“Music theater”, Barrie Kosky notes, “is fleeting, it arises and passes …” The director and artistic director of the Komische Oper Berlin is a melancholic and was philosophical when he recently presented his last season in Berlin. However, he has found a substitute location, more permanent than the windy stage art – a book, entitled “On Ecstasy”, not a novel, just a libretto, in German a little book, the size of a spacious palm. In it: memories and reflections of a man who has worked his way up to the potent music theater makers of the present. Barrie Kosky chooses his personal tone of voice, like on stage, when he charms his audience via the microphone, lets the emotions run free. But “ecstasy”? This is a “feeling of trance, intoxication or rapture associated with mystical or prophetic enthusiasm”.
To make this tangible, Kosky, who was born in Melbourne in 1967, thinks of concrete moments of happiness. First of all, they are connected to his Polish grandmother and her cooking skills, with her chicken soup. Kosky remembers the “seven-year-old Jewish child” and his early pleasure in eating: “The first spoon with which the hot soup flooded into my mouth and down my throat was deep metaphysical rapture.” And his grandmother also opened the gate to operatic happiness for him by telling him about Madama Butterfly, Puccini’s addictive, unhappy music. The scratchy record of it was only a prelude to a visit to the Princess Theater in Melbourne, where the singer’s voice “caressed my eardrums, penetrated my body and made me dizzy”.
The boy understands: Theater is the ideal place for everything ecstatic
When the boy discovered Gustav Mahler’s music at fifteen, the mystical beginning of the first symphony, “the 56 bars of a deep string hum in the lowest octave”, he suddenly woke up in a completely different world, because “suddenly a spacious landscape appeared on, full of possibilities, with no beginning or end “. The ecstasy and horror of the teenage Mahler seduction still amazes adults: “Which composer brings together a funeral march, a children’s song and a snappy klezmer band on the same page of a symphonic score?” The éducation sentimentale the boy becomes artistically efficient because he learns to understand Mahler’s theatrics, his sense of “characters, scenes, dramatic confrontations, light, sound direction”. And he understands that the theater is the ideal place for everything ecstatic, the stage for “an alchemical mixture of manipulation, ritual and stimulation”.
Barrie Kosky: On Ecstasy. Translated from the English by Ulrich Lenz. Verlag Theater der Zeit, Berlin 2021. 104 pages, 15 euros.
Kosky simply had to discover Richard Wagner, the “master of theatrical phantasmagoria”. He deciphered the “Flying Dutchman”, “Lohengrin”, the “Tristan” and ended up with the largest imaginable, Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen” and thus in his own present. Barrie Kosky has given the title “More ecstasy” to the last, unfortunately rather sobering, 20 pages of his book. For them, the theater workaholic may have lacked the patience to write. He wrote the ecstasies of childhood himself in 2007 and turned it into a book in Melbourne, now he has Ulrich Lenz, the translator from English, ask a few questions about the present.
No ecstasy update in the management office of the Berlin Komische Oper, but definitely there the rediscovery of the operettas of the Weimar Republic. In no way ecstatic, but highly significant the Wagner work in Bayreuth, Kosky’s time and Nazi-critical “Meistersinger”. And at least comparable to the grandmother’s chicken soup, a Japanese pleasure event, the 15-course menu in Tokyo – the opera man with chopsticks.