LStefan Herheim, the second new opera director in Vienna, certainly doesn’t have it easy. While his colleague Lotte de Beer only had to change the color of the facade of the Volksoper, the structural problems in the historic Theater an der Wien are so great that it has to remain closed for more than two years. After the building inspection, the originally planned draining of the cellar grew into a general renovation of the house. In the course of this, the electrical engineering including a photovoltaic system, the fire protection, the installations and elevators have to be rebuilt. Of course, the stage will also be brought up to the current state of the art.
This costs a lot of money – around sixty million euros are estimated for the repair of Vienna’s municipal opera stage – and time. The Norwegian director Stefan Herheim didn’t want to let this go to waste during his first artistic directorship. And so, after a number of adaptations, the newly named MusikTheater an der Wien (MTAW) will find an alternative quarter in Hall E of the Museumsquartier, which is already being used by the Wiener Festwochen, until autumn 2024: Dozens of containers for technology and cloakrooms had to be stacked behind the building in order to to be able to start operation. At the opening on 15./16. On October 10, Herheim announced an “Open Day” to show the large audience the provisional arrangement: with public rehearsals and short concerts by the two most important orchestras in the house, the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, with panel discussions and workshops for Children, through whom the new youth program “TaWumm!” was efficiently advertised.
Despite the restrictive conditions, Herheim is producing thirteen premieres this season, eight in the Museumsquartier and five in the small chamber opera. Programmatically, he follows his predecessor Roland Geyer by combining rarely performed stage works such as Mieczysław Weinberg’s Dostojewski setting “Der Idiot” (April 28, 2023, director: Vasily Barkhatov) with well-known operas such as Weber’s “Freischütz” (March 22, 2023, director: David Marton) or Berg’s “Lulu” (May 27, 2023, director: Marlene Monteiro Freitas) and supplemented by baroque operas, which are rarely represented at the competing State Opera and the Volksoper. The breaks in the pure stagione operation are also this time filled with nine concert performances of operas from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It all started with a work by Agostino Steffani composed for the Duchy of Hanover, “La lotta d’Ercole con Acheloo” (1689), which is based on a story from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. A lively one-act play with a mixture of Italian and French stylistic elements, which the cosmopolitan Steffani got to know from Jean-Baptiste Lully in Paris. Two remarkable singers, soprano Anna Prohaska and mezzo-soprano Sonja Runje, stood out from the soloist quartet, which was stylishly accompanied by the Bach Consort Wien under Rubén Dubrovsky.
