Terje Stensvold and Gisela Stille share one of the less-bloody moments in the Norwegian Opera’s take on the Jack the Ripper tale “Lulu.” (Erik Berg)
When “Die Walkure” opens at the Met Friday, expect standing ovations for conductor James Levine and singers Deborah Voigt and Bryn Terfel — and mild applause or a boo or two for director Robert Lepage.
That’s no knock on Lepage or his massive set, but par for the course in New York, where opera directors don’t matter so much. In Europe, it’s another story: There, the director’s curtain call provokes the wildest excitement of the night.
In what the Germans call “Regietheater” — literally, “director theater” — the staging is as important as the music itself, especially if it challenges or even changes the way you understand a familiar tale.
In Germany last month, Barrie Kosky’s production of Dvorak’s “Rusalka” for the Berlin Komische Oper turned the “Little Mermaid” legend into a Victorian horror story. Here, the fishtailed heroine’s transformation into a human girl is accomplished not with a magic wand but with a boning knife, as blood and entrails splatter the stage.
Even more cutting-edge was a radically new staging of Wagner’s “Parsifal” in Stuttgart. As directed by Spain’s Calixto Bieito, Wagner’s saga of a youth’s quest to join the medieval Holy Grail brotherhood became a blood-drenched shocker about a cannibal cult in a post-apocalyptic America. Orchestra members reportedly walked out of a rehearsal to protest a scene in which a choirboy was beaten to death with a leather belt.
Inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” this grim “Parsifal” ended with the new high priest climbing naked into a blood-stained metal tub and being carried off in triumph. Though it’s not clear whether he’s the new messiah or the noon meal, the image was haunting.
Another director to watch is Stefan Herheim, who delivered a dazzling take on Berg’s “Lulu” for the Norwegian Opera.
Herheim redefines this lurid 1935 tragedy — about a femme fatale who falls afoul of Jack the Ripper — as a black comedy by having literally everyone in the show lust and die for Lulu, including a wardrobe lady, who develops a fatal lesbian attraction.
The director’s high-camp style — like Almodovar on Adderall — borders on sensory overload. Yet Lulu’s murder is quiet, almost discreet, granting the antiheroine a peaceful, poetic finish.
The Met has yet to engage any of these three directors, but general manager Peter Gelb is cautiously bringing aboard others from the Regie school.
Dmitri Tcherniakov, who’ll helm “Prince Igor” for the Met in 2013-14, recently directed a “Don Giovanni” set in the mansion of a creepy, old-money European family.
“The greatest skill of a director is to do something imaginative that brings new insight to a work but avoids corrupting the story so it doesn’t make any sense to someone who doesn’t [already] know it,” Gelb says.
To that end, he’s also interested in German director Thomas Ostermeier, of whose “Marriage of Maria Braun” at BAM last year The Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli declared, “[cuts] through flab and mediocrity like a sharp blade slicing through lard.”
While the Met stage won’t be dripping with bodily fluids anytime soon, it seems Regietheater is on its way, transforming the picturesquely pleasant into life-changing art.