Schnitzler’s “Reigen” as music theater

At the time, Arthur Schnitzler's "Reigen" was scandalous and kept under lock and key. In the 1990s, Philipp Boesmans turned the material into an opera. The production in Stuttgart now lifts it into the here and now - with wit and surprisingly tonal. Ten couples, ten times sex? There is nothing to see on stage. What is publicly negotiated is what the changing sexual partners have to talk about with each other before and after. When Arthur Schnitzler's "Reigen" premiered in 1920, the play nevertheless caused a stir. So much so, in fact, that the "Reigen" was henceforth kept under lock and key. It was not until 1982 that it was allowed to be performed again. Eleven years later, the Belgian composer Philipp Boesmans made an opera out of it, premiered in Brussels. The conductor of the premiere, Sylvain Cambreling, is now General Music Director in Stuttgart. There, he was on the podium yesterday for a new production of Boesmans' "Reigen." The composer turns 80 next week, and his opera was staged by a 46-year-old, Nicola Hümpel of Berlin. And she has indeed rescued the piece into the present day. The "in-out game" also as stage design It seems as if Schnitzler's "Reigen" was just waiting to be brought to the stage in times of dating apps and cyber sex. In any case, director Nicola Hümpel and her team "Nico and the Navigators" have located the play entirely in the here and now. Every now and then, someone pulls out a cell phone, takes a selfie or types something into it. After the encounter, there is a photo that is projected onto the back wall of the stage and then wiped aside, as is usual with the relevant apps. One stays, the other leaves. Clear the way for the next copulation partner. One after the other, they try it out with each other: harlot and soldier, soldier and parlor maid, parlor maid and young gentleman, and so on. The names are still from Schnitzler, the characters are from today. The stage is a cold room within a room: a low stone-grey ceiling always remains the same, for each encounter two new walls are brought in from the right, from the left the seating or reclining furniture comes through a hole in the wall. Set designer Oliver Proske has imaginatively transferred the old in-out game to the stage. However, the equation "new bed, new happiness" never works out. Where Arthur Schnitzler writes only dashes and leaves the rest to the imagination of the reader or the director, Philipp Boesmans composes sometimes a glassy fragile, sometimes a hard mechanistic music of togetherness. This sounds surprisingly tonal; in a mixture of Alban Berg and French Impressionism, conductor Sylvain Cambreling and the Stuttgart Orchestra spread out a wide palette of colors. However, he cannot avoid the impression that the composition also turns in circles at some point and could well have been streamlined by half an hour. On the whole entertaining and with consistently good singers Because the direction takes the topic rather lightly, it remains an overall entertaining evening. There is no sex to be seen, rather documents of its failure. And that is often quite funny. The soldier splashes some liquid across the stage before it even really gets to touching. The sweet girl bites so heartily into a sausage that her counterpart becomes frightened. Young woman and young man can't find the right position in a much too narrow foam landscape. Via live video, the faces can be seen in close-ups, which in this case actually fits well, because the consistently very good singers also turn out to be excellent actors. This results in eye dramaturgies that range from sublime pathos to irritated disgust and rarely match each other. Only a dancing couple, which can be seen again and again as a film in between, remains as a utopia in the background, happy, dissolved, with the idea that physical closeness and love could actually be reconciled. A notion that fades, but at least cannot be wiped away quite so quickly.

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