Today in The New York Sun, our own music critic Jay Nordlinger reports from the Salzburg Festival on a a particularly bad example of "director’s theater," which I wrote about here last week.
The opera Der Freischütz, by Carl Maria von Weber, is a Christian tale, Nordlinger writes. "But how do you handle a Christian tale on a continent whose elite culture is decidedly post-Christian, to say the least?" Well, here is how Falk Richter, a director from Hamburg, handled it:
Check out Nordlinger’s entire description of what can happen to a Christian opera in post-Christian Europe.At the end of Act II, we have some hot nude models, parading around in high heels. They kneel down to take communion, in a kind of black mass. And the characters now and then leave German for English, speaking words we don’t exactly expect in "Der Freischütz." One of Samiel’s acolytes declares, "Money is everything." And John Relyea’s Kaspar speaks some of the pivotal words of the opera — Mr. Richter’s opera, that is:
"Destruction, death, corruption, rape, war, invasion, burnt children, low taxes, and religion — that is what we would kill for; that is what our hearts yearn for."
Yes, low taxes, to go with burned children and religion.
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