Johannes Erath

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Johannes Erath (born 1975 in Rottweil ) is a German opera director .

life and work

Erath completed his violin studies with Rainer Küchl at the Vienna University of Music and with Hansheinz Schneeberger in Freiburg. He worked as an orchestral musician in the Vienna Volksoper and in the orchestra academy of the Vienna Philharmonic , but then switched to directing. At first he worked as an assistant u. a. by Willy Decker , Nicolas Brieger , Guy Joosten , Peter Konwitschny and Graham Vick worked in theaters all over Europe. In 2002 he became director of the Hamburg State Opera , and from 2005 to 2007 he was a scholarship holder of the “Akademie Musiktheater heute” of the Deutsche Bank Foundation .

Erath's early productions mainly include works by contemporary composers, such as the world premiere of Jörn Arnecke's Drei Helden in Rheinsberg , Gerhard Schedl's triptych , Dieter Kaufmann's fugue Unfug-e , Elliott Carter's What Next? and the world premiere of Péter Eötvös ' Paradise Reloaded at the Neue Oper Wien . From the classical repertoire he staged Un ballo in maschera in Bremerhaven , Les contes d'Hoffmann and Cendrillon at the Stadttheater Bern , Orfeo ed Euridice and Aida at the Cologne Opera , Eugen Onegin in Mainz, La traviata and The clever little fox at the Hamburg State Opera .

Long-term collaboration linked the director with the Graz Opera during the artistic direction of Elisabeth Sobotka . Erath staged Alban Berg's Lulu and Mozart's Don Giovanni in Graz in 2010 , the Elektra by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss in 2012, Wagner's Lohengrin in 2013 and Korngold's Die tote Stadt in 2015 . Lohengrin , in particular , which can also be seen at the Oslo Opera House in 2015 , received broad approval from the public and the press, praising it as “a poetic, visually stunning, sometimes fairytale production”. The costumes for this production were designed by the French couturier Christian Lacroix , with whom Erath had already worked for Aida in Cologne ; Tannhäuser will follow at the Saarbrücken Opera in June 2017 .

Since 2009 Erath has also been staging regularly at the Frankfurt Opera . He made his debut with Eötvös ' opera Angels in America at the Bockenheimer Depot , worked on Verdi's Otello in the main house in 2011 , Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto in 2012 and Carl Maria von Weber's Euryanthe in April 2015 . In June 2015 Erath staged Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at the Semperoper in Dresden, using a series of quotations from the Commedia dell'arte . The FAZ described his interpretation as a “comedy of losses” and the magazine Opernwelt reported: Erath “sets the plot one after the other in three historical settings: It starts with the archaic world of the Commedia dell'Arte on a stylized wooden pedestal, on its types Da Ponte was also building up. It is followed by an implied stage set that represents the later 18th century. The conclusion is formed by the open stage of modernity, with spoken dialogue parts and interspersed French chanson scraps on the accordion, also using acoustic means of theatrical refraction. "

In 2017 he successfully staged the world premiere of the opera Der Mieter by Arnulf Herrmann based on the novel by Roland Topor at the Frankfurt Opera . The libretto was written by Handel Klaus , and it was conducted by Kazushi Ōno . Audiences and critics were enthusiastic that Erath had “succeeded in creating a fascinating puzzle of the real and the surreal.” In March 2018, Erath returned to the Cologne Opera and staged Jules Massenet's Manon in the opera's alternative venue on the right bank of the Rhine.

Erath has a teaching position for "scenic lessons" at the Berlin University of the Arts .

Quotes

“The still young director Johannes Erath has recently attracted increasing attention from large music stages. […] In doing so, he revealed his talent for psychologically precise, enlivening personal direction - which is no longer a matter of course today. This is now also clearly evident in 'Otello'. Erath braces the figures into a plausible network, but also makes it clear that Otello's conflict is based on his own personality structure. "

- Gerhard Rohde : The White Moor assassins his alter ego, FAZ , December 6, 2011

"The archaic aspect of the desire for revenge is something precultural - see 'eye for eye'". Clytemnestra has many reasons to hate Agamemnon. He stole her daughter before and during the Trojan War. Electra's hatred, on the other hand, is generated from her withheld love. She is still a girl who denies herself to all men. [...] I found my key to it in a theatrical version of Seneca. Then Elektra asks the patricide Aegisth, 'What is worse than death?' Aegisth answers: 'Live when one desires to die.' "

- Johannes Erath : “Elektra” has so much to do with us, Kleine Zeitung , 17th January 2012

“[Lohengrin is] one of the few fairy tales without a happy ending. [...] He cannot become human without losing his divinity. If you don't give yourself up, love cannot develop. A relationship cannot work like this, it would definitely explode sooner or later, Ortrud acts more as a catalyst. The question of how much we need to know about our partner or whether we trust them is the same one we ask ourselves today. "

- Johannes Erath : "Lohengrin is a fairy tale without a happy ending", Kleine Zeitung , September 14, 2013

Awards

Web links

Commons : Johannes Erath  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
  • Cologne Opera , scene excerpts from the Aida production by Johannes Erath
  • OperaBase , some dates of Erath productions

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kurier : The visually stunning world of the "Swan Knight" , September 29, 2013
  2. New music newspaper : “Le nozze di Figaro” - Mozart modern: Lots of color and (too) brisk tempos at the Semperoper , June 24, 2015
  3. Carsten Niemann: Accessed. Le nozze di Figaro in Dresden. In: Opera world . August 2015, p. 39.
  4. Wolf-Dieter Peter: The unreal of reality , world premiere of Arnulf Herrmann's psycho-opera Der Mieter in the Frankfurt Opera, NMZ Online , November 13, 2017