General
Otto Schenk, Opera Director and Bulwark of Tradition, Dies at 94
A prominent practitioner of the historically grand productions that were once fashionable at the Met, he was especially well known for his stagings of Wagner.
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.
His death was announced by his son, the conductor Konstantin Schenk.
In a statement on its website, the Vienna State Opera’s general director, Bogdan Roscic, said Mr. Schenk “was able to draw on the intellectual and artistic wealth of the entire history of theater and communicate it brilliantly to a wide audience.”
In Austria, Mr. Schenk’s renown as an actor, particularly as a comedic performer, arguably eclipsed his reputation as a director. But his international reputation rested largely on the operas he produced in a career that spanned almost six decades.
In the United States, his opulent stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas from the late 1970s to the early ’90s garnered him lasting recognition. Many, including “Parsifal,” “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” “Tannhäuser” and, perhaps most famously, the four-part operatic cycle “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” are available on home video.
Along with the Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, 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 Rudolph Bing and Joseph Volpe. In Europe, he remained popular as a bulwark of tradition against stage directors — including many of his own generation — who brought modern and avant-garde sensibilities to theater and opera.
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’s 16 productions for the Met became increasingly infrequent.
