Opera “Valuschka” by Péter Eötvös in Regensburg

KAfter five minutes, there are the first laughs in the pretty Regensburg theater: “The increasing chaos is having just as noticeable an impact on rail traffic as it does everywhere else. The functioning of daily life is unpredictable,” says Hagelmayer, the innkeeper and actually the narrator in “Valuschka”, the thirteenth, brand new opera by Péter Eötvös. Hagelmayer is obviously one of us. He understands something about the world in which we (have to) live.

The professor whom Eötvös kindly lets listen to music by Johann Sebastian Bach also understands something about this world that we are so quick to believe is ours. Of course, his insights are not quite as amusing: “Nature has ceased its normal functioning. There will be no more snow. People talk about the Last Judgment. This is unnecessary. Everything will perish on its own anyway.” If we replace “Judgment of the World” with “Last Generation,” we will quickly be back to where we like to be picked up by the theater and where we don’t want to be taken back so quickly.

“Valuschka”, based on the libretto by Kinga Keszthelyi and Mari Mezei, follows the 1989 novel “Melancholy of Resistance” by László Krasznahorkai, which Béla Tárr based his film “The Werckmeister Harmonies” twenty-four years ago. The opera premiered in Budapest on December 2nd, but Sebastian Ritschel and Stefan Veselka, currently artistic director and general music director at the Regensburg Theater, wanted to premiere a new work by Eötvös several hundred miles up the Danube. György Buda created his own German version of the originally Hungarian libretto, and if you believe Sebastian Ritschel, who also directed the Regensburg performance, then the Hungarian and German versions of this opera only have an overlap of “around seventy percent” musically. The theater therefore speaks of a “premiere”.

A traveling circus with a stuffed blue whale

The title character, János Valuschka, delivers the newspapers in his hometown. He is considered a “degenerate,” an “idiot.” But Hagelmayer calls him the “uncorrupted Valuschka, who proves the presence of angelicity in the midst of devastating degeneration.” Valuschka marvels at the beauty of creation and the order of the cosmos. The mayor of the city, Mrs. Tünde, ensnares him in order to convince her husband, the professor, to stand as a person of respect at the head of the “It's green so green” movement she founded. She wants to restore “order” in the city.

Ms. Tünde uses a traveling circus with a stuffed blue whale and a mysterious “prince”, dwarf and with three eyes, to stir up unrest in the city, station the military and establish a dictatorship that doesn't seem very comfortable. Valuschka is identified as the cause of the unrest and is sent to a mental asylum as not guilty. He no longer gives any answers to the professor who visits him there. The wonder at the beauty of creation has died in him.

“Tragedy with music. Eötvös calls his new piece a grotesque opera. The predominantly melodramatic style – a notated chant to a symmetrically divided orchestra that gently but constantly rumbles, rattles, hisses, snarls, burps, grunts, whistles and farts – is linked to the cabaret style of Arnold's “Pierrot lunaire” with expanded means Schönberg. One could also think of the pieces that Bertolt Brecht published with Hanns Eisler or Kurt Weill. Significantly, Eötvös allows two characters to stand out from the talk-singing mishmash of inauthenticity: the clear-thinking Hagelmayer, who only speaks, and the clear-feeling Valuschka, who only sings.

The libretto is one of the funniest and most pointed that has been written for contemporary opera in recent years. Unfortunately, Eötvös' musical prosody doesn't convey these punch lines vividly enough. There was also not enough work done in Regensburg to make the text more understandable. It is striking that with the tenor Benedikt Eder as Valuschka, a fantastic, remarkable singer and actor, you understand every word when he just sings, but with many other actors – with the exception of the perfect Gabriel Kähler as Hagelmayer – not a single one, even when he sings you speak. In return, the singers convincingly manage to create a vocal physiognomy of their characters: vixen-like suppleness in Kirsten Labonte as Mayor Tünde, glowing sensuality amid haunted fear in Theodora Varga as Valuschka's mother Mrs. Pflaum, righteous, worn-out kindness in Roger Krebs as the professor, dashing and lustful Lieutenant elegance in Jonas Atwood as the man in the loden coat and vain flickering nervousness in Hany Abdelzaher as the circus director.

Fit for flash bullying

Harish Shankar trained the choir, especially the men, for proto-fascist flash bullying. Stefan Veselka sought advice on the musical implementation from the seriously ill Eötvös, who was actually supposed to conduct, which he managed to do in a very evocative way.

In Kristopher Kempf's versatile stage design, which allows new exterior and interior spaces, even the blue whale itself, to emerge from the backdrop of an old city, the actors act in costumes from around 1930 that Sebastian Ritschel designed. His direction historicizes the events, which encourages the audience to make self-references rather than the usual updating required. The fact that Eötvös allows a feminine fascism to emerge from a green movement, which itself has right-wing populist traits, is one of the strengths of the piece as an inner ambivalence and prismatic refraction, which resists political appropriation.