From the Muppet Show to Kafka, Yiddish theatre to Vivaldi, pop music to Wagner – Barrie Kosky’s enthusiasms ricochet at a speed that leaves you dizzy as well as, in their rampant variety, a touch envious. This 58-year-old Australian theatre and opera director sees all art, all life, as one. His love of clowns, cabaret and musicals is as intense as his passion for theatre and grand opera. “Whether it touches the soul is all that matters,” he says, his loquacious personality expanding into a small side office at the Royal Opera House in London before a rehearsal. His new staging of Die Walküre, the second opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, openson 1 May .
Kosky was born in Melbourne but has been based in Berlin for the past 20 years, where he was artistic director of the Komische Oper and still has an association there. He is funny, clever, outrageous but above all serious. His productions may shock, though that is never his intention. Dressing his Carmen up in a gorilla suit for a production that now has cult status in Frankfurt and Copenhagen – but did not catch light with audiences in London – was part of a studied aesthetic: the heroine living her brief life through a set of extreme roles. In his Das Rheingold, the first part of the Ring which opened in 2023, he caused upset in some quarters by having Erda – mother Earth – represented by a naked 82-year-old woman.
“How can Earth, dreaming and witnessing this story, not be in her own bare skin?” he says. “There is nothing more beautiful than watching older people on stage. It almost reduces me to tears, thinking about what their bodies have experienced, their histories. If people don’t like it, that’s their problem. After 35 years of working in opera, I am experienced enough to understand that if you put something out there for artistic reasons, there will be negative reactions. People have paid for tickets. They can have any reaction they want. It’s never about saying, ‘Hey, this will really annoy the Royal Opera audience.’”
Describing himself as a cocktail of Russian, Polish, Hungarian and English (his mother was born in Harrow) as well as Australian, Kosky has explored his origins in his work, from youthful endeavours in Australia to a career spanning the world’s major opera houses (his widely acclaimed production of Handel’s Saul returns to Glyndebourne this summer). From 1991, for six years, he had his own company Gilgul, which investigated Jewish identity and migration through physical theatre. He has just had a huge success with Philip Glass’s Akhnaten in Berlin. As he signs off on Die Walküre, he will start work with Cecilia Bartoli, the star Italian mezzo-soprano, on a new piece based on Vivaldi and Ovid for Salzburg, and next he will prepare a German-Yiddish version of Kafka’s The Trial for the Berliner Ensemble.
His capacious tastes are given full rein in a short memoir published in 2008, called On Ecstasy. In a few heady pages, he describes his childhood yearning for his Polish grandmother’s chicken soup, his Hungarian grandmother’s love of opera, his gay awakening in the school changing rooms, “a forbidden zone touched with rapture”, and his experience of being dumbstruck by Mahler and emotionally drugged by the “phantasmagoria” of Wagner.
The question is how he continues to be so drawn to that composer, whose writings and works are rife with anti-semitic tropes. This is Kosky’s second tilt at the Ring cycle. The first, completed in 2011, was in Hanover. He has also worked at Wagner’s festival theatre of Bayreuth in Bavaria, where he directed Die Meistersinger, featuring a giant puppet and a backdrop of the Nuremberg trials. But for a UK audience, his attitude is different.
“I do believe people can appreciate Wagner above all for the music,” he says. “I have no problem with that. However, as a Jew and as a director, I don’t have that luxury. I’m dealing with the text, and how to interpret that text. In Germany, the cultural baggage of Wagner is en-or-mous. Any German audience knows about the association of his music with Hitler. The operas always reverberate with that history. One of the reasons I accepted this Covent Garden Ring is because it enables me, with a non-German audience, to concentrate on other things: on the redemptive power of love and the brilliance of the narrative. Do I believe Wagner anticipated the Third Reich? No, I do not. Do I believe there are elements in Wagner’s life and work that are deeply problematic and contradictory and unpleasant? Yes, I absolutely do.”
A disturbing aspect of Die Walküre is the incest between the twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, which results in the birth of the cycle’s hero, Siegfried. As Kosky points out, in some ancient societies – the Incas, the Egyptians – incest was not taboo. “But Wagner is not interested in good or evil, or in the norms of Christian morality. He was driven to explore mythic, primal impulses. In these sibling-lovers, he creates two of the most sympathetic characters in any of his works.”
But at the same time you cannot escape the idea of pure blood, of race, of eugenics. For Wagner, the greatest of all dramas was Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia trilogy in which the brother-sister relationship is key. Greek drama shapes Wagner even more than Nordic myth. The orchestra acts as the chorus, commenting with leitmotifs, the musical themes used by Wagner to suggest particular characters.
As a trained pianist, Kosky is among those few directors able to steep themselves fully in the score. His joy at working alongside Antonio Pappano, former music director of the Royal Opera who is returning to conduct the successive operas in the Ring, is touching. “His assistant remarked: ‘Tony is a conductor who occasionally directs and Barrie is a director who occasionally conducts in the rehearsal,’ because I throw myself around all the time and jig my shoulders to the music. Tony’s sense of humour is almost as wicked as mine. We giggle helplessly even though there are definitely no jokes in Walküre. He is a genius musician. I adore everything about this man. He breathes with the stage. You feel it physically. Everyone knows where this inhalation and exhalation is, so all are breathing as one. It’s the rarest gift. It’s what Tony does better than anyone I’ve ever worked with.”
With rehearsals about to start, Kosky gives a rush of observations about the state and profile of opera: no, he cannot judge, as yet, whether the rise of the political “alt-right” in Germany has made any impact. Yes, opera ticket prices, despite efforts by opera houses, are still too high, but outside first nights you get different audiences, who save up and are addicted to an art form that combines everything: singing, dance, sculpture, literature, painting. Prices are still less than people pay for a Lady Gaga gig or a top sporting event, “and this Die Walküre sold out within a fortnight”.
Berlin, he notes, even after a reduction, still has arts funding of nearly €1bn, for a city of fewer than 4m people, “which is unthinkable to someone like you from England or me from Australia”. He reveres the tradition of opera in the UK, saying: “Britain has produced some of the greatest singers, conductors, directors in the world. But there’s an Anglo-Saxon tendency to feel guilty about enjoying opera. In Germany and central Europe, it’s part of the DNA.” He remains evangelical about the value of the arts in nourishing the soul. “I don’t expect politicians to get that.” But in Berlin, he adds, a huge number – 45% – of visitors come to experience culture of one kind or other. “Think what that means in terms of hotels, restaurants, transport. We need to line up our arguments better about the economic value of the arts”.
For Kosky the return to the Royal Opera has an element of private odyssey. His Hungarian-English grandfather had a fruit and vegetable stall in Covent Garden. “I find it very moving to walk through that site every day and think, ‘This is where Jo Fischer sold fruit and veg.’ That part of the family was involved in Yiddish theatre in the East End. One uncle was a clown, the other a composer. I still have his manuscripts in my apartment in Berlin.”
In Kosky’s view, that other family – the god Wotan, his Valkyrie daughters and other complicated offspring – is a visceral microcosm of us all. “You need know nothing about Nordic myth or Wagner’s antisemitism or Hitler’s abuse of the music,” he says, “because you are sitting there, on the edge of your seat, wanting to know what happens next.” He is still talking at top speed as he hurries off to the rehearsal room.