Even the temporary stupefaction that the act of love entails: Stuttgart Opera prepares a smart performance for Philippe Boesmans' epicurean Schnitzler opera "Reigen". The scandal caused by the premiere of Arthur Schnitzler's "Reigen" 96 years ago is no longer imaginable. However, giggling accompanies promiscuous events across social classes to this day and is also a sign of embarrassment. The Belgian composer Philippe Boesmans also wrote music for the time between the before and the after, which is what Schnitzler is about. He gives directors the opportunity and the task to show one sex scene after the other, to put it bluntly. In Stuttgart, director Nicola Hümpel solves this problem with great affection. People sink into mattresses, slip off the self-acting bed, devour each other extraordinarily, handle phallically deformed sofa cushions as if by chance, roll around in a mud bath, and they actually chew on a Vienna sausage. Man does what he can, but in the end it is not enough. On a video screen, a video screen finally used sensibly and unashamedly, one sees the faces in close-up. Naked horror can be seen reflected on them, the temporary stupor that the act of love brings, the ugliness of greed. The music echoes itself and others To this the music rustles, chirps, jingles and echoes itself and others. The former in a web of motifs that seem to waft from one scene to the next. The second in a high incidence of quotation, directly - the "Salome" verbiage "Man kill this mosquito" - and indirectly through Wagner or Bach imitations. The characters, erotically animated, are pathetically high-pitched in the manner of 1920, and more recent avant-garde is in any case not the theme when Boesmans comes on the scene. Instead, it shows how the relatively tonal opera could have a future beyond the already known with the (in Stuttgart after a good three hours enthusiastic) audience. Debussyian impressionism and Richard Strauss' intoxicants are extended into the present day and enriched with impertinence (which was already not alien to Strauss). The effect is immediate and original, even if epigonal things are hidden in it and not at all. Colorful and noble, the Staatsorchester Stuttgart rolls out Boesman's epicurean music under the baton of Sylvain Cambreling, who conducted the premiere in Brussels in 1993. Luc Bondy is no longer alive, the librettist who spiced up Schnitzler's text and certainly had no intention of deepening it or making it more thoroughly spiritual. But composer Boesmans arrived, and colleagues claim to have seen tears of emotion in his eyes. Few new operas have another opportunity to show off 23 years after their premiere. Hümpel's concept is unconditionally comedic, but even the silliest is well done. What is the silliest? Perhaps the, uh, foam rubber molded, slowly extending penises? The tailor-made already shows the perfect stage design by Oliver Proske. The furniture for the respective scene, which just misses the probable, comes in on a revolving stage, between room dividers with funny wallpaper, between which beds, tables, people fit through by means of precisely sawn-out holes. Or not, in which case the floor lamp slowly falls over as the stage rolls on, just as the man is not granted stability in every situation. Five female and five male soloists do wonderfully well vocally with their uncluttered but substantial performances and are also very much challenged acting-wise: Lauryna Bendziunaite (a fine strumpet) and Daniel Kluge (a compact soldier), Stine Marie Fischer (a resolute parlor maid) and Sebastian Kohlhepp (a drippy young gentleman), Rebecca von Lipinski and Shigeo Ishino (a hilarious married couple), Kora Pavelic (an extremely goal-oriented sweet girl) and Matthias Klink (a poet aptly unifying narcissism and self-irony), Melanie Diener (a diva in sound and movement) and André Morsch (a Helge Schneider-like count). That the actors on stage are juxtaposed in their human inadequacy with a tender on-screen love couple (Julia von Landsberg and Michael Shapira) is not compelling, but neither is it ludicrous. That Hümpel gets a kick out of using prop repetition to suggest other lovers besides the ones shown is just as fine. Variety is the motto of the evening, nightmares are there. But the dark sides of desire, profiteering, exploitation have no place here, not with Bondy, not with Boesmans, not with Hümpel.

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