Depravity and unbridled lust: Schulhoff's Flammen revived in Prague

Anyone who finds opera tedious and predictable should book a flight to Prague immediately to see Flammen (Flames), a Czech-German co-production of the 1932 opera by Erwin Schulhoff. Along with a running theme of unbridled lust, it offers cross-dressing, blasphemy, murder, suicide, plenty of blood, sex with a watermelon, intimacy with a dead animal and a character crucified on a car. Not to mention one of the most innovative and audacious opera scores of the 20th – or for that matter, any – century.

Schulhoff, a Prague composer and pianist educated in Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne, got the idea for Flammen from a manuscript by Czech author Karel Josef Beneš, who recast Don Juan as a tortured soul cursed with immortality. Searching for redemptive spiritual love, he is doomed to an eternity of licentiousness. After a brief premiere run in Brno, the opera fell into obscurity, hamstrung by a libretto in a constant state of revision and a score that a number of music directors looked at and deemed too unorthodox or complex to take on. It didn’t help that the Nazis declared the opera a prime example of Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) and banned it in Germany.

With no storyline, Flammen defies conventional staging. In the final version, there are 12 scenes depicting Don Juan in various unrelated conquests and flirting with the other main character, La Morte, a female version of death who holds his only hope for release. The women, including a nun, all throw themselves at Don Juan with lines like, “Kiss, suck, tear me apart, my whole body is yours.” He responds with ferocious lust, treating them sadistically and then casting them aside while bemoaning his fate. In a nod to Mozart, Donna Anna and the Commendatore appear in one scene, but both end up dead. In short, there’s not a lot to feel good about.

Spanish director Calixto Bieito takes up the gauntlet by going directly to the dark heart of the piece, with a stripped-down black box set, heavy doses of brutal physical interaction and a taste for the grotesque. A devotee of Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Bieito floods the stage with a nonstop stream of jarring illusory images – a nun wearing a fantastical halo crown, a floating car, dancers in nude body costumes with private parts painted on them, performers coming and going through holes ripped in the set. It’s impossible to keep up with them all, which proves to be an effective device. Without time to rationally process them, the images create an amorphous atmosphere of unease and dislocation, a sense of being unmoored from reality. The audience feels as adrift as Don Juan.

Somehow this all holds together over two and a half hours, and much of the credit for that belongs to Jiří Rožeň, who has quickly established himself as the go-to conductor in the Czech Republic for avant-garde opera. Schulhoff apparently never met a musical idiom he didn’t like, and almost every one of them appears in a score that changes literally minute-to-minute, ranging across neoclassical, sacred, atonal and soundtrack music flavored with pop, jazz and borderline electronics. Rožeň handled the dizzying changes with precision and balance, segueing seamlessly from soothing harp and glockenspiel passages to full orchestral tumult. He was even more impressive in the long musical interludes that separate most of the scenes, weaving impressionistic textures to set the tone and mood. 

The score is no less difficult for the singers, who are never given a melody to follow. Typically they are singing in a different key and tempo than the orchestra, which itself is often going in two different directions at once. And the technical demands of the vocal parts are severe, especially for Don Juan, who spends most of the evening crying out in anguish and pain. Ukrainian tenor Denys Pivnitskyi did heroic work and didn’t seem to mind having crushed watermelon rubbed all over his torso and face. As La Morte, Norwegian mezzo Tone Kummervold was a near-constant spectral presence onstage, but had to wait until the final scene for a substantial solo, which she delivered with clarity and authority. And in the triple role of murdered lover, nun and Donna Anna, Ukrainian soprano Victoria Khoroshunova was physically abused more than anyone should be onstage. She sang and suffered beautifully.

Even with all that depravity, the most disturbing moments for the audience were the two points at which the fourth wall is broken. One closes out the opera. After singing about the allure of “dark eternity,” La Morte beckons the audience to join her. Earlier, it is Don Juan who steps to the front of the stage after confronting his dark inner self, points an accusing finger at the audience and sings, “You are all like me, all Don Juans!” It’s almost automatic to recoil and think, no we’re not. Or are we?