← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · hqz
Thread ID: 14316 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-06-25
2004-06-25 02:46 | User Profile
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Opera: Die Entführung aus dem Serail By Shirley Apthorp Published: June 22 2004
Maria Bengtsson's coloratura is flawless, her tone sweet and clear. And Kirill Petrenko has a rough idea of how Mozart goes, even if his pace is too brisk for the singers and his balance is poor. The orchestra has played worse, and the cast certainly gives its all.
It is not possible to say anything else good about Calixto Bieito's new production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail for Berlin's Komische Oper. The rest is obscenity and degradation, senseless violence and gore.
Bassa Selim is lord of a brothel, rather than a harem, and keeps Konstanza on a leash in a cage. Bieito has decided Mozart's opera is about prostitution and the slave trade, and he has hired real hookers to prove it. The opera opens with Osmin using one. He sings his first aria naked in the shower, giving his genitals a good scrub.
Later he urinates in a glass and forces Blonde to drink it. Then, while Konstanza sings "Martern aller Arten", he hacks up a whore with a knife, finally offering the soprano a pair of bloodied, severed nipples. No wonder she shoots herself at the end.
Whatever moral points Bieito may feel he is making, what he serves up is sick, violent pornography. Nudity, sex, torture, alcohol, drugs, rape, murder and madness - but no joy, no humour and certainly no love.
Presumably because most of the audience would otherwise leave, Bieito plays the whole thing without an interval. You forget after the first half-hour that it's Mozart's music running in the background. The singing becomes just one more athletic feat performed by the cast between orgies. This is not art. It is puerile attention-seeking.
Bieito contends that love is impossible and this kind of imagery is normal. Perhaps if he stopped watching X-rated films and started listening to Mozart, he would think differently. If our sensation-hungry opera world has to go to this length to get press attention, we have a problem. Tel: + 49 30 4799 7400
No stars
Berlin today is obviously even more decadent than it was in the 1920s. How far the mighty have fallen since the reign of Frederick the Great, who would have dealt summarily with queer pipsqueak Bieito.[/FONT]