The Seven Deadly Sins (Die sieben Todsünden) (review)

Peter Sellars is either a saint or a sinner. As a director and producer of opera particularly, Sellars divides audiences with his anti-traditionalism, fluctuating between abstract symbolism and hyperrealism in the form of updated (i.e., present or near-present) settings. And while these signature aspects of his stagings might be mistaken for those of the bulk of avant-garde post–World War II operatic stage directors, Sellars has become the poster boy for those who love—or love to hate—their opera besmirched. His prominence in this regard owes to his penchant for the seemingly most pristine of masterworks, as evinced by the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy that Sellars staged in the 1980s, a classical counterpart to the flashy, often overblown conceptual style of MTV videos. (Are Sellars's Così, Don Giovanni, and Figaro commentaries on, or implicated in, the excesses of that decade?)

Sellars has been less divisive when it comes to non-canonical repertoire: the American premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies' chamber opera The Lighthouse in 1983, or the 1987 Houston Grand Opera world premiere of John Adams's (albeit now semi-canonical) postminimalist Nixon in China. This brings us to Sellars's realization of The Seven Deadly Sins (Die sieben Todsünden), the final, post-rift collaboration of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Labeled a ballet chanté (sung ballet, the adjective relating to popular cabaret song), with a scenario by Edward James and Boris Yevgen'yevich Kochno plus lyrics by Brecht, Sins was commissioned and premiered by George Balanchine's "Les Ballets 1933" in Paris that same year. Amid Sellars's oeuvre of musical-theatrical productions (broadly defined), his Sins, based on a Lyon Opera production as staged at the Auditorium Maurice Ravel (François Postaire, stage director) and filmed in 1993 for television, hardly seems edgy, much less controversial. Perhaps this impression derives from the fact that Weill's and Brecht's collaborative swansong is not known widely through professional stage or video productions; that is, unlike the Mozart-Da Ponte operas, there is no yardstick of imagined authenticity by which to measure Sellars's interpretation.

But what would an "authentic" realization of Sins look and sound like anyway? Trans-historical Verfremdung (alienation), the central tenet of Brecht's Epic Theater, is an oxymoron, as alienation is contextual. Conversely, in what ways could a staging of Weill-Brecht go awry? Through avoidance of topicality in favor of a now-historical milieu? By pandering to bourgeois cravings for entertainment? (In this way, the 2006 revival of The Threepenny Opera, directed by Scott Elliott for the Roundabout Theater Company at Studio 54 in New York City, might be guilty of distorting the "work," although the Great White Way flavor of this production, however naughty, might itself be experienced as alienating, especially to purists.) The Seven Deadly Sins (or any piece of Zeitoper or Epic Theater) invites—no, demands—a confrontational attitude toward aesthetic, socioeconomic, political, and moral issues. Ultimately, that Sellars's Sins seems less than sinful might be because Brecht's and Weill's unique creation is already chock-full of Sellars's brand of symbolism and is aching to be topical. One might say that Sins chose Sellars.

The chief characters (better: personae) in The Seven Deadly Sins are Anna I and Anna II, conceived for a soprano and a female dancer, respectively, who leave their home in Louisiana in search of fortune and fame. (For the 1933 premiere, Weill's soon-to-be ex-wife Lotte Lenya created the role of Anna I, and Viennese ballerina Tilly Losch danced Anna II.) The apparent duality of the Annas is at the foundation of Sins. As described by Anna I in the Prologue, her "practical" and "rational" nature (praktisch, bei Verstand) contrasts with Anna II, who is "pretty" and a "bit mad" (schön, etwas verrückt). Yet they are really two sides of the same coin; that is, Anna is one character portrayed by two people ("Wir sind eigentlich nicht zwei Personen, sondern nur...