The opera director Otto Schenk, 76, says that his current production of Don Pasquale will be the last work he does for New York’s Metropolitan Opera – in fact, it took some prodding from the Met’s Joseph Volpe and the presence of legendary Anna Netrebko to coax Schenk out of his semi-retirement at all. “He is a link to an earlier, even a prewar tradition of German-language theater, down to the earthy dry humor that harks back to cabaret traditions of the 1920’s.”