Selling Hindemith with naked nuns on roller skates
OperaThe state theatre in Schwerin, northeast Germany, is staging Paul Hindemith’s short opera Sancta Susanna, which few living people have ever seen.
In order to hit the headlines, director Florentina Holzinger has inserted a scene of naked nuns performing their rollerblades moves (as they doubtless do in all the best nunneries). The score is further extended with excerpts from Bach, Cole Porter and a contemporary composer Johanna Doderer.
We won’t offend you with a picture. There are other sites where you can find such things.
photo: Mr & Mrs Hindemith
Will that be enough to sell Hindemith? I have never warmed to his music, except for the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Weber, a hilarious orchestral showpiece.
I find Sancta Susanna rather appealing musically. As I recall, the story is hot enough without needing this kitsch effort.
My fly on the wall tells me that the Vatican is considering a conclave to discuss dress codes of nuns in all the monasteries that still exist. This after a very long inspection tour of 6 cardinals who spent two weeks in every monastery in Europe to thoroughly and repeatedly check on internal customs and costumes.
Nuns generally live in convents and Monks in monasteries
Ah, yes — the last group you can safely offend!
In point of fact, the Vatican is not very keen on this opera. Nor are any other Christian groups.
I’m a Catholic, and they do not speak for me. I think the story is hackneyed, but I think the music is interesting, and not particularly difficult.
I don’t know a lot of Hindemith, but whenever I hear a piece I wonder why I do not pursue more — in general I have not been put off by his style, which seems to straddle the last of the classical certainties and the dawn of the new ways without offending either.
How can you tell they are nuns if they are naked?
Also naked nuns take their religion seriously and make sure their gear defines their dedication to the Church:
https://taz.de/Florentina-Holzinger-inszeniert-Sancta/!6011620/
Even if they have a habit of being clothed; once they are naked, nun will be able to disguise their true selves.
Nuns are usually clothed in a habit.
Though simple in habit, nun’s the wiser when naked.
By their habits.
Heretic…
You want to talk to Hindemith about that. The orgy in the nunnery was his idea. Nothing new here, apart from the roller skates.
don’t tell the CBSO
Hindemith didn’t write an opera called Sancta. He did, however, write an opera called Sancta Susanna. Assuming Wikipedia’s synopsis is right, roller-skating naked nuns is at the milder end of the visual imagery the director could have chosen.
Presumably on secondment from the Mecklenburg Chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
Paris Opera did Sancta Susanna in 2016, on a double bill with Cavalleria Rusticana. No naked nuns on roller skates, just one naked dancer. It was quite a show.
YouTube has a Pisa performance from 2018. I haven’t watched it yet but I will, out of curiosity. The score is good and it’s only 25 minutes.
Yes and no. The whole evening is called Sancta, the first half of which is Hindemith’s one-acter Sancta Susanna. In other words, only part of the show is the Hindmith opera, which, let’s not forget, is about an orgy in a nunnery possessed by demons. Bruno Walter refused to conduct the première for this reason.
In that sense, it’s the perfect starting point for a Florentina Holzinger show, and anyone who buys a ticket knows what to expect.
Sancta Susanna is a gripping expressionist opera. From Schott’s website :
The nun Susanna is kneeling in humble contemplation before an altar of Maria in the middle of the night when she is awakened from her trance by her fellow sister Klementia who admonishes her that she should become aware of her physicality.
Through a church window which has blown open in the wind, the scent and rustling of a lavender bush floods in to the church accompanied by the moaning of a maid who is disporting herself with a knave in the convent garden. Susanna summons the ‘bashful’ maid and asks her with lenient understanding about her lover, ‘Willem’. The ‘young and sturdy’ knave appears to collect his ‘maid’. The experiences of this night remind sister Klementia of an event many years ago which she relates to Susanna who is listening spellbound: one night, a fellow sister Beata had kissed the image of the crucified Jesus while naked and was subsequently interred alive in the wall behind the crucifix.
Susanna falls into ever-intensifying mystic raptures, removes her clothes, tears the loin cloth from the crucified Jesus in a state of intense ecstasy, falls to her knees and looks up at the cross. A spider which is crawling across the altar falls into her hair, causing her to fall to the ground with a scream. The other nuns who have been summoned by the prayer bell congregate for the church service, hesitate when they espy the motionless Klementia and then crowd around Susanna in a semi-circle. Standing proudly, she demands to be given the same punishment as Beata. When the nuns kneel down, Susanna resists this punishment in a ‘sudden vehemence’ with an energetic ‘No’. The scandalised nuns increasingly urge Susanna to go to confession, but Susanna stands ‘erect in inviolate grandeur’ before the sisters who are damning her.
COMMENTARY
Sancta Susanna was considered by contemporaries as the strongest of the three single-act operas. The fusion of religious devotion with sexual desire on the one hand is complemented by the inscrutability of determined religious obedience and inner stirrings of the soul. Numerous natural occurrences have been recorded in symbolist and naturalist literary traditions as for example in the works of Maurice Maeterlinck and August Strindberg. The closed musical framework and the characteristic primarily recitative style of the vocal parts directly convey the stringency of the plot. Conceived in symmetrical form with a monothematic character as a sequence of variations, the music displays slight reminiscences of Claude Debussy’s tonal language and unfolds in a luxurious orchestral magnificence. The entire musical development unfolds on the basis of the theme heard on the flute at the beginning of the opera. The convent world is evoked through an unyielding musical timbre and monotonous dynamics; in contrast, Susanna’s awakening sensuality is musically developed through expansive melodic lines and a glittering tonal richness. In 1922, Theodor W. Adorno summons up almost euphoric words on the subject of Sancta Susanna: ‘It is remarkable how Hindemith in the most mature of his stage works is here simultaneously able to generate the thematic surging of the orchestral torrent, wide-arching vocal melodies, the humidity of the night in spring and the cataclysmic power out of this single fundamental force in a solidified, sensual and plastic concrete form which only in his hands can be transformed into a symbol of animal instincts.
The production in Germany is decribed as a “musical-like show”. So, indeed, you’re warned.
The WERGO recording is excellent.
It has been performed (quite recently) in Prague, Marseille, Grafenegg and Cagliari (2018).
Naked nuns on skates should be fun.
What an awful story. Typical product of a time of serious repression, the time of Freudian extacies.
The name of the opera is Sancta Susanna.
Nudity isn’t offensive.
Hindemith, on the other hand… (I jest…)
Hindemith interestingly was fascinated by medieval and renaissance period madrigals, choruses and bawdy tales. When he was a Professor at Yale, he formed a choral group Collegium Musicum who sung a variety of music, especially the songs of Josquin des Prez who was known for the naughty nature of some of his work. So the opera Sancta Susanna which came out in 1922, was used as a cudgel against him by the Nazis to label his music degenerate was created from his historical interest in medieval and renaissance music practice.