Joachim Herz

Joachim Herz (15 June 1924 – 18 October 2010) was a German opera director and manager. He learned at the Komische Oper Berlin as an assistant to Walter Felsenstein. His major stations were the Leipzig Opera where he opened the new house with Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Komische Oper and Semperoper in Dresden, where he opened the restored house with Weber's Der Freischütz in 1985. He staged many world premieres, and worked internationally. Herz was the first director to apply Felsenstein's concepts to Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, staged in Leipzig from 1973 to 1976.

Life Born in Dresden, Herz attended the Kreuzschule there, completing with the Abitur in 1942. and which he expounded in numerous of his writings. In 1848, Wagner began writing the Ring poem. Herz took up this coincidence of time and content and interpreted the Ring as "a play about the class struggles of the 19th century." "Wagner has now alienated this class struggle tragedy of the 19th century, chosen a parable-like form for it, and as an alienating costume has put Nordic mythology over it, from which he has also drawn decisive moments of conflict in the fable's direction." (Joachim Herz) Both Herz and the conductor of the tetralogy, , and Rudolf Heinrich, responsible for stage design and costumes, had been Felsenstein students. In the conceptual preliminary work (July to September 1972) Herz and Heinrich developed the thematic-staging core points and the visual worlds of their Ring interpretation. In their conception, the gold that is forged into the ring by Alberich is "first of all beautiful nature", transforms into artistically treated nature (the ring), which is also suitable as an object of exchange, and finally mutates into the "basis of a universal exchange value". "The ring is a principle: it signifies the possibility of primitive accumulation of capital. It signifies a potentiation of wealth and power." (Herz)

An essential question of the Ring interpretation was what actually perishes at the end of Götterdämmerung: the world as such or the world of Wotan? Herz and Heinrich decided that it is the world of Wotan and his adversary Alberich (who is only the alter ego of the father of the gods, as they deduced from the musical analysis of both leitmotifs) that is destroyed here. Consequently, Herz reinterpreted "Siegfried's Funeral March" as Wotan's abdication: the father of the gods (who actually no longer appears in this opera) strides saluting through a deserted trellis of eagle pylons. The final image of the Leipzig production showed the men and women, not further defined by Wagner, on an empty stage. "At the end, it's tabula rasa: the old has been wiped out. Now a new one begins. How this new is to be constituted is not to be shown at this point. Wagner did not know." (Herz) The FAZ attests Herz's Ring "great provocative power and consistency." The Herald Tribune called Das Rheingold a "stunning performance" that also made "a little theatrical history." This return of the RING to the theatre, the retheatricalisation of events over which the mists of Nordic-mythical boredom had so long hung penetratingly, probably strikes the viewer first. (...) There are no dull stretches of the Nibelungen in which nothing but beautiful pathos is offered; theatre is played, and with such fervour that one imagines oneself at least in Salome." Ernst Krause in Opernwelt, June 1976

Further productions Dresden: Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten (Richard Mohaupt) (1950) Komische Oper Berlin Die Zauberflöte (Mozart, 1954)

Publication Stephan Stompor (ed.), Walter Felsenstein, Joachim Herz: Musiktheater : Beiträge zur Methodik und zu Inszenierungskonzeptionen. Leipzig : Reclam, 1976