In September, the Komische Oper Berlin opened its new season with one of the most ambitious premieres in recent memory: a 12-hour-long marathon performance of Monteverdi’s three complete extant operas: L’Orfeo, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea. Not only were the three operas back-to-back premiere productions; they also featured fresh instrumentation by the Uzbeki-Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin. For Barrie Kosky, the Komische’s plucky new intendant, the ambitious and irreverent fusion of tradition and innovation speaks volumes about his vision for the company. ‘My intendanz does not begin with champagne, but rather with orange juice and croissants at 10am,’ explains the 45-year-old Melbourne native.

The Monteverdi Trilogy was only the starting point in a season of 12 new productions, including three world premieres. Kosky, who won an Olivier award last year for his production of Castor and Pollux at ENO, has also scheduled a valuable Kurt Weill festival for January and given over the entire month of May to Mozart.  

Kosky’s plans confirm the Komische Oper as one of today’s most spontaneous and exciting opera companies. Like much else in this city, the Komische’s history testifies to a complex and complicated past. Before the Second World War, it housed the Metropol-Theater, a legendary revue theater in the 1920s. In 1947, under the leadership of director Walter Felsenstein, it became the Komische Oper, a theatre that performed many shades of musical theatre and opera, from Broadway to Janáček. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, the Komische found itself on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. It spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s forging a post-unification identity to differentiate itself from the city’s two more prominent (and better-funded) houses, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and the Deutsche Oper. Andreas Homoki, Kosky’s direct predecessor (who takes over at Oper Zürich this season), was at the helm since 2003, and injected new life into the company by expanding the repertoire to include Strauss and Wagner, and engaging spunky directors like Kosky and the Catalan shock-auteur Calixto Bieito: decisions that could attract their share of controversy. Bieito’s blood-and-sex drenched 2004 production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail was so gruesome that the Komische’s sponsor threatened to withdraw its support, although the production’s initial run was sold out. One of Homoki’s nods to tradition was to maintain Felsenstein’s philosophy of performing in German language only, a convention that Kosky has now reversed for several of the season’s premieres. In October, the company will mount the world premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu, an English-language work that is, in part, a reworking of Berg’s unfinished score.

Kosky plans to keep the company’s current productions in German and decide for future productions individually. For instance, he is a firm believer that the house performs Mozart in German, so that audiences can understand all of Da Ponte’s witticisms. But he insists that French opera doesn’t work in translation. ‘So, if we do Rameau, which we should do – we’re the perfect house for Rameau and it’s not done in Berlin, there’s an audience that I think will be fascinated and delighted to experience Rameau – it must be done in French,’ Kosky explains. Another repertoire that he feels loses something in translation is Russian. This season’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa will be sung in the original language. However, Kosky has said that when they perform Shostakovich’s The Nose in few seasons’ time, it will be in German, as befits a conversation piece. ‘Generally speaking, it’s not either/or. It’s just a little bit more flexible,’ he insists.

Kosky says he’s not a radical, although he is committed to bringing changes to the house. ‘It’s not about stopping things or abruptly changing things. It’s about developing things. Andreas brought many new things to the house, many new directors and impulses, and I will do the same,’ he said. What he will not alter, however, is the company’s fundamental character as ‘an ensemble house that presents music theatre night after night.’

Harking back to his theatre’s pre-war history as a variety stage, Kosky has programmed little-seen operettas by the early 20th-century Jewish composers Kurt Weill (Der Kuhhandel), Paul Abraham (Ball im Savoy) and Emmerich Kálmán (Die Bajadere) that Kosky considers fitting to the company’s profile. ‘This music is brilliant and it deserves to be heard. And I think that we should not be playing Wagner and Richard Strauss. We have Barenboim and we have Runnicles and we have Rattle and the city is full of fantastic musicians playing those big pieces. And we don’t need to do that,’ he says emphatically.

He admits freely that his inaugural season is uncommonly flush. ‘We’re not going to do three world premieres every year and I can only do this Monteverdi thing once at the beginning. But for me, it was very important that we make a statement that differentiates the house from the other two houses.’ For the new intendant, this means stressing the company’s energetic, chameleon-like nature. As Kosky says, ‘What opera house in the world does West Side Story and Die Soldaten (two works slated for coming seasons) played and sung by the same people?’