- Götz Friedrich
Götz Friedrich (
August 4 ,1930 inNaumburg ,Germany –December 12 ,2000 inBerlin , Germany) was a German opera andtheatre director .He was a student and assistant of
Walter Felsenstein at theKomische Oper Berlin in (East) Berlin, where he went on to direct his early productions. He first came to international prominence with a controversial 1972 production of Wagner's Tannhäuser at Bayreuth. He defected to the West whilst working on a production of Jenufa in Stockholm later the same year. ["Daily Telegraph" obituary, 23 August 2001]From 1972-81 he was principal director at the Hamburg State Opera. Between 1977 and 1981 he was also director of productions at the
Royal Opera House atCovent Garden inLondon , where he staged the first British performances of the three-act completion of Berg's "Lulu". In 1981 he took up the post of general director of theDeutsche Oper Berlin where he stayed until his death in 2000, staging productions across the whole of the operatic repertoire.He was partciularly known for his productions of Wagner. He staged his first production of the "Ring" at Covent Garden (1973-76, conducted by Colin Davis). The designs by Josef Svoboda centred on a revolving hydraulic platform. In the 1980s he directed a new production for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin (the so-called 'Time Tunnel' "Ring"). Covent Garden later imported this production to replace a planned production by Yuri Lyubimov, which had been abandoned after "Das Rheingold". Bernard Haitink conducted complete cycles of the second Friedrich "Ring" in 1992. The production was also staged in Washington and Japan.
He directed the world premières of
Luciano Berio 's "Un re in ascolto ",Ingvar Lidholm 's "Ett Drömspel" [Loveland, Kenneth, "Reports: Salzburg" (October 1984). "The Musical Times", 125 (1700): p. 588.] and Henze's "Raft of the Medusa".He was the initiator of the 1986 founded "
The American Berlin Opera Foundation " (ABOF), located inNew York City .Among his productions available on DVD are the 1974 Unitel film of "Salome" (with
Teresa Stratas ), a 1981 film of Elektra with Leonie Rysanek and Astrid Varnay (both conducted by Karl Böhm) and the 1982 Bayreuth production of "Lohengrin" (withPeter Hofmann and Karan Armstrong).Friedrich was married to Ruth Maria Kubitschek, with whom he had a son, Alexander. From his marriage to soprano
Karan Armstrong , he had another son, Johannes.References
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
