Uncomfortable times are ahead of the opera.
If you visit the refreshing Opera Forward Festival at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam and talk to its director Sophie de Lint, you can already feel the front lines of future struggles over art.
"When I 'Eurydice.
When I put Manfred Trojahn's Die Liebenden, blind' on the program, I got angry letters after the premiere,” reports de Lint in an interview with this newspaper.
The work is too old masterly, too full of assumptions and Eurocentric in its reference to the ancient myth, to four hundred years of opera history, to Rainer Maria Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus".
Above all, the artistic team of "all old white men" was unbearable.
You can't do something like that anymore "today".
the rhetorical stones,
with which one wants to smash the windows of the opera here, fly from the direction of an aggressive academic milieu of students at universities and art schools.
They have discovered the slogans of diversity, accessibility and decolonization as ammunition for firing on art autonomy.
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the Feuilleton.
Follow I follow
Sophie de Lint puts it more mildly, of course.
She tries to react intelligently and de-escalating to this pressure by approaching the young critics.
“At the opera, we gave the art school students the opportunity to show us how they wanted to work.
These young people show us the way to the future of opera.
They make it clear to us in what form stories should be told in the future and what messages are important.
If we don't listen to this criticism at all, we won't win any new audiences for the opera."
The conductor Lorenzo Viotti, newly appointed music director, reiterates the statements made by his artistic director during the presentation of the 2022/23 season program: "In conversations with young people, especially at public rehearsals, I noticed that they need strong feelings.
They must be emotionally addressed by the narrative form or the story itself.
You're looking for that. Maybe even the shock.
And if they don't find that, they reject the opera completely." But Sophie de Lint added later: "It was also clear to me that something like Manfred Trojahn's opera would not be taken away from me.
That has to have its right and its place.” New hostilities as a response to old ones are not to be had with her.
When a famous director wanted to hold seminars on empowering women in theater at her house, de Lint,
as she puts it: “I don't have anything like that.
I don't separate men and women when it comes to 'empowerment'.”
What do the new narrative forms with strong feelings look like?
Composer Philip Venables, together with director Ted Huffman, took up an authentic case from 2016 in "Denis & Katya": Two fifteen-year-old Russian schoolchildren had fled their parents, some of whom were violent, withdrew heavily armed into a house and left a trail of destruction in their wake .
They filmed their escape, their violence, their confrontation with the police and put everything on the Internet, linked to live chats.
To the deadly end.
Huffman and Venables very sensitively refuse any illustration of what is happening.
They tell instead of showing.
The two actors, Michael Wilmering and Inna Demenkova, constantly change roles in an epic break.
The music of four cellists, of course, does no more
as the respective emotional situation or to imitate the typing of text messages with repeated tones.
The piece is as accessible as it is shocking.
In terms of genre, it may tie in with the mono-operas of the Soviet composer Grigori Frid (“The Diary of Anne Frank”, “Letters of Van Gogh”), but without making their musical demands.
The music makes itself small in favor of the pedagogical effect.
The result is a kind of “Peter and the Wolf” for online natives in their teens.
without, however, making their musical demands.
The music makes itself small in favor of the pedagogical effect.
The result is a kind of “Peter and the Wolf” for online natives in their teens.
without, however, making their musical demands.
The music makes itself small in favor of the pedagogical effect.
The result is a kind of “Peter and the Wolf” for online natives in their teens.