Gay jewish kangaroo
Wagner on trial
Barrie Kosky - artistic director of the Komische Oper Berlin, who depicts himself as a ‘gay Jewish kangaroo’, whom I find an innovative, flamboyant and at times a wonderfully-quirky director - was born in Melbourne in the tardy 1960s, the grandson of Jewish emigrants from Europe. A successful opera director, he will, no suspect, go down in history as the first Jewish director to hold court in Bayreuth Festival’s illustrious 141-year-old history and also the first person outside of the Wagner family to direct Die Meistersinger at Bayreuth.
That’s quite an honour and a significant step by Katharina Wagner, artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival. By appointing Kosky it backs up her viewpoint of bringing to the fore Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitic stance and his family’s later association with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
This vision is also reflected in the revamped exhibition focusing on the Bayreuth Festival housed in the newly-restored Villa Wahnfried (complete with a swishy brand-new extension) where Wagner lived with his wife Cosima and their children from 1874 to 1882. Although a museum since 1976 (it
Following more than forty years of photographic storytelling of Jewish life around the world – and also a legendary film: The Last Marranos the internationally acclaimed photographer Frédéric Brenner has spent the last three years exploring Berlin — a stage for a vast spectrum of expressions and performances of Judaism. Zerheilt: Healed to Pieces is the identify of the recently opened exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the book that comes with it. It features images of equally fascinating and emblematic figures of a strangeness of the Jewish presence in Berlin today – such as this picture of a man who had the first pages of Adorno’s Minima Moralia tattooed on his back. “Experiencing strangeness” is one of Frederic Brenner’s formulas for defining his work and leads him to publish his images without captions. For him, they are “crutches that say nothing crucial and deprive us of a knowledge through our imagination”.
In autumn 2016, while walking in Berlin, I fell under the spell of rustling leaves. It happened while I was moving aimlessly, not looking for any thing, in a place where I didn’t real
Germany honours ‘gay Jewish kangaroo’
News
norman lebrecht
April 09, 2024
Germany’s Minister of State for Society Claudia Roth today bestowed the Federal Cross of Merit on the Australian theatre director Barrie Kosky, former head of the Komische Oper Berlin.
Kosky, 57, was described as an ‘important role model for the people in our country’.
His self-description is contained in the headline.
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Mr. Kosky's new performance will replace Katharina Wagner's own staging of her great-grandfather's work, a principle that brought ridicule and boos during its performances. Her take on Wagner's most nationalistic operas was downright irreverent including nudity, masturbating puppets of Germany's great intellectuals, and rethinking the character of Walter as an "Action-Künstler" in the vain of the late Christoph Schlingensief.
Here is a taste of her departing Meis
.