Since the arrival of Regietheater in opera, beginning in the 1970s, the possibilities, limits, and demands of stage directing in opera have been a topic of debate. Regietheater both maintains opera’s musical dramaturgy and radically questions, re-examines, and recontextualises the transmitted and ascertainable strata of meaning in the available texts (libretto, score, discourse on the staging history). By discussing some exemplary moments and striking characteristics of Regietheater productions of the Wagnerian repertoire (e.g., by Harry Kupfer, Peter Konwitschny, Katharina Wagner), the chapter argues that such productions are necessary for keeping the well-known repertoire alive. The chapter is not meant as an overview of current staging practices of the Wagnerian repertoire, nor as a best-of list for Regietheater productions; it is rather an attempt to highlight some of the possible effects of those productions.

“Staging The Magic Flute” examines the production history of Mozart’s opera over more than two centuries, from its 1791 premiere to 2019. It focuses especially on productions of The Magic Flute since 1970 and the critical reactions they have provoked, and asks if there can ever be a definitive staging of this iconic work. Productions discussed in detail range from Barrie Kosky’s radical “silent movie” version for the Komische Oper Berlin to August Everding and David McVicar’s long-running fairytale-Enlightenment stagings for (respectively) the Bavarian State Opera and The Royal Opera. Among the many other directors and designers discussed are Marc Chagall, Ingmar Bergman, David Hockney, Peter Sellars, Pierre Audi, Julie Taymor, Peter Stein, and Simon McBurney.

This article explores Bertolt Brecht’s significance for the most advanced forms of contemporary experimental and avant-garde theater.Brecht is one of the most popular and most-produced playwrights world-wide, and certainly in Germany; however many mainstream productions tend to deprive his work of its radical political and aesthetic edge.Nevertheless, contemporary avant-garde and experimental theaterwould be fundamentally unthinkable without Brecht, and it is particularly indebted to the most radical phase of Brecht’s career, when he and his team were working on learning plays (Lehrstücke) in the late 1920s and early 1930s during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Brecht’s conception of a separation of the elements, of putting mechanisms of power clearly on display, and of creating collective agency that, via script-based theater, tendentially removed power from the hands of writers and directors, are fundamental building blocks of contemporary experimental theater. The article explores such forms and their impact on the basis of experimental work by Robert Wilson, Wanda Golonka, and She She Pop.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century in Germany, Ibsen had become a household name for promoting sociocultural change. Different avant-garde movements such as the Freie Bühne and the prominent theatre maker Max Reinhardt placed Ibsen’s plays at the centre of theatrical innovation. The twentieth century saw Ibsen represented in newly imagined theatre spaces, early silent cinema and later the Regietheater of Peter Stein and Peter Zadek. This German tradition continues until the present day when Thomas Ostermeier’s touring productions have become key reference points for theatre makers and scholars alike. But what often appears as a continuous success story reveals itself as a complex performance history of setbacks, struggles and reactionary reappropriations, such as by the film industry of the Third Reich. This account of Ibsen’s German reception draws out the nuanced and often contradictory dynamics that made Ibsen one of the most important dramatists of German theatre.

The period from the inaugural production of the Ring (1876) to the bicentenary of Wagner’s death (2013) encompasses a variety of dramaturgical approaches. The tradition of naturalistic, illusionist theatre, to which Wagner was heir, was exposed within twenty-five years to the innovations of Alfred Roller and Adolphe Appia, then in turn to the austere iconoclasm of Wieland Wagner, the ideological revolutions of Bertolt Brecht and metatheater, and more recently to the radical theories of deconstruction and post-dramatic theater, all of which have come to constitute what is known as Regietheater. Wagner’s richly multivalent cycle also provided fertile territory for political, environmental and feminist interpretations, but this focus on ideological aspects of the work has developed alongside an emphasis on the theatrical dimension (including mime, dance, avant-garde design, video, and new technology). Indeed, it could be argued that the primacy accorded mime, gesture, and choreographed movement in recent decades represents a fidelity, in some respects, to the composer’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and that the apotheosis of the latter has been achieved only in the age of Regietheater.