When, after two and a quarter hours of playing and agonizingly long torture scenes, the priest Grandier, accused of witchcraft, finally dies by fire, a short orchestral postlude follows - no sounds symbolizing consolation and redemption in the string heaven, but a dull vocal instrumental bubbling that burns into the audience's memory.
It sounds like an echo of the horrible events rising from the depths of the people's soul.
In the end, this people has gone from being a dull, manipulable collection of individuals to a loyal community of active tormentors, whose circle the convict staggers along almost endlessly according to the old military ritual of running the gauntlet.
One of the many strong scenes in the stirring new production of Krzysztof Penderecki's first play The Devils of Loudun,
with which the Munich Opera Festival was opened.
It was a great, unanimous success with the audience, which was not marred by the fact that the leading actor Wolfgang Koch fell ill a few days before the premiere and had to be doubled by baritone Jordan Shanahan in the orchestra pit and actor Robert Dölle on stage;
as a double grandier, they earned a special round of applause.
The three-act play, premiered in 1969 in the Liebermann era at the Hamburg State Opera and played through without a break, presented itself as a heavyweight among the stage works of the twentieth century, comparable to Bernd Alois Zimmermann's "Soldaten";
both works are based on historical material and are frighteningly topical to this day;
Penderecki, with his music that gets under your skin and his merciless focus on the question of truth, is perhaps even more compelling than Zimmermann's work, which is four years older and focuses on the brutalization of human beings through the craft of war.
In the face of mass hysteria, the reasonable has no chance
The libretto, written by Penderecki himself, is based on the 1952 short story The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley and dramatized by playwright Robert Whiting.
The historically documented event with the exorcism of the devil and human sacrifice is processed, which took place in the western French city of Loudun in 1634 - five years before the publication of Descartes' "Discours de la méthode".
Unscrupulous clerics tied to power use the accusations of a mentally ill nun, blackmailed during an exorcism, to deliver the priest Grandier, whom they hate, to the knife.
Grandier, not a child of sadness when dealing with young women, makes little Philippe pregnant (with youthfully fresh soprano Danae Kontora) and campaigns for the preservation of the city walls,
which Cardinal Richelieu wants to let slide in the interests of state power.
With that, his fate is sealed.
The intrigue, which profits from superstition, sex fantasies, informers and mass hysteria, cannot be stopped even by the king's enlightened envoy, who exposes the exorcism as humbug.
In his opera, the Catholic Penderecki was not concerned with topics discussed today such as corrupt bishops and MeToo, but with the question of truth and the strength of faith at the beginning of the secular age.
Using the example of Grandier's existential annihilation, this is exercised as a question of political power.
In the dialogues between Grandier and his cynical adversary Baron de Laubardemont, a character tenor role coldly executed by Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, it escalates into a fundamental distortion of truth, in which the baron wants to use dialectic shrewdness to force the tortured victim to reveal his faith and thereby relies on the Will of God calls - true and false, God and devil appear in reversed roles.
Today's observer has to think of the Russian propaganda machine in the Ukraine war.
Luminous soundscapes and percussion effects
As the setting for the evil story, Bob Cousins created a house-like, permanently rotating cube in cool gray.
With its diverse perspectives, it enables the rapid succession of the cinematically short scenes, some of which are simultaneously running, to be seamless.
The functional stage design and today's everyday clothes (costumes: Mel Page) demonstratively locate the events in the present, which is underlined by the factual direction by Simon Stone, which is close to the text.
He brings the cruel exorcisms, the public disinhibiting rituals of the nuns and torture scenes to a concentrated effect without creating unnecessary scandal - the play itself speaks a strong language.
The actors were consistently convincing, above all the expressive Aušrine Stundyte in the role of the unfortunate prioress.
Jochen Kupfer and Kevin Conners deliver brilliant character studies as a disgusting informer and torture duo in the form of doctor and pharmacist, Ulrich Reß, the treacherous confessor of the nuns, and Martin Winkler as exorcist are terrifying characters.
The whole event is carried by a scenically extraordinarily effective music.
Under the sovereign direction of Vladimir Jurowski, the orchestra and choir of the State Opera took on the colorful score with playful enthusiasm.
Here Penderecki drew on the pool of noise colours, luminous soundscapes and percussion effects with which he had brought a new tone to contemporary music ten years earlier in his groundbreaking orchestral piece "Anaklasis".
This composer has stood the test of time - not a trace of the once feared aging of new music.