1930–2025: Otto Schenk is dead

He achieved the excellence to which he owed his popularity in the most difficult subject: humor, which he took very seriously throughout his life. With his wit and – even at a young age – wisdom, he won his way into people’s hearts ever since he made his cabaret debut under Karl Farkas. The “laughter successes” in a double conference with Helmut Lohner and his prop monologue “The Greatest Hour of Josef Bieder” became classics. A late highlight was “Too Stupid to Be Old” with Michael Niavarani. Even when only his voice was heard, he made the audience laugh and at the same time deeply touched them.

His dubbing of the animated film “Oben” with Austrian idiom received a lot of attention. In the Austrian version of the 2009 Disney film, he lent his voice to the lovable misanthrope Carl Federicksen. This meant that, at an advanced age, he achieved the feat of scoring points even among the youngest. A demanding audience that should be taken seriously, according to Schenk: Children, he said, should “never be thought of as idiots.” For them, stories have to be told in a particularly exciting way.

Starting signal for a life on stage

Schenk, born on June 12, 1930 in Vienna, was the son of an Austrian notary and an Italian mother, both Catholic. The paternal grandparents were baptized, but of Jewish origin. The Nazi racial laws therefore classified him as a “half-breed”, so he escaped the terror and survived the time of barbarism, albeit only just. After graduating from Stubenbastei – one of his fellow students was Friedrich Gulda – he moved to the Max Reinhardt Seminar after two semesters of law and political science at the University of Vienna.

His theater career began in the 1950s at the Theater der Jugend in Vienna. As an actor at the Volkstheater and in the Josefstadt, and later also as a director, he established the Theater of the Absurd with plays by Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. And he proved early on to be a master of the comedy that is inherent in tragedy. He appeared as a cabaret artist at Simpl. In 1956 he married his colleague Renee Michaelis, whom he had met at the Reinhardt Seminar – a connection for life that was severed after more than seven decades by Renee Schenk’s death. She died in April 2022 after a long illness.

At first she, who was affectionately called “Mika” by her husband, was active as an actress herself before she gave up her own career in favor of her Otto. For example, she appeared as Maria in the legendary ORF series “The Leitner Family”. And at Josefstadt she was in the 1955/56 season as Ida in “By Candlelight” by Karl Farkas and Siegfried Geyer, in 1958/59 as Daisy Delahay in the tabloid comedy “Charley’s Aunt” and most recently in 1968/69 as Yvonne in “Herzliches Condolences” by Georges Feydeau. Their son Konstantin der Schenks, who was born in 1957, was already born. In the same year, Otto Schenk made his debut as an opera director with Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at the Salzburg State Theater.

Bockerer and Bernhard

Schenk played and directed at the most important opera houses in the world: at the Vienna Castle and major German stages as well as at the Scala in Milan. 30 different operas at the Vienna State Opera alone, 15 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York: “I don’t even know when that was and how you can do that. If someone had asked me beforehand: ‘Do you want to do 30 operas at the State Opera?’, I would have said he was crazy. “I didn’t believe it either until they presented me with the list,” wrote Schenk in his biography “I’ll stay a little longer.”

For him, music is a language, or – as the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt used to say – sentences that are composed “just in tones,” he summarized his credo in his memories. He played enthusiastically in “Bockerer”, “The Farmer as a Millionaire” and in Thomas Bernhard’s “Theatermacher”. Peter Turrini wrote roles for him: in “Josef and Maria”, “Grillparzer in the Porn Shop” and “Love in Madagascar”.

In the 1980s he was a member of the board of directors at the Salzburg Festival for two years, and from 1988 to 1997 he was director at the Josefstadt. He was a chamber actor and honorary member of the Vienna State Opera and Theater in der Josefstadt, and in his 80s he became a “citizen of Vienna”.

Laughter against fear

“Otto Schenk has the art of making people laugh like no other. But because this laughter is linked to the secret recognition of human fallibility, people love him,” was the reason given for “Nestroy” in 2000 for his life’s work. “Otto Schenk helps them to dissolve their fears for a moment through laughter. And in doing so, it comforts them about their own misfortunes and their own weaknesses. This is how he became the most popular actor in Austria.”

“The greatest adventure,” Schenk once said, is “life itself.” The most terrible thing was “war and persecution by the Nazis” and the best thing was that you survived that. To see that peace had returned.

The adventure has been lived, the story has been told to the end. He cannot be replaced. He left a lot behind. “Life,” he noted in his memoirs, “is something you only do while you are alive. And sometimes you stay longer than you live. And then I don’t want to stay just a little bit when I’m no longer alive. So I’ll stay a little longer.”