He saw himself “always on a journey of discovery”. At the same time, Jürgen Flimm was at home all over the world. The director and artistic director worked internationally in opera, theatre, film and television. His work has been celebrated on homes on multiple continents. Flimm died on Saturday at the age of 81, according to the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden. After countless works, his most recent directorial plans remain unfulfilled. This spring, Flimm wanted to realize Samuel Beckett’s “The Last Tape” with Wolf-Dietrich Sprenger at the St. Pauli Theater in Hamburg.
People in focus
The focus of his directing work was the human being with his social and psychological entanglements. He always tried to stay close to the present. For him, the theater became an indispensable part of current living environments. At the same time he had a kind of personal 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 a song out loud, calling myself a cheerful Rhenish person 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.
Start in Munich
He began his directing career in 1968 as an assistant to Fritz Kortner and Claus Peymann at the Munich Kammerspiele. As a theater manager 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 from 2006 to 2010 the Salzburg Festival. There he was honored with mourning flags at the weekend. From 2010 to 2018 he was director of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden. In a duo with conductor Daniel Barenboim, he mastered tricky years by having to move the house twice because the State Opera had to be renovated. After that it was enough for him because he “under no circumstances wanted to be the oldest director in Germany” and also didn’t want to “drive through the aisles with a walker”.
On the main stages
He has been on the most important stages over the decades. Flimm 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. On the other hand, 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”. For him, too, it was one of his best works.
Trips to TV
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.” (dpa)