Continuity and Innovation (published in OPERNWELT, February 2020 issue)

Since founding Heartbeat Opera, the German director Louisa Proske has found an artistic home in New York

Whether popping up at unusual performance sites such as Manhattan’s hippest park, the High Line, or a club in Brooklyn, or its main stage, the elegant 200-seat black box theater at Baruch Performing Arts Center — in only five years, Heartbeat Opera has become the most ambitious independent opera company in New York. It was founded in 2014 by Washington D.C.-born Ethan Heard, and a native Berliner: Louisa Proske. The Heartbeat team created their latest season with two million dollars. Its remarkable distillations of the repertoire make opera accessible to young audiences from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds, for whom opera would otherwise remain a closed book.

The company’s trademark is classics in chamber format, reconceived for small ensembles by co-music director Daniel Schlosberg. And importantly, the productions of director Louisa Proske. Again and again her original ideas, seeking contemporary access to themes and characters, have caused a stir - with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (2016), Bizet’s Carmen (2017), or Mozart’s Don Giovanni (2018). Recently, Proske, together with co-director Chloe Treat, presented a version of Weber’s Der Freischütz, that opened the piece up to an audience very little familiar with German Schauerromantik . The Wolf Crag was set in Texas. Max and Kaspar, a traumatized war veteran, were deputy sheriffs for police chief Kuno. One of the themes of the production was the crisis of masculinity in present-day America. Outside of her work with Heartbeat, Proske regularly directs Shakespeare, and the New York Philharmonic has commissioned a new production of Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All (1946) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Where does her passion for Musiktheater come from? As a child she regularly visited Berlin’s three opera houses, she says. Her father’s family lived in East Germany, the other half in the West. “The Wall, and more widely the idea of borders made a deep mark on my cultural consciousness.” In her Carmen, which was created in the immediate aftermath of the Trump election, Don José was a guard at a border post between the US and Mexico. After the fall of the wall in 1989, the Komische Oper Berlin was looking for new voices for its children’s chorus. Louisa Proske was one of the first West Berlin children that were accepted, at eight years old. “Very soon, I was on stage almost every week, singing and acting in Harry Kupfer’s lovingly cared-for productions. The idea that opera could be a living theater with characters crafted with great detail and integrity, and that it could also be spectacle and popular art, this idea was familiar to me early as a child.” She knows the legendary directing work of Walter Felsenstein only from video tapes, but his spirit, she says, was felt everywhere. In the performances of the older soloists like Anny Schlemm, but also behind the scenes: “My God, what a passion at work, what an alchemy of common effort! It has influenced me deeply.”

Louisa Proske believes unwaveringly in opera as utopia: in the moving force of that human machine, in which vastly different skills and talents work together to create a collective experience - one that the audience can take home with them. And she learned something else at the Komische Oper: the advantage of long-term collaborators. Heartbeat Opera does not have a fixed ensemble, but in order to develop a personal aesthetic, and a sustainable profile, its soloists, artistic teams and crews often return, sometimes for five, six or more productions. “A healthy balance between continuity and innovation, that is the key.” --- David Shengold