Berlin (AFP)
Harry Kupfer, one of Germany's most renowned opera directors, died Monday at the age of 84 in Berlin, his Viennese art agency Arsis announced on Tuesday.
Director between 1981 and 2002 of the prestigious Berlin Comic Opera (Komische Oper), Harry Kupfer died "from a long illness", the agency said in a press release.
Born in 1935 in Berlin, he began his career in the former East Germany (GDR), becoming in turn responsible for the opera of the Weimar National Theater and the Dresden Opera.
In 1978, he made his West debut with a very noteworthy presentation of the Ghost Ship, by the German composer Richard Wagner, for the Wagnerian Festival in Bayreuth.
A few years later, in 1981, he joined the Berlin Comic Opera to become its director, spending more than twenty years there and producing nearly 140 productions, including many works by Wagner.
For his departure in 2002, he and his longtime friend the Israeli-Argentine conductor Daniel Barenboim organized a Wagner festival of unprecedented scale in the prestigious Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin.
This festival was the crowning achievement of a joint adventure with Barenboim launched in 1992, which led them to present each year one of the ten great operas of the famous composer.
After his retirement from the Opéra comique, he continued his career abroad, staging operas on order anywhere in the world, notably in Sydney, Barcelona and even Helsinki.
His last production was an opportunity for him to return last spring to the Opéra Comique, where he presented the opera "Poro" by composer Georg Friedrich Haendel.
© 2019 AFP