Few other opera director has a better feeling for the sparkling world of operetta than Barrie Kosky. His modern productions, his understanding of Offenbach's humour and magic and the necessity for virtuosic and brilliant performers excite not only the audience at Komische Oper Berlin. Naturally, he's the perfect choice for our Not Quite Opera Month to talk about today's importance of operetta.
Nadja Dobesch-Warlick: First of all, congratulations on your Salzburg Orphée. It was a big hit with the audience and it certainly gave operetta some long-missed international attention. Operetta is in the DNA of cities like Vienna and Berlin, but internationally, it’s a different thing. Do you think you are pioneering a trend?
Barrie Kosky: Well, I may not be the first one, and I’m not the only one, but one of not so many. Laurent Pelly has also directed Offenbach very successfully in the last years at the Opéra de Lyon [Ed: Offenbach’s Le Roi Carotte in 2015] and has brought operetta to new audiences. When I started at Komische Oper Berlin as Intendant, we made a very conscious decision to relook at a particular time of operetta in a particular style. It didn’t start something, but I think it propelled something, and that’s different.
There are, of course, different types of operetta from different eras, the sexy and provocative ones of Offenbach’s time, the nostalgic Viennese ones looking back on the good old days… Who do you think is interested, who is your audience, and who might be interested in what?
I think you’re absolutely right there. Operetta is as broad a Fach as opera is. But operetta only functions properly with a strong relationship between the artist on stage and the audience. Most of the operettas are musical comedies (not all of them, but most), therefore they rely on the interaction with the audience. What Offenbach understood very clearly was that his performers had to be virtuosic and brilliant. I think this continued in Vienna, Budapest and Berlin where the pieces were written for particular performers. The audience went to most of the operetta productions knowing the performers, whether that was Hortense Schneider in Offenbach’s time, or Fritzi Massary in Vienna, and in Berlin, Richard Tauber or Rosy Barsony. These pieces were written for people, they were written for performers, for very particular types of artists.
And nowadays, at the Komische Oper, I’ve brought in extraordinary people like Dagmar Manzel in Berlin, I work with Katharine Mehrling, I work with Max Hopp, and I also work with Anne Sofie von Otter [Ed: in Bernstein's Candide]; she is one of the great mezzos of our time and has a fantastic sense of humour. I like combining singing actors and opera singers and dancing actors, which is exactly what the operetta tradition did. These people weren’t opera singers; operetta was a Fach, a highly respected Fach.
So, coming back to your question, and why I’m saying this: the audiences for me have to be very diverse. I hate this idea that you do something for a type of audience. I have never understood that, I have never done it. I want as broad an audience as possible. When I was young, I hated my theatre being full of people my own age. When I started directing, I didn’t want my theatre full of 22-year-olds. I wanted my theatre to be full of all sorts of different people. Now I’m very, very spoilt in Berlin at the Komische Oper because we have one of the most diverse audiences I’ve seen anywhere in the world. There is such a mixture of students, of grandpas, of queer audience, of operetta fans, people who like musicals, and it’s every type and colour and gender and sexuality. And this, for me, is the ideal operetta audience.
It was a bit of a shock for me in Salzburg because suddenly I’m confronted with one particular sort of audience, that’s an audience that can pay 400 euros for a seat. But in Berlin in particular, I want to present firstly to this diverse audience, and secondly, you know, I don’t want the audience to sit watching an Offenbach or Paul Abraham operetta, and to be thinking that they’re watching something nostalgic, something that their grandmother listened to, or watching something that’s like a dead corpse that’s being breathed into. I don’t want that. I want them to be watching it and to be entertained and stimulated by it for what it is.
When Bogdan Roščić was appointed director of the Wiener Staatsoper, he said that opera is „die größte Materialschlacht der Kulturwelt” (“the biggest battle of material in the arts”). But when I think of your Salzburg Orphée or other elaborate productions, say, the new Csárdásfürstin at the Volksoper Wien, I get the impression that operetta even tops opera in this respect. You have the ballets, you have outrageous costumes, you have to rewrite the texts so they speak to modern audiences and so forth. Would you agree?
Bogdan has to say that because he is the designated Intendant… [Kosky smiles] so, if I were in his position, I’d probably also say that. But I have said many times, and I say this through 30 years of experience in opera, that to direct a large-scale operetta production is ten times more exhausting, complicated and demanding than directing any opera, and that includes The Ring. And to actually take the music and the text, to try and interweave the dancing elements, to try and make the piece work as a piece of entertainment but with also depth, to work out the style of the production, to get everyone to be playing in the same world (because we don’t really have a performance tradition of operetta – except maybe what I tried to develop at the Komische Oper Berlin) – this is exhausting. I am completely exhausted after I’ve done an operetta… but I enjoy doing it!