There are many reasons why people go to the opera that are not talked about.

The motifs are filled with shame, are perceived as pathetic, even shabby.

It can be about replacing sexuality that has not been lived out, about pure emotional discharge, i.e. doing emotional defecation, about compensating for a lack of respect or even love, about temporarily pumping up your own measly ego through projections onto monumental figures.

For the director Axel Ranisch, the opera is also a place of knowledge for what the audience represses in itself.

But he takes no pleasure in exposing the poor sausage in the opera lover, instead wanting to use compassion to replace repression with acceptance.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The Lyon Opera is now showing Ranisch's reading of Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto.

The director, who is equally adept at music theater and film, books and radio plays, tells a story of abuse in the gambling den milieu on stage (equipment: Falko Herold), and in the film a story of abuse in the high-rise milieu of Berlin-Lichtenberg.

On stage, it is actually Gilda who is being abused by the Duke of Mantua, a mafioso.

In the film it is Hugo (the actor Heiko Pinkowski) who is first betrayed by a woman who raises a cuckoo's daughter who is then seduced by her biological father.

This Hugo desperately likes to hear "Rigoletto" because he identifies with the duke's court jester, Gilda's father.

Only he fantasizes - like children sometimes,

This is told in a sophisticated way, at the same time with great technical virtuosity, because gestures in the film are coordinated to the second with the musical accents of what is happening on stage.

Ranisch, who has already interlinked film and stage several times, goes one step further here and combines both art forms into a polyphonic, not parallel, but opposing narrative with motif crossings.

This is a new quality in his own development as a director, although the danger that the film could gain the upper hand over the stage becomes apparent.

This is of course mainly due to the captivating presence of the saddened Heiko Pinkowski.

Extreme ambition can be heard from the moat in Lyon: Daniele Rustioni, promoted from chief conductor to music director, wants to make Lyon “the best opera house in France when it comes to Italian repertoire”.

Leaping elegance and crackling aggressiveness in pianissimo can be heard here from the orchestra.

Rustioni breathes just as precisely with the soloists as with the chorus, trained to the highest precision by Benedict Kearns.

Every hit is there;

nothing falls apart, yet the music remains flexible and organic;

it keeps the volume levels perfectly balanced.

Enea Scala is a visual attraction as the Duke and brilliant as a performer for his character's manipulative narcissism.