“Art must be a dangerous, a disorienting act. It must shake us to the core as a collective.” (Milo Rau) Right after the 150th anniversary of Bayreuth, Milo Rau is staging Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and in Israel as a road movie through German-Israeli history: from the Holocaust […]
„A dangerous act“ – Milo Rau stages Wagner in Israel and Berlin
“Art must be a dangerous, a disorienting act. It must shake us to the core as a collective.” (Milo Rau)
Right after the 150th anniversary of Bayreuth, Milo Rau is staging Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and in Israel as a road movie through German-Israeli history: from the Holocaust to the resumption of diplomatic relations in the 1950s, from the traumatic 1972 Olympic massacre to the opening of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
Can Germany come to terms with its guilt over the Holocaust simply by standing firmly enough alongside Israel? Can a distinction be made between history and Tagespolitik? And can the music of Richard Wagner – a self-confessed anti-Semite, a favourite of Hitler and a composer who is still boycotted in Israel today – ever be separated from the crime against humanity that was the Shoah?
Milo Rau’s „scandal in waiting“ (The Guardian) will have its world premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on 24 October. The public performance in Tel Aviv this August will be part of the research for the opera production.
Milo Rau, artistic director of Europe’s biggest crossover-festival, the Vienna Festival, is one of the most prominent and politically engaged artists of our time, with over 100 productions, films and books to his name. His work – ranging from activist tribunal formats to a film adaptation of the Bible, from radical adaptations of classical works to the founding of a ‘Free Republic’ – has revolutionised theatre like no other.
For some time now, the writer and director – a recipient of the European Theatre Prize, amongst other honours – has also turned his attention to opera. Following his ‘revolutionary’ (Bachtrack) production of Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito (2020) and the opera Justice (2024) – “an opera like no other before” (ARD) – Rau is now staging Richard Wagner’s music for the first time.
Rau’s production of The Flying Dutchman is conceived as a kind of historical road movie through German-Israeli relations, from the genocide of European Jews to the present day, which is marked by contested politics of memory. His interpretation combines Wagner’s classical musical theatre with Rau’s characteristic documentary-style, cinematic methods: the ensemble, centred on the two star singers Tomasz Konieczny (the Dutchman) and Aušrinė Stundytė (Senta), is joined by two narrators: Sara von Schwarze – whose grandparents were Nazis and whose parents converted to Judaism – and the Berlin based Shlomi Wagner – who is obsessed with the idea of performing Wagner’s music in Israel, thereby liberating it from its Nazi past for the present day.
The director views Wagner’s ‘redemptive opera’ as a mirror of a radical analysis of the present: As a prologue to the Berlin production, Milo Rau and his team stage a public performance in Israel of selected Wagner arias. What does the cultural ‘Wagner complex’ – anti-Semitism, German guilt and the hope of redemption – mean in today’s Israel? As part of this one-off performance, Rau and his Jewish and Arab guests discuss the sense and nonsense of artistic boycotts, and the impact of the Holocaust on German, Israeli and Palestinian history until today.
