Die Fledermaus Text

Regietheater Takes Another Scalp

I used to think that the most painful image I’d seen from a Regietheater opera production was from Peter Sellars’s Trump Tower version of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro : Cherubino, dressed in a football uniform, mechanically humping on his bed during “Non so più cosa son.” That was a happier time. Now I have witnessed Figaro and the Count malevolently slashing Cherubino with a razor during “Non più andrai,” smearing him with his own blood, callously shoving him into a straitjacket, violently stuffing a wad of cash into his mouth, and then leaving him barely conscious, slumped over in despair.

You still have to go a German-speaking country, it turns out, to get the full Clockwork Orange treatment of Mozart. Outside Berlin, there is no better place to do so than at the Salzburg Festival, which Gerald Mortier, as artistic director, turned into a premier venue for Regietheater in the 1990s. Mortier decamped from Salzburg in 2002, but the festival has continued to hire a large quota of opera directors guaranteed to reject the composer’s conception of his own work in favor of their own predictable obsessions, drawn from the dreary postmodern tool kit of nihilism and sexual transgression.

Salzburg’s Nozze di Figaro , directed by the 47-year-old German Claus Guth, is no exception. This is the fourth year that the production has been mounted here since its premiere in 2006; the festival subsequently invited Guth to massacre Mozart’s other two sublime Da Ponte operas, Don Giovanni and Così Fan Tutte .

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