Thanks to the Beijing Music Festival, the Deutsche Oper Berlin has given Chinese opera fans the rare opportunity to appreciate two impressive productions directed by the renowned Gotz Friedrich (1930-2000), who startled Bayreuth and Covent Garden with the Marxist tone of his stagings of Wagner.
At the Poly Theater, Deutsche Oper Berlin performed Friedrich’s 1993 production of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier on October 3 and 5, and on the night of October 7 and 10 they performed Wagner’s Tannhauser that Friedrich directed in 1992.
Gotz Friedrich
The East Germany born Friedrich - rated by some to be among the most powerful creative influences on opera in recent times - was at the forefront of those seeking to establish the central role of the director in European opera houses during the 1970s and 1980s.
Friedrich shot to fame - and notoriety - in 1972 with a staging of Tannhauser at Bayreuth, in which Wagner’s pious troubadours were presented as jackbooted SS officers, grinding the faces of a disgruntled proletariat. The Bayreuth audience saw this as an imputation of neo-Nazism and booed Friedrich.
But Friedrich was no ideologue, and had been planning to defect from East Germany to enjoy the artistic freedom of the West, a step he took later the same year during a production of Janacek’s Jenufa in Stockholm.
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