Festival Music
Tragicendeavours
As the curtain goes up on Staatsoper Stuttgart’s Actus Tragicus, Carol Main lifts the lid on what makes this one of the EIF’s must-see events 88 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 27 Aug–10 Sep 2009
A ctus Tragicus. A presentation of tragedy. With that title, Stuttgart Opera’s production is hardly going to be a bundle of laughs. Yet, the sheer beauty of the Bach cantatas, which lie at the heart of this highly unusual synthesis of music and drama, give certain confidence that Actus Tragicus will be one of the most intense and deeply affecting events of this year’s Edinburgh Festival. Set within a cross-section of a four- storey building, the mundane, repetitive, everyday tasks and events of people’s lives can be seen in stark reality, with death an overshadowing presence all around them.
Opening just a day after the Bach at Greyfriars series, featuring around 20 cantatas from Johann Sebastian’s total output of over 200 comes to a close, Actus Tragicus is a combination of six sacred cantatas, which draw together to form one theatrical whole. The funeral cantata known as Actus Tragicus – ‘Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit BWV 106 (God’s time is the best of all)’ – is the only one of the six which can be heard in straight concert performance, as well as being part of the opera. The production was created by opera director Herbert Wernicke who died, tragically, in 2002; thankfully his two main successors dramaturg Albrecht Puhlmann and conductor Michael Hofstetter bring it to Edinburgh. ‘In this picture of human life, there is a desire to reach some sense of redemption’, says
Puhlmann, ‘but there is no possibility of belief in the resurrection. That’s why you see at the bottom of the house a plastic copy of Hans Holbein’s very graphic corpse of Christ waiting for his resurrection. He’s been lying there for over 2000 years and, in a way, is forgotten by the people in the building living above him.’ In the Holbein painting, ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’, the artist depicts the dead Jesus as having suffered in the same way as an ordinary human. His body is decomposing and emaciated. ‘The people in the house above,’ says Puhlmann, ‘are living their lives as mortals, but are unaware of other things around them.’
The characters in the house are numerous. There are over 50 different personas on stage, ranging from a nurse to a thief, a boy playing with a ball and a couple about to make love, all of them with fixed choreography for their actions. ‘It is about death, and vanity, and about life,’ says Hofstetter, who says that he has never conducted anything like this before. ‘Everyone is an individual, but repeating his personal activity in a neurotic way,’ he says. ‘They perform one action throughout the whole evening. Even if you come to see this show ten times, you won’t have seen everything that is going on. Something different is going on in every window, in every room.’ A family is eating supper in one space,