He directed the Berlin State Opera, celebrated successes in New York and divided opinion with his “King Arthur” in Salzburg: Jürgen Flimm’s work on international stages was legendary. Now the artistic director and director has died.
He saw himself “always on a journey of discovery”. And yet Jürgen Flimm was at home everywhere. The director and artistic director worked in opera, theatre, film and television. His work has been celebrated at homes around the world. Flimm died at the age of 81, according to the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden.
His most recent directorial plans remain unfulfilled. Flimm wanted to bring out Samuel Beckett’s “The Last Tape” with Wolf-Dietrich Sprenger this spring at Hamburg’s St. Pauli Theater. The focus of his directing work was the human being with his social and psychological entanglements. At the same time he had a household god in Mozart. “The Marriage of Figaro” or “Don Giovanni” are the greatest works ever created by man, he once enthused.
Departure and preservation, tradition and the search for new forms were not in competition for Flimm. He tried to combine seemingly opposites on stage. Born on July 17, 1941 to a Protestant family of doctors in Gießen, Flimm grew up in Cologne, where he studied theater studies, German and sociology. The city should not have too much influence on its image. “Just because I once sang songs out loud, calling myself “Rhenish happy nature” over and over again is total nonsense,” he once said. But he also didn’t want to be the “romantic German artist”, who regularly sinks into melancholy.
He began his directing career in 1968 as an assistant to Fritz Kortner and Claus Peymann at the Munich Kammerspiele. As a theater director he earned merits in Cologne from 1979 to 1985. As artistic director from 1985 to 2000, he made Hamburg’s Thalia Theater the most visited stage in Germany. Flimm directed the Ruhrtriennale and the Salzburg Festival (2006-2010). From 2010 to 2018 he was director of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden. He has worked at La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden London, the Vienna State Opera, the Metropolitan Opera New York and the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals, among others.
He received mixed reactions with his Bayreuth “Ring des Nibelungen”, as did his collaboration with Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Henry Purcell’s “King Arthur” in Salzburg. He was celebrated undividedly in New York with Beethoven’s “Fidelio”, which was named the best opera production of the year by the “New York Times”.
Flimm was also a director in film and television productions. Among other things, he realized two episodes of the season “Ein Herz und Eine Seele”, which was considered a TV cult in the 1970s, with Heinz Schubert as disgusting Alfred and Helga Feddersen in the role of Else. Sometimes Flimm also worked as an actor. Among other things, he was in front of the camera in two episodes of “Tatort”. In Berlin he sometimes met Otto Rehhagel, whom Flimm knew from his Hamburg days. He admires the strong nerves and knowledge of human nature of the football coach. “He has his premiere as a coach every week.”
