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.
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.
Because opera never glorifies “male hetero-sexuality”.