In the best scene of the night, Aušrine Stundyte is tied to a bed. The bed is hard and narrow, it can be folded up so that the singer is tied to a board at the ramp. She wears the neat robes of a nun, she also plays one, she is Jeanne, prioress of the Ursuline order. Jeanne is tormented by lust of the flesh, which is a bigger problem for a prioress, so she decides to declare her cravings to be affliction of the devil.
This brings up Father Barré, vicar of Chinon, who is an imperious, highly gifted exorcist and is portrayed by Martin Winkler in a rather terrifying way. He asks Jeanne about the devil’s visits, and Stundyte does the following: She spits out various names of the devil, booms in a dark male voice, squeaks like a girl, moves her face in obscene gestures.
Now you can think for a long time: Is this Jeanne playing devilry, is she playing the image of madness, is she severely traumatized or really crazy? Stundyte conveys everything at the same time, is a victim of pain and a perpetrator out of necessity, and that is roughly the core of what director Simon Stone wants to tell with his staging of Krzysztof Penderecki’s opera “The Devils of Loudun” for the opening of the Munich Opera Festival.
The case is historic and well documented. In 1634 Father Grandier was tortured and burned in Loudun because he was said to have been in league with the devil. Grandier was, not unusual at the time, a woman’s man; Jeanne desired him, but did not get him. Since her female desire, unlike that of men, was completely forbidden by the prevailing, bigoted morality, she chose the story of the devil as a way out or as revenge for those who were rejected.
The orchestra becomes a giant synthesizer, creating a menacing atmosphere
This is the one thread that alone would not have cost Grandier his life. The other is politics. Since the Edict of Nantes (1598), the Huguenots in France have enjoyed religious freedom and owned secure cities. Years later Cardinal Richelieu resented this, disturbed his conception of centralized power; he robbed the Huguenots of part of their autonomy and had the fortifications of their cities razed. Loudun’s too. Grandier now falls into this grinder of power and intolerance, his execution is also a sign from the authorities that everyone must kindly adhere to their guidelines.
Aldous Huxley wrote all of this in 1952, around the same time as Arthur Miller wrote his closely related play, The Witch Hunt. John Robert Whiting made a play out of Huxley’s non-fiction book, Penderecki built his German-language libretto out of it. And finally his opera, which was first unsettling when it premiered in Hamburg in 1969, but then became a success. By this time he had long since renounced the avant-gardism of the time.
In the “Teufels” there is no music at all for long stretches, the soloists speak (very well in Munich) or declaim freely, an extremely ingeniously designed ground fog often wafts around, the orchestra becomes a giant synthesizer, creates a threatening atmosphere, and always again there is a bang, an organ booms, the sound explodes. If you want to perform this strange, sometimes grotesque music, then you have to do it like Vladimir Jurowski and the Bavarian State Orchestra did that evening, it’s the perfection of originality.
The same applies to the casting of the singers: flawless, all around 30 soloists. Astonishing in this piece, which is now seldom played. Which led to a problem: three days before the premiere, Wolfgang Koch, planned to sing Grandier, tested positive for Corona. The solution: Robert Dölle from the Residenztheater plays the grandier, meets his ensemble colleagues Thiemo Strutzenberger and Barbara Horvath on stage, Jordan Shanahan sings the part from the ditch. Neither of them had a single rehearsal with an orchestra, both are fabulous, sometimes taking turns movement for movement, once speaking upstairs, then singing downstairs.
Exorcism Carnival in Church.
(Photo: Wilfried Hösl)
The division even benefits Simon Stone’s request. The man is obsessed with realism, hates anything that could be a parable. Now Bob Cousins places a large concrete cube on the stage, which rotates tirelessly and from which windows, stairwells and a church are cut out sharply. People, like the ones walking around in our streets, populate the stage and sing about devils and highly distressing questioning. Police are standing around and torturing Grandier with electric shocks for an excruciatingly long time, nuns fall into erotic raptures and wear T-shirts with feminist slogans, carnivorous honest men denounce Grandier because they are jealous of his success with women. Once there are three of them in bed at the same time, which causes some older viewers to gasp.
The brute and completely secret-free integration into reality means that nobody gets upset. Stone’s staging sways back and forth, extremely accurate, enlightening moments that are simply right next to outrageous banalities. The exorcism looks like something out of a 1970s horror film, everything that is politics is told succinctly, the image of women alternates between deliberately showing the male view of it and platitudes. Quite a big cheer at the end.