl (Brünnhilde), Renate Härtel (Fricka), András Faragó (Wotan) and others. a.
  • Siegfried , premiere on October 25, 1975. With Jon Weaving (Siegfried), Guntfried Speck (Mime), Rainer Lüdeke (Der Wanderer), Thomas M. Thomaschke (Fafner), Sigrid Kehl (Brünnhilde) and others. a.
  • Götterdämmerung , premiere on March 28, 1976. With Jon Weaving (Siegfried), Sigrid Kehl (Brünnhilde), Ekkehard Wlaschiha (Gunther), Hanna Lisowska (Gutrune), Karel Berman (Alberich), Fritz Huebner (Hagen) and others. a.

Reviews (selection)

  • “Both the production by Joachim Herz and the set design and the costumes by Rudolf Heinrich adhere to Wagner's own statements, and that has not exactly been the norm since Wieland Wagner. Of course, the two of them do not fall back into the hollow pathos, into the clinking of weapons and swinging swords that Wieland Wagner retired, but they are radically departing from the extreme stylization that has been common since 1951 and return to the “core” in a modern way "Back from Wagner's scene instructions." (...) "Every institute that can boast such an excellent and overwhelming production as this 'Rheingold' performance has worked its way up to the best in the world."
  • The FAZ certifies the Ring von Herz “great provocative power and consistency”.
  • The Herald Tribune called Das Rheingold an “overwhelming performance” that also made “a little theater history”.
  • “This return of the RING to the theater, the retheatricalization of events over which the nebulae of Nordic mythical long-time moved so penetratingly, is probably the first thing that strikes the viewer. (...) There are no dreary Nibelungen stretches where nothing at all is offered but beautiful pathos; the theater is played, and with such fervor that you at least believe you are in SALOME. ”Ernst Krause in OPERNWELT, June 1976

Further productions (selection)

Honors

Trivia

Herz was the first director who created the Ring of the Nibelung as a parable of 19th century capitalism. After that there was hardly a production without this background. Chéreaus Bayreuth's “ Century Ring ” 1976 was based entirely on Herz's innovation, which alone would have made Herz the superstar of the opera world today. Unlike Chereau's Ring , Herz's interpretation was not recorded on video because this technology was not yet available in the GDR at that time. The epoch-making production is only documented in two workbooks of the Academy of the Arts of the German Democratic Republic.

Fonts

  • Stephan Stompor (Ed.), Walter Felsenstein, Joachim Herz: Music theater: Contributions to methodology and staging concepts . Leipzig: Reclam, 1976

literature

  • Dieter Kranz: Berlin theater. 100 performances from three decades , Berlin 1990 - including conversations with the heart.
  • Michael Heinemann and Kristel Pappel-Herz (eds.): Opera with a heart. The music theater of Joachim Herz. Volume 1: From baroque opera to musical drama. Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-936655-92-6 .
  • Michael Heinemann and Kristel Pappel-Herz (eds.): Opera with a heart. The music theater of Joachim Herz . Volume 2: Between Romanticism and Realism. Cologne 2011. ISBN 978-3-936655-93-3 .
  • Michael Heinemann and Kristel Pappel-Herz (eds.): Opera with a heart. The music theater of Joachim Herz . Volume 3: Music theater in the present. With a foreword by Peter Konwitschny . Cologne 2012. ISBN 978-3-936655-94-0 .
  • Short biography for:  Herz, Joachim . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Christoph Kammertöns : Joachim Herz , in: Lexikon der Oper , Vol. 1, ed. by Elisabeth Schmierer, Laaber 2002, pp. 680–683.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Opera director Joachim Herz has died. In: Welt online. October 18, 2010.
  2. ^ Eckart Kröplin: Richard Wagner Chronicle . JB Metzler Verlag GmbH Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-476-02587-6 , p. 158
  3. ↑ a b c d Joachim Herz stages Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen at the Leipzig Opera House. Part I: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre. Academy of Arts of the German Democratic Republic. Berlin 1975
  4. ^ Walter Felsenstein, Götz Friedrich, Joachim Herz: Musiktheater. Contributions to methodology and staging concepts. Publishing house Philipp Reclam jun. Leipzig 1970, p. 206ff
  5. ↑ a b c Joachim Herz stages Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen at the Leipzig Opera House. Part II: Siegfried, Die Götterdämmerung. Academy of Arts of the German Democratic Republic. Berlin 1980
  6. ^ Program booklet for Richard Wagner: Die Walküre , ed. vom Leipziger Theater, 1973/74 season, issue 16
  7. ↑ Paul Moor: Leipzig seeks new access to Wagner: Back to Realities. In: DIE ZEIT of April 20, 1973
  8. ↑ quoted from DER SPIEGEL 42/1974, pp. 156–161
  9. ↑ quoted from DER SPIEGEL 16/1973, pp. 194–197
  10. ↑ Interview with director Joachim Herz 10/2002 . In: Der neue Merker No. 155 (22nd year) May / June 2009.
  11. ↑ Joachim Herz stages Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen at the Leipzig Opera House. Part I: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre. Part II: Siegfried, Die Götterdämmerung. Academy of Arts of the German Democratic Republic. Berlin 1975 and 1980
personal data
SURNAME Heart, Joachim
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German opera director and director
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH October 18, 2010
Place of death Leipzig