Nikolaus Lehnhoff
Opera stage director who set Parsifal in a bunker and was acclaimed for his realisations of Janáček
NIKOLAUS LEHNHOFF, who has died aged 76, was a stage director whose realisations of Janáček’s powerful operas with the conductor Andrew Davis were widely acclaimed at Glyndebourne. His three productions – Kátya Kabanová (1988), Jenůfa (1989) and The Makropulos Case (1995) – explored the tortured souls of Janáček’s characters and brought a fresh sense of direction to the East Sussex opera house at a critical time.
He was associated with Anja Silja, the German soprano with a scaldingly intense voice; her powerful renditions of Janáček’s tragic older women, notably the Kostelnicka in Jenůfa, a gut-wrenching tale of infanticide and redemption, are seared in the memory of all who experienced them.
In The Makropulos Case, Emilia Marty (again played at Glyndebourne by Anja Silja) took a powerful drug, the elixir of life, more than 300 years ago. Now, exhausted with living, she is unable to die. To symbolise the slow but never-ending passage of time, Lehnoff arranged for the stage and its contents to be constantly moving – albeit slowly and almost imperceptibly.
His Parsifal for English National Opera (conducted by Mark Elder), was set in a concrete bunker and famously depicted the Holy Grail as a radiant blinding light – perhaps the aftermath of a nuclear disaster; or the reappearance of an older deity shining once more upon troubled humanity? The production toured to San Francisco, Chicago, Baden-Baden and Barcelona. The DVD, starring Thomas Hampson and Waltraud Meier, was also well received.
Lehnhoff eschewed the post-war fashion, particularly in Germany, of “regitheatre”, the art of completely disregarding the composer’s staging instructions, often in favour of brutalist or postmodern designs; instead, although his productions were not necessarily set in their original period, he sought elegance, symmetry and the use of vivid colours.
Nikolaus Lehnhoff was born in Hanover on May 20 1939. He studied theatre and musicology in Vienna and Munich. After completing his doctorate – on the humour in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger – he worked at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. By 1963 he was working at Bayreuth as the last assistant of Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson and Anja Silja’s lover.
After Wieland’s death in 1966 Lehnhoff turned up as assistant stage director in New York – in part, he said, to shake off the Bayreuth influence. “I worked with [Rudolf ] Bing at the Metropolitan Opera for his last five years, with Karl Böhm, [Leonard] Bernstein, then with [Herbert von] Karajan at Salzburg and I learnt a great deal. I did the first Ring of my own in 1972. But you get stuck with these elephants, especially if you’re German!” he told The Daily Telegraph in 1999.
On Böhm’s recommendation Lehnhoff made his directing debut in 1972 in Paris with Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, starring Christa Ludwig and Walter Berry. He achieved his goal of escaping from the long shadow of Wieland Wagner with his first Ring Cycle in San Francisco, staged between 1983 and 1985. One critic noted that he “seems to have renounced the abstractions and austerities of his master and gone back to a kind of Wagnerian staging that is sometimes called ‘realistic’, even though it is really far from true to any life lived on this earth.”
Lehnhoff returned to the Met in 1989 to direct Strauss’s Salome. Rather than the traditional staging in the time of John the Baptist, he set it in a glassy, high-rise palace with Mesopotamian columns. “Nowadays we are attacked by creeping, noiseless catastrophes of nature and civilisation: the dying of the forests, the Aids epidemic, Chernobyl, and so on. And I think a
Salome production should react to our time and confront us with problems we can understand,” he told The New York Times.
In the late 1990s he was considered a possible successor to Graham Vick as director of productions at Glyndebourne, which had recently been redeveloped with a modern, state-of-the-art theatre, but Lehnhoff instead spoke of his fear of being tied down. “I really just want to be able to do the things I enjoy,” he told The Daily Telegraph. After his Janáček success – which was followed by Smetana’s The Bartered Bride in 1999 (though without the Davis/Silja combination that had worked so well in Janácek) – Glyndebourne dared to consider Wagner. Lehnhoff directed Tristan und Isolde there in 2003, conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek, but a full East Sussex Ring Cycle has yet to materialise. Lehnhoff ’s work took him to many of the world’s major opera houses – Fidelio in Salzburg conducted by Simon Rattle; Don Carlos in Zurich – and in 1997 his production of Pfitzner’s Palestrina at Covent Garden was nominated for a Laurence Olivier award. His last production was Puccini’s Turandot at La Scala, Milan, in May.
Nikolaus Lehnhoff, born May 20 1939, died August 22 2015