In the intelligent new Stuttgart production of Philippe Boesman's "Reigen," based on Arthur Schnitzler and Luc Bondy, director Nicola Hümpel shows that she has a light hand, a lot of feeling and a sharp mind. In the theater, five minutes is a long time when no one says anything and, in the opera, even the musicians sit silently by. In Stuttgart's Großes Haus, however, the production of Philipp Boesmans' musical theater piece "Reigen" gets off to a fabulous start, and the silent prelude does not last a second. Under a suspended roof, ten actors are rehearsing a first performance for the following scenes. Man and woman, woman and man. They eye each other, move around, sniff each other out. After all, there's truth in the saying that at some point people can no longer smell each other. But that will be later. For the moment, the hour strikes them all here, in which they know nothing of each other: the strumpet nothing of the soldier, Mrs. Emma nothing of the young gentleman and the poet Robert nothing of the singer, who is still an actress with Doctor Arthur Schnitzler, who writes the "Reigen" in 1896. Two years after the play is finally premiered in Berlin in 1920 (and immediately banned), Sigmund Freud, who previously had not always had only sympathy for Schnitzler's theatrical mission and soul work, writes: "Her being seized by the drive nature of man, her decomposition of cultural-conventional certainties, the adherence of her thoughts to the polarity of love and death, all this touches me with an uncanny familiarity." No wonder, then, that one of the greatest psychoanalysts in the theater, director Luc Bondy, who died last year, took the original and made it slightly comedic-boulevardesque at the Brussels Opera nearly a quarter-century ago, looking for the joke where you'd least expect it: post-coital, when humans as animals are supposed to be sad throughout. Bondy thought it was hilarious, too, and so did the composer Philippe Boesmans, then already long promoted by musical theater innovator Gerard Mortier and hailing from near Liège, who delivered a curiously spun, quote-rich, masterfully crafted score that was replayed from Frankfurt to Amsterdam. In the theater, five minutes is a long time when no one says anything and, in opera, even the musicians sit silently by. In Stuttgart's Großes Haus, however, the production of Philipp Boesmans' music theater piece "Reigen" gets off to a fabulous start, and the silent prelude does not last a second. Under a suspended roof, ten actors are rehearsing a first performance for the following scenes. Man and woman, woman and man. They eye each other, move around, sniff each other out. After all, there's truth in the saying that at some point people can no longer smell each other. But that will be later. For the moment, the hour strikes them all here, in which they know nothing of each other: the strumpet nothing of the soldier, Mrs. Emma nothing of the young gentleman and the poet Robert nothing of the singer, who is still an actress with Doctor Arthur Schnitzler, who writes the "Reigen" in 1896. Two years after the play is finally premiered in Berlin in 1920 (and immediately banned), Sigmund Freud, who previously had not always had only sympathy for Schnitzler's theatrical mission and soul work, writes: "Her being seized by the drive nature of man, her decomposition of cultural-conventional certainties, the adherence of her thoughts to the polarity of love and death, all this touches me with an uncanny familiarity." No wonder, then, that one of the greatest psychoanalysts in the theater, director Luc Bondy, who died last year, took the original and made it slightly comedic-boulevardesque at the Brussels Opera nearly a quarter-century ago, looking for the joke where you'd least expect it: post-coital, when humans as animals are supposed to be sad throughout. Bondy also found it hilarious, and so did the composer Philippe Boesmans, who at that time had already been promoted for some time by the musical theater innovator Gerard Mortier and who came from near Liège, and who delivered a curiously spun, quote-rich, masterfully crafted score that was replayed from Frankfurt to Amsterdam.

In the presence of the Belgian composer Philippe Boesmans, the Stuttgart State Opera performed his music theater work "Reigen" about messed-up relationship boxes as a tragicomedy. A great evening. Stuttgart - Contemporary operas, once premiered, rarely catch on at other opera houses. Exceptions, as always, prove the rule, and one of these exceptions, intelligently interpreted, is Philippe Boesman's version of "Reigen" after Doctor Arthur Schnitzler, whose historically disturbing theatrical text from the beginning of the twentieth century was contemporarily arranged by director Luc Bondy 23 years ago in Brussels. However, 23 years is also a long time, but now in Stuttgart it doesn't matter at all. In the reading of director Nicola Hümpel, who enlivens the scene with impressive changes of perspective, wit, feeling and not only incidental, but aesthetically formative video work, the work appears as if it were new. From B for Bendziunaite to P for Pavelic, this is all highly thought-out opera theater, musically sounded out in detail by conductor Sylvain Cambreling with the Stuttgart State Orchestra. At the final "Servus!" in the tenth picture, one is pleased to think that the farewell here also always means a beginning. One would like to see/hear it again. Great evening, best atmosphere.

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.

After a decade, the Stuttgart Opera has once again been voted the best of the year. So it's a little hard to think that in two years the artistic direction will change. Looking back on a successful season. In the seventies, Jossi Wieler, who grew up on Lake Constance, studied in Tel Aviv and worked at the Habima National Theater; one often doesn't even think about it. He knew German theater mainly from theater magazines, in which at that time, when Botho Strauß was still an editor and not yet a national writer, theater was spoken of as if it were, at least by proxy, the world. So: for itself and quite seriously. It was the time of Peter Zadek, Peter Stein, Hans Neuenfels and Pina Bausch, and "exactly where they were," Jossi Wieler once said - appropriately enough, we were sitting in the Turmstüberl of Munich's "Valentin-Musäum," "I wanted to go there, too. That worked out so far for the stranger in the stranger, with whom one has not been able to get rid of the feeling from the beginning, i.e. since Bonn acting times in the Werkstatttheater, as if he, with means changing according to the occasion, always wants to tell only one story, because perhaps - of the love possibly overcoming all conflicts - there is also only one story that is always worth telling: that of power and powerlessness, that of master and servant. Wieler's pictures have this quality: that they accompany you through life, make you think, sometimes even guide you. For example his "Amphytrion", a high bar exercise, at the same time free and faithful to Heinrich von Kleist, which in 1985, more than thirty years ago, he had Robert Hunger-Bühler perform in a highly original way - actually on the apparatus and on the stage, which at that time was already designed by Anna Viebrock. Was that a god, how he swung and talked and flew! And was that an analysis, how he, swinging, circled the language. Only to land again on the ground, where the assistant Sosias was onionized, as one cannot say otherwise. In a balloon above time Wieler's daring gymnasium acrobatics of yesteryear came back to mind when one sat in the performance of Vincenzo Bellini's "I Puritani", literally marveling at the stage design. For once again the will to think laterally, to be different, was crystal-clearly recognizable, even strengthened by co-director Sergio Morabito. But not out of affability or because one could not think of anything better, but out of consistent deliberation. So the play only became a contemporary play (about virtue terror, religious abuse, cadaver obedience, etc.) because it was left in its time, centuries ago. And yet it was contemporary, oppressively close in its drama, which Wieler/Morabito only rarely broke up ironically. Like, to take a breath. In this special season, the terror of the 17th century in the air was matched by Kirill Serebrennikov's direction, which worked with both biblical force and virtuosity with video and live cam. He saw Richard Strauss' "Salome" above all as the downfall of the political gang around Herod (here: master and servant in one person): not as a sultry, but as an evil parable. And, please: no pity. In Serebrennikov as well as in Christoph Marthaler ("The Tales of Hoffmann") and Nicola Hümpel ("Reigen"), the dramaturgy in the past season had sought out the counterparts it needed in order to continue to move confidently in its own visual language. All three of them presented productions that the former house director Andrea Moses had never managed to the same extent: written in their own way, but not obsessed with asserting a topicality that is no longer exactly that when it comes across as over-demonstrative. It's quite possible that the artistic directors didn't choose the advertising image for the new season by chance: an entire Großes Haus, with motivated people inside, takes off in the shape of a balloon. They know where the earth is. But they want to get up there a bit, if they can. A pound to grow with The prime example of "Salome," a performance from which people came out as if they had just learned to spell the word opera, teaches us, by the way, that the good things are often very close at hand, or work. The Coburg opera director Roland Kluttig, whose "Parsifal" this season (in Coburg!) can be looked forward to, was quickly booked as a substitute. Kluttig is a Stuttgart product from the Lothar Zagrosek era, whom the dramaturge Juliane Votteler (now opera director in Augsburg) already attested at the time that he was not only a "transmission belt," but already had great personal responsibility. Kluttig proved how big that is now when he electrified Strauss in such a well-dosed way that the walls almost shook in the Stuttgart Opera. In addition to GMD Sylvain Cambreling, who will still be in charge of the next two seasons under the artistic direction of Jossi Wieler, further conductors of Kluttig's caliber would be very desirable and definitely in the spirit of the workshop idea. Apropos, workshop, walls - and yes: will the award for "Opera House of the Year" by the magazine "Opernwelt" bring anything in this respect? That someone would be chosen by the politicians who would do nothing but see to it that plans, if they existed, were quickly put into practice (where in principle it is already past twelve)? And that, at all, perhaps once is tried to grow with such a pound as it represents now times such a distinction? Germany has, what one should not forget perhaps, some large city operas, which are hardly or no longer in function: In Cologne, as in Berlin's Linden Opera, construction seems to be going on forever. Frankfurt, where there is an excellently managed house, is facing renovation measures that cannot yet be calculated. Stuttgart, a glance at the almost pompously funded and managed Munich may suffice as a warning, has a lot to lose, and more than one title: its audience.