From the London Times:
WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 13 2000
Goetz Frederich Opera director who had the administrative ability to
run a major theatre while at the same time retaining his flair as a
creative artist Goetz Friedrich was one of the most powerful influences
on opera in the second half of the 20th century. His career as a
director was both long and consistent. He started in 1958 with a
production of Cosi fan tutte in Weimar, the university town where he
had studied theatre, and practically every year thereafter brought
four or five Friedrich stagings both within Germany and beyond.
In addition, from 1981 until his death he was General Director of
the Deutsche Oper in West Berlin. His last years in that job were
overshadowed by the financial and political wrangling that followed
German reunification, but Friedrich deserves to be remembered as one
of that increasingly rare band of men with the stamina and the
intelligence to run a major theatre and at the same time remain a
creative artist - his nearest equivalent in Britain is perhaps Sir
Peter Hall.
Part of Friedrich's success and confidence undoubtedly came from
making the right decisions very early on his career. The son of a
lawyer, he was born in Naumburg, in what became East Germany. As soon
as his university course was complete he went in 1953 to the Komische
Oper in East Berlin to work under Walter Felsenstein. The next decade
or so saw the Komische Oper at the height of its artistic achievement.
Felsenstein's insistence on lengthy rehearsal periods and on making
each singer on stage act soon became famous, as did his habit of
cancelling first nights without warning if he was dissatisfied with
the progress being made. Western critics braved the rigours of crossing
into the East at that time to get a taste of the Felsenstein method,
perhaps sensing that he was beginning to change the face of opera.
Perhaps, too, they sensed that he had gathered a number of young
directors around him who were going to bring in a new, even
revolutionary style of production.
Harry Kupfer and Joachim Herz were among them, but the man closest
to Felsenstein was almost certainly Friedrich. This was shown in an
early book by him on Felsenstein's interpretation of Die Zauberfloete,
followed by a full-length study of the working methods of his mentor.
Friedrich on several occasions went on record as saying that he owed
everything to Felsenstein. His own career at the Komische Oper spanned
a number of regular repertory pieces, the diet of any aspirant young
director, but also included Janacek's Jenufa (1964) in his own
translation - the start of a lifelong love affair with that composer
- and the German-language premiere of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess
(1970).
In 1972 Friedrich decided that he could accept the working conditions
in East Germany no longer and defected to the West. "It was", he said
many years later, "a choice that had to be made." And once made it
was irrevocable. His name was removed from the Komische Oper posters
of his productions, which remained in the repertoire long after he
had left. Any return to East Germany was out of the question, and
indeed he did not go back there until January 1990, after the removal
of the Berlin Wall.
In the year he defected, Friedrich made his debut at Bayreuth with
a controversial Tannhaeuser, the start of an intermittent relationship
with that Festival; Lohengrin and Parsifal followed later. It was
Wagner, too, which brought him to Covent Garden in 1974 for a searingly
theatrical Ring, which in part was a metallic reflection of an
industrial society, with an army of slaves working down in Niebelheim.
Sir Colin Davis was the conductor and it was the start of a partnership
which went on to other operas including an atmospheric Freischuetz.
In 1977 Friedrich, at Davis's prompting, was appointed principal
producer at Covent Garden, a post he held concurrently in Hamburg.
Eventually the partnership cooled, and Friedrich left the Garden in
1981 when he was offered the job of running the Deutsche Oper. But
in 1989, when Covent Garden decided to scrap the imaginative but
perhaps impractical Ring devised by Yuri Lyubimov, they called on
Friedrich again, who reworked the rather gloomy production he had
recently done for his own house. A luridly dramatic Elektra followed,
giving Covent Garden one of its more successful and durable productions
of the 1990s.
Although Friedrich's reputation, especially in the West, was built
mainly on German and Czech opera, he remained true to his Komische
Oper training and never neglected the Italian repertoire. Quite apart
from productions of Boheme and Aida in his own house, there was a
notable Manon Lescaut for Hamburg in 1979 and a Forza for Munich in
1986. Also in 1986 he was responsible for an Otello with Domingo,
one of the productions which opened the Los Angeles Opera.
Nor did he neglect contemporary music. At the Salzburg Festival he
mounted the first production of Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto.
Hans Werner Henze and Wolfgang Rihm were other composers whose
premieres he staged.
In the latter part of his career Friedrich was able to build a
successful artistic partnership at the Deutsche Oper with the dynamic
young conductor Christian Thielemann, who became the house's general
music director in 1997. But for much of Friedrich's last decade in
Berlin administrative problems loomed larger than creative work.
He had rejoiced at the fall of the Wall in 1989 and the ensuing
unification of his country. He soon discovered that the triumph of
democratic capitalism had its price. East and West Berlin had once
been content to pour almost limitless funds into their cultural
institutions, treating them as lavishly subsidised showpieces for
their opposed regimes. The ideological rationale for this policy
vanished when Communism collapsed; with it went the limitless funds.
As the wider costs of unification rose, there were suggestions that
three opera houses, accounting between them for some DM235 million
in subsidies, might be more than a single city could support. Friedrich,
who had dominated the operatic life of West Berlin without challenge,
now found himself competing for the limelight - not to mention the
audiences and the shrinking funds - with Daniel Barenboim at the
Staatsoper and Harry Kupfer at the Komische Oper.
Not used to counting the cost of artistic excellence, he was
uncomfortable in the new climate. He insisted that he would be
"unwilling to sacrifice our hard-won reputation for innovation and
experimentation to a financial race".
In the four years to 1998 the Deutsche Oper accumulated a deficit of
some DM19 million, and Friedrich, whose contract as the house's
general director had just been extended to 2001, was fortunate not
to be sacked. "All these years we were liberal in the best tradition
of free art," he observed. "What irony that with the great opening
of our world we are in jeopardy."
It was an unhappy end to a distinguished career. Goetz Friedrich was
a man bursting with ideas, working himself to the limit with an ever
present packet of cigarettes. There were streaks of the academic,
and he was awarded professorships by both Berlin and Hamburg. But he
was happiest in the opera house, converting singers into actors,
devising new ways of turning the stage into a "spielbare Raum" (a
playable space) - a very Felsenstein phrase.
Friedrich was twice married. He is survived by his second wife, the
soprano Karan Armstrong, who appeared in a number of his productions,
and by a son from each marriage. His last production, of Gian Carlo
Menotti's children's opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, opened on
Friday in Berlin.
Goetz Friedrich, opera producer, was born on August 4, 1930. He died on
Tuesday 12 December, 2000 aged 70.
Scott Morrison
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