There are surprising cross-references between Bernhard Lang's opera "Der Golem," premiered in Mannheim, and the new Stuttgart production of Philippe Boesmans' "Reigen" after Arthur Schnitzler. They poke frantically at their smartphones. Video inserts reflect their faces. Soon, however, the portraits are wiped away by a hand: as if they themselves were merely offers and products on a display, to be used as needed - or to be deleted without further ado. Nicola Hümpel makes a strong association in her new production of the Schnitzler opera "Reigen" by Philippe Boesmans at the Stuttgart State Opera. Hümpel takes the social criticism further, which is already clearly outlined in the original by Arthur Schnitzler - his scandalous play from 1897 is far more than a study of promiscuity and sex between people of different social backgrounds; in Schnitzler's work, the disturbed sociality of modern man is exposed. Intimacy and Sex This is where Hümpel and her Berlin company Nico and the Navigators come in: Pornography and sexual partners have never been available so quickly, anonymously and unhindered as in the age of the Internet and social networks. Schnitzler's vision of a total alienation of the now digital ego and collective isolation seems to have come true. Hümpel develops her diagnosis in a chamber play - all the more compelling because she is interested first and foremost in the interior and intimacy of the characters. Videos, which she integrates for the first time, show the individual faces of the characters, magnify their reactions like magnifying glasses, capture the smallest emotions. In keeping with this, Oliver Proske's stage primarily exhibits the characters themselves - as if in a panopticon. The production benefits considerably from the engaging presence and brilliant acting of the soloists. All sorts of characters amuse and injure themselves here: the singer (Melanie Diener) and the poet (Matthias Klink), the strumpet (Lauryna Bendžiūnaitė) and the soldier (Daniel Kluge), the count (André Morsch), the husband (Shigeo Ishino) or the young woman (Rebecca von Lipinski). Hümpel makes some of them fidget nervously, almost uniformly and mechanically, with which the disturbed social role models become all the more clear. In this way, the Stuttgart "Reigen" takes a fundamentally different approach than the more recent "Reigen" opera that Austrian Bernhard Lang served up for the 2014 Schwetzingen Festival. While Georges Delnon's Schwetzingen "Reigen" direction focused mainly on provocative mattress acrobatics, Hümpel is concerned with the hidden longings and fears behind them. Where occasionally absurd pillow fights are staged or ejaculates splash far into the theater sky, the topical and moral explosiveness is humorously broken: In this way, the Stuttgart "Reigen" does not fall into the simple voyeur and sex trap. In this way Hümpel not only sharpens Schnitzler's intention, but also Boesmans'. Just as Schnitzler omitted the consummation of the acts of love by dots, Boesmans refrains from explicit intercourse music, for instance after the model of the "Rosenkavalier" prelude by Richard Strauss or the "Lady Macbeth of Mzensk" by Shostakovich. Moreover, Hümpel picks up on the character direction that is laid out in Boesmans' colorful music. Similar to Lang, Boesmans works with a postmodern variety of styles in "Reigen." But while Lang's music soon exhausts itself in arbitrary, quasi-minimalist redundancy, Boesmans uses the variety of styles to effectively characterize the characters. Baroque pomp, late Romantic pathos, quotations or sounds of early modernism: the Belgian composer's repertoire is rich. With Bernhard Lang, on the other hand, stylistic diversity remains more of an end in itself. This is also the case with his new opera "Der Golem", which has now been premiered at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, in a decorative directorial installation by Peter Missotten. It is based on the once widely read novel of the same name by Gustav Meyrink, which was published in 1915. Behind the Golem is a creature that haunts the Jewish ghetto of Prague every 33 years. It appears to the jeweler Athanasius Pernath (Thomas Berau), who promptly encounters strange characters - such as the junk dealer Wassertrum and his hateful son (Alin Deleanu) or the beautiful Angelina (Astrid Kessler). With klezmer and salon music, also pop and jazz sounds, Lang's music leads into the respective places of the plot, but the material itself and the characters remain monotonously drawn. Even in the vocal style Lang renounces differentiations, in order to always oscillate between speaking, singing and reciting - occasionally spiced with a shot of onomatopoeia. This soon comes across as similarly interchangeable as the constant repetitions, which increase the comprehensibility of the text, but spell out the plot all too simply. Yet Meyrink's "Golem" is not simply a horror novel, but is based - highly complex at the time - on findings of modern dream psychology, oriental-occult visions, Jewish secret teachings and not least on the romantic fantasy of an E. T. A. Hoffmann. Being and Appearance Meyrink sketches dark twilight states of the inner life of the soul until the boundaries between being and appearance, ego and outer world become blurred. This ambiguity remains unused and unheard in Lang's opera version - a fact reinforced by Joseph Trafton's somewhat sweeping musical direction. In contrast, Stuttgart's "Reigen" shines not least thanks to the exemplary differentiation of Boesmans' score by Sylvain Cambreling and the Stuttgart State Orchestra. Cambreling had already conducted the world premiere of the opera at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels in 1993 - his experience of the work and his clairvoyance now benefited this important new production.

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