Word: liebermann
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Manager Rudolf Bing turned it down, even after Austrian Chancellor Josef Klaus personally urged him to accept. The New York Philharmonic's Leonard Bernstein and Cleveland's George Szell were approached, but said no thanks. The Hamburg Opera's Rolf Liebermann declined an offer, and feelers were rejected by former Edinburgh Festival Director Lord Harewood and the West Berlin Opera's Egon Seetehlner...
Hamburg's approach sounds like a formula for box-office harakiri, but, as General Manager Rolf Liebermann says: "Our job is to try out new things and to find new directions. In such a context, a flop or a hit today is of no consequence whatever." In practice, the company has many more hits than flops, selling out a seasonal average of 86% of its 1,670 seats, attracting opera buffs from around the world to its occasional week-long programs of contemporary opera, and having its pick of top festival tours...
...Museum. Liebermann, 56, a charming, energetic ex-composer, firmly controls quality by adjusting the tiniest strokes of stage business and watching nearly every performance. In the belief that "seduction of the audience through the eye is easier than through the ear," he has brought such gifted directors as Jean-Louis Barrault and GianCarlo Menotti to Hamburg to stage his productions; and as a musician, he has persuaded such fellow composers as Hans Werner Henze, Ernst Krenek and Krzystof Penderecki to write new operas for the company...
Proud as he is of Hamburg's 289-year operatic history, Liebermann is a manager who "hears ahead," in the words of one of his singers. Appropriately, six of the seven productions presented by the Hamburgers at the Met were written in the 20th century (as was a quarter of their entire repertory). "The moral and democratic responsibility of a music-theater manager," says Liebermann, "is to confront the public with its own times," not to preside over "an old, stinky museum...
Flushed with success, Hamburg State Opera Director Rolf Liebermann described The Visitation as "the best opera since Wozzeck." U.S. audiences may have a chance to see and hear for themselves next summer, when Liebermann expects to bring The Visitation to Manhattan as part of the Hamburg Opera's first American visit...