Word: liebermann
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Conceived by Paris Opéra General Director Rolf Liebermann, Don Giovanni is an attempt to go beyond the usual filmed operatic performances or made-for-TV studio productions. Joseph Losey (The Servant, The Go-Between) takes his cast of international singing stars out on location to the waterways of Venice and to some stunning Palladian villas in the countryside around Vicenza. Never mind that Ingmar Bergman's 1975 version of Mozart's The Magic Flute showed what enchanting results a modest, studio-bound production could achieve. Never mind, too, that the locale of the Don Juan legend...
...Paris, the opera world's most tantalizing other shoe has finally dropped. The Paris Opera presented the first-ever full-length Lulu, third act and all. To Rolf Liebermann, the Paris Opéra's general director, it was the culmination of a 30-year quest. To Conductor Pierre Boulez, it was belated "justice to a work that has been mutilated." To the black-tie audience of statesmen, artistic leaders, 200 music critics and assorted opera buffs, it was a triumph and, to some, a perplexity...
...inhospitable climate for productions of Lulu, since the Nazis regarded it as entartete Kunst (decadent art), but thereafter it began to enter the international repertory. Approaches to other composers about finishing the third act had ended inconclusively. Opera managers vied for the chance to present the first complete performance; Liebermann made his first bid in 1950, when he was musical director of Radio Zurich. But they literally did not have a ghost of a chance. Berg's widow and musical executrix, Helene, claimed that her husband's spirit made nocturnal visitations to her in which he opposed completion...
Early in the 1960s Berg's publishers, Universal Edition in Vienna, quietly commissioned Cerha to proceed with the orchestration anyway. After Helene Berg's death at 92 in 1976, a genteel scramble ensued. Liebermann had a secret advantage in Boulez, long the publishers' first choice to conduct the premiere...
Backstage is, of course, the real heart of any opera company, and its denizens are often as well known as the stars. There, be it in Washington or New York, no one is going to occupy a more central or intriguing position than Rolf Liebermann, 65, the Swiss-born general director of the Paris Opera. In the space of only four years he has achieved what many thought impossible: he has turned the once floundering Paris Opera around and restored talk of la gloire...