Opera in Europe: Established but Adventurous

Recent productions in Germany and the Netherlands—of classics, curiosities and contemporary works by composers ranging from Strauss to Saariaho—powerfully exemplified the scene’s risk-taking artistic ethos.

By 

Heidi Waleson

April 7, 2025 at 4:43 pm ET

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The company of Offenbach’s ‘Die Schöne Helena.’ PHOTO: IKO FREESE

Berlin; Dresden, Germany; Amsterdam

New Yorkers who visit Berlin often feel at home—the German city is busy, sprawling, decidedly unquaint, has efficient public transportation, and is packed with culture. Glass-enclosed malls rub up against Prussian monuments; pierced and tattooed Goth teens ride the U-Bahn with commuters. Unlike New York, however, the establishment opera scene matches that modern vibe. During my recent visit, there was nothing cautious or old-fashioned on view at the city’s three large opera companies, and the houses were packed. In five days of opera-going, which included a day trip south to the Semperoper Dresden, the only standard repertory title was Richard Strauss’s “Elektra” (1909). And the oldest one, Jacques Offenbach’s opera buffa “Die Schöne Helena” (1864), at the Komische Oper, was by far the nuttiest.

The Komische Oper performs operettas, musicals and operas. From 2012 to 2022, it was led by the ebullient Australian stage director Barrie Kosky, who is criminally underemployed in the U.S. “Helena,” a revival of his 2014 production, is Offenbach’s madcap retelling of the roots of the Trojan War as a sex farce, in which the Greek kings are fatuous idiots, Helen is bored with her marriage, and Paris is the answer to her prayers. Mr. Kosky’s wacky adaptation is smart, fast-paced, and outrageous without being vulgar. The spoken sections zip by in a clever German text by Simon Werle, punctuated by musical in-jokes like the thunderous “Agamemnon” chord from “Elektra” when that character is called upon to speak. As in all the theaters, supertitles in German and English mean you don’t miss a word, and the dialogue sections meld seamlessly with the musical numbers.

With its 1892 theater under renovation, the company is based at the streamlined 1,000-seat Schiller Theater; all the German houses are small relative to New York’s 4,000-seat Metropolitan Opera, providing welcome intimacy. The main feature of Rufus Didwiszus’s “Helena” set, a walkway that brings the performers out in front of the orchestra, increases that feeling. In Act 1, the entire cast crowded onto it for the kings’ contest, playing this nonsense farrago of riddles in overlapping, accelerating dialogue practically in the audience’s lap. Later, the six astonishing male dancers cruised it on roller skates (Otto Pichler was the inventive choreographer; Buki Shiff did the riotous costumes, which included 1920s beachwear).

The superb ensemble cast, equally adept at acting and singing, was headed by soprano Nicole Chevalier, a comic volcano as Helena, with the aid of jaunty tenor Tansel Akzeybek as Paris. Adrien Perruchon led the company orchestra, which clearly has this repertoire in its bones.

Mr. Kosky has a continuing relationship with the Komische, and his haunting new production of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” (1984), which offers an unusual take on this milestone contemporary work about a forgotten pharaoh, was also on. There are no Egyptian details in Klaus Grünberg’s abstract set (a white box with a turntable) or Klaus Bruns’s mostly modern costumes. The emphasis is on ritual, and seven dancers—who devised the movement sequences with Mr. Kosky—make the music’s repetitive patterns visual and meaningful.

A scene from Philip Glass’s ‘Akhnaten.’ PHOTO: MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

Countertenor John Holiday was poignant in the title part, but the story here was the ensemble: A community follows a leader with an original idea—monotheism—but then violently turns on him when he fails them. Mr. Kosky emphasized that failure, and the company chorus was extraordinary in its starring role, not just singing but moving along with the dancers. The orchestra, led by Jonathan Stockhammer, seemed less comfortable with Glass’s distinctive style. The entire run was sold out; hopefuls scouted tickets outside the theater.

The Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s 1,400-seat house has a traditional-looking horseshoe shape with boxes and tiers. First opened in 1742, it was destroyed and rebuilt several times; a seven-year renovation was completed in 2017. I caught the sumptuous new production of Leoš Janáček’s “The Excursions of Mr. Brouček” (1920) featuring the high-powered artistic team of conductor Simon Rattle and director Robert Carsen. In this seldom-performed satire, Brouček, a landlord who cares only about beer and sausages, gets drunk in a pub and dreams two fantastical trips, first to the moon and then to 15th-century Prague in the middle of the Hussite uprising, where he meets incarnations of people from the pub. Mr. Carsen astutely updated the period to 1968-69—the time of the moon landing and of the Prague Spring and its aftermath—aided by Dominik Žižka’s judicious use of archival video: the Apollo 11 launch and Woodstock; Czech Communist Party leader Alexander Dubček speaking on television; the Soviet tanks rolling into Prague; a heavily attended funeral.

A scene from Janáček’s ‘The Excursions of Mr. Brouček.’ PHOTO: ARNO DECLAIR

The philistine Brouček is out of his depth in both places. In the comic first act, the artist denizens of the moon, who live by sniffing flowers, are here attending “Moonstock” amid colorful Pop art decor; they are appalled when he pulls out a sausage. Designer Annemarie Woods had fun with Twiggy-esque and hippie costumes. The colors are darker in the more serious second act, where Brouček pretends to join a resistance group but won’t put himself in harm’s way.

Tenor Peter Hoare excelled in Brouček’s harsh, choppy music; soprano Lucy Crowe nailed the stratospheric notes and zaniness of Etherea on the moon and the mourning lyricism of Kunka in Prague. The adept ensemble cast also featured the sensitive baritone Gyula Orendt in multiple roles, including Kunka’s father. The chorus captured the rowdy lunar shenanigans and the impassioned hymns of the fighters, as did Mr. Rattle’s nuanced conducting of the superb Staatskapelle Berlin. And although Brouček wakes up back home in a beer vat, Mr. Carsen doesn’t let him—or us—escape: In the opera’s final moments, a tank careens into the pub.

The Deutsche Oper performs in a modern 2,000-seat house that opened in 1961. “Elektra,” a revival of a production by Kirsten Harms, the company’s artistic director from 2004 to 2011, was the most conventional show I saw, though in a German Regietheater mode. Bernd Damovsky’s set is a bare box and Elektra (Elena Pankratova) starts out mostly buried in its dirt floor, doubtless in sympathy with her dead father, Agamemnon. We get the claustrophobia of Elektra’s obsessive quest to avenge his murder, but the production has little visual variety other than lighting changes and the feathery red coat of Klytämnestra (Doris Soffel). Ms. Pankratova had the notes and stamina for the challenging title role, though she often lost the volume battle with Thomas Søndergård’s overly exuberant orchestra. As Chrysothemis, Camilla Nylund had better luck, and Tobias Kehrer’s booming bass made you sit up and pay attention to Orest. He also was the center of the final tableau, bloody and naked to the waist. Typically, Orest commits the murders offstage. Like the other productions, the choice prompted a rethink of the opera—who is the real hero?

Dresden, two hours south of Berlin, was largely obliterated by Allied bombers at the end of World War II. Many of its historic buildings, including the handsome 1878 opera house, were later reconstructed. Semperoper Dresden’s new Lorenzo Fioroni production of Kaija Saariaho’s powerful final opera, “Innocence” (2021), is less literal than the original Simon Stone staging, which comes to the Metropolitan Opera next season.

Rather than grounding it in familiar reality, Mr. Fioroni gives this story about the aftermath of a school shooting a mythic dimension. In Paul Zoller’s striking set, the survivors of the massacre inhabit a wintry landscape upstage while the wedding of the shooter’s brother to an unsuspecting bride is celebrated downstage at a long table with more seats than guests. As the two worlds meet and secrets are revealed, the emotional devastation becomes palpable and visual, movingly communicated by the outstanding cast. Notable members included the affecting Mario Lerchenberger as the tormented bridegroom; Fredrika Brillembourg, capturing the Teacher’s dislocation in expressive Sprechstimme; and Venla Ilona Blom as the dead student Markéta, haunting her mother (Paula Murrihy) with her childlike, folk-style yelps and costumed by Annette Braun in ghostly tulle like an anti-bride. Maxime Pascal was the capable conductor.

The most unconventional show I saw in Europe was at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam—the world premiere of “We Are the Lucky Ones” by composer Philip Venables and librettists Ted Huffman and Nina Segal. The opera is based on interviews with numerous Europeans between the ages of 72 and 82, the generation born during and immediately after World War II. Over 100 minutes, the dynamic singers—four men and four women—describe the building of lives over those early scars in song and speech. There’s luck and prosperity, but also an undercurrent of distress in the music that intensifies as they consider the future and face death. No singer is pegged to any one character, and there is some gender switching, as when tenor Miles Mykkanen becomes an East German woman who remembers the day the wall fell because her husband had just left her.

Vocally arresting in its variety of solos and ensembles, and remarkably immediate in its themes, the opera was enhanced by Mr. Huffman’s crisp direction and spare set, and by Bassem Akiki’s sensitive conducting of the Residentie Orchestra. Like the German shows, it was a thought-provoking evening, not just entertainment.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).