Potente Opera: “Reigen” by Philippe Boesmans

Sex on the opera stage? That's where it often gets stuck with these people. But Philippe Boesmans' music is potent. The "Reigen" is acclaimed in Stuttgart. The harlot has sex with the soldier. And he with the parlor maid Mizzi, who then does it with the young gentleman, who then dates the young woman in the hotel, who later lies in the marriage bed with her husband Gottfried. The husband meets the sweet girl, the latter meets the inhibited poet, the latter meets the actress. Then the actress also has a rendezvous with the count - who is drunk with the harlot. The "round dance" comes to a close. Arthur Schnitzler wrote the famous play still in Danube monarchic Vienna, at the end of the 19th century, it is about seduction and vulnerability, about desire and weariness, about longing and disappointment, but more about the biological "mechanics" and less about an erotic encounter, more about frustration than about love and happy satisfaction. And all this up and down the social strata. That's the finding: sex happens, but then escape happens quickly. This "Reigen" was considered scandalous and unperformable for a long time, then came on stage in 1920 at the Kleines Schauspielhaus Berlin of Gertrud Eysoldt, a criminal trial followed, and the unnerved Schnitzler forbade by copyright all further performances from 1922 on, which was valid until 1982. So - but now let's imagine that the "Reigen" had become a real long-running hit in the 1920s and that a composer Alban Berg, fascinated by it, had not only composed Büchner's "Wozzeck", but had also cheekily and humorously created a comic Schnitzler opera, that is, at least a tragicomic one: with the tonal language of an atonal-melodic Viennese school, but also with ironic quotations from half of music history and a good portion of expressionist zeitgeist of the Franz Schreker brand. No, Alban Berg did not do that, nor did any of his colleagues from that time. But the opera still exists, only it was composed in this form by the Belgian Philippe Boesmans on a libretto by Luc Bondy and premiered in Brussels in 1993. Now this "Reigen" can finally be experienced and discovered at the Stuttgart Opera House. A delayed classic of the modern age, so to speak. Boesmans is a gifted theater musician, he can illustrate, he is lyrical and he has wit: the nervous young gentleman curses not the woman, but in the same "Salome" tone of Herod, the insects buzzing around him: "Kill this mosquito!" The orchestra then celebrates the long-awaited success of the erectile young lord with the chorale "Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan" and baroque triumphant trumpets. That's quite a bit of opera: superbly played by the Staatsorchester under the baton of Sylvain Cambreling. He was already the premiere conductor, played the work also in his time as Frankfurt opera director and knows every nuance, every mood, every effect. It was a very tonally plastic, pointed premiere. Great applause - also for the bowing, very touched 79-year-old composer Boesmans. The Stuttgart ensemble was in excellent form: among them Rebecca von Lipinski as the young woman, Kora Pavelic as the wonderfully bug-eyed, naive sweet girl, and Matthias Klink as the grotesquely libidinous poet. And Melanie Diener emphatically gives the prima donna - in opera, the actress is a singer who at least rehearses coloratura with relish. The actors' grimace play provides for laughs. Thanks to virtuoso video art, the audience can be close to the action in this co-production of the Stuttgart Opera with "Nico and the Navigators" from Berlin. Director Nicola Hümpel and her team present the "Reigen" stylishly designed and also a bit trashy spiced up in the cell phone age. Not a shocker production, not opera porn, but a serious game of lust. And after each scene, a character has to leave the scene: one last snapshot, then a hand wipes the picture away smartphone-like. A pair of dancers, a man and a woman as a romantic counter-image of real erotic togetherness, is also inserted by video: whenever the real actors get tangled up in their inability to love. Gladly also on treacherous furniture, on rocking sofa seesaws or the disintegrating marriage bed. The furniture travels on the revolving stage through the walls of various rooms - a very own round dance. Everything hollow, surreal. Like the love rituals.

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