Joachim Herz was a German opera director and manager.
17 Facts About Joachim Herz
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Joachim Herz learned at the Komische Oper Berlin as an assistant to Walter Felsenstein.
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Joachim Herz then studied piano, clarinet and music pedagogy at the Hochschule fur Musik Dresden.
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Joachim Herz's studies were interrupted by military service in 1944 and 1945 but completed in 1948.
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Joachim Herz then studied opera direction there with Heinz Arnold, later musicology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Joachim Herz opened the new opera house in 1960 with Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
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Joachim Herz caused a particular sensation with his Der Ring des Nibelungen, completed in Leipzig in 1976.
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In 1976, Joachim Herz returned to the Komische Oper Berlin, succeeding Felsenstein.
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Joachim Herz was from 1981 to 1991 chief director at the Dresden State Opera, from 1985 in the reopened Semperoper, for whose opening he staged Weber's Der Freischutz.
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Joachim Herz staged productions all over the world beginning in 1959.
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Joachim Herz worked at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow as well as at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, in London and in Vancouver.
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Joachim Herz staged a total of 126 productions and new productions of over 60 operas, many of which have become classics.
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Joachim Herz taught at the Leipzig University from 1976, and from 1981 as head of the department of opera direction of the Musikhochschule Dresden.
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Between 1973 and 1976, Joachim Herz staged all four parts of the Ring at the Leipzig Opera House.
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Contrary to the performance practice of the time, which was primarily influenced by the works of Wieland Wagner, Joachim Herz sought the conceptual key for the tetralogy in Wagner himself, especially in his social revolutionary views, which made him a barricade fighter in the 1848er Revolution and which he expounded in numerous of his writings.
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Joachim Herz was the first director to set the Ring des Nibelungen as a parable of 19th century capitalism.
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Unlike Chereau's Ring, Joachim Herz's interpretation was not recorded on video because this technology was not yet available in the GDR at the time.