Saying goodbye to Joss Wieler | TIME ONLINE



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Stuttgart (dpa) – Debris on the stage, ghostly sounds, corpses in many places – Jossi Wieler (66) chooses an extremely dark farewell at the Stuttgart State Opera. Here, Switzerland has distinguished itself over the last 25 years as one of the most respected opera directors. His latest work in Stuttgart is now the world premiere of the opera "Erdbeben.Träume" by composer Toshio Hosokawa.

The Japanese themselves have experienced how a 2011 earthquake triggered a tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in his homeland. His artistic work on this shocking tragedy sometimes seems strangely like a ghost movie. Whistling wind, drops of water splash, it scolds. These apocalyptic sounds are reinforced by the clear language of the librettist Marcel Beyer .

A forbidden love between the pupil Josephe (Esther Dierkes) and his preceptor Jeronimo (Dominic Great), she receives a child from him; the mother and the little one are killed at the end: "As his broken skull shines, how the cerebral mass sparkles in the sun", Beyer writes about the dead child. The winner of the Büchner Prize brought to Heinrich von Kleist's [1949005] story entitled "The Chilean earthquake" (1806) to this day.

What appears so brutally, it is the confrontation with the catastrophes of civilization and the fragility of the world, with the violence of nature and of the man. Beyer, Wieler, playwright Sergio Morabito and scenographer Anna Viebrock themselves made a photo in Fukushima last year. There is a mood of end-time. The stage, Beyer's text and Trumpet's Hosokawa's music and Sylvain Cambreling's four drums on the podium made the audience happy on Sunday. But there will be more happy sounds by the end of the month during a "high season" dedicated to departing Wieler, with many air shows.

The human abyss has been the subject of many joint productions of Wieler and Morabito. In 1993, the intendant Klaus Zehelein brought together the playwright Wieler and the playwright and deep connoisseur of Morabito opera in Stuttgart. A text of more than 500 pages and an illustrated book titled "Transfiguration" recalls how Mozart's opera "The clemenza di Tito" began. Seven times, Stuttgart critics have awarded the title of "Opera of the year".

Stage workers have never been Wieler and Morabito. They are researchers who always try to tell a familiar story, always with respect for work. Wieler said in an interview, "Our goal has never been to turn stories into a reality that makes them easily readable for us." We believe that making foreign strangers instead of covering or hiding them is a win-win situation in the book.

Not as an authoritarian power, but as a sensitive listener, he has always given members of the assembly a right to look at productions and their own ideas, say many people to his subject. "He knows that his strengths lie in management and personal relationships with people and perhaps less in business decisions or in difficult contract negotiations," says Marc-Oliver Hendriks, general manager of the house. to three divisions.

At the same time, the 66-year-old man was involved in politics for a long time – for example, when he denounced the house arrest of Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov as an arbitrary justice . Wieler himself brought his latest work from Stuttgart "Hansel and Gretel" on the stage – and demonstrated at the premiere with a T-shirt "Free Kirill" for the release of Serebrennikov.

And even in 2015, the conservative "demo for all" sentiment was raised against the education on sexual diversity in schools, Wieler literally showed his flag. At that time, a banner in the rainbow colors titled Diversity was on the facade. Above all, the strengthening of right-wing populists worries Wieler and Morabito. "Authoritarian politicians want to take art and culture as a decorative backdrop to their understanding of Heimat at the limit," writes Morabito as the theater group's publisher. Although he sees the state theater in a "stable position". If he and Wieler leave Stuttgart to work freelance again, then new times will break here.

Designated Artistic Director Viktor Schoner will have to put his own accents after the era of Wieler. He is also faced with the need to renovate and expand the building, which is more than 100 years old. The project is a challenge not only because of the cost of more than 400 million euros. Above all, the question of where the whole popular can find a temporary place during the closure is particularly open.

Stuttgart State Opera on "Earthquakes.

High season program

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