"Every comedy contains tragic and lyrical moments"

I don't even own a director's book. Never had one. Because I've only ever worked on people, with people. Everything I invent in a production, I invent thanks to those I'm allowed to work with. Whereby Der Rosenkavalier is a very "given" work. Much is predetermined by the music and text and only needs to be followed. There is a rococo milieu that is patinated by Art Nouveau; there is an (invented) language that has to be used very realistically. And there are moments when the sheer beauty really degenerates. In my five productions of this opera, I have always tried to fulfill these conditions; it has never been my style to invent something contrary - I don't have that talent. My addiction has always been to listen into the work, to hear something out of it, not to put something on top of it or let a fantasy run rampant that only uses the work.

My concept is always the piece in question. First of all, I have to have a place that allows me to tell the story. So there are always long discussions with the set designer at the beginning, because it's a different path that has to be taken every time. A piece like Der Rosenkavalier requires a strange precision because the music is so precise. Other works may only need individual clues, hints of a place, but here the detail has to be right. And then it's all about the people - that's the main work. You have to get all the performers to make everything they do come naturally.

Even though - or rather - because there is music! Because when you love, everything becomes music, it's almost a new language. You then have the feeling that you can no longer just speak, but have to sing everything. That's exactly what opera is! And when that happens, you are richly rewarded! When the singers and the choir are infected, when singers become a horde of reality fanatics, when individual characters and personalities are on stage, in short: when everyone is infected by the theater bug - then the miracle of opera has been created!

I'm a stickler for detail: a person's posture, the way they walk, the way they sit down all reveal more about their biography than three hours of talking about what kind of person they are and where they come from. Someone who picks their nose will not have had a good upbringing - there is no need to discuss this in detail. The biography is conveyed in detail! A review once critically remarked that one of my productions was "humanizing". Humanizing, what does that even mean? What else is supposed to happen in the theater? If the critic meant that the characters behave like people, then I've achieved what I wanted..

This is almost a technical question that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. Every great comedy contains tragic and lyrical moments. If you look at the end of the opera, things end relatively well for almost everyone, but for the Marschallin with a wistful, beautiful, gigantic renunciation, which Richard Strauss composed in a magnificent trio. It is ultimately a victory of youth, of young passion against mature passion. But of course there is also a great deal of humor in this work, sometimes in individual details, for example in the very naming of the ox, whose lustfulness is punished at the end: As we all know, ox is the neuter of the bovine family ... This is no coincidence!

The ox does not follow the path of love, but the path of lust. He almost doesn't care who he gets into bed. The marriage is purely a matter of money; he takes the pretty girl, who has shoulders like a hen, as an addition to the twelve houses. The Marschallin has scruples and misgivings, because for a second she has the feeling that she is embarking on a similar path that is all about eroticism: and so she renounces eroticism at the end of the first act. She senses an ill wind blowing, a hautgoût of overestimating sensuality, and doubts the permissibility of her excursion into this very eroticism. After all, she is the intellectually superior one, she cannot love anything intellectual about Octavian, whom she calls Bub, she loves youth in him. But she is not an old woman, which is often misunderstood. She certainly has experience, it's not her first affair, she reveals that. But I think Octavian is the first to leave her, she has thrown the others out.

You'll have to ask her. But I don't think she would know either. In any case, the Marschallin is a popular figure.

One marvels at the extent to which this work anticipates the liberation of women. The Marschallin does not allow herself to be talked out of love by the supposed sacrament of a marriage into which she has been commanded. Of course, this is not a license for adultery in the first act. However, it is an adultery that happens out of love, in contrast to the prescribed and dictated marriage - an astonishing moment that has led to great controversy.

He is not an evil person. He is weak and a Renaissance figure, an offshoot from another time. And he is oversexed, perhaps not so much in fulfillment, but rather in desire: he would probably achieve nothing with Mariandl, even if she were a woman. Because he is overexcited and suffers a veritable fit of erotic weakness.

The question is always how clever or stupid little Sophie is. Maybe she's just uneducated because she wasn't brought up and comes straight from the convent? She finds very clever words of love and senses what the marshal is all about, who gives and takes. And she holds her own in the love duet. So at least she is gifted with a heart and attempts a great dramatic rebellion against her father and the ox, which she can hardly be trusted with.

I don't think so. We don't know whether the Marschallin has a bourgeois background, but her marriage to the Field Marshal is certainly very different from that of Octavian and Sophie.

Yes, it was said that after Elektra he betrayed modernism and took a step backwards. But that only proves how much the critics at the time sat on their ears and didn't realize how differentiated and complex this score is, at least as complicated as those of Salome or Elektra. Der Rosenkavalier is certainly not a simplification or popularization of the opera. And the audience rebuked the critics right from the start!