Opera director Kratzer faces Wagner workload and AfD backlash

Opera director Tobias Kratzer is balancing leadership of Hamburg State Opera with major Wagner productions in Munich, while a nude promotional image for his latest production has drawn criticism from the AfD, BR reported.

Kratzer has led the Hamburg opera house for just over a year. He recently staged Verdi’s Macbeth there, while in Munich he is preparing two major Wagner music dramas this season: the four-hour Siegfried, scheduled for October 29, and the similarly long Götterdämmerung, scheduled for June 27. Each production has around six weeks of rehearsals, requiring him to travel between Hamburg and Munich.

“Good planning, good teamwork and a terrible carbon footprint make it possible,” Kratzer told BR, joking about the travel. He said the weather in Hamburg lived up to every stereotype, but described the city’s opera audience as exceptionally open, warm and welcoming.

Kratzer became one of opera’s most sought-after directors after his Tannhäuser production at the Bayreuth Festival became one of the biggest audience successes there in recent years. Although he could have continued working as a travelling star director, he chose to move to Hamburg after the opera house had gone through difficult artistic years.

He said he had been prepared for the worst because of the prejudices he had often encountered about Hamburg. The audience, he said, had received him and his team “with open arms.”

The administrative demands of running an opera house no longer seem unfamiliar to him. Kratzer said it was important to understand where one came from and to recognise what one could not yet do, either acquiring those skills quickly or bringing together the necessary expertise within the team.

He also said it was important to understand how a job felt from the inside. Observation alone was not enough, he argued, because people could not know whether a profession was truly for them until they had done it themselves.

Kratzer’s first season in Hamburg challenged audiences with unusual, unfamiliar and new works. His second season began with Macbeth, a dark and sparse production that was partly booed.

That reaction did not concern him. “I would not find it exciting to create a programme that does not rely on the audience’s curiosity,” he said. The alternative, he argued, would be to offer only what people already knew and repeat the same repertoire. A publicly subsidised opera house did not need to exist merely to present what everyone already knew and what other institutions were already doing, he said.

Promotional material for Macbeth featured a naked man clinging to a thin tree trunk. The image was created by prominent Zurich art photographer Tom Huber. Hamburg’s AfD objected and submitted a parliamentary inquiry to the Hamburg Senate, arguing that the monthly programme was freely accessible to children and young people.

Kratzer said the image was not a reason for concern. Everything an opera house presented publicly, he said, also contributed to the cityscape in some form and represented an artistic statement. Such statements could be judged differently, but they created debate, which he described as part of the opera house’s task.

For his Munich production of Götterdämmerung, Kratzer has announced a political interpretation that could include references to current issues. Opera direction, he said, could make works emotionally relevant and understandable to a contemporary audience, even if productions did not address the day’s events directly.