A 90th birthday ‘glorification of male homosexuality’
OperaZurich Opera hired the Russian exile Kirill Serebrennikov to mark what would have been Alfred Schnittke’s 90th borthday this month. His staging of ‘Life with an Idiot’ replaces recent anti-Putin connotations with maximum gay exposure.
From Lotte Thaler’s first-night review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
A handsome man. Blond and naked. At first he lets off steam until he has taken off his bathrobe and mask. Then he breaks into a St. Vitus dance to the horrific music, not knowing whether he is a dog, an ancient hero or Dostoyevsky’s epileptic: the actor and dancer Campbell Caspary is the “Idiot” at the Zurich Opera House. Maximum capacity is guaranteed. Men and women take equal pleasure in this tattooed, luxurious body. And in the play itself he also makes both sexes happy. First the nameless woman who has an abortion, whereupon he turns to her husband, called “I”, and lives with him in “bliss” until he kills the jealous wife and disappears from the man’s life.
The basis is the grotesque story and political satire “Life with an Idiot” by the writer Viktor Yerofeev, who … wrote it in 1980 in response to his exclusion from the Russian Writers’ Union. Today he describes it as a “gift” to the Soviet Union, for “what it did long before my time and then to me.” The idiot, nicknamed Vova for Vladimir, red-haired and with a pointed beard, is the image of Lenin….
Read on here.
photo: Monika Ritterhaus/Zurich Opera
Seen one production of KS you’ve seen them all.
The reason to go should be to hear Schnittke’s eclectic and always entertaining music.
I like Schnittke’s concertos very much – grotesque waltzes, eerie micropolyphony, manic outbursts, faux romantic gestures, sudden fortissimos out of nowhere. It’s like talking to someone in severe mental distress, but somehow the narratives are coherent. The first time I cried my eyes out to music was to his first cello concerto, a work that is almost never played nowadays (just like many of his other works). Surely his star will rise just like Zelenka or Vivaldi.
Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL7HsRrk5Jk
Depicting the horror of living in Russia, this open psychiatric institution where the patients have taken control.
Well, no 🙂 According to his own commentary, this was the first piece he completed after his stroke in 1985, and it had to do with the new way of musical thinking that opened to him during that period. The final movement came down to him like in a magnificent dream, after he already composed the first three. That commentary was widely circulated. Indeed, a very memorable composition.
The opera is called “Life with an Idiot”, as in the quoted paragraph, not “The Idiot”. It’s a great piece from the fascinating year of 1992, when the Soviet world was collapsing and Schnittke and Yerofeyev danced on its grave. It was an era when the Soviet people, “children” of Lenin, became rebellious teenagers. Now most of them have grown up, except for Serebrennikov and Yerofeyev, who are still fighting the battles of the last century, and drawing false analogies with present-day Russia.
The Idiot is in fact another opera by Weinberg
False analogy? Life in Russia is exactly that of ‘Life with an idiot’.
I’m sorry, do you live in Russia? What exactly do you know on the subject, other than what you read in the western media? Life there is a damn sight more affordable, comfortable, and civilised than most European and North American countries, I can tell you because I have seen all these places with my own eyes. The crime rate is lower, healthcare and education systems better, the streets are clean, infrastructure works, and, in spite of what you will read here, people enjoy full freedom of expression. You can criticise the government, be my guest! What you can’t do is incite violent revolution, say Nazi slogans or things that threaten national security, just as in the US. If you don’t believe me, buy a ticket and go there! Russia is open to everyone, it’s the west that is trying to stop its citizens going there. OK, rant over.
Of course your can criticize the government. It’s what happens AFTER the criticism that’s the problem.
I’d be curious to hear your explanation of why people holding completely blank pieces of paper in public were arrested. And why criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine can result in up to 15 years of prison time.
Criticising the armed forces is against the law in Russia, just as it is in Ukraine, and I think that’s fair given that those young men are out risking their lives to protect the rest. As for the blank pieces of paper, well, unplanned protest events are illegal in Russia. Frankly, Russians are sick of revolution, having lived through the horror of the Soviet collapse, and people are more keen on change from within the existing political structures, rather than some kind of system overhaul. Biden made it clear the US wants regime-change in Russia, which they tend to inflict upon all countries that won’t kowtow to Washington, so unfortunately Russia has to fortify itself against that threat. If America were to take a step back and give Russia space to breath, in my opinion the country would be able to become more open and transparent.
Because opera never glorifies “male hetero-sexuality”.
f by ‘glorify’ you mean suicide, murder, betrayal, lust and intrigue.
“St. Vitus Dance to the horrific music”. Absolutely priceless and how rare to find a critic with a sense of humour!