Two vampires tour the world, beholding humanity’s decline under a child-like tyrant and his furry monster creation: Gorgonzilla.
You should expect mischief when literature Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek pops up, and Sunday evening in Hamburg will be no exception with the premiere of her new grand-guignol opera Monster’s Paradise.
The Austrian author has teamed up with fellow Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth in a new work that lashes out at tyranny – and its enablers.
Director Tobias Kratzer says the opera “asks the question whether the opposition against such rulers don’t have to become monstrous themselves to stand up to such a phenomenon”.
READ MORE
“The opera is scurrilous and entertaining,” said Kratzer to Stern magazine, but doesn’t trivialise the horrors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) shootings or the Venezuela putsch.
“I came to the realisation that you can only face down figures like Trump as a form of grotesque.”
Composer Neuwirth says her attempt to tackle the “oppressive reality” of the modern world was inspired by the approach of Stanley Kubrick in Dr Strangelove, which she describes as “a tragedy disguised as a comedy”.
[ The battle for Minneapolis: ‘Ice agents are like this invisible goon squad’Opens in new window ]
“The mechanisms of power and greed are ultimately always the same when you look at human history, but in contemporary guises ... beginning with the brutalisation of language, the fear of losing something,” she told Austria’s Kleine Zeitung daily.
“Seemingly ordinary acts at the outset – human vanity, greed and lust for power – unfold over time into a man-made catastrophe.”
Her librettist, Jelinek, is one of the most celebrated authors in the German-speaking world, best known to international audiences for the book behind the 2001 psychodrama The Piano Teacher with Isabelle Huppert.
Three years later she won the Nobel Prize for literature.
She has returned many times to musical theatre, including a 2002 opera with Neuwirth based on the David Lynch film Lost Highway.
The opera’s creators decline to say if they have written themselves into the two vampire heroines of the evening, Vampi and Bampi.
They are similarly tight-lipped on whether their tyrannical king is Trump.
Jelinek describes their anti-hero as “a greedy child who bangs his cutlery on the table”.
“Someone like Trump,” she told Austria’s News magazine, “you cannot really satirise.”
Their latest collaboration comes as a surprise, not least to the two women themselves, given previous wounding experiences in opera. Or, to be more precise, the men who control German-language opera houses.
Jelinek had such stress over her last libretto that she is on the record saying: “I never want to hear the word ‘opera’ again. If someone says it near me, I’ll slap them. And if I say it near someone, they may slap me.”
Neuwirth feels much the same. In 2019 she was the first woman ever commissioned by the Vienna State Opera to write a new work.
Her opera, based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, attracted international acclaim and prizes – but the opera house dropped it after just five performances.
Neuwirth claims the (male) opera director called her “crazy” while a (male) orchestra musician denounced her work during a rehearsal as “such shite”.
Unlike experimental contemporary male composers, she thinks women composers “aren’t allowed say anything”.
“Instead be good and accept everything,” she wrote in Austria’s News magazine.
For Kratzer, Hamburg state opera’s new director, Monster’s Paradise is an attempt to make up for past failings.
“It’s a failure of the opera business in recent years not to ... have won over Neuwirth and Jelinek for a new collaboration,” he said. “I didn’t want to have the accusation made against me not to have tried.”
