A Night at the Opera

When my girlfriend Feleicia’s boss at the AAFES bookstore, Rob, who has four master's degrees in opera performance, told her he’d scored her and I free tickets to “Zaubern” at the Schwetzinger Schloss Rokokotheater, all he said about it, having seen it himself, was that it was a modern opera, about a man who loses his mind.

I didn’t know what a modern opera was so I looked it up online. On the Seattle Opera’s website, under its Opera 101 section, I found this:

Many modern operas concern the anxiety and alienation of twentieth-century life.

Modern opera explores contemporary themes using techniques drawn from
twentieth-century musical, visual, and narrative art forms.

Shortly before the opera began Tuesday evening, Feleicia and I explored a few of the acres and acres of elegant gardens on the Schloss grounds. The Schwetzinger Schloss is an icing-pink Baroque palace, and is billed in tourist brochures as the “Versailles of the Palatinate.” Mozart visited Schwetzingen and the Schloss three times, first as a touring child prodigy in 1763, and after his later visits wrote of them, “This is a town where you can make genuinely beautiful music.” His operas still pack the Rokokotheater.

Tickets were still available for “Zaubern” when we picked up ours at will call. They were comp tickets from the mezzo soprano, Betsy Horne, who is from Kansas, and great seats; third row, center. The seats themselves (maybe 200 on the floor) were tiny, wood, and painted with a cream-colored lacquer. The rest of the theater was equally antique, and in rococo style; ornate, fantastical, and fake. Plaster lion heads peeking through clumps of plaster grapes on the undulating walls of the balconies. Column shapes melting out of the walls near the stage, painted to look like blue marble. Things like that.

People were still seating themselves when the orchestra began to tune their instruments. They were still tuning them as the doors were closed and the lights were dimmed. From my seat I could see into the pit and my best view was of three musicians seated along the outer stage-right rim. One, a fat-cheeked Japanese young man with a thin beard along his jowls, cleared his throat and then made a clicking noise, like the one you would make to govern a horse. A Kevin Kline lookalike in a tuxedo sitting next to him made the same clicking noise, and so did others I couldn’t see. Then there was the sound of a half-dozen newspapers rustling, and a bell tone or two. German text was projected onto the the upper left corner of the black curtain that still concealed the stage. The curtain rose.

Behind a screen that separated the stage from the audience, a man in his thirties wearing an oversized pink suit stuffed to make him look fat perched halfway up the inclined wall of a metal cage the width and height of the entire stage, looking bewildered. Discordant strings were plucked, giving the impression of a black widow spider gliding across its web toward prey.

The man peered through a rolled-up sheet of white paper, unrolled it and inspected it. Then he showed it to us. It was blank. He folded it up, put it in his pocket, waved a wand at it, removed the paper from his pocket, unfolded it, scanned it, looked startled, showed it to the audience. Printed on it in black block letters was, “HANS.”

A woman’s voice boomed from somewhere above. My German is terrible, but I thought she said, “where to, Hans?”

For the next hour, surreal characters took turns tormenting Hans, while the orchestra played what sounded like the soundtrack to a horror film. A man wearing a giant hand and a muscle suit made of cushions stabbed himself through the forearm with an aluminum foil knife. Betsy Horne and a few other women wearing tight black pants and tank tops and cat masks bit Hans’ ankles. Voices shrieked. Hans hummed and rocked, his jaw dropping and snapping shut like he was a nutcracker doll. Paper crinkled. The Kevin Kline lookalike panted like a dog, and when he looked up sheepishly into the audience, he and I momentarily locked eyes. A woman who seemed to be a talk show host cried into a microphone while a video image of her was projected both behind her onto a ten-foot oval screen and, much larger, onto the screen that covered the stage. Then a young couple, a red-haired woman and a chubby guy, both wearing just white underwear with red handprints on them, turned up inside Hans’s cage, emerging from under blankets. Hans, looking awed, carressed each of them. And then, as the lovers together shoved open the rear panel of the cage, the curtain dropped for intermission.

The lights came up and by the time I stood and turned toward the rear of the theater, nearly all the seats were empty. I went to the edge of the pit and catalogued the instruments. In front of each of the clicking guys’ chairs was a silver Casio keyboard. A man with wild gray hair tuned a Les Paul. A cello lay propped up on its side against a chair. There were racks of copper chimes, a sitar, and a saxophone, too, as well as a number of traditional orchestral instruments.

We followed an elderly couple out into the lobby. Other elderly couples sipped mamosas at the bar. Still more clustered in small groups outside in the gardens, chatting quietly in the dusk against a soft-focus backdrop of gushing stone fountains, manicured shrubs and gravel lanes lined with tall graceful trees. Nearly everyone looked over seventy, and wore suits and gowns from a different time. Aside from Feleicia and I, the only people younger than retirement age I saw there were a woman in her thirties with hair dyed the dark shade of red that’s popular with middle-aged German women, and a man in his twenties with tussled bleached hair wearing billowing pants that looked like they’d been made by cutting down the middle of a skirt and sewing together the resulting flaps into pant legs.

Pressed together outside against the building, Feleicia and I played for a moment at analyzing the opera’s plot. She had studied theater in college and explained that experimental theater was more popular in Europe, especially Germany, than in the States. She thought the same might be true of modern opera. She looked away for a moment, toward a brick in the red sandstone patio that read “Rokokotheater - Built in 1752,” then turned her face up suddenly and with entreating eyes, said, “Rob says it gets more exciting in the second half.”

A warning bell rang, sounding just like an old school bell, and a few minutes later, when it rang again, we returned to our seats. The elderly couple at the end of our row stood to let us by, bowing slightly and smiling as we passed. When the curtain rose we saw that Hans had removed his jacket, which hung now on one of the bars of his cage. And while a man mummy-wrapped in bandages crawled across the stage dragging an IV stand, and later while the chubby lover pulled a foot-long rubber penis out of his briefs and took his partner from behind, and still later, after Hans found his way out of his cage for the first time, Hans continued to strip.

The action became more difficult to follow towards the end. On stage at the same time were the man with the muscle suit, tipping his red cowboy hat again and again; and the lady cats, slinking around under the cage; and a nurse, squeeling that the mummy-man, now tucked into a hospital bed tipped up like a car on two wheels, “already stinks”; and a young man and woman dressed like futuristic boy scouts, bouncing up and down in-synch on a hidden trampoline. And then it was just Hans; hunched over and straddling a few bars in the roof of the cage, wearing only his boxer shorts and the fat suit, gazing down into the cage.

A ten-foot-tall image of Hans’s grinning wide-eyed face, in green and pink hues, was projected onto the rear screen. The same image was then projected onto the front screen, too, and after hovering there for a moment it began to shrink and fade. Then more faces floated in from the sides of the screen, also fading and shrinking as they receded along with the first, as though into a vortex at the rear of the stage. Violins droned. People moaned. The faces that came in from all sides arrived smaller and smaller, shrinking and fading, floating into the vortex, then more, and more, now a constellation of ghostly faces, growing smaller and more numerous, now just dozens of oval-shaped white lights, shrinking and fading. And then silence, and the final curtain.

The next morning when I got to work I dropped in on my friend and colleague, Dr. Oliver Bentz. Oliver has a doctorate in German literature and is a freelance writer on culture for a few of the major papers in the south of Germany and in Vienna. I told him that last night I’d seen a modern opera.

“Ohhhhh, modern opera,” he replied, making O shapes with his mouth and eyes. Then he leaned forward in his swivel chair, and smiling and rubbing his hands together, he asked, “Was it music, or was it just a lot of crying around?”