‘Make opera living’: why the operatic world is divided over some European stage directors’ radical reinventions of beloved works
- ‘I’m known for my irritating work, and I think I was hired for that,’ says a director who puts cocaine-fuelled fights and a near-naked hooker in a Mozart opera
- Such reinventions of beloved works don’t sit well with some who put on operas. Yet modern stage settings rejected by audiences a few years are accepted now
The opera world is split in two: some European productions reinvent works in ways composers never imagined, while traditional stagings favoured in the United States and parts of Italy are condemned by some cognoscenti as passé.
Martin Kušej’s vision of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Salzburg Festival in Austria includes cocaine-fuelled fights, a predator priest, a nearly naked hooker and a basement garage rave.
Damiano Michieletto transforms Verdi’s Aida at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Germany, into an antiwar jeremiad in which Radamès collapses from PTSD during a Triumphal March of amputees and the High Priest Ramfis attempts to marry the King’s daughter Amneris.
Tobias Kratzer’s staging of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, revived at this year’s Bayreuth Festival, also in Germany, envisions a clown-clad title character as part of a counterculture clique with a drag queen, dwarf and love goddess in a sequined cocktail dress who runs over a cop with a Citroën van in a Burger King car park.
“I’m very well known for my irritating work, and I think I was hired especially for that,” Kušej says.