As you walk up the hill to the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, you ask yourself one last time whether you would be here if you met a conductor right away. But you meet a conductor. Oksana Lyniv, born 1978 in Brody, Ukraine, is the first woman to conduct the Bayreuth Festival. In addition, the opening premiere this Sunday, the “Flying Dutchman”. For people who think conservatively, this is the twilight of the gods of the last male domain.
Of course, Oksana Lyniv knows about the attention she’s getting with her Bayreuth debut, simply because she’s a woman. That’s why she is happy that you can’t see her in Bayreuth while she is working. “It’s not about what I wear, how I hit, it’s just about whether it works or not, just hearing.” At least at the moment of the performance. If you tell her that you once watched her conduct the incidental music at a guest performance at the Bavarian State Opera in Paris and that she was entranced by the elegance of her movements, all she says is: “No, no.”
After an hour and a half, this conversation is moved to the fresh air, a photographer wants to take pictures of her in front of the Festspielhaus. On the way there she wonders: “Pietari Inkinen, who is conducting the ‘Walküre’ this year, is two years younger than me. And what’s going on with him? Nothing.” There is a lot going on with her, it started early on when she was asked by male conducting colleagues what this was about and whether she needed this, this conducting. The musicians never asked that. It wasn’t her idea at first anyway, but that of her colleagues and lecturers at the Music Academy in Lviv (formerly: Lemberg), who asked her if she wanted to become a conductor. At that time she was 18 and firmly believed that conducting, like the military, was only for men. But she soon knew: “I didn’t just want to sing or play, I wanted to build the really big shapes like an architect, to create a synthesis. Conducting is also about philosophy, literature, meaning, history.”
If you ask Oksana Lyniv about her childhood in Brody, the first word she says: “Freedom”.
Joseph Roth, the novelist of the lost Austrian glory and the peculiarity of East Galician life, once described his hometown Brody based on what there is no there: no theater, no cinema, no café. And no comparison to Lviv, 130 kilometers away, the K&K cultural metropolis.
If you ask Oksana Lyniv about her childhood in Brody, the first word she says: “Freedom”. The parents had their own house, the last one on the street. On one side was a wheat field, behind it a birch forest, on the other side spruce trees grew, and in front of the house was a large garden. Three generations and a lot of music in the house.
There are four elementary schools and one music school in Brody. The parents taught there, and the father led a choir as before in a village in the Carpathian Mountains. “It’s even harder, wilder.” In addition to music, his father loved working in the earth, as he still does today: “At five in the morning in the field, that’s like a prayer for him.” Sometimes he woke Oksana, they picked mushrooms and berries in the forest. When the rest of the house woke up, she already had “something fresh for breakfast on the table”. In the Soviet era, teachers were underpaid. Now it’s even worse, your own garden all the more important. But now that the children are out of the house, the parents no longer know what to do with all the fruit.
Oksana walked everything, three kilometers to school and three kilometers back. And to the choir rehearsals. At some point the father founded a family ensemble, father, mother, aunt, cousins, brother. They toured, as far as Kiev, with folk music and Ukrainian art songs arranged by their father. Oksana played the sopilka, the Ukrainian flute, and once they appeared on television: “The next day at school was embarrassing.”
The family had small savings, but with the end of the Soviet era everything was suddenly gone. “My studies had just started. I often had no pocket money, no money for the train ride.” The music college, as she calls the school, was in Lviv. Oksana Lyniv became self-employed, began to work alongside her studies at the age of 16, as a répétiteur and prompter in the opera in Lviv, which is how she got to know the repertoire. The father went to Portugal for two and a half years to earn money, asked her in letters what she wanted. Her dream was a CD player. It came true. Her first CD was a recording of “Walküre” under Georg Solti.
“My problem is: I can’t work out a work out of intuition, on a whim. I have to get as close as possible to the composer, his time, the epoch.”
She became the assistant to the opera director in Lviv, then came her first trip abroad, in 2004 for the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg. Lyniv didn’t speak a word of German, poor English, took third place and was assistant to Jonathan Nott, chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, for six months.
When asked how she prepared for the “Flying Dutchman”, she slams about ten kilos of score, including the critical report, on the table. Then she disappears into the next room and comes back with a pile of books. But first of all the score, which is available in two versions, the original version from 1841, and a second, written between 1842 and 1880. Lyniv enters into the score with which she works, how certain passages were in the original version. In measure 267 there is a piano with an accent in the first version, and a pianissimo subito in the second. “You can see in which direction Wagner was working. Did he get faster, slower?” She also finds it exciting that Wagner continued to work on the work when he was already studying it in Dresden. He moved the plot from the Scottish to the Norwegian coast, Donald became Daland, Georg became Erik.
Well, you know that. It is also obvious that on the pile of books lies Heine, who wrote down the myth, Wagner’s diaries, letters, Wagner’s instruments. But Max Graf? He belonged to Sigmund Freud’s circle and wrote an analysis by Wagner based on the “Holländers”. “My problem is: I cannot work out a work out of intuition, on a whim. I have to get as close as possible to the composer, his time, the epoch.”
The college in Lviv had many books, but they were from the Soviet era. Scores in Russian, hardly a word about historical performance practice. So she decided in Bamberg that she had to learn German, taught herself to do it in half a year, rummaged through the libraries, and went to Dresden to study advanced courses and master classes. “It was my golden time!” Finally to hear the music live that she only knew from sheet music and old records. In Lviv there was mainly Giuseppe Verdi in the opera, in Dresden the Semperoper.
She was approached by agents at the competition in Bamberg, and she didn’t even know what they wanted. She didn’t have a business card anyway, and she lost the one from the agents. When she told this to her fellow conductor Kirill Petrenko, he laughed a lot. She got the job with him without an agent. One phone call and she went to the Bavarian State Opera as Petrenko’s assistant.
Oksana Lyniv would never accept a guest appearance in Russia. “The annexation of Crimea remains an illegitimate action against the sovereignty of our country.”
She conducted the “Flying Dutchman” in Barcelona in 2017, which she is now very happy about, after all, she knows how the piece works. From Munich she went to Graz as chief conductor, and it was there that Bayreuth’s general manager Katharina Wagner became aware of her. After three years, Lyniv gave up the permanent position. How the relationship was with her director Nora Schmid, who will take over the Semperoper in 2024, can perhaps best be speculated on the basis of a story: Before the first lockdown, Oksana Lyniv worked on Mieczysław Weinberg’s Holocaust opera “The Passenger” in Graz. Fifteen orchestral rehearsals including a dress rehearsal, a CD recording was planned, then came the lockdown. When the production came out in September, Lyniv was not conducting, but the now new boss took over the fully rehearsed performance. But the orchestra board wanted it, she says.
After four years with Petrenko, she no longer had to be afraid of Bayreuth. He invited her when he was conducting the “Ring des Nibelungen”; she was sitting in the ditch. The acoustics there are tricky, there is a delay between music and singing, which Kapellmeister evidently can cope with better than conductors with an ingenious self-image.
And she has learned the Kapellmeisterei thoroughly. In Munich she led the second orchestra in parallel to Petrenko’s conducting in Zimmermann’s “Soldiers”, drove the orchestra on a podium through the riding hall with Boris Blacher’s “Die Flut” and dubbed Béla Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra” live in the production of “Judith” to a silent film. One can assume that it can also cope with an acoustic delay. She also seems to find the Bayreuth Graben very funny: “But I don’t yet know what it sounds like outside. They gave me recordings of the stage orchestra rehearsal, which I will listen to afterwards.”
Five years ago, Lyniv founded a youth orchestra and the “Lviv MozArt” festival in Lviv. She had discovered that Franz Xaver Mozart, the youngest son of Wolfgang Amadeus, had worked as a musician in Lemberg for a long time. Franz Xaver was well connected, friends with Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin paved the way to Vienna and published Franz Schubert’s symphonies. And thus became part of the long musical tradition of the region, which it is reviving.
“Moscow,” explains Lyniv, “was always afraid of Lviv, there was a strong anti-communist tendency here.” The Soviets came in 1939 when people already knew about the famine and Stalin’s terror. In 2019, Lyniv commemorated cultural tradition and performed Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish symphony in the ruins of the once magnificent synagogue of Brody Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein’s father was from Rivne, 100 kilometers from Brody. Oksana Lyniv would also never accept a guest appearance in Russia. “The annexation of Crimea remains an illegitimate action against the sovereignty of our country.”