Kratzer says Wagner cuts need a clear reason

Director Tobias Kratzer is open to shortening Richard Wagner’s operas, but says cuts should serve a purpose. A performance of Siegfried at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich runs for almost six hours, BR reports.

Kratzer’s production features a live horse, two ravens and vivid action painting, and won applause from most of the audience. Still, he acknowledged that not every passage in the opera is equally compelling.

He singled out the duet between Siegfried and Brünnhilde in Act Three as, in his view, the least successful passage aesthetically. Wagner wrote it after a 12-year break during which he worked on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Tristan und Isolde, Kratzer said. The duet, he added, does not have the same economy as the rest of the Ring.

Kratzer said he had worked hard to bring movement to the relatively static scene. But he does not believe that length necessarily makes an opera boring. A compulsory cut to Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots was among his most negative experiences, he said, because the opera’s broad narrative style was weakened and the result became more boring.

Wagner operas are regularly shortened abroad, particularly in Asia, including by European directors. Kratzer said that cutting an opera can be justified, but not simply because someone finds a five-hour performance too long and wants to reduce it to three hours.

Kratzer also said opera productions need not last forever. Directors try to make works emotionally relevant to audiences today, and productions naturally have a limited lifespan, he said. Götz Friedrich’s celebrated production at the Deutsche Oper Berlin kept audiences engaged for 33 years.

As director of the Hamburg State Opera, Kratzer has focused more on experiments and discoveries than on Wagner. His Tannhäuser production at the Bayreuth Festival has drawn attention since 2019, but he said he has no master plan for Wagner, who is not at the top of his list.