The Opera and the Opera: Hermann Nitsch Stages Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise

In The City and the City, a science fiction novel by the British writer China Miéville, two cities coexist in the same physical space, but the denizens of each city have learned to "unsee" the inhabitants of the other city, and are even punished if they acknowledge them. At times the recent Munich production of Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise seemed to tell a similar story, that of the opera and the opera. The new director of the Bayerische Staatsoper, Nikolaus Bachler, had invited the infamous Austrian performance artist Hermann Nitsch to design and stage the work, perhaps hoping for one of Nitsch's patented scandals. Nitsch, an exponent of Viennese Actionism who stages mock masses using copious amounts of blood, innards, and naked congregants, has been a lightning rod for decades, attracting the ire of the press, the Catholic Church, and politicians such as the late Jörg Haider.

But if the Munich audiences were scandalized, it was for all the wrong reasons: Nitsch seemed to do what he usually does—parading naked men and women in processions, pouring fake blood or animal innards on them, splashing supposedly symbolic paints onto canvases—while an entirely separate group of people who happened to occupy the same space put on a performance of Messiaen's opera. It seemed as though Nitsch refused to provide a traditional staging and instead asserted squatter's rights on the stage. The story of the saint's death and transfiguration unfolded against a backdrop of repetitive and at times aggressive interruptions by groups of Nitsch amanuenses dousing naked bodies in blood, crucifying naked men, splashing colors onto canvases, and then neatly stacking those canvases backstage—in other words, going about their business seemingly unimpressed by the spectacle around them.

The German press was quick to pick up on the opera and the opera, and they responded by taking sides. The Frankfurter Rundschau commented that "the fulfillment we heard in the three acts [of music] only at rare moments made any connection with the awful visual charlatanry" of Nitsch's production.¹ The audience too seemed to sense how separable the staging was from the music: after the performance, the conductor Kent Nagano was greeted with frenetic applause; the man behind the staging was greeted by boos and whistles. To be sure, the applause was well earned: Paul Gay was an impressive Saint Francis and a worthy successor to José van Dam, who had originated the part and dominated it for much of the first two decades of the opera's performance history. Christine Schäfer was sublime as the Angel, and Nagano, who had assisted Seiji Ozawa in the opera's Paris premiere in 1983, coaxed rich textures and an intimate yet lush sound from the massive orchestra and choir required by Messiaen's score. The staging, almost by design, had a much more ambiguous reception both among the audience and in the big dailies.

It was almost as though the production itself solicited this kind of schizophrenic reaction, since it violated any number of written and unwritten rules about what is entailed in staging an opera. And indeed, no one in the German press seemed to consider the possibility that the "charlatanry" that supposedly befouled the "fulfillment" of the opera text was perhaps not a matter of bad staging but instead a calculated response to the particular ways in which Messiaen's opera strives for "fulfillment."

They might have noticed that Nitsch was well aware of the disconnect which reviewers and audiences found so disconcerting—that, in fact, he seemed to invite it. Given their insistence on ritualized movement and repetition, Nitsch's performances can in principle be extended indefinitely or compressed to fit a particular timeframe. Yet the stage action that accompanied the opera was at all times out of synch with the music and singers—they entered a scene late but without any clear motivation, or they might accompany the action for a while and then drop out or even walk out arbitrarily. This effect—disconcerting, to say...