A loner for Hamburg's opera

Small drum, big drum. The double, militarily strict percussion roll introduces the overture to Rossini's opera "La gazza ladra", which is rarely performed in its entirety, and immediately invites you to tap and dance. Here in Hall E of Vienna's Museumsquartier, this could symbolize another start. Director Tobias scratches vehemently strives for new shores. On the interim stage of the Theater an der Wien, he deals with Rossini's opera semiseria, which is actually simpler, but precisely for that reason it is so complicated. It is his first production in the city.

The 42-year-old initially caused a sensation within the company in 2008 when – even before graduating from the Everding Academy in Munich – he successfully applied under two identities and with two concepts at the RingAward directing competition in Graz. In 2019 he prepared one of the few, largely untroubled successes in recent history for the Bayreuth Festival with the witty, multimedia “Tannhäuser”. In autumn 2025 he will be the new artistic director of the Hamburg State Opera. WELT learned this from various sources.

The current, not uncontroversial Hamburg duo, artistic director George Delnon and music director Kent Nagano, will not extend their contracts again. Although this important person is not to be officially announced until December, the contract is complete and Kratzer is already in the process of canceling productions planned elsewhere.

And yet the situation is surprising. Tobias Kratzer has been in the professional business for a little over ten years and is in high demand. He is engaged with a preference for difficult, bulky pieces, also with a large choir. After a Meyerbeer series, the serious Rossini now seems close to him. He will also do the projected "Ring" at the Bavarian State Opera.

But the imaginative, professional Tobias scratches, who always competes with the same team, is also considered a not exactly unpretentious loner, brash, assertive, intent on his own validity. Why is he already drawn to a directorship where you have to integrate? Has he already said so much as a director? On top of that as the head of a large, currently difficult repertoire house that he has never worked on himself and that actually requires daily attendance without outside jobs?

A house where Hanseatic civic pride has been longing for the star shine of yesteryear for years, which has long been unaffordable. So what should the down-to-earth scratcher, who until now largely only had to think of himself, do, how should he motivate the giant house that has become boring? Are artistic directors really still the right solution for this today?

As hard as that can be seen from his creatively burned-out colleague Stefan Herheim (already 52) in Vienna, who has just taken over the Theater an der Wien, which had been outsourced due to renovations lasting several years. This is a stagione house with just eight premieres of five performances each on the big stage. One of them is Gian Carlo Menotti's 50-minute Christmas children's opera "Amahl and the Nightly Visitors", which Herheim - after an all too well-behaved, uninspired, colorfully floating version of Janacek's "The Cunning Little Vixen" at the start - is the second and last directorial work of the season still presented.

Scratches, on the other hand, also swallowed a lot of chalk for his Vienna debut. "The Thieving Magpie" - a bird perched on a silver spoon puts a falsely accused maid, who is also being courted by the nasty mayor, in mortal danger on a farm - is a melodrama that was once intended to move audiences to tears at the persecuted innocence. The creatively tuned Rossini provides a lot of drama with little action, and that for three hours.

This is retold in a trashy, run-down uniform stage setting between the kitchen, workshop, garage, hayloft and drying room in a very straight forward, but well-behaved way. The direction only exacerbates the Kafkaesque exposure of those involved to an unmoved, anonymous jurisdiction, and - a little local joke - the Magpie, which was first shot down and then capable of flying again, whose predatory perspective we can follow on video through a beaked drone, ends up in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in front of the shiny gold Saliera Cellinis, who became the victim of an amateur thief a few years ago.

But musically it is almost pure joy. Only Nino Machaidze's sharp voice as Ninetta bites too much. And Nahuel Di Prierro, as an abysmal evil Podestà, paints vocals with too little bass black. But otherwise, including the wonderful Arnold Schoenberg Choir, a great ensemble management. Maxim Mironov's flexible and high-flying tenor stands out (even in ugly gym shorts), who, as his lover Gianetto, doesn't even have anything particularly grateful to sing. Antonio Fogliani, on the podium of the Vienna ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra, condenses this gloomy, military march-based, not at all funny Rossini with a great deal of professionalism.