“GERMANY faces the last taboo” was the way the critics described the opening this week of a new film about Hitler. For the first time, the Führer is portrayed to a German audience as a soft-spoken human being rather than a demented demagogue. Der Untergang — The Downfall — shows him at the end, during the final 12 days in the bunker, a broken man, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, veering from hysteria to tenderness.
This is not so much the last taboo, as the latest stage in a journey that Germany has made since the war, from the years of suppression, when the Nazi regime was rarely discussed, through a painful confrontation with the Holocaust and the part played by ordinary Germans, to the present day, when they feel able not only to analyse Hitler as a man, but also to explore the suffering they themselves endured as a result of the bombing of their cities.
It is a remarkable story of the maturing of a nation. Why, then, should it still suffer from retarded development when it comes to the arts, and particularly opera? On Monday night, along with about 1,200 others, I endured the opening night of the Hanover State Opera’s production of Il trovatore, part of the Edinburgh Festival, directed by the biggest name in German opera, Calixto Bieito. Though Catalan himself, the Germans have embraced him with enthusiasm. It was, without doubt, the most unpleasant evening I have spent in the theatre. We festival veterans are used to sex and violence — they come with the territory. But to witness the crude evisceration of a familiar and dearly loved work is like being involved in a head-on collision.
Verdi’s opera is a typically absurd story of mistaken identity, love and revenge. It includes scenes of great serenity and others of high drama. It also has a notoriously difficult aria in which the troubadour of the title is required to sing a high C, which few tenors are able to attain. Opera buffs wait in gleeful anticipation to see whether it will be reached. They do not, on the whole, expect to see the moment drowned in blood.
From beginning to end we were assaulted by scenes of torture, mutilation, gang rape, sodomy, necrophilia and masturbation. The soldiers and gypsies of the chorus are shaven-headed monsters, who brutalise and kill to order. The famous Anvil Chorus takes place while Manrico, the troubadour, is being subjected at the back of the stage to a homosexual rape. Count di Luna makes love to a shop- window mannequin that has seen better days. Ferrando, the captain of the guard, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, is a sadist who hands over the young Inez as a prize to a tattooed murderer; when next she appears she is dripping with blood, remaining on stage in a catatonic state only long enough to be dumped in a bath and disposed of in ways I could only guess. The final scene, one of the most moving in opera, when the heroine, Leonora, dies, and Manrico is led off to his death, takes place in the back of a seedy trailer with the words “Gypsy Whore” spray-painted over it.
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It is as if the opera had been shifted to the hell-hole prison of Abu Ghraib, and perhaps Señor Bieito would claim that that is the point. Except that there was no point. All tragedy and pathos, the light and shade of any great drama, were drowned in relentless violence, and though the singing was often superb, we were so transfixed by horror that it passed us by.
The Edinburgh audience applauded at the end, but I think that it may have been as much through relief as acclamation. The company should have been sent straight back to Hanover to mend its ways. This was no more than an adolescent attempt to shock, and it is not the first time that Señor Bieito has used sniggering sex and lavatorial humour to show us how bold he is. His version of A Masked Ball opens with 14 lavatories on stage. His production of Celestina , also at Edinburgh, has the full quota of rape, stabbings, lesbianism and nudity.
Is this, then, the summit of the European avant garde? Is it really the case that we have progressed so little that we cannot think of anything better to do with great drama than subject it to the banality of grotesque violence and perverted sex? Do directors not realise that what might have seemed shocking a generation ago now seems little more than a parody of itself? A nation which has shown that it can come to terms with a history so dark that it swamps anything that could ever be conceived on stage, deserves something more than Señor Bieito, naked bodies and simulated sex. Politically, it has made massive strides. It is high time its culture caught up.
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