By the final week of July, the European opera season has begun its annual migration. Aix is over; Salzburg and Bayreuth are just gearing up. In Munich, however, curtains are still rising until the very end of the month.

For an American opera-goer, such stamina can seem almost indecent. The Metropolitan Opera’s 2025–26 season ended on June 6, nearly seven weeks ago. During the height of summer in Bavaria, however, it is still possible to travel around Germany’s largest and second-most populous state and find a full and remarkably varied operatic repertory.

Over the past four weeks, I saw seven operas in Munich, Nuremberg and Regensburg. They covered 281 years of operatic history, from Handel’s Alcina (1735) to Paul Moravec’s The Shining (2016). Wagner, Dvořák, Berg, Weber and Gottfried von Einem filled the intervening centuries. The survey was accidental, but it revealed the abundance of opera here long after most companies elsewhere had closed up shop for the summer.

The Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich’s principal opera company, occupies a special position within this landscape. Its regular season flows seamlessly into the Münchner Opernfestspiele, a six-week festival that serves as both a capstone and a concentrated display. Productions from the preceding months return alongside festival premieres and starry revivals, allowing local and visiting opera lovers to sample in a few days the range of a house that has been performing since fall.

The first of this year’s two new festival opera productions arrived on June 25 with Die Walküre, the second installment of Tobias Kratzer’s Munich Ring in progress. Siegfried and Götterdämmerung both arrive next season, and two complete cycles are planned for summer 2027. Under general music director Vladimir Jurowski, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester played superbly, producing Wagnerian weight without sacrificing clarity or momentum. Irene Roberts sang an emotionally raw, blistering Sieglinde and gave the production its most complete performance. Nicholas Brownlee’s Wotan generated heat despite some roughness, while Miina-Liisa Värelä offered a lyrical Brünnhilde whose lighter sound did not always conquer the Nationaltheater.

Kratzer rarely allowed the opera to stand still. Characters fidgeted and copulated awkwardly; Fricka vivisected a lamb while arguing legalistically for the sanctity of marriage. The Ride of the Valkyries became an elaborate video sequence of mounted warrior women tearing through Munich. It was giddily exciting and an undeniable crowd-pleaser. Yet the production’s ingenuity diverted attention from the intimate catastrophes at the work’s center. Its restless activity kept Wagner’s climactic recognitions and farewells from gathering their full emotional force.

Several weeks later, I took the train to Nuremberg, roughly an hour from Munich, for the final performance of Alban Berg’s unfinished masterpiece Lulu, staged by the company’s intendant, Jens-Daniel Herzog. It was the end of an ambitious season that had also included Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence, likewise staged by Herzog in what looked like a cut-rate homage to Simon Stone’s world-premiere production.

His Lulu was similarly economical but far more persuasive. Herzog kept the stage uncluttered, using a few well-chosen props and a high-gloss fashion photograph of Lulu in place of her painted portrait. The spareness ensured that the focus remained squarely on the musical and vocal performances.

The Staatsphilharmonie Nürnberg played Berg’s angular and lush score, heard in Eberhard Kloke’s alternative realization of the third act, with confidence and appetite. The young American soprano Juliana Zara triumphed in the fiendishly difficult title role. The Nuremberg performances were her first in the part since her acclaimed 2023 role debut in Darmstadt. Her bright, powerful and flexible soprano, physical fearlessness and frank eroticism lent Lulu a directness in keeping with the character’s insistence that she has never tried to be anyone other than herself.

With vocal and dramatic agility, Zara moved between cunning, desire, strength and helplessness without allowing the role to settle. With each new confrontation, her Lulu seemed to discover which version of herself the person before her required. I hope it is not too long before I hear her in this bravura role again.

Staatstheater Regensburg, home to another of Bavaria’s largest opera companies, also closed out its season with an ambitious new production: the European premiere of Paul Moravec’s The Shining, adapted from Stephen King’s novel.

The plot will be familiar to anyone who has seen Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic, although Moravec and his librettist, Mark Campbell, hew more closely to King’s book. King famously disliked the liberties Kubrick took with the material. Moravec’s Jack Torrance, the struggling writer who accepts a winter caretaking job at a grand Colorado hotel, enters the Overlook as a recovering alcoholic trying to repair his relationship with his wife and son. His mental deterioration is a human tragedy long before malevolent spirits intrude.

Moravec writes in an accessible, richly orchestrated style, with recurring motifs, carefully shaped vocal lines and an alert sense of pacing. The music can behave like a particularly accomplished film score, providing dread and atmosphere. It is also theatrically efficient: Moravec knows how to organize scenes succinctly while giving his characters ample opportunity for emotional expression.

Sebastian Ritschel’s production understood those strengths. Sam Madwar’s flexible set and video design moved fluently through the Overlook’s bedrooms, bar, boiler room and hedges, making the hotel a highly differentiated physical environment instead of a generalized emblem of evil. Stefan Veselka and the Philharmonisches Orchester Regensburg brought sweep and tension to the score. German baritone Carl Rumstadt traced Jack’s collapse with mounting violence, while Romanian soprano Theodora Varga preserved Wendy’s dignity even when the libretto asked her chiefly to plead for her life and protect her son from his possessed father.

A few days later, at Munich’s Gärtnerplatztheater, Gottfried von Einem’s Der Besuch der alten Dame represented a different sort of horror. Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 tragicomedy concerns Claire Zachanassian, a wealthy woman who returns to the town that drove her away decades earlier with an indecent proposal its impoverished inhabitants cannot refuse. Claire offers them a fortune if they kill Alfred Ill, the man who impregnated and abandoned her, then bribed two witnesses to deny his paternity. The townspeople reject the bargain with righteous indignation. Soon they are purchasing expensive goods on credit, counting on money that can arrive only after Ill is dead.

Known in English as The Visit, the play was the Swiss playwright’s international breakthrough. Dürrenmatt later adapted it as the libretto for von Einem’s 1971 opera. More recently, it inspired a quirky and unsettling Kander and Ebb musical that reached Broadway in 2015 with Chita Rivera as its titular revenant, as well as a sprawling 2020 adaptation by Tony Kushner at Britain’s National Theatre whose run was cut short by the COVID-19 shutdown.

In his libretto, Dürrenmatt preserved the play’s macabre, artificial language and gallery of grotesques. Claire’s attendants bear names such as Boby, Koby, Loby, Roby and Toby, as though they had wandered out of a sinister children’s rhyme. Spoken onstage, such dialogue can land awkwardly, its exaggeration exposing the actors more readily than the society Dürrenmatt is mocking. Singing better accommodates such strangeness: opera’s native stylization allows these figures to sound at home in their distorted world.

Von Einem’s score is skillful, theatrical and gratifying to voices, although its idiom is a better match for the play’s humor than its horror. Still, the Gärtnerplatz orchestra, conducted by Michael Balke, made it sound like gripping and expressive music theater. Sophie Rennert’s Claire and Ludwig Mittelhammer’s Ill were vocally and dramatically well matched, despite the deliberate imbalance in their stations.

Impressively, the smaller roles in this rarity were filled with seasoned character singers, including Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as the mayor, Norbert Ernst as Claire’s butler, Matija Meić as the schoolmaster and Paul Schweinester as Hofbauer. Their sharply differentiated performances allowed the citizenry of Güllen to emerge as a vivid community rather than a generalized image of provincial destitution.

The evening’s most vivid presences, however, were Claire and her black panther, embodied as puppets in Nikolaus Habjan’s production. Habjan collaborated with puppet designer Soffi Povo, who built the figures. Rennert sang beside the wizened puppet of Zachanassian. In the play, Claire describes the accidents that have left much of her body prosthetic; the puppet made that artificiality visible by showing us a woman whom money and injury have transformed into a machine built for revenge.

With their bloated, bulbous features, the figures brought rotting Muppets to mind. That unsettling combination of cartoonishness and decay provided an effective visual analogue to Dürrenmatt’s play. Beyond the puppets, however, Habjan’s staging was as stodgy and drab as a high-school production of Our Town. There was rarely enough sinister wit or sense of danger onstage to show how decent townspeople come to regard murder as a civic duty.

After watching a modern European community reason its way toward collective murder, I was transported, via Handel and Ariosto, to a mythic realm where danger announces itself as enchantment. Across town, Alcina, the Opernfestspiele’s second opera premiere, lit up the Prinzregententheater. This 1901 theater, modeled on Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus and prized for its clear acoustics, has become a regular home for the Staatsoper’s summer Baroque productions.

Members of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester played with extraordinary buoyancy and refinement under Stefano Montanari. Rhythms sprang into life without becoming brittle; slower passages unfolded in long, suspended breaths. The cast was exceptional, with Jeanine De Bique’s Alcina and John Holiday’s Ruggiero dominating an evening of superb Baroque singing. Aria after aria unfolded in phrases that could be melting, arch, aching, plaintive or muscular as required.

De Bique, who triumphed last season as Télaïre in Peter Sellars’s production of Castor et Pollux at the Palais Garnier, conducted by Teodor Currentzis, held Alcina’s glamour and desperation within the same vocal line, allowing the sorceress’s authority to crumble gradually into loneliness. Holiday, who made a phenomenal impression last season in Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production of Akhnaten, sang with ease, beauty and emotional openness, finding a tenderness in Ruggiero that made his awakening from enchantment unusually affecting. Their finely shaded performances allowed Handel’s succession of arias to accumulate into a psychological drama that the arid production rarely supplied.

Johanna Wehner’s staging was too static and nondescript for such volatile music. Its first half offered handsome surfaces without establishing a compelling theatrical world. After intermission, however, the figures inhabiting Alcina’s island appeared as living statues, beautiful objects into which her discarded lovers had been transformed. The image brought the staging into focus. What had seemed decorative acquired a disturbing emotional logic, and the second half became increasingly beautiful and moving, even if Wehner seemed primarily concerned with polished surfaces.

Enchantment and suspension between worlds also stood at the center of the sixth opera in my Bavarian summer binge. Martin Kušej’s 2010 production of Rusalka removes Dvořák’s fairy tale from its watery landscape and relocates it to a dank basement. In the Austrian director’s staging, Vodník, the water spirit who serves as Rusalka’s father figure and protector in the opera, keeps her and the other water nymphs imprisoned there. The abuse she suffers in the cellar sets the terms for everything that follows in the world above. Her voicelessness, estrangement, hospitalization and fatal reunion with the Prince become consequences of captivity.

The staging concept sounds blunt and even tasteless, but its images retain their power sixteen years after the production’s premiere. Set designer Martin Zehetgruber’s ultra-wide, pipe-filled cellar, accessible by a long ladder, is leaky, dark and airless. When the Gamekeeper and Kitchen Boy discover the prisoners, they summon the police, who raid the basement and arrest Vodník. Rusalka and the other victims are transferred to a psychiatric clinic.

In the final scene, the police escort Vodník, in irons, to visit Rusalka in the psychiatric ward. When the Prince arrives, she kills him. Kušej has turned Dvořák’s fatal kiss into the recurrence of trauma: for Rusalka, intimacy and violence have become inseparable.

Malin Byström’s Rusalka sometimes seemed to tear loose from the musical framework around her. She was not always exact, but the freedom of her phrasing gave the character a volatile intensity. Jamie Barton relished Ježibaba’s blood-curdling low notes, finding the right measure of menace and camp. Christof Fischesser’s Vodník was perhaps the evening’s most complete performance, vocally commanding and dramatically disturbing without reducing the character to a stock monster.

Pavel Černoch’s Prince sounded expressive but underpowered through much of the evening, as though he were preserving his resources. In the final scene, the voice finally opened, acquiring the lyrical urgency and ravaged despair that had been missing earlier.

The revival’s principal attraction was the young Czech maestro Petr Popelka, who will become the Bayerische Staatsoper’s general music director in the 2029–30 season. Rusalka is a score he plainly knows intimately, and he conducted it with phenomenal urgency, refinement and intelligence. Instrumental details emerged without disrupting the dramatic line; every shift of color or pulse seemed responsive to the action.

Munich will require far more of him in the future. A general music director at one of the world’s great repertory houses must move persuasively through Mozart, Wagner, Strauss, Italian opera, 20th-century works and new scores. One superb Rusalka cannot answer every question. It did reveal the sensitivity, alertness and dramatic instinct that Popelka can bring.

Four nights later, on July 29, I returned to the Nationaltheater for a nearly sold-out revival of Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2021 staging of Der Freischütz. I remembered the production more fondly than it deserved, perhaps because I first encountered it amid the strange euphoria of live opera during the pandemic. Seen again, its anonymous corporate world—Kuno as a predatory executive, Max and Kaspar as employees competing for advancement—proved dramatically inert, stripping Weber’s supernatural tale of mystery without finding much of interest beneath it.

The production’s principal visual enticement is its monumental, stage-spanning set: a luxurious, oak-paneled corporate office. The elaborate backstories Tcherniakov invents for Weber’s characters, however, feel arbitrary and reveal little about the opera. The production drew scattered boos at the curtain call, an unusual response to a five-year-old revival, though hardly an inexplicable one.

Thankfully, the musical performance redeemed the evening. Bálint Szabó gave Kuno dark, solid authority. Kyle Ketelsen’s muscular bass-baritone suited Kaspar, reimagined here as a former soldier with PTSD; his doubling as Samiel made complete dramatic sense and lent Weber’s demonic presence a pained ambiguity.

Stanislas de Barbeyrac, who triumphed last season as a ravaged Siegmund in Barrie Kosky’s London Die Walküre, brought Max an unusually handsome, refined tenor, with enough wildness at its edge to suggest a man coming apart. Golda Schultz, who also sang Agathe at the premiere, now sounded freer and more luminous than ever, her legato effortless and her soft singing almost melting.

Daniele Rustioni, the Staatsoper’s principal guest conductor from 2021 to 2023 and now principal guest conductor at the Met, plainly retained his rapport with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester. At the curtain call, he raised its players section by section, visibly delighted by what they had accomplished. After ten months of opera and six weeks of festival performances, the orchestra still sounded as though the season had only just begun.

all photos ©Monika Rittershaus

The 2026 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence arrived in a period of retrenchment and transition, with fewer new productions than in some recent seasons. Aix’s artistic director, Pierre Audi died suddenly in spring 2025 at the age of 67. Ted Huffman, his American successor, newly in place, is implementing Audi’s 2026 plans and part of the 2027 edition before developing his own vision from 2028 onward.

The four staged works I saw during the opening days arranged themselves into a rough diptych. On one side stood life-affirming operas about the will to struggle and persevere: Die Frau ohne Schatten and Die Zauberflöte. On the other were two works about endings and leave-taking: a revival of Romeo Castellucci’s ritualization of Mozart’s Requiem, first staged here in 2019, and the world premiere of Francesco Filidei’s chamber opera Accabadora.

To be sure, life and death are porous categories. Vitality kept breaking into the works about endings, just as intimations of mortality entered the most life-affirming pieces. Strauss’s fairy tale opera is full of magical transformations and dislocations: a white gazelle that turns into a woman; an emperor who turns to stone; a shadow that loosens itself from the body of a poor woman. Mozart’s fantastical singspiel is either allegorical or nonsensical depending on your point of view.

It ends with the triumph of love and reason, but along the way characters contemplate rape, murder, and suicide. Castellucci’s Requiem, for all its catalogues of extinction, turned out to be one of the most bracingly alive things I have seen from the Italian director. Accabadora, about a woman who performs mercy killings in a Sardinian village and her adopted daughter, is also a coming-of-age fable and tale of emancipation.

The undeniable highlight of this year’s festival was Barrie Kosky’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, conducted by Klaus Mäkelä, who becomes chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in September 2027. Frau gives a director a surplus of meaning and then dares him not to drown in it. Its symbolic apparatus is so overstocked that a production can spend all evening unpacking it and still never locate its pulse.

Kosky, to his credit, trusted the opera’s weirdness. He did not tidy it up or turn it into a psychiatric dossier with orchestral interludes.

From the first image, Kosky made Nina Stemme’s Amme the figure through whose gaze, or consciousness, the opera unfolded. Seated in her rocking chair, she seemed to call the story into being and lingered at its margins even during the rare stretches when she had nothing to sing. The possibility remained that the whole fairy tale was hers to tell – or to dream.

Michael Levine’s set was dominated by a black cube that descended from above, swallowing and releasing bodies and objects like a top hat or box from which a magician might produce a rabbit — or a corpse. The Emperor rode a colossal rocking horse poised over a curved blade, with slaughtered deer below him. Barak’s house was a cluttered assemblage of scaffolding, buckets, rags, and pans.

Keikobad, the Empress’s silent father, appeared as an oversized porcelain doll’s head, as surreal and disquieting as a drawing by Roland Topor. A dancer in a sparkly black leotard slipped through the action as both an erotic apparition and a personification of the sought-after shadow.

Kosky interpreted Hofmannsthal’s libretto as not narrowly concerned with fertility; the director did not so much erase the reproductive plot as make room for other resonances. Recalling Chamisso’s tale of Peter Schlemihl, the shadow became a visible mark of human belonging. The Empress’s determination not to barter in shadows meant refusing to purchase her humanity at the expense of another’s misery. Kosky’s most conspicuous revision came at the end of Act II.

Instead of responding to her husband’s threats of violence with newfound ardor and devotion, the Färberin did what any modern woman would do: attack the bastard with the nearest hammer. It was a deeply satisfying inversion that fit the score perfectly, even as it cut against the grain of the libretto.

Performances of Frau remain comparatively rare because of its enormous technical, orchestral, and vocal demands. My own attachment to the work began with the Metropolitan Opera’s 2001 production, directed by Herbert Wernicke and conducted by Christian Thielemann.

In 2001, I had recently gotten into the habit of scoring standing-room tickets ($16, if memory serves) to anything and everything at the Met. The evening was one of a handful of performances that helped determine the course of my life. I remember leaning against the back row of the orchestra in utter stupefaction, wondering what in God’s name this gigantic, ravishing, deranged thing was and why I had needed to reach the ripe age of 15 to discover that opera could be this overpowering and sumptuous.

Since then, Frau has been one of the few pieces (along with Lulu) that I will travel great distances to see.

Nowadays, Frau is sometimes treated as an orchestral luxury good, all polish and expense. (That was the dismaying impression left by Thielemann’s recent performances in Vienna and Zubin Mehta’s in Berlin.) Mäkelä ensured that the evening never became a bath of Straussian perfume.

The Orchestre de Paris kept revealing the score’s joints: the concertante exchanges between voice and instrument; the small instrumental commentaries that seem to listen to and answer the singers; the mournful cello solo during the Emperor’s great Act II scena; and the violin meditation preceding the Empress’s confession before Keikobad in Act III.

Mäkelä understood that the human voice in Frau is often less a melody placed above the orchestra than another brilliant instrument within an unusually rich chamber texture. His tempi could be daring. Some stretches were held back to the edge of stillness, as in the Empress’s resolute farewell to the Amme near the start of Act III.

These suspended moments, coupled with Kosky’s exceptionally sensitive Personenregie, made the opera’s dream-time palpable: the characters seemed trapped inside slowly churning machinery that could at any moment turn deadly. The performing edition assembled for Aix puzzled me in the best possible way. Mäkelä wrote in the program that it retained many of the cuts Karl Böhm made with Strauss’s approval, yet I cannot remember hearing a live performance that sounded more complete.

Aix assembled an enviable cast with one knockout performance. Ambur Braid’s Färberin had the amplitude, steel, and nerve for the role, but also the desolation. Her voice cut through the orchestra with thrilling security, and she seemed dramatically alive in every bar. The part did something similar for Christine Goerke in the Met’s 2013–14 revival; Braid’s tour de force gave the same sense of a performer seizing this towering role with utter conviction.

Though no one else onstage matched Braid’s white-hot intensity, all the performances benefited enormously from Kosky’s dramatically refined and nuanced direction, which included words and phrases that were barked out, whispered, or screamed.

Stemme, a veteran Amme, knows how to turn the character’s endless arioso into rousing theater with Sprechstimme-like commands, threats issued between clenched teeth and sudden eruptions of vocal extravagance. Vida Miknevičiūtė’s Empress took longer to persuade me. At first, her voice sounded too steely, too firmly planted in the human world, for a figure who begins as an ethereal creature. The role ideally wants a gleam that can suggest both fragility and distance.

Yet as the Empress gained moral weight over the course of the opera, Miknevičiūtė’s full-bodied, even lusty, intensity felt earned. By the final Act, her soaring, frankly hochdramatisch singing was deeply moving.

Michael Spyres, who recently wowed in the Met’s recent Tristan, sang the Emperor with elegance and nobility, though the part did not seem a perfect fit. Strauss’s finest tenor role asks for heroic altitude with lyric poise. Spyres’s sound was occasionally too weighty, with some patchiness in the exposed writing. Still, he lent the character dignity, no small feat in a role that is nearly a psychological blank. Brian Mulligan’s Barak was the weak link among the principals.

He sang thoughtfully and with clear musical intelligence, but the voice lacked the dark, burnished center and weight the role needs. Barak should anchor the mortal world. Mulligan offered sympathy in spades, but not enough gravity.

If Frau was the festival’s triumph, Clément Cogitore’s Die Zauberflöte, staged at the outdoor Théâtre de l’Archevêché, was its most exasperating failure. There was a clear logic to placing the two works on the same program: Strauss and Hofmannsthal modeled their Märchenoper on Mozart’s earlier one.

Cogitore, a French video and multimedia artist, approached Zauberflöte as a reckoning with the moral and historical legacy of the West since the end of World War II. Tamino and Pamina were doubled by child and adolescent actors, figures of innocence trapped in the nightmare of history.

For better or worse (and mostly for worse), projected video carried much of the production’s burden: An endless montage of archival footage showed cities of rubble slowly being rebuilt and the triumph of the American way of life alongside anti-Black racism and late 20th-century and early 21st-century wars and calamities.

Zauberflöte is, on one level at least, about enlightenment and initiation. Yet the ethics of the piece is far from straightforward. The Queen of the Night — a clear progenitor of Strauss’s Amme — lurks in moral ambiguity. The opera asks us to accept on faith that Sarastro is an enlightened leader rather than simply a misogynist tyrant. There was, then, a certain logic to using the piece to meditate on the dark side of rationality and the dialectic of Enlightenment.

Sadly, the severity overwhelmed an opera that is often just plain silly. Any director who approaches Zauberflöte needs to allow solemnity to rub up against nonsense.

For a while, the child doubles, who delivered the spoken text in adorably high-pitched voices, helped. Tamino, one of the stiffest characters in opera, gained vulnerability; Pamina’s suffering seemed connected to the terror of learning what kind of world adults had prepared for her. The Three Boys made sense as witnesses from the ruins rather than decorative cherubs. But Cogitore kept barraging the audience with archival footage that supplied commentary rather than moving the production forward.

The musical side was another matter. Leonardo García-Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea played with elegance, lift, and an ear for chamber-scale detail. The prominent glockenspiel and harpsichord gave their reading a zing that the onstage action sorely lacked. One of the production’s few jokes was musical: Sarastro’s ceremonial motif recurred as a ringtone during a series of phone calls during which Tamino and Pamina’s fate was discussed with unseen interlocutors.

The idea was not especially deep, but in this ponderously Sebaldian Zauberflöte any comic relief was welcome.

The cast rescued much of the evening. Ying Fang’s Pamina was exquisite: pearly, poised and delicate. Her melting, aching “Ach, ich fühl’s” had time-stopping intensity. Mauro Peter was a handsome and capable Tamino, singing with sturdy, flexible tones. Sabine Devieilhe’s Queen of the Night was wild, eccentric, and adored by the audience. Brindley Sherratt brought old-school authority to Sarastro, here imagined as blind.

Sean Michael Plumb’s Papageno had charm, ease, and a boisterousness that seemed out of tune with almost everything else in Cogitore’s production.

Several nights later, the ruins projected during Zauberflöte gave way to full-scale annihilation in Mozart’s Requiem, also staged at the Théâtre de l’Archevêché. Castellucci’s well-travelled production is an intricately conceived, masterfully executed meditation on the ceremonies and rituals through which humans respond to the pain and mystery of death.

The production begins with a woman near the end of life and expands outward until her departure becomes a planetary inventory of vanishings. The names of extinct animals, languages, places, peoples, and civilizations are patiently projected onstage. The staging piles loss upon loss until Mozart’s funeral mass seems to be sung for the cosmos.

That description makes the evening sound grueling and bleak. It was not. Castellucci can be severe, and some of his work trades in a sleek, fashionable pessimism. This Requiem, by contrast, was full of bodies in motion and color in bloom. Dancers, choristers, folk costumes, children, flowers, ritual objects, processions: The stage kept generating forms of life even as the production recorded their disappearance. Death was everywhere, but so were human invention and joy.

Flowers, bodies, voices, gestures, and even the theater itself appeared as temporary concentrations of energy, beautiful because they were transitory. Castellucci treats dissolution and entropy as processes that awaken and ignite our creativity. We make music, costumes, rites, and dances because everything will, someday, vanish.

Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion, an ensemble comprising orchestra and chorus, made Mozart’s unfinished score, supplemented in this 95-minute arrangement by various other Mozart works, plainchant, and German chorales, feel like an organic whole. The playing was refined and forceful, with impressive transparency and discipline. Mélissa Petit, Beth Taylor, Duke Kim, and Alex Rosen formed a strong vocal quartet, but the choral singing carried the evening’s physical and spiritual weight.

In the program, Castellucci writes of performers exhausted like supernovae at the end of the piece, and the image felt apt.

Silvia Costa, Castellucci’s assistant on the original production, deserves credit for the revival’s precision and vitality. Recreating Castellucci can easily become a matter of preserving cryptic images under glass. Here the staging had rigor as well as warmth, and the choreography of bodies and objects felt freshly inhabited.

The updated atlas of vanished or endangered places included sites destroyed in Gaza and southern Lebanon, which may have prompted the lone but very vociferous boo at the curtain call. The final projected title, a memorial to Audi, was also deeply moving. What had been one of the major successes of his tenure now returned as a tribute and farewell.

If Castellucci’s Requiem draws individual mortality outward toward the extinction of cultures and species, Francesco Filidei’s Accabadora brings death back to the bedside. Adapted from Michela Murgia’s novel, the opera follows Tzia Bonaria Urrai, a Sardinian seamstress called on to end the suffering of the dying, and Maria, the adopted daughter who discovers Bonaria’s vocation and recoils from it.

Filidei’s previous opera was a large-scale adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose that had its world premiere at La Scala in 2025. Accabadora is an 80-minute work scored for 17 players; Lucie Leguay led members of the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon in a precise but somewhat chilly performance. Filidei creates a finely graded chamber texture from harmonics, tremolos, and flickering dynamics.

Harp, accordion, celesta, and bells give the ensemble some of its most distinctive colors; the Sardinian identity enters most forcefully through the evocative choral writing. Much of the solo vocal music remains close to inflected speech, keeping the Italian text unusually intelligible while also constraining lyrical expansion. An offstage male ensemble evokes cantu a tenore, while a more nakedly expressive female chorus comes to the fore in an extended lament at the opera’s midpoint.

Filidei writes in the program that he conceived of the chorus as a second orchestra, but its uneven distribution throughout the piece means that it rarely determines the work’s musical syntax. This folkloristic music, sung in Sardinian, opens a rougher, more resonant space. I wished it were more fully absorbed into the score. So many of the surrounding scenes developed through curiously colorless recitative and ostinatos.

I enjoyed Accabadora much more in the radio broadcast, where I could focus on Filidei’s attentiveness to sonority and proportion, and on the friction between individual and collective voices. Without Valentina Carrasco’s attractive but static staging before me, Filidei’s control of timbre and instrumentation became easier to admire.

In the theater, the bread baking, looms, and grapevines descending for the vendemmia produced prettified images of village labor that remained stubbornly undramatic — and troubling in their romanticization of rural poverty. The direction of the singers was often broad and awkward, leaving Noa Frenkel and Rachel Masclet, the accabadora and her adopted daughter, to supply emotional definition lacking from the production.

Frenkel nevertheless lent Bonaria weight and concentration, while Masclet channeled Maria’s youth and openness.

Accabadora was staged at the 493-seat Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, an 18th-century Italian-style theater that has hosted the festival’s past chamber operas. Given the festival’s financial constraints, smaller-scale works like these will likely become more necessary in the future. Aix is hardly alone in finding that though artistic plans are made years ahead, production costs refuse to stand still while subsidies and sponsorship are far from guaranteed. But the festival’s own position is particularly delicate.

A regional audit covering 2014–20 had already described the festival’s economic model as fragile. Under Audi, who ran the festival from 2018 to 2025, Aix pursued a larger and more expensive program while relying on sponsorship that proved less dependable than projected. A combined €4.4 million shortfall for 2023 and 2024 led to €1.6 million in repayable emergency public aid, and the €23.1 million budget for 2026 is 16 percent below the 2023 level.

Future projects are likely to be scaled back as Aix repairs its finances. All that makes chamber opera more than an economical sideline. Works such as Accabadora allow Aix to keep new opera a vital part of the festival without assuming the cost – or the risk – of a large-scale world premiere. Whatever changes Huffman makes to Aix, I hope that new chamber opera remains part of the festival’s identity.

On its opening weekend, Aix looked less like a festival in mourning than one pondering both its inheritance and its future. Frau and Zauberflöte asked how people become fully human through education, initiation, trial, and temptation. Requiem and Accabadora asked how we meet our inevitable end: through memory and ritual, through naming and being named.

In Audi’s final fully planned Aix, opera became what it has always been at its strangest and most powerful: a medium where the living sing in the presence of the dead.

A verison of this report also appears at Parterre Box with the headline “Aix tremendae, salva me”

A number of years ago I wrote a story about a man who, in part to avoid confronting a deteriorating relationship and in part to armor himself against the onslaught of a bitter winter in Berlin, retreats into his books: not by reading them, but by endlessly sorting and cataloguing them. At the time, I felt with suffocating intensity that I had barricaded myself in my Kreuzberg apartment with books. Like the story that grew out of it, that claustrophobia was a manifestation of my larger fear of getting stuck in Berlin.

...

Book collecting is ill-suited to a nomadic existence. A library is a highly unportable thing. There is perhaps no greater illustration of this truth than the scene in “Take the Money and Run” where Woody Allen works as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.

...

Though in recent years I have put distance between myself and Berlin, the city still has me – and hundreds of my books - in its grip. Now my library is scattered across bookshelves (a word I at first misspelled, rendering it “bookselves,” which is a lovely neologism) in Berlin, Munich, Italy and New York, which makes it impossible for me to ever find anything.

...

Through I’ve spent much of my life hunting for books, my library is not particularly valuable. I mostly go for old paperbacks: a British series of pocket Penguins from the 70s with works of modern art on their covers; brightly colored Vintage Contemporaries from the 80s; somber Vintage Modern Classics, with their durable spines and matte covers, from the 90s. On the shelf, my books are a jumble of irregular shapes, colors and sizes. My wife complains about their lack of uniformity. It offends her Italian design sensibilities. I tell her: That’s American individualism, baby.

...

When I began trading my pocket money for books, I frequented the street vendors on Broadway who marketed to an undergraduate crowd. The titles they laid out on their rickety folding tables looked like a subversive version of Columbia’s core curriculum: Augustine, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, and Frantz Fanon. I’d pick up a few badly scuffed paperbacks, thinking I could get a head start on college for a couple of bucks. There was one book seller with a funny scrunched up face, boxy black-rimmed glasses, a broad forehead and tufts of white hair, who looked like a supporting character in a Bukowski or Hunter S. Thompson book. He routinely got into heated conversations with passing students and professors about John Rawls and Ursula K. LeGuin. He claimed to have a Masters in Science Fiction from Columbia. I read that he died during the pandemic. Were his books buried with him?

...

Books with blemishes never bothered me. In time, I even came to appreciate the wear and tear, admiring the scars that previous owner(s) and the world at large had left on books that were, after all, designed to be portable, durable and cheap. They all, I realized, had a history. Sometimes there were clues – a dedication, an address, an ex libris stamp or sticker. More often, however, few traces remained, leaving me to puzzle at the stupefying set of circumstances that led to the encounter of my discovering a treasure in a cavernous warehouse in Middlebury, Vermont; a crawlspace in Kreuzberg whose shelves were sagging with mildewy volumes of hair-raisingly illustrated German cookbooks; or buried beneath a stack or romance novels in a Bombay’s Thieves’ Market. Clutching a long-sought book in my dusty hands, I often think: So much has conspired to bring us together.

...

Places, for me, are inseparable from the books I have found while exploring them. In Paris at 15, I picked up a French paperback of “Lolita” with a curly- haired redhead sucking a lollipop wrapped in plastic at one of the green kiosks along the Seine. In Istanbul at 23, I found Robbe-Grillet’s “Recollections of the Golden Triangle” in a palatial bookshop on Istiklal Caddesi. Abandoning my family during holidays in Jerusalem, I often descended into the musty basement annex of the Schatz Book Gallery, hidden in a small pedestrian road off King George Street, where I exhumed long out-of-print novels by Italo Svevo and Alberto Moravia.

...

The keen pleasure of acquiring books I discovered as an adolescent, and which has since accompanied me through life, has recently taken on a morbid tinge. For years, a veteran New York Times’ editor I’ll call Dick invited me over to his house in Chappaqua, a second home which, he half-joked, he could never leave, because of his library of 5,000 books. I never found the time for a jaunt to Westchester before he died from Covid in the autumn of 2021. On my last trip to New York, we had dinner in Westchester with Dick’s widow, whom I’ll call Pat. We sat outside by the gravel driveway, enjoying cold salmon as Pat’s bulldogs, Lucy and Ethel, barked incessantly. After dinner, Pat ushered me inside the house. “Così fan tutte” was faintly playing on the radio as she led me to the living room and told me I was free to take anything I wanted.

The books were meticulously ordered on dark oak bookcases, the occasional exhibition poster poking out from any free wall space. I took down several tomes from the History and Philosophy sections somewhat sheepishly. Would Pat let me abscond with the rare first English edition of The Arcades Project?

Driving back to Manhattan, I glanced at the paper bag full of Dick’s books on the seat next to me. Gone was the excitement I had felt an hour earlier when I had made my pile. In its place was a sense of despair, even panic, at knowing that someday my library will, like Dick’s, be dispersed. If there are any readers left by then, I hope that the books that I loved and that will outlive me are will not be too brittle, cracked or faded to seduce and enchant anew.

-Adam Joachim Goldmann

This version of this text was originally delivered as a talk in Berlin in October 2024 as part of Lettrétage’s event “Walter Benjamin in the “Sphere of Life.”

You can find Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library” from 1931 here.

Once again, the Berlin opera season startled with sheer volume and variety of titles on offer: over 90 staged opera productions, including 24 premieres across the German capital’s three full-time opera houses.

Comme d’habitude, the Komische Oper’s eclectic programming proved that the excitement of the Kosky years continues to infect the company in its westernly exile in the Schiller Theater, while their historic home undergoes a lengthy, costly and very troubled renovation. In October, they opened the season with a spectacular Jesus Christ Superstar directed by former intendant Andreas Homoki and staged at Hangar 4 of Tempelhof Airport. Granted, Lloyd-Webber is not Mozart, but the rock arena-style production was, pardon my French, fucking amazing. I was sad to miss the wintertime premieres of Salome (dir. Evgeny Titov) and Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk (dir. Kosky), but it’s wonderful to see the Komische continue to program such thorny and demanding pieces.

Next season kicks off in late September with Aribert Reimann’s Lear, staged by Kosky at Tempelhof. Another highlight of 2026-27 is the Berlin transfer of Andrea Breth’s acclaimed Aix production of Madama Butterfly, the Komische’s first new take on Puccini melodrama’s since shock-and-schlock-meister Calixto Bieito’s preposterously violent 2005 staging. (In the final scene, Cio-Cio-San killed her child with a samurai sword and, splattered in blood, laughed manically as Pinkerton dashed onstage to discover his lifeless son.) Titov returns early next year to direct Karol Szymanowski’s Król Roger and the season winds down in May with Kosky’s long-awaited production of Porgy and Bess.

At the Berlin Staatsoper, the world premiere of Matthias Pintscher’s Das kalte Herz in January appears to have been admired at a distance rather than fully embraced. The only new production at Berlin’s oldest opera company that appears to have had a genuine impact was Ted Huffman’s dazzlingly physical production of The Cunning Little Vixen.Sadly, it’s not being revived next season. I hope it returns to the house soon! Generally, however, the lackluster programming at the house indicates a serious lack of artistic direction for the Staatsoper under its recently-appointed intendantin Elisabeth Sobotka.

A glance at the booklet for the coming season does not exactly inspire confidence. Stefan Herheim’s production of Francesco Cavalli’s magnificently wacky La Calisto, a 1651 work that was a highlight of last summer’s Aix festival, is far and away the most intriguing of the six premieres planned for 2026-27, while a new La Forza del Destino by the in-demand Russian director Vasily Barkhatov replaces Herheim’s absolutely wonderful yet seldom-revived 2005 production of Verdi’s most opulent and most confusing potboiler.

2025-26 was a season of transition for Deutsche Oper Berlin, one of the largest repertory houses in the world. Last summer, the company bid farewell to its longtime general manager Dietmar Schwarz, leaving an interim season before a new leader, Aviel Cahn, arrives.

Cahn, who previously ran the Grand Théâtre de Genève, has reduced the number of revivals per season and has unveiled a triumvirate of maestri to succeed Sir Donald Runnicles, the Scottish conductor who has led the company since 2009. Starting next season, Maxime Pascal, Titus Engel and Michele Spotti will share principal conducting duties.

Recently, the house announced a mouthwatering new season (discoverable on a stylish new website) that kicks off in late September with Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht, the final installment in Pascal’s first-ever cycle of the complete septology.

This season, however, the company often seemed to be treading water. Michael Thalheimer’s Tristan und Isolde, a transfer from Geneva, which opened the season, was notably mostly for kicking Graham Vick’s miserable 2010 staging out of rep, while David Hermann’s dark and minimal production of Korngold’s Violanta was one of the weaker entries in the company’s valuable project of operatic rediscoveries, which I would love to see continue under Cahn’s direction. Still to come is a fresh staging of Albert Lortzing’s once-(immensely) popular Zar und Zimmermann, a comic opera that appears to be slowly re-entering the repertoire after many decades of neglect.

As Berlin’s long opera season enters into its final month, two routine revivals and one worth getting exciting bring this busy yet none-too-satisfying year to a close: Philipp Himmelmann’s striking production of Don Carlo (June 12, 20, 26); Ruth Berghaus’ classic avant-garde staging of Pelléas et Mélisande (June 21, 23; July 3 & 9); and Ole Anders Tandberg’s hopelessly confused take on Carmen (June 12).

Reviews of all three have been freshly added to the Berlin Opera Database.

Featuring loans from the Louvre, the Getty, the Albertina, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the National Gallery in London, the jewel-like exhibition also recounts the history and prestige of the Barberini dynasty through works by Bernini, Giuliano Finelli (including his stunning bust of Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger), and Francesco Mochi, including pieces that return to Rome - and to the grand Palazzo Barberini - for the first time in centuries. More information here. (Closes June 14).

_{All photos © Adam Joachim Goldmann}

And stepping outside…

This just in: The Bayerische Staatsoper has announced the 40-year-old Czech conductor Petr Popelka as its next General Music Director starting with the 2029/2030 season. The Russian-born maestro Vladimir Jurowski, who has led the Munich company since 2021, will step down at the end of the 2028-9 season.

Popelka, a former principal double bassist for the Dresden Staatskapelle, currently leads both the Wiener Symphoniker and the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra. A biographical sketch on the website of the Berliner Philharmoniker, where Popelka debuted earlier this year in a program of works by Dvořák, Berg and Schumann, calls his recent rise as a conductor as “meteoric.”

Popelka has only appeared once before at the Bayerischen Staatsoper, in last season’s premiere of Leoš Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová. He returns this summer for the Opernfestspiele’s revival of Rusalka.

The music directorship of the Bayerische Staatsoper is one of the most coveted positions in the world of opera. Currently, Jurowski juggles his commitments in Munich with several other high-profile and time-consuming positions. It will be interesting to see whether Popelka will focus on his duties in Munich with the sort of single-minded determination that Kirill Petrenko brought to the job during his now-legendary tenure at the company between 2013 and 2020, before he was snatched up by the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Like Petrenko at the time of his Munich appointment, Popelka is relatively young and not particularly well-known. Unlike the Russian maestro, who led Theater Meiningen, Wiener Volksoper and Komische Oper Berlin before landing in Munich, Popelka doesn’t seem to be particularly specialized in opera, although he has paced Shostakovich’s The Nose in Dresden, Elektra in Oslo, Schwanda in Vienna and Don Giovanni in Zurich, all within recent memory.

I haven’t been able to find any audio-visual evidence of Popelka in the opera pit, but here’s a clip of him conducting the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and the Swedish soprano Malin Byström in the final scene of Salome as part of the 2024 Nobel Prize Concert.

I have been derelict of late in my Substacking duties. Yet in the immortal words of Dr. Frank-N-Furter: “I can explain!”

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about politics & culture and cultural politics.

Last month, I reported on the opening of the Venice Art Biennale and the controversies surrounding Israel and Russia’s participation for the Forward.

I popped over to Salzburg to weigh in on Barrie Kosky’s dazzlingly silly production of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims for Cecilia Bartoli’s Whitsun Festival. My review at Parterre-Box places the production in the context of Salzburg’s recent administrative and artistic upheavals. (I can’t wait to return, in early August, for the main summer festival’s new production of Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, directed by Romeo Castellucci).

Lastly, my 5000-word essay on political turmoil and outrage at the 76th Berlin Film Festival recently ran as a Sidebar column. In it I reflect on the most recent installment of the world’s most political festival and discuss the standout films I saw there, while discussing the Berlinale’s history and position within the film festival ecosystem.

Happy reading! I hope to be back soon with Substack-exclusive content.

Your Feuilletonist

Valie Export, the Austrian artist, filmmaker and performer whose confrontational actions of the 1960s and 1970s helped define feminist art in Europe and profoundly shaped thought and discourse about the female body, cinema and public space, died in Vienna on May 14, three days before what would have been her 86th birthday.

Her death was announced by the Valie Export Foundation. Thaddaeus Ropac, her longtime gallerist, said the cause was complications from an at-home fall.

Ms. Export — who wrote her name in capital letters, as VALIE EXPORT — worked in film, photography, performance, sculpture, installation, video and wrote theoretical texts. She became famous for works that were frequently scandalous and misunderstood, especially in Austria, but their purpose was clear and quite simple: to show how images of women are made, circulated, desired and controlled.

In “Tapp und Tastkino,” or “Tap and Touch Cinema,” first performed in 1968, she wore a small curtained box over her bare torso and invited people to reach inside and touch her breasts. In 1969’s “Aktionshose: Genitalpanik,” or “Action Pants: Genital Panic,” she entered a cinema in Munich, Germany wearing trousers with the crotch cut out and walked through the rows of seated spectators.

Those actions became standard points of reference in histories of performance art and feminist art. At the time, they were often treated as provocations or obscenities. Ms. Export understood them as tests of a culture in which women’s bodies were on display everywhere, but rarely on their own terms.

Ms. Export came out of the same postwar Viennese art world that produced Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Muehl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose Actionist performances often involved blood, animal carcasses, self-wounding and sacrilegious ritual. Like them, Ms. Export rejected the decorum of Austrian postwar culture and its evasions about violence, sexuality and authority.

But she also differed sharply from them. The Actionists often turned the body into a site of ritual, sacrifice or shock. Ms. Export used her own body more analytically. She wanted to show how spectatorship worked, how film trained desire, how language and architecture shaped women’s experience, and how public space enforced unspoken rules.

“The Austrian scene was very traditional, and they didn’t know about conceptual art,” she told The Guardian in 2019, recalling some of the challenges she faced when starting out. “The second thing was that I am a woman.”

Valie Export was born Waltraud Lehner on May 17, 1940, in Linz, Austria, which had been annexed by Nazi Germany two years earlier. Her father, Rudolf Lehner, was a former school director who died fighting for the Nazis in Africa during World War II. Her mother, Margarethe Lehner, née Kousal, was a primary-school teacher. Waltraud was a rebellious child. Along with her two older sisters, she attended a convent school, an experience she later described as strict but formative.

At 14, she enrolled at the School of Arts and Crafts in Linz. At 18, she married Ernst Alois Höllinger and soon had a daughter, Perdita. The marriage did not last. She later said that she quickly realized she did not want the life expected of a wife and mother in postwar Austria.

“I thought: this is not my life, being married and a mother,” she said in the Guardian interview.

After the marriage ended, she placed her daughter temporarily in the care of one of her sisters and moved to Vienna, where she studied textile design, graduating in 1964 from the Höhere Bundes-Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Textilindustrie. She then worked in film, including as a script girl, editor and extra, while becoming involved in Vienna’s avant-garde circles.

Her break with domestic convention had lasting consequences. In 1970, after she was convicted on pornography charges connected with her co-editorship of a book on Viennese Actionism, a judge temporarily withdrew her custody rights. The episode became part of the personal history behind her work: a young woman who challenged sexual and artistic norms was punished not only as an artist, but as a mother.

She used the name Waltraud Höllinger professionally up until 1967. In that year, she renamed herself Valie Export. “Valie” was from a childhood nickname; “Export” referred to Smart Export, a popular Austrian cigarette brand. At once a pseudonym and a logo, the new moniker allowed her to cast off both her inherited names and replace them with something portable, commercial, cheeky and defiantly self-made.

In “VALIE EXPORT — SMART EXPORT,” a self-portrait made in 1970, she posed with a cigarette package altered to bear her own image and new name. It was a compact statement of artistic self-invention: at a time when advertising routinely packaged women for consumption, she packaged herself.

Some of her first major works belonged to expanded cinema, a form that pushed film beyond the projected image and into performance, the body and the viewer’s own position.

“Tap and Touch Cinema” was performed in Vienna and Munich in 1968. In its best-known form, Ms. Export wore a box resembling a small theater over her naked upper body. The box had curtains; viewers were invited to put their hands inside. Peter Weibel, her then-partner and collaborator, helped draw attention to the action with a megaphone and timed the encounters.

The action reversed the conditions of ordinary moviegoing. In a dark cinema, a spectator could watch a woman’s body without being seen. In Ms. Export’s work, the spectator had to stand in public, touch what he could not see and look at the artist while doing so. The woman was no longer an image on a screen. She was present, watching back.

“Action Pants: Genital Panic” made a similar point inside of the cinema itself. The work has often been misremembered as taking place in a pornographic theater and as involving a machine gun. Ms. Export later clarified that the original action took place in an ordinary Munich arthouse movie theater and that the famous gun photographs were made afterward as posters.

The action itself was plainer yet more disturbing than those famously reproduced images. Wearing crotchless pants, Ms. Export walked through the rows of spectators and confronted them with the body that cinema usually kept at a safe remove, transformed into projection and fantasy. Some members of the audience left.

Other early works were similarly direct and designed to provoke discomfort. In “Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit” (“From the Portfolio of Doggedness”), from 1968, Ms. Export led Mr. Weibel through Vienna on a leash as he walked on all fours. In “Body Sign Action,” from 1970, she had a garter belt tattooed onto her thigh, making permanent an accessory associated with erotic display. In “Facing a Family,” broadcast on Austrian television in 1971, she showed a family eating dinner while watching television, so that viewers at home were confronted with an image of their own behavior.

In “…Remote…Remote…,” from 1973, she used a knife to cut at her cuticles and placed her bleeding fingers in milk. The work is difficult to watch, but its logic is precise. Ms. Export was not using injury as spectacle. She was connecting bodily pain to childhood discipline, domestic cleanliness and the quiet violence of social training.

Her “Body Configurations” photographs, begun in 1972 and continued through the decade, extended that critique to the built environment. In these works, she bends, stretches or folds herself against curbs, corners, stairs, walls and patches of urban architecture. Sometimes she marks architectural lines in red. The photographs are controlled and often elegant, but they show the body adjusting itself to structures that were not designed for it.

Ms. Export also wrote and organized exhibitions. In “Women’s Art: A Manifesto,” published in 1972, she argued that women had to do more than enter existing artistic systems. They had to change the means by which women were represented. In 1975, she organized “MAGNA. Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität” at Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna, an early and important European exhibition of feminist art.

Her films, though less widely known than her public actions, were central to her career. Her first feature, “Unsichtbare Gegner” (“Invisible Adversaries”), released in 1977, is a science-fiction psychodrama about a female photographer who believes that alien beings called the Hyksos are taking over human bodies.

The film later lent its title to a 2016 exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Curated by Lauren Cornell and Tom Eccles, “Invisible Adversaries” placed Ms. Export’s work alongside that of artists including Bruce Nauman, Ida Applebroog, Lorna Simpson, K8 Hardy, Hito Steyerl, Trisha Donnelly and Emily Jacir. In that well received show, Ms. Export’s work from decades earlier felt surprisingly relevant and even prophetic by anticipating arguments about surveillance, media, gender performance and the instability of identity.

Her other feature films included “Menschenfrauen” (“Human Women”) (1979) and “Die Praxis der Liebe” (“The Practice of Love”) (1985), about a journalist investigating a criminal case while researching peep shows in Hamburg, which screened in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival.

“Syntagma” (1984), one of her most concentrated experimental short films, used montage, doubling and fragmentation to examine the female body as something assembled by images and signs. Ms. Export did not treat the body as a natural refuge from culture. For her, the body was already shaped by culture: by film, language, architecture, religion, law and memory.

International recognition arrived early, but unevenly. Ms. Export participated in documenta in Kassel in 1977 and again in 2007. In 1980, she and the painter Maria Lassnig represented Austria at the Venice Biennale, the first women to fill the Austrian pavilion.

Ms. Export’s central contribution there was “Geburtenbett” (“Birth Bed”), an installation with a large female abdomen and legs on a bedlike structure, red neon light streaming from the vulva and a television showing a Catholic Mass where the head would have been. It brought together birth, religion, media and bodily control in an image that was hard to assimilate or domesticate.

The Venice presentation caused an uproar. Ms. Export had already been accused of obscenity and pornography. Now she was representing Austria with an installation that many of her compatriots considered blasphemous.

Her reputation for shock and scandal was one reason why her institutional acceptance was slower at home than it was abroad. She did not receive a major Austrian retrospective until the 1990s.

By the turn of the century, the world seemed to have caught up with Ms. Export.

In 2005, Marina Abramović re-enacted “Action Pants: Genital Panic” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as part of “Seven Easy Pieces.” Ms. Export consented to the re-enactment, but she also pointed out the difference between the two works. Ms. Abramović sat for hours in a museum before an audience that had come to see performance. Ms. Export had moved through a cinema in front of spectators who had not expected to be confronted.

In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a film retrospective. In 2012, it acquired a substantial body of her work. Major exhibitions and presentations followed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Belvedere in Vienna, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, the Neue Berliner Kunstverein, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, the Albertina in Vienna, Fotomuseum Winterthur and C/O Berlin. In 2024, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles presented her first solo exhibition in that city since 2001.

In 2012, her 1980 Venice Biennale works were restaged at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in London. By then, images that had once been treated as outrages had become part of the history of feminist art.

Teaching was one of the constants of Ms. Export’s later career. She held posts at the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Berlin University of the Arts. From 1995 to 2005, she was professor of multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

Her honors included the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, the Alfred Kubin Prize, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts, the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, the Golden Nica from Prix Ars Electronica, the Max Beckmann Prize and the Grand Silver Decoration of Honor with Star for Services to the Republic of Austria.

In 2015, the city of Linz acquired her archive, which became the basis of the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz, a collaboration among the city, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz and the University of Arts Linz. The Valie Export Foundation, created to support and research her legacy, was announced in January 2024.

Ms. Export is survived by a sister, Elisabeth Wiener, and a grandson, Patrick Chan. Her second husband, Robert Stockinger, died in 2016. Her daughter, Perdita Chan, died earlier this year.

Ms. Export continued working into her 80s, overseeing her archive and a catalogue raisonné. She also remained wary of treating feminism as a closed historical chapter. In a 2025 interview with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, she issued some strong, direct advice to younger female artists. “Keep going, stay radical, scream loudly, speak loudly,” she said.

In a 2016 interview with The New York Times, at the time of the Bard exhibition, Ms. Export was asked about having become a legend. She smiled, but the idea seemed to make her uncomfortable.

“To be a legend — it’s really very difficult,” she said.

For Wagnerites in the German speaking world, Easter means one thing and one thing only: Parsifal. Over this weekend, there are no fewer than eight different productions of Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel to choose from - if one includes the former Austro-Hungarian city of Prague. That’s a staggering number of productions of a work this demanding and difficult to cast.

Towards the end of Daniel Barenboim’s long tenure at Deutsche Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s superb, Dostoevsky-themed Parsifal was often the highlight of the company’s Easter Festival Days. This year’s Festtage, the first presided over by Christian Thielemann, Barenboim’s successor, is surprisingly Wagner-free. Instead, the highlight (and main draw for the out-of-town crowd willing to shell out 300€ for a ticket) is La Netrebko headlining the company’s new Ballo in maschera (conducted by Enrique Mazzola), while Thielemann conducts two of his favorites, “Ein deutsches Requiem” and Der Rosenkavalier. (I’m not sure who in their right mind would want to pay 300€ for a solid yet none-too-exciting cast performing in André Heller’s cosmically bad production, an expensive - and clueless - embarrassment from Matthias Schulz’s troubled Intendanz).

Deutsche Oper Berlin has rushed in to fill the gap left by the Lindenoper, bringing back its own Parsifal, Philipp Stölzl’s deadeningly literal storybook staging from 2012, possibly - hopefully! - for the last time. The cast, drawn largely from the company’s large and excellent ensemble, includes Attilio Glaser as Parsifal, Albert Pesendorfer as Gurnemanz, Thomas Lehman as Amfortas and Irene Roberts as Kundry. The 25-year-old Finnish maestro Tarmo Peltokoski conducts.

Down in Munich, Georg Baselitz and Pierre Audi’s painterly and largely static production, from 2018, is one of Bayerische Staatsoper’s most-hated stagings (a new Parsifal is reportedly on the way). But it returns this season with an impressive cast, headed by Clay Hilley in the title role. The young American tenor recently starred alongside Lise Davidsen in Tristan und Isolde at the Liceu. In Munich, his co-stars include Peter Mattei as Amfortas, Christof Fischesser as Gurnemanz, and Anja Kampe as Kundry. The always-excellent Sebastian Weigle, a seasoned Wagnerian and true opera conductor, regardless of what the New Yorker thinks (he used to lead a small company called Oper Frankfurt), conducts.

The third major Parsifal in Germany is a new production at Semperoper Dresden directed by Floris Visser and conducted by Daniele Gatti, Thielemann’s successor. The gothic cathedral set recalls Tobias Kratzer’s Ring-in-progress in Munich. Dresden’s cast, headed by the another young American, Eric Cutler. Bayreuth veteran Georg Zeppenfeld sings Gurnemanz. Rounding out the cast are Oleksandr Pushniak as Amfortas, Scott Hendricks as Klingsor and Michèle Losier as Kundry.

One of the most remarkable features of the German opera system is that it makes it possible for even smaller companies to mount the sort of complex, demanding works that would otherwise be prohibitive costly and require far too much outside support. In addition to Deutsche Oper Berlin, Bayerische Staatsoper and Semperoper Dresden, Nationaltheater Mannheim and Deutsche Oper am Rhein, where Michael Thalheimer’s starkly-focused production plays its final performance on Good Friday. (Essen’s Aalto Theater also brings back its Parsifal, directed by Roland Schwab, later this month).

Mannheim’s Parsifal is certainly one of the only opera productions still in repetoire anywhere. With its colorful, at times trippy projections, Hans Schüler’s simply uncluttered staging is reminiscent of New Bayreuth, the stark and stripped-down postwar aesthetic with which Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, signalled a decisive break with the festival’s past.

The revival cast is largely drawn from the company’s ensemble, with yet another American, the Heldentenor Bryan Register, in the title role.

Turning eastward, Wiener Staatsoper is where Klaus Florian Vogt, one of the world’s reigning Wagnerian Heldentenors, chooses to spend his Easter. The company surrounds Vogt, a singer with a voice that is both clarion and ethereal, with a stellar cast that includes Gerald Finley as Amfortas, Franz-Josef Selig as Gurnemanz, and Jennifer Holloway as Kundry. Axel Kober, a Bayreuth mainstay, conducts Kirill Serebrennikov’s sensitive prison-set production, which premiered at the house during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.

Austria’s other Parsifal is a new staging by Philipp M. Krenn, at the Tiroler Fesrtspiele Erl, a festival currently led by Jonas Kaufmann as artistic director. The star tenor will not be appearing in the production, which is conducted by the estimable Asher Fisch. The impressive cast is headed by Jamez McCorkle (the fourth American singing Parsifal this weekend!), Michael Nagy (Amfortas) René Pape (Gurnemanz) and Ricarda Merbeth (Kundry).

For this Easter weekend’s final Parsifal, we journey to another corner of the vanished Hapsburg empire, Prague, where the National Theatre recently unveiled a new production by Andreas Homoki, the former intendant of Komische Oper Berlin and Oper Zürich. Markus Poschner leads a Czech-heavy cast that is led - surprise, surprise - by an American singer in the title role: lyric tenor Matthew Newlin, from Georgetown, Illinois.

We should be grateful to all these European opera companies for putting these American tenors to work, especially since the one and only U.S. Parsifal bowed in San Francisco earlier this year (with yet another American tenor, Brandon Jovanovich, in the title role).

Nor does this Easter-induced Parsifal glut single the end of Grail festivities this season. Coming in June, Susanne Kennedy & Markus Selg’s trippy, digitally-enhanced production arrives at the Wiener Festwochen. I’ve heard great things from friends who who caught the earlier performance in Antwerp and Ghent (where the title role was sung by Christopher Sokolowski, who hails from the Hudson Valley). In Vienna, Yi-Chen Lin conducts a cast headed by Russell Thomas, a native of Miami, Florida.

On Friday, the Berliner Philharmoniker returns to the Osterfestspiele Salzburg (Salzburg Easter Festival) following a 13-year exile at the Baden-Baden Festival. The centerpiece of their homecoming program is the premiere of “Das Rheingold,” the opening salvo in the festival’s new “Ring,” a highly-awaited collaboration between conductor Kirill Petrenko and director Kirill Serebrennikov timed to the tetralogy’s 150th anniversary.

Petrenko, the Berliner Philharmoniker’s chief conductor since 2019, used to head the Bayerische Staatsoper. When he led the “Ring” at the Bayreuth Festival in 2013, Petrenko was acclaimed as perhaps the greatest living interpreter of the “Ring.” After he and the Wagner festival parted ways, the only place to hear Petrenko’s “Ring” was Munich, where he conducted full cycles in 2015 and 2019. Reportedly, the promise of a new “Ring,” the very first fresh cycle that Petrenko gets to conduct with his very own orchestra (as the conductor pointed out in a rare press talk held this morning in Salzburg) was critical in luring the Berliners back to the Osterfestspiele.

Serebrennikov is one of the world’s most prominent dissident artists. The Russian director who spent nearly two years under house arrest in Moscow awaiting trial on embezzlement charges that were widely seen as fraudulent. Since leaving Russia in 2022, he has become one of Europe’s busiest theater and opera directors.

The new Osterfestspiele “Ring” also nods to the festival’s history. In 1967, Herbert von Karajan launched the Osterfestspiele with a now-legendary “Die Walküre” designed by Günther Schneider-Siemssen.

While rededicating the Easter Festival with a “Ring” - possibly the highest-profile staging of the tetralogy anywhere - seems designed to appeal to purists (“Rheingold” features the role debut of Christian Gerhaher, a noted lieder baritone, as Wotan; sadly, he will not be returning for “Walküre”), Petrenko and the festival’s artistic director Nikolaus Bachler (Petrenko’s old boss from Munich) are also throwing a curveball by interrupting Wagner’s cycle to dip into Schoenberg’s unfinished operatic masterpiece, “Moses und Aron,” which will be staged in 2028 between “Walküre” and “Siegfried.”

The Osterfestspiele seems poised to make headlines next year as well. It was recently announced that next year’s “Walküre” will feature Lise Davidsen, the powerhouse Norwegian soprano currently selling-out the Met’s new production of “Tristan und Isolde,” in her role debut as Brünnhilde (!). (March 27 - April 6)

GUSTAVE COURBET, REALIST AND REBEL. Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria.

At the Leopold Museum in Vienna, “Gustave Courbet: Realist and Rebel” offers a sweeping look at the French painter who scandalized, provoked and helped remake 19th-century art.

Billed as the first solo Courbet exhibition in Austria, the show brings together some 130 works, including 90 paintings, tracing his break with academic idealization in favor of something earthier, more tactile and more modern. There are the unsparing self-portraits, the sensuous nudes, the scenes of bohemian life and labor, and the brooding landscapes and seascapes that gave material weight to the natural world.

A particular draw is “L’origine du monde,” Courbet’s still-disruptive 1866 painting, on rare loan from the Musée d’Orsay. The exhibition, which travels to the Folkwang at a later date, presents Courbet not just as a master of realism, but as an artist whose defiance was inseparable from his radically individual way of seeing. (Through June 21)

DREI SCHWESTERN / THREE SISTERS. Residenztheater, Munich, Germany.

“Chekhov’s plays all begin with the direction that they are set in the present and I am taking him at his word,” says Simon Stone, the Australian writer-director who has made a career of wrenching classics out of their period settings and dropping them into the agitated muddle of the present.

In Stone’s adaptation of “Three Sisters,” created nearly a decade ago for Theater Basel, the characters engage in compulsive self-analysis and speak in quick, overlapping bursts. Let loose on Lizzie Clachan’s intricate and monumental set, they are both recognizably Chekhovian and contemporary: full of longing, a flair for self-dramatization, wit, and bafflement at their own inertia.

As Stone, whose production was invited to Theatertreffen and named Play of the Year by the magazine Theater heute in 2017, has put it, “The present never stops. At some point, people started shifting it to the past because they thought that by the present the author had meant his own present. But they should always reflect contemporary society.” (March 30, April 2, April 30)

ROTHKO A FIRENZE. Palazzo Strozzi and other locations, Florence, Italy.

Last year, over a quarter million people (including yours truly) flocked to Palazzo Strozzi’s sublime Fra Angelico exhibition. “Rothko a Firenze,” the Stozzi’s ambitious follow-up, seems on track to become the museum’s second blockbuster of the season. In his first 10 days, the exhibition, which extends out from the Renaissance palazzo to various locations throughout Florence, including the Museo di San Marco and the Laurentian Library, has attracted 20,000 visitors. Co-curated by Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, and Elena Geuna, the exhibition explores how Florence influenced and inspired the great Russian-born American artist who is best known for his color field paintings.

The exhibition gathers more than seventy works, many never before shown in Italy, and follows Rothko’s development from early figurative paintings shaped by symbolic, psychological, and Renaissance concerns to the neo-Surrealist works of the nineteen-forties and the floating Multiforms that ushered in full abstraction. Major later canvases, including No. 3 / No. 13 (1949) and Untitled (1952–53), give way to the darker, more architectonic paintings of the nineteen-sixties, culminating in the Black and Gray series and late works on paper, where Rothko’s art reaches a new synthesis of austerity and inwardness.

Rothko’s relationship with Florence dates to a trip he and his wife, Mell, took to the city in 1950. He was profoundly affected by Fra Angelico’s frescos in the cells of the monastery at San Marco and the vestibule of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library. Those works chimed with and may have inspired Rothko’s own search for transcendence.

“My father wanted those who looked at his paintings to have the same religious experience that he had while making them,” says Christopher Rothko. “Inspired by his travels to Rome and Florence, that spiritual element became even more central. Throughout the exhibition we have created intimate rooms where personal interaction with Rothko’s works is maximized and enhanced by their resonance with the historic rooms themselves.” (Through August 23)

Since his death in 2002, at the age of 56, the German opera director Herbert Wernicke has become a legendary figure. Best known for his spectacular 2001 production of “Die Frau ohne Schatten” at the Metropolitan Opera, Wernicke was due to direct a new Ring cycle at Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper at the time of his death. (Only his “Rheingold” saw the light of day, in 2002; thereafter the company turned to Andreas Kriegenburg, whose cycle arrived in a decade later.)

Bayerische Staatsoper is one of the few places where you can still see the visionary director’s productions. (At the urging of Christian Thielemann, Wiener Staatsoper mounted a stellar revival of his stunning staging of Pfitzner’s “Palestrina” last season.) Wernicke’s dazzling red and black-hued production of Strauss’ “Elektra” returns for three performances starting tomorrow. The Russian powerhouse soprano Elena Pankratova tackles the punishing title role. The promising cast also including Sinéad Campbell Wallace as her sister Chrysothemis, the great Lithuanian mezzo Violeta Urmana as Klytämnestra and Scottish bass-baritone Iain Paterson at Orest. House GMD Vladimir Jurowski conducts. (March 18, 21 & 27)

BERNINI AND THE BARBERINI. Palazzo Barberini, Rome.

After hosting last year’s once-in-a-generation Caravaggio show, Rome’s Palazzo Barberini returns to a more paired-down format with an exhibition that traces the artistic evolution of Gian Lorenzo Bernini via his relationship with Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII and, more generally, the Barberini family’s role in the development of the Italian Baroque. “Bernini and the Barberini” reconstructs the history and prestige of the Barberini dynasty through important loans from the Louvre, the Getty, the Albertina, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the National Gallery in London that have been brought together for the exhibition - including busts of family members created by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Giuliano Finelli, and Francesco Mochi that return to Rome for the first time in centuries. (Through June 13)

LUCIAN FREUD: DRAWING INTO PAINTING. National Portrait Gallery, London.

This exhibition reveals the master painter and draftsman’s obsession with the human face and figure from the 1930s to the early 21st century.

Focusing on Freud’s mastery of drawing in all its forms – from pencil, pen, and ink to charcoal and etching - it examines Freud’s working practice, artistic techniques and processes and features 12 works newly acquired from the artist’s estate. Where Freud’s psychologically intense paintings - a small collection of which will be on display - are big on texture, his drawings are stripped of flourish and intimately spare.

The exhibition, the museum’s first dedicated to Freud since 2012, highlights how the unsparing artist pierced the surface, for example, while drawing his children, wives and mistresses, to get at deeper truths in his clinically raw studies. (Through May 3)

THIS WILL NOT END WELL. Grand Palais, Paris

After stations in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Milan, the American photographer Nan Goldin's career-spanning retrospective arrives at Paris' Grand Palais this week.

The exhibition brings together six major works spanning half a century: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), her magnum opus; The Other Side (1992–2021), a homage to her trans friends photographed between 1972 and 2010; Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022), a testament to the trauma of families and the taboo of suicide; Memory Lost (2019–2021), a claustrophobic journey through drug withdrawal; Sirens (2019–2020), a trip into drug ecstasy; and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a work based on six myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which explores the condition described by Stendhal as a collapse provoked by the overwhelming beauty of art. (March 18 - June 21)

SIEGFRIED. Royal Opera House, London

Barrie Kosky’s acclaimed London “Ring” cycle continues with “Siegfried,” which the Australian director describes as the “macabre scherzo in the symphony of the ‘Ring,’” in a program interview with yours truly. This staging foregrounds the tetrology’s environmental concerns by having the entire drama filtered through the figure of Mother Earth (Erda in the libretto), represented onstage as an old, naked woman. But this is far from a cerebral, concept-driven production. In the previous two installments (“Rheingold” and “Walküre”) Kosky has focused on the interpersonal relationships at the heart of the cycle, restoring a sense of intimacy and fragility of Wagner’s epic. Anthony Pappano conducts a mouth-watering cast headed by Andreas Schager (possibly the best living Wagnerian Heldentenor) in the title role. Peter Hoare, Christopher Maltman, Christopher Purves and Elisabet Strid round out the cast. (March 17 - April 4)

MEREDITH MONK IN CONCERT. Maerzmusik, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin

For six decades, Meredith Monk has treated the human voice as both an instrument and dramatic medium.

Now 83, Monk is headlining this year’s MaerzMusik, one of Berlin’s foremost festivals for new music. Joining her onstage at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele this weekend are longtime collaborators Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin. The varied program feels like a concentrated tour through Monk’s highly personal musical and vocal world. It ranges from early landmarks like “Wa-lie-oh” and “Gotham Lullaby” to later works drawn from ATLAS, mercy, and Cellular Songs, tracing a body of music that can be ritualistic, playful, austere, and tender.

Monk emerged from downtown New York in the 1960s and became a pioneer of extended vocal technique. Well over half a century later, her work, largely premised on the idea that the world’s oldest instrument is at once the most enigmatic and revealing, has lost none of its power to startle, provoke and delight. (March 21)

FRANZ WANNER: SUSPENDED PRESENCES. Lenbachhaus, Munich.

For the past two decades, Franz Wanner has probed the fault lines between Germany’s democratic self-image and the histories of exploitation, secrecy, and violence it prefers to smooth over. Born in Bad Tölz in 1975, Wanner works with photographs, texts, films, and found objects, often tracing the afterlives of Nazi forced labor into the present. That inquiry runs straight through “Suspended Presences” ("Eingestellte Gegenwarten”) at the Lenbachhaus. The exhibition begins with a pair of Plexiglas safety glasses excavated at Sachsenhausen and expands into a coolly devastating meditation on labor, armaments, museums, and official memory. Wanner makes archival research feel urgent and alive: vitrines, shields, and other transparent barriers become evidence, implicating industries, the state and even the cultural institutions where his work is displayed. but the museum itself. (March 24 - July 19)

Ted Huffman’s playful and riotously colorful take on Janáček’s bittersweet fairy tale The Cunning Little Vixen has become the first major hit of Elisabeth Sobotka’s reign at Berlin’s oldest opera company.

In his Staatsoper debut, the prodigiously talented American opera director brings the animal and the human worlds closer together, accentuating the blurred line between man and beast inherent in Janáček’s opera (the composer also wrote the episodic libretto, based on the novella by Rudolf Těsnohlídek). Physically dynamic (the production features young acrobats) and emotionally thoughtful, this Vixen, which is headlined by Vera-Lotte Boecker, Magdalena Kožená and Svatopluk Sem and conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, has been rapturously received by critics and audiences alike. (March 15)

Huffman was recently announced as the artistic director of the prestigious Aix-en-Provence Festival. He’s not the only American director to soon head one of Europe’s major summertime cultural events.

In 2027, Lydia Steier will take over the Ruhrtriennale, a performing arts festival that lights up industrial ruins in the Ruhrpott, Germany’s rust belt, even summer. (She’ll take over from the artistic director of the current three-year cycle, Ivo van Hove.)

Steier, who began her directing career at the nearby Komische Oper (currently closed for renovations until Kingdom Come…) made her Staatsoper debut during the Covid-19 lockdown with La fanciulla del West. (Sobotka’s predecessor, Matthias Schulz is one of Steier’s champions; earlier this year, he invited her to inaugurate his Intendanz at Oper Zürich with Der Rosenkavalier.)

Her sophomore outing at the Lindenoper is an intricate staging of Offenbach’s phantasmagorical Les contes d’Hoffmann where the Muse and the Four Villians battle for the writer’s soul in a technically-dazzling staging that uses surrealism and slapstick to capture the opera’s shifting and overlapping registers of macabre horror, vaudeville-like comedy and bleak tragedy. Benjamin Bernheim (March 20) and Jean-François Borras (March 22) alternate in the title role. Pierre Dumoussaud conducts.

BEST PICTURE

One Battle After Another

I’ve loved P.T. Anderson’s work ever since Boogie Nights. One Battle After Another is neither his best film (That would be The Master), nor the best film of the year (that would be It Was Just an Accident), but it’s a dazzlingly virtuosic work that features many of Anderson’s signature touches: terrific performances, kinetic camerawork, a musical propulsion that never lets up and a wholehearted embrace of silliness reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon, whose “Vineland” served as a (very loose) model.

BEST DIRECTOR

Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

Anderson, perhaps the most American American auteur since Robert Altman, has never won an Oscar. The Coen Brothers, to whom he lost in 2008 for “No Country for Old Men,” are too idiosyncratic and eccentric for that designation. Anderson clearly takes inspiration from the Coens (there’s a lot of the Dude in Bob Ferguson, DiCaprio’s character in One Battle), but there’s a greater decree of self-effacement to his genre-hopping, stylistically varied work. It’s hard to say what makes an PTA film a PTA film, but you know one when you see it. He might not have a strong visual signature, but there’s no mistaking the 10 films he has made over the past 30 years for anyone else’s work.

BEST ACTRESS & BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Renate Reinsve & Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value

Sentimental Value is the best-acted film of the year, which makes its three acting nominations - an astounding feat for any film, but especially a foreign-language production - highly gratifying. In Reinsve’s third collaboration with director Joachim Trier, the actress goes deeper than she did in The Worst Person in the World (which won her best actress at Cannes in 2021). The film is an intimate yet epic chamber piece about how art and family intersect. Renate Reinsve plays Nora, a stage actress who reconnects with her estranged father, a filmmaker played by Stellan Skarsgård, following her mother’s death. At the start of the film, we see her backstage managing a panic attack in the minutes before the curtain rises on a full house. Nora, who tries to tear off her costume and escape, needs to be dragged onstage. Jittery, impulsive, frantic and extremely silly, Reinsve’s performance in this opening scene is also something of a directorial feint that harkens back to Trier’s previous film. When Skarsgård enters the story, using his ex-wife funeral as an excuse for coaxing Nora into starring in a film he wrote with her in mind, Reinsve’s performance becomes more muted and her character slips into a crippling depression. Two hours later, at the film’s climax, Nora and her sister Agnes, played by an incandescent Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, confront each other in a wrenching reconciliation that matches Bergman in how intensely it channels raw human emotion. Yet their dialogue is suffused with a tenderness and poignancy that Bergman rarely granted his characters. It’s a devastating and beautiful scene that feels utterly believable. Reinsve and Lilleaas, who are uncannily convincing as sisters, ensure that the film’s catharsis feels earned.

BEST ACTOR

Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon

I feel certain that if more people had seen Richard Linklater’s magnificent Blue Moon this year’s Best Actor race would not be hard to call. Ethan Hawke gives the performance of his career as the boozing librettist Lorenz Hart holding court at Sardi’s. The date is March 31, 1943, opening night of Oklahoma! on Broadway. It’s the first musical that Hart’s erstwhile partner, the composer Richard Rogers, wrote with Oscar Hammerstein II and Hart, who loathes the show and lambasts it as “fraudulent,” also senses that it’s going to be the biggest hit Rogers ever had.

Hart, who we learn at the start of the film will be dead by that November, spends the evening nursing his grudges, lusting after a college-aged poetess, ingratiating himself with his old partner and surreptitiously (and, as the evening progresses, not so surreptitiously) kicking back shots of bourbon, expounding all the while on everything under the sun to absolutely anyone who will listen. No doubt about it, this is a talky picture. But Linklater’s unobtrusive direction ensures that Blue Moon feels perfectly cinematic, not merely a filmed play.

Hart, as Hawke plays him in a startlingly self-effacing performance - it’s not just the terrible combover and diminutive stature - may be a self-absorbed, washed-up dirty middle-aged man, but he is in consummate command of language. Eventually the film becomes something larger than a portrait of an artist in decline; it morphs into a love letter to the poetic and profane pliability of the English language. Robert Kaplow’s brilliant original screenplay is a throwback to classic Hollywood, with its sophisticated banter and sparkling repartee. (Hart and the bartender, played by Bobby Cannavale, bond over their mutual love for Casablanca.) In the film, Hart is a man who is always performing, eager to show off his erudition and hard-nosed cynicism. The words that he exerts perfect control over are his best friends. Hawke lets us see the loneliness beneath that dazzling verbose exterior.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Sean Penn, One Battle After Another

If you ask me, this is really the Oscar’s toughest race. Delroy Lindo’s performance as the Bluesman Delta Slim was one of the few things I enjoyed about Sinners. Skarsgård’s flawed father in Sentimental Value doesn’t ask for absolution but gains our sympathy. And Benicio Del Toro’s wise and unflappable Sensei in One Battle After Another gives that explosive film its moral compass. However, it is One Battle’s villain, portrayed by Sean Penn in a short, brazen and magnetic performance, that deserves Oscar gold. Penn is one of the greatest living actors, and the psychotic Col. Steven J. Lockjaw might be his most spectacularly deranged creation: a man who will stop at absolutely nothing to get what he wants, which is admission into an ultra-exclusive club of white supremacist elites who call themselves the Christmas Adventurers. (A complete PTA invention, by the way. There’s nothing even remotely similar in “Vineland,” although it’s such a loopily Pychonian detail that I hope the reclusive author relishes it as much as I did.) Lockjaw is a vain, scowling fascist freak; another actor could have easily just turned him into a parody. But Penn makes this outlandish, weirder-than-life creature frightening real. It’s a reasonably small role in this nearly three-hour long film, but Penn commands the screen whenever he’s on in with a fiercely controlled, twitching performance that is both blood-curdling and hilarious.

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE
It Was Just an Accident, France

Three of the year’s best movies are in the running for Best International Features. All of them debuted at Cannes, where they won major prizes.* This year’s jury, headed by Juliette Binoche, justly awarded the Palme d’Or to Jafar Panahi for his blistering existential thriller It Was Just an Accident. Panahi has repeatedly defied the 20-year ban of filmmaking that the Iranian regime gave him in 2009. It Was Just an Accident is the most audacious and philosophically challenging of the six features he has made in secret. (At Cannes, Panahi refuted a wild rumor that his first film made illegally, This is Not a Film (2011) had been smuggled out of the country on a USB stick hidden in a cake.) With this year’s Oscars taking place against the backdrop of the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran, It Was Just an Accident, which calls attention not just to its dissident director but also to the plight of ordinary Iranians who try to resist their repressive government, clearly gains in significance. In truth, however, the film needs no boost from current events. This tightly-wound and meticulously-plotted examination of how the human yearning for justice is complicated by our thirst for revenge is at once specific to present-day Iran and universal. Panahi’s way of sustaining and deepening the tension between moral imperatives and the limits of human knowledge makes It Was Just an Accident reminiscent the work of Asghar Farhadi. It belongs alongside that two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director’s 2011 film “A Separation,” as one of the contemporary cinema’s few genuine masterpieces.

*Sirat, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, is a cheap assault on the senses. The Voice of Hind Rajab, which won the Grand Prix at Venice, is a film whose importance is unfortunately marred by its soap-operatic tendencies.

Luis Buñuel’s two earliest films, classic surreal shorts made in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, both feature the concert version of the Liebestod. Buñuel famously claimed that the guiding principle in making “Un chien andalou” was that no image or series of images in the 16-minute silent film should lend itself to logical interpretation. On the soundtrack, the Liebestod (performed by the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra and Carl Bamberger) alternates with jaunty tangos. It may be futile to fixing definitive meanings to Buñuel and Dalí’s powerfully strange sequences - a razor slicing through an eyeball, ants crawling out of a hand, a dead horse in a piano - yet “Un chien andalou” is saturated in imagery of sex and death, which makes the Liebestod a perfect choice.

In many ways, “L’âge d’or” is a much more complex film than its predecessor. For one, Buñuel and Dalí tried to sustain a flow of surrealist images for a full hour. For another, their follow-up to “Un chien andalou” has dialogue, which opens up new narrative and aesthetic possibilities. Much of the film attacks the Catholic Church (so much so, that Dalí threatened to quit the production unless Buñuel toned down the blasphemous content) and the film’s soundtrack encompasses Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Schubert. Wagner is the only composer whose music Buñuel and Dalí use diagetically. Towards the end of the film, a pair of lovers (Gaston Modot and Lya Lys) attend a concert of the Liebestod in the garden of a chateau and steal away to consummate their passion among marble statues. Lys greedily sucks the toes of what appears to be a Greek goddess (Diana?) and Modot watches her transform into an old woman. As the music crescendoes, she cries out in delight, “What joy to have killed our children.” “My love! My love!” he answers her as blood streams down his face. The conductor breaks off and clutching his head walks away from the podium and toward the lovers, where he plants a long kiss on the Lys’ lips. Both here and in the subsequent scene, with Modot mourning his lost love, Buñuel and Dalí deny us the resolution Wagner builds up to over the course of the opera. As Modot violently tears the feathers from a pillow, the Liebestod is taken over by a martial drumroll that ushers us into the film’s final provocation, a five-minute-long version of the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” featuring Jesus Christ.

Black Moon (1975)

I love this bizarre, one-of-a-kind Louis Malle film, which, in its surreal and apocalyptic vision of sexual warfare, looks back to Godard’s “Week-end” and ahead to Lanthimos’ “The Lobster.”

In the film, a young woman, Lily (Cathryn Harrison), seeks refuge from the ravages of an unspecified war between the sexes, in a sprawling and decaying farmhouse. There, her company include disquietingly beautiful brother (Joe Dallesandro) and sister, a bedridden one woman (the great German actress Theresa Giehse in her final film role), a gaggle of children and farm animals.

Before it got a Criterion release, “Black Moon” was virtually impossible to find. (I was thoroughly mesmerized by some scenes I saw during a late-night T.V. broadcast when I was 12 or so, and spend many fruitless years searching for it.)

The film’s dream logic precludes a straightforward narrative. “Alice in Wonderland” is clearly part of the film’s DNA. So too is Tristan. At the film’s climax, a young boy and girl sing the Act II love duet in the house’s red velvet-upholstered salon to an audience of naked children, including a baby in an antique basket lying next to a couple of sabres. With high focus, Lily accompanies their patchy warbling on piano and, despite its lack of polish, the musical performance is strangely affecting.

Malle was a director with a deeply musical sensibility. For further evidence of this, see “Elevator to the Gallows,” whose rhythms are dictated by Miles Davis’ smoky, nocturnal score, or “Pretty Baby,” his most controversial film, whose atmosphere of sordid nostalgia and evocation of louche turn-of-the-century Storyville owes as much to New Orleans Ragtime on the soundtrack as it does to Sven Nykvist’s haunting cinematography.

I’ve never across anything Malle said about Tristan (or Wagner generally, for that matter), but I’ve always felt that the opera also inspired (or at least informed) his 1958 breakout, “The Lovers.” Although we hear none of Wagner’s music in that earlier film, its depiction of love as sudden, fierce and bewildering, not to mention Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Marc Bory’s long night-time ramble through forest and glade chimes with many of Tristan’s themes. Might this help explain why, 12 years after “The Lovers,” Malle positioned the Act II love duet at the climax of his most cryptic and chimerical film?

You can watch the Tristan scene here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x22qcop

Or the entire film on the Criterion Channel: https://www.criterionchannel.com/black-moon

Aria (1987)

This movie is a curio: a bold yet failed attempt to translate opera for the MTV generation. Producer Don Boyd commissioned ten filmmakers - including Robert Altman, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell and Julien Temple! - to make short films using music from operas of their choosing. As you might imagine, the results are highly uneven. Arias, overtures and dances from works by Verdi, Puccini, Charpentier, Korngold, Wagner, Rameau, Lully and Leoncavallo form the background for vignettes that are, by turns, surreal, experimental, cheesy and wacky.

The “Liebestod” segment by director Franc Roddam (“Quadophenia”) is one of the best and most moving. Two young, ennui-ridden lovers (one of whom is a young Bridget Fonda) drive through Vegas, check into a cheap hotel, have sex and then slit their wrists in a bathtub. Moody and bleak, the wordless mise-en-scène brings to mind “Bonnie and Clyde” as directed by Wim Wenders. On the soundtrack, we hear the great Leontyne Price.

Melancholia (2011)

Though I love some his earlier films, particular “Breaking the Waves” and “Dogville,” I am not a fan of Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world gloom-fest “Melancholia.” It was such a deeply misanthropic film that it was hard to come away feeling anything but, “Of course, humanity deserves to perish.” However, the most offensive thing about “Melancholia,” to my mind, is von Trier’s generous use of Tristan.

Von Trier seems oblivious that Tristan Wagner’s score is one of the most profound piece of music ever composed on the subject of love. Of course, the lovers die in the end, but they are transmuted into Schöpenhauer’s pure will (represented by Wagner as both night and music). In “Melancholia,” however, the world on the brink of destruction is evil and any possibility of human sympathy and connection is a downright farce.

The film ends (spoiler alert!) with an awesome digital armageddon. As the credits roll, we hear Tristan once more: not the overture, but the slowly-expiring prelude to Act III, where Tristan lies delirious and dying. Again, the juxtaposition between this misanthropic and cynical filmmaker and Wagner’s sublime ode of undying love boggles.

We should be happy for von Trier ultimately passed on the offer to direct the 2013 Ring Cycle at Bayreuth.

One of the most talked-about films at the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival was the embattled Iranian filmmaker Jafar Pahani’s Closed Curtain, which was made in defiance of a 20-year ban on filmmaking. A courageous work of personal filmmaking, it was co-directed by fellow filmmaker and longtime friend Kambozia Partovi. When the festival drew to a close on Saturday, the International Jury headed by the Hong-Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai awarded Panahi the Silver Bear for best screenplay.

In the constellation of major film festivals, Berlin has a reputation as the most politically engaged. Films that deal with hot button issues routinely screen and win awards here. The 2011 Golden Bear winner was Asghar Farhadi’s marital drama A Separation, which went on to become the first Iranian film to win the foreign film Oscar. Even before running afoul of the regime, Panahi was a favorite here, having won the Silver Bear in 2006 for Offside, about girls who try to sneak into a stadium to watch a soccer match disguised as boys, since women are banned from stadiums in Iran.

Since his arrest in 2009, Jafar Panahi has become an international symbol for freedom of expression. Cannes, Berlin and Venice all invited him to sit on their juries in 2010 and 2011 and left a symbolic empty chair for him to remind the world of his ongoing persecution. A year into the ban, Panahi’s documentary This is Not a Film was smuggled to the Cannes Film Festival on a USB drive hidden inside a cake. A straightforward video-essay, This is Not a Film is formally at odds with Closed Curtain, an enigmatic work that confirms Panahi’s stature among the world’s major filmmakers.

Over the past two decades, Iranian cinema has been enjoying a renaissance, with directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf and Bahman Ghobadi winning awards on the festival circuit. As the scholar Richard Tapper has pointed out, from the late 1990s onwards, “No respectable festival could be without at least one film from Iran.” Many works that have been lauded abroad have met with censorship at home, especially those that deal with taboo social themes or films that do not conform to the sharia restrictions outlined by the Ministry for Guidance and Islamic Culture.

Restrictions were eased somewhat during the rule of president Mohammad Khatami, who as minister for culture in the 1980s and early 1990s had helped to lay the foundation for a new national cinema. But under the government of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, filmmakers have been working under increasingly strained conditions, a situation that has worsened since the contested 2009 presidential elections. The current regime has sent a staggering number of filmmakers, actors and actress to jail or driven them to exile, of which Panahi is just the best-known example.

There is sometimes a danger that the political dimension of an artist’s work can overshadow or obscure its other qualities (Ai Weiwei is an example that springs to mind), but Panahi’s films deserve both their praise and controversy. While there is no doubt that his fame has spread as a result of the Iranian government’s measures against him, no one acquainted with his distinguished body of work can accuse him of being a mere cause célebre.

The word “poetic” is often used applied to Panahi’s work, a socially relevant body of cinema that shows life at eye-level and resists overt messages. They are not designed for a specialist audience, but rather entertaining, tautly edited and often suspenseful. His films are straightforward and accessible, and perhaps it is that transparency that has gotten him in trouble. He is not a maker of allegories. When his films confront social inequalities, they do so with overtly and without apology. The films that have gotten him in hottest water have dealt with women who have been stripped of their rights. The Circle, which won the Golden Lion at the 2000 Venice Film Festival and is arguably his most courageous work, is a claustrophobic and Kafkaesque drama about a series of desperate women in Tehran. But even at his boldest, Panahi does not resort to cheap provocations. The violence and repression hinted at onscreen never takes on a sensational or exploitative tinge.

The uninitiated may be surprised to discover films are remarkably restrained and subtle. Panahi’s films have a cinéma-vérité flavor, which he sometimes achieves by such strategies as handheld camera and working with non-professional actors. With the exception of his debut, The White Balloon (1995), all of Panahi’s films have been refused an exhibition license in Iran. (In spite of this, however, his films are popular in Iran via bootlegs and illegal downloads. Panahi himself has speculated that Offside is one of the country’s most popular films).

The government’s official charge against Panahi is for “making and distributing propaganda against the state.” Labeling films that openly advocate free thought “propaganda” is a particularly noxious example of double-talk. From the perspective of a repressive and paranoid regime, Pahani is a dissident voice that needs to be muted. In this, the Islamic Republic of Iran correctly understands the power that artists like Panahi wield. The regime’s error is in thinking that they can silence him.

The most provocative thing about Closed Curtain is that it was made at all. By defying the government’s ban, Panahi has turned the mere act of turning on a camera into a political act. This is Pahani’s his most experimental and formally complex film to date. There is not much to explain at the level of plot. An unnamed screenwriter (played by Partovi) and his dog hide out in a seaside villa. We never learn what the writer, who keeps the curtains shut and only goes out at night, is hiding from. Without explanation, a desperate woman manages to invade the writer’s sanctuary. He begs her to go away, but she insists on staying. He doesn’t know what to suspect. Is she a spy? Is she suicidal? In the morning the house is burglarized and a window broken. When Panahi shows up, both as the film’s director and a character in the film, the lines between fact and fiction converge.

Responding to his own circumstances, Panahi has here produced a work that is more hermetic that his previous films, but at the same time mysterious and gripping. The film’s obtuseness reflects the unique context in which it was made. As such, the tenor of social outrage familiar from his past works is here replaced by inner pain and frustration. Panahi has himself become a victim of the sort of injustice and repression that his past work has exposed explored. He has turned the camera inward, employing strategies of indirection and Brechtian estrangement to find a way to talk about his plight without being indulgent or preachy. Pahani is no longer diagnosing social ills, but instead creating a psychological portrait of an artist who is forbidden from making his art. The result is poignant, unsettling and, like the situation that Pahani finds himself in, ambivalent and unresolved.

Closed Curtain was shot entirely in Panahi’s villa on the Caspian Sea, using a Canon 5D camera and a five-person crew. Out of a need to extreme secrecy, the curtains were drawn most of the time. Knowing this has the effect of making us feel as if we are hiding along with the actors and filmmakers. Closed Curtain invites its audience to become complicit in an act of rebellion.

While the film never leaves the confines of the villa, the outside world intrudes in the form of a TV news report about stray dogs who are rounded up and killed by the government as unclean animals, menacing voices and police whistles from outside, even the posters of Panahi’s films that are covered up and unveiled late in the film. Ultimately, the film’s shifting points of view and non-linear storytelling defies the viewer to interrogate the narrative in order make sense of what he has seen.

At the film’s press conference in Berlin, Partovi claimed that he and Panahi did not set out to make a political film. However, when a government decides to censor its filmmakers, the personal becomes political. If Closed Curtain looks different from the director’s previous films, that’s because it demanded to be made differently than his other films. A director who has so often held up a mirror to society is now projecting his own life and struggle, but through a cracked looking glass. The film’s formal complexity suggests that human psychology is trickier to unravel than social ills. Furthermore, in presenting us with an enigma, Panahi dares us to collaborate by solving the riddle. This is what makes Closed Curtain successful as a politically subversive film; Panahi shows his artistic strength and courage in the way he responds to brutality and repression by reaching inward.

In his book Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema, Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has written that, “Panahi does not do as he is told — in fact he has made a successful career in not doing as he is told.” It has yet to be seen what sort of legal repercussions the film may have for Panahi and his collaborators. According to the court that sentenced him – an injunction not only against filmmaking, but also writing screenplays, travelling abroad and giving interviews – any violation of the ban could carry a six-year jail sentence.

In one of his only public statements about Closed Curtain, Panahi himself has suggested that its personal and social dimensions of the film are difficult to sever. He writes that the film’s formal qualities “highlight why filmmaking is a necessity in a filmmaker’s life: it is the imperative need to show the reality of the world we live in.” In reality, this is Jafar Panahi’s only crime.

© 2013 by A.J. Goldmann

The Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, whose career has been on a relentless upward trajectory since she won Operalia in 2015, is a big deal for the Metropolitan Opera. The opera’s general manager, Peter Gelb, is hoping she can help him plug a massive hole in the Met’s finances, which are in tatters after Gelb repeatedly raided the company’s endowment.

The Met could use a new superstar, especially since the company parted ways with the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko over her alleged support for Vladimir Putin. Netrebko, who lives in Vienna and still performs on many of the world’s great stages, is doing fine. (In fact, based on recent performances I’ve heard her in, including her sensational turn as La Gioconda at the 2024 Salzburg Easter Festival, she’s never sounded better.)

Advance sales for Yuval Sharon’s new production of “Tristan” were so strong that the company decided to add an additional performance. And while I’d love to think that the run on tickets stemmed from opera lovers’ excitement at seeing one of America’s leading avant garde directors let loose of the Met’s cavernous stage, Davidsen – one of the world’s leading singers tackling one of opera’s most demanding roles – was clearly the main draw. Even so, a sold-out run of eight performances at a 3800-seat theater, while very impressive, won’t make a tremendous difference for the cash-strapped Met. (Using the average ticket price last season as reported by the New York Times in a recent article, the maximum box office intake from the run hovers around $4 million.) Gelb seems to be banking on an opera-loving billionaire being so blown away by Davidsen’s Isolde that he hands the Met his checkbook.

At 39, Davidsen is certainly one of the younger Isoldes in recent memory, especially as far as Isoldes at the Met go. American soprano Deborah Voigt was 42 when debuted the role, in Vienna, in 2003. Five years later, she brought it to the Met in a famously mishap-prone run that kept her and Ben Heppner, her intended Tristan, apart until the final performance.

Swedish soprano Nina Stemme was 40 when she first sang Isolde (in Glyndebourne in 2003). She practically owned the role for a solid decade. However, by the time she sang it at the Met, in Mariusz Trelinski’s 2016 opening night production, her best days were sadly behind her. (Trelinksi’s staging, set on a battleship, was never revived. Okay, so it wasn’t the production of the decade – or even of the year – but retiring it immediately after its premiere run was pure financial folly.)

Prior to Isolde, Davidsen’s weightiest Wagner assignment was Sieglinde, a role she first sung in Stefan Heirheim’s “Ring” at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and later during a monumental “painting action” planned and overseen by the late Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch at the Bayreuth Festival. I caught both performances. As the anguished Wälsung, Davidsen wielded a steely lyrical voice that constently wowed. It was a fiercely determined, ardor-filled and brazenly full performance.

Perhaps surprisingly, the new Met “Tristan” will not mark Davidsen’s debut as Isolde. Earlier this year, she sang in five January performances of the Liceu’s rather anonymous new production by Bárbara Lluch. You can rent a slickly edited version on the opera house’s streaming platform LiceuOPERA+. Clearly hosting such an important debut was a major feat for Barcelona, although in context – and, in particular, given the underpowered Tristan of American tenor Clay Hilley, the drab staging, and an account of the score by Susanna Mälkki that was curiously lacking in drama – it often felt like a warm-up for the Met.

On the basis of what I heard on the DIGITAL PREMIERE + SPECIAL EDITION that I shelled out €19.99 for, New York audiences are right to expect the world (and the moon and the stars) from Davidsen. Despite the musical and dramaturgical limitations of the production, she is a consistently magnificent Isolde, inhabiting and channeling her character’s shifting moods through her full, creamy voice. There is something almost grandly old-fashioned about her Isolde: the seemingly effortless way her voice soars above the ceaseless churn of the orchestra, her ability to sculpt phrases beautifully and archly, the alluring crispness to her German that brings to life the poetry of Wagner’s best-written libretto. She paces herself well, remaining in excellent voice over the course of the long role, past the stormy and imperious first act, onto the heady passion of the second and resolving in a muscular and coloristically varied Liebestod at the evening’s end. It is a beautiful measured performance of consummate artistry, and well worth a small donation to the Liceu.

What makes Davidsen’s triumph all the more exciting is that it’s been a good while since we’ve had an important new Isolde. The last I can remember is Anja Harteros, who sang it alongside Jonas Kaufmann’s Tristan in a 2021 Munich production. Harteros was a careful and disarmingly subtle Isolde and it’s a pity that she hasn’t sung it since. (There are rumors that Asmik Grigorian will tackle the role at Salzburg in the future, but no details are known.)

The Met has a lot riding on their new “Tristan.” They’re taking a huge gamble with Yuval Sharon, whose innovative theatrical ideas may not go down well with New York’s rather conservative opera audience. (Sharon is also slated to direct the Met’s next “Ring” cycle, although I suspect that that might depend on how his “Tristan” is received.) There’s a lot we don’t know – and can’t know- in advance. How will the singers making their role debuts fare: will Michael Spyres, the run’s Tristan, be able to hold his own against Davidsen; can Ryan Speedo Green find the appropriate register of sorrow and gravitas for König Marke? Will conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin respect and convey the score’s imposing architecture, and not merely its lush atmosphere and dazzling detail, over three long acts?

A lot could still go wrong with this “Tristan,” but after Barcelona, Davidsen’s triumph at the Met seems all but guaranteed.

Monika Rittershaus

Wandering the sun-scorched streets of this ochre-colored town, I began to wonder whether opera, with all its fragility and grandeur, was designed to withstand a heatwave. At the 2025 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, it had to do more than that. This summer’s edition, which ran from June 4 – 21, took place in the wake of the sudden death in May of Pierre Audi, the festival’s charismatic and visionary artistic director. One of opera’s true evangelists as well as one of the most powerful and well-connected players in the world of music, Audi used his time in Aix to help reinvent the festival through the works he commissioned from George Benjamin, Kaija Saariaho and Pascal Dusapin, as well as through the directors he engaged, including Barrie Kosky, Romeo Castellucci, and Simon Stone. His loss hung over the festival like a high, slow-moving cloud, and yet his tireless spirit was palpable in the five opera stagings he programmed for this season, which, even before his passing, had been designed to be his last in Aix.

This summer was my first attending the festival, which lies outside of my traditional Teutonic summertime circuit, bounded by Bayreuth, Munich, Salzburg, and the Ruhr. I was spurred to finally attend by all that I had heard of Aix’s evolution, under Audi’s stewardship, as a place of musical and artistic risk-taking as well as the directors who had signed up for this year’s program. Another not insignificant factor was how I kept running into Audi over the past year and change: in New York, where he staged “Inside Light,” which was basically an expensive listening party and laser light show at the Park Avenue Armory (where Audi was also artistic director) that was based on Aus LICHT, his monumental three-day-long presentation of large excerpts from Stockhausen’s legendary – and cosmically bonkers – septology seen in Amsterdam in 2019; in Brussels, where his powerfully focused Götterämmerung completed La Monnaie’s “Ring” after the company fired Castellucci, the cycle’s original director, officially over budgetary concerns; and in Rome, where Audi spent a month rehearsing Alcina to ensure that this transplant of a decade-old production had the freshness and vitality of a premiere. On each occasion, he reiterated an invitation to Aix. My resistance was already weakening. After his death, it totally broke down. Having skipped the first five years of his tenure, I was determined to catch his final act.

Going into the festival, the production I was most excited for was the new “Don Giovanni,” staged by Robert Icke, a British theater director who has been called every name in the book – wunderkind, enfant terrible, iconoclast– for his adaptations and updatings of the likes of Aeschylus, Chekhov, Schiller, and Schnitzler. I’m always curious to see how theater directors make the transition to opera. In Europe, and especially the German-speaking world, this is a very common state of affairs. It’s practically de rigueur for places like Bayreuth, Berlin, and Munich to engage acclaimed and provocative dramatic directors for their upcoming seasons. (In the U.S. and U.K., the worlds of theater and opera tend to be more separate.)

Aesthetic cross-pollination is crucial for opera, a genre defined by artistic hybridity, to stay vibrant. But directors who come from theater need to think carefully about what it means to do opera and think hard about when choosing their repertoire. (Christopher Rüping, one of Germany’s best young directors, turned down a dozen offers to stage opera until the Bayerische Staatsoper gave him the opportunity to develop his own version of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, which he combined with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking for a musical-theatrical meditation on waiting, grief, and letting go that was one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen.)

I’m no stranger to Icke’s theatrical approach and consider myself a fan. I also give him a lot of credit for daring to inaugurate his operatic career with a work that is notoriously difficult to stage well. Sadly, however, Icke seemed to approach Don Giovanni (seen 4 July) purely as a theater director: that is to say, without sufficiently taking into account the defining role that the music plays in telling the story, defining its characters and setting up its moral, emotional, and dramatic stakes. Icke had some extremely clever ideas and many baffling ones, and he might have even pulled off his Don Giovanni as twisted incest soap opera, à la David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,” where the title character was the projection of a girl (Anna) who had been sexually abused by her father (the Commendatore) while her mother (Elvira) failed to protect her, had he kept the focus squarely on the characters.

Monika Rittershaus

And no, I don’t mean the largely gratuitous black and white video that showed Zerlina or Don Giovanni in (mostly unflattering) close-ups for lack of anything else to do. As it was, there were far too many layers to unpack and ciphers to decode. As the evening progressed, these riddles seemed increasingly gratuitous. Not only did his production render much of the libretto unintelligible: it was barely legible on its own terms. (Somewhat harrowingly, the themes of sexualized violence that Icke bored into echoed throughout my week in Aix, leaving me to wonder if the festival and the artists working there were tapping into the traumatized subconscious of a country that has roiled by the horrific revelations of the Pelicot trial and the more recently concluded case of a former surgeon sentenced to 20 years in prison for raping and assaulting 299 victims, most of them children.)

Icke’s approach was oddly divorced from the score and gave the impression that he had failed to understand a basic truth of opera: that music is not illustrative but constitutive. In opera, the notes do not merely support or echo the libretto—they complicate, subvert, redefine. Icke gave us high-concept theatre, but he didn’t seem to be listening to what Mozart was saying.

Fortunately, Sir Simon Rattle and the Bayerische Rundfunk Symphonieorchester were. Their reading was sharp, brisk, and dramatically alert, qualities that one sorely missed in Icke’s staging. The cast delivered on many fronts: South Tyrolean baritone André Schuen returned to the role of the Don after several years of putting it to the side and sang with virile elegance. South African soprano Golda Schultz was a white-hot Donna Anna; Magdalena Kožená, as Donna Elvira, was less vocally secure, though expressively intense. Amitai Pati was a lyrically urgent Ottavio but sang a touch too softly. Madison Nonoa and Paweł Horodyski were delightful as Zerlina and Masetto. Clive Bayley was a thunderous Commendatore, while Krzysztof Bączyk’s Leporello, kept at a glacial remove from the central action of this production — Icke didn’t seem to know what to do with him — failed to impress as the beleaguered servant.

Jean-Luois Fernandez

Icke had a lot of resources at his disposal. If not entirely squandered, they certainly were not put to best possible use. Arriving less than 24 hours after Mozart’s antihero was dragged to hell, The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor, an abridged version of Benjamin Britten’s 1951 opera in a new chamber arrangement by the young British composer Oliver Leith and directed by Ted Huffman, was a masterclass in doing a lot with very little (seen June 5).

Huffman, an American director and Aix veteran who has directed both classic works (L’incoronazione di Poppea in 2022) and new ones (Philip Venables’s The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, which Huffman wrote the libretto for, in 2023) was originally signed up for a different work entirely. He was forced to pivot when the festival, facing severe financial constraints, cancelled that large-scale production. (The festival hopes to salvage it for a future edition). The substitute plan came together in a matter of months; the director, composer, cast and musicians only had two and a half weeks to rehearse.

Leith’s radical reduction is masterful and gripping. He whittles down the gargantuan scale of Britten’s original to the barest essentials. Onstage, six singers and four musicians, who play keyboards and percussion, form a tight unit, conjuring the opera’s maelstrom of homoerotic desire, brutality, rage, and remorse with muscular confidence. There was no budget for new sets and costumes, so Huffman and his team raided the festival’s warehouse, carrying long white tables and a few well-chosen costumes and props into the theater to create a stage-within-a-stage that creaked like the boards of a ship.

Jean-Louis Fernandez

White remained the production’s dominant hue, suggesting both Billy’s purity and the vast ocean. So much about the evening felt as exposed and raw as the flayed back of the Novice, one of the few details that Huffman rendered realistically gruesome. The effect was like a dab of red on an otherwise immaculate canvas.

All the singers played multiple characters – except for Ian Rucker, the young American baritone who sang the title role – switching roles by donning a wig or throwing on officer’s coat. There was little pretense of realism and the production’s meta-theatricality heightened the sense of Leith’s chamber reduction as something of a “Little Billy Budd Passion.” The sound world evoked both Britten and something more introverted and elemental. The music suggested the lapping sea, suffocated longing and haunted regret.

Inside the jewel-like (and blessedly air-conditioned) Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, a two-hour-long performance of rare intensity and concentration unfolded with directness and simplicity. The cast was uniformly excellent and well-matched: Rucker’s honey-voiced Billy; Joshua Bloom as the villainous Claggart; Christopher Sokolowski as the idealistic Vere; and Hugo Brady, Noam Heinz, and Thomas Chenhall in assorted other roles.

Monika Rittershaus

I left Billy Budd full of admiration for what I had witnessed and experienced, the palpable devotion of everyone on and behind the stage and how beautifully everything had come together despite difficult circumstances. It was a reminder that in the right hands, scarcity can sharpen theatrical intention. I barely had time for a mediocre dinner — Aix, I discovered to my horror, is something of a food desert and the handful of good restaurants are all booked out in advance — before the premiere of Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, a hit of yesteryear that is remembered today, if it all, for the soprano aria “Depuis le jour” (seen 5 July). The reasons for its neglect quickly became obvious.

Charpentier called the opera a roman musical (“musical novel”) and he seems to have wanted to give verismo a French twist. Its title character is a young seamstress in Paris who becomes intoxicated with both the city and the bohemian poet Julien, who is her neighbor. Their love is frowned on by Louise’s protective and earnest working-class parents. “Louise” is credited with injecting a new degree of naturalism into French opera, but, as the production so aptly demonstrated, it mostly remains of historical interest. It’s a tiresome melodrama where everyone is pining one minute and fêting Paris as the earthly paradise the next. Life! Love! Youth! Paris! The twaddle becomes tiresome almost immediately. Imagine a third-rate rewrite of La bohème without raw emotion and without memorable characters or settings.

Monika Rittershaus

The handsome single set production, which played on the outdoor stage of the Théâtre de l’Archevêché, was typical of director Christof Loy. It relocated the work to the late 19^th century clinic of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, whose pioneering (though deeply misogynistic) work on hysteria influenced his most famous pupil, Sigmund Freud. Loy’s solution to the opera’s banal declarations of doomed love and syrupy paeans to Paris was to stage the entire thing as a psychodrama. Louise, a girl sexually molested by her father, checks into the clinic where she relives the cycle of abuse while pre-enacting fantasies of escape, first through finding a protective beau and then – spoiler alert! – through suicide.

The checkered lobby of the clinic, dominated by a long green bench and large rectangular windows (sets by Etienne Pluss) was an effective backdrop for the intimate family scenes and love duets, but became overcrowded and chaotic in the numerous Paris-by-night set pieces. As always with Loy, the principals were well directed. Their dramatic performances carried an anguished and emotional charge that was almost mercilessly subverted by the perversity and unsentimentality of Loy’s concept.

Soprano Elsa Dreisig gave a brave and committed performance in the title role, though her pearly voice lacked the vocal heft required to make the part soar. The English tenor Adam Smith struggled as Julien, a vocally punishing and dramatically underwritten role. Much better were Nicolas Courjal as Louise’s emotionally overbearing (and, as per this production, depraved) father and Sophie Koch as her severe and embittered mother. In the hands of conductor Giacomo Sagripanti and the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon, the score sounded lush but generic. Some works are forgotten for a reason.

Ruth Walz

The following evening saw a return to intimate Musiktheater, with the world premiere of The Nine Jeweled Deer at LUMA, an arts center in Arles (seen 7 July ). Billed as a chamber opera, it was roughly on the same scale as “Billy Budd.” Yet the production featured an almost preposterous array of onstage and behind-the-scenes talent: the Israeli composer Sivan Eldar; the Indian American musician and storyteller Ganavya Doraiswamy; the MacArthur-winning artist Julie Mehretu; the best-selling American novelist Lauren Groff; and the southern Indian classical music vocalist Aruna Sairam, all under the aegis of American avant-garde legend Peter Sellars.

This summer find Sellars at work at two of Europe’s major opera festivals. His next assignment is at the Salzburg Festival in August, where he will stage Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Mahler’s “Der Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde in a single production called “One Morning Becomes an Eternity.” When I interviewed him earlier this year, he told me that newly fashioned pieces like these were partially an attempt to get away from the gigantism of the opera of empire.

In much of his recent work, Sellars seems to have served less as a traditional director and more as a spiritual guide through a production. And so it was in this arrestingly beautiful yet often-perplexing work, a one-of-a-kind fusion of electronic music, jazz improvisation, ragas, storytelling, and visual art that felt like closer to a ceremony than a performance. We witnessed, and to an extent, became part of, something that felt like an archaic ritual from the future.

Ruth Walz

Streams of spiritual thought, fable and personal reminiscence flowed together into what might, very roughly, be termed the plot. Its backbone was a Buddhist Jataka tale, depicted in an ancient cave drawing in the Thousand Buddha Grottoes, in China, of a magical jewel-encrusted deer who is hunted by a greedy king after being betrayed by a man she saved from drowning. The piece created resonances between this allegorical act of violation and modern victims of sexual violence through tales of female solidarity and a form of music therapy practiced by Doraiswamy’s grandmother.

Groff’s modern retelling of the Jataka tale, projected as text on a screen and read aloud by the author, was sparse, precise and poetic. Mehretu’s abstract paintings, riots of color and markings that suggest a variety of meanings, were transferred to large fabric scrims and framed the performers. As light passed through them (James F. Ingalls did the hypnotic lighting), they seemed to float and expand. Seated on a carpet, Doraiswamy and Sairam chanted and vocalized as five musicians played wildly over the electronics performed by Augustin Muller from the Paris-based IRCAM, where Eldar developed the piece. It was often hard to tell who had done what and how much of the score was notated or improvised. That blurriness seemed to be the point, with the outlines of individual egos intentionally indistinct.

On the bus ride back to Aix after the show, I heard a critic grumble about cultural appropriation (Sellars, Eldar, and Groff are white) and a composer told me the whole thing had seemed phony to her. Thinking back to the performance several weeks later, I still don’t quite know what to make of it, but I can’t accuse it of insensitivity or insincerity. It was frequently mesmerizing but also elusive and felt overlong – especially in the hangar-like exhibition space where the premiere was held on this balmy July night.

Monika Rittershaus

A refreshing breeze coursed through the Théâtre de l’Archevêché the following evening for the premiere of La Calisto (seen 8 July). If the festival’s four previous productions had dealt soberly and severely with themes of sexualized violence and sexual violation, providing an Aix-Ray of perverse desires and the lengths to which the powerful will go to sate them, Francesco Cavalli’s Ovid-inspired dramma per musica from 1651 served as the festival’s satyr play.

In La Calisto, Jupiter lusts after a nymph who is devoted in chastity to the god’s daughter Diana. Following Mercury’s shrewd advice, he assumes Diana’s form and leads Calisto into a grotto for some heavy petting. When the real Diana returns, she is startled to find that the nymph is now a nympho who wants to spend every moment in carnal devotion to her mistress. Meanwhile, the virgin goddess of the hunt is not as pure as she seems either. Despite her vows, she in love with the smooth-faced poet Endimione. All manner of concupiscent complications ensure.

The Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen served up a single set production that proved extremely versatile and dynamic, thanks, in part, to a turntable in the center of the dark wood-paneled salon that spanned the stage. The set’s upper half was painted a ghostly white, which seemed to suggest that the production’s Baroque setting was both homage and pastiche. Period frocks, ruffles, corseted dresses and wigs abounded, as did candelabras and upholstered furniture, but the mood was breezy and irreverent, perfectly in synch with the naughty narrative and the sparkling score.

Monika Rittershaus

It was clever, sexy, and superbly performed by a young cast, led by the radiant French soprano Lauranne Oliva as Calisto. The American bass Alex Rosen was equally booming and bumbling as Jupiter, and his falsetto passages as the fake Diana had a perfect comic tone and delivery. As Diana, Italian mezzosoprano Giuseppina Bridelli impressively ping-ponged between fending off Calisto’s advances, secretly pining for Endimione (the countertenor Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian in a pensive performance) and raging at her dad for dressing up as her and shtupping her nymph.

Sébastien Daucé led his baroque music orchestra Ensemble Correspondances with unfailing wit and propulsive verve. Onstage and in the pit, the performances crackled with rhythmic vitality and expressive color. Each of the 13 cast members understood the high degree to which music and text are fused in this key example of the Venetian Baroque. (It ain’t called a dramma per musica for nothing!) My one reservation about the production was that it emphasized the opera’s raunchy high jinks at the expense of its darker, more tragic aspects. Then again, after so much abuse and trauma spread across the earlier offerings, it was gratifying to finish this Aix-rated festival with a comic climax.

This report was also published at Parterre Box

You can predict Cannes right up until you can’t.

For months before the official announcement, the film rumor mill works overtime trying to anticipate which of the year’s most-awaited titles will secure a coveted invitation to launch at the Croisette.

But the world’s most famous film festival never follows a script. At this year’s line-up, announced yesterday, big name international auteurs share the stage with wildcards, and the omissions feel just as deliberate – and are just as telling – as the selections.

Thurday morning at UGC Montparnasse in Paris, festival president Iris Knobloch and artistic director Thierry Frémaux rolled out the official selection for the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and once again, the lineup had people both cheering and scratching their heads.

First, some statistics. Frémaux revealed that they received an all-time record of 2,909 feature film submissions from 156 countries. That includes 1,127 debut films, which is staggering on its own. He also mentioned that roughly one-third of the world’s film productions tried to land a spot at Cannes this year — a jaw-dropping percentage and a reminder of just how crucial Cannes has become, especially for filmmakers who can’t rely on studio machinery or superhero franchises to find an audience.

Look at last year’s Palme d’Or winner, Anora. Without Cannes, its slow rise from indie darling to Best Picture Oscar winner would’ve been near-impossible. Cannes launched it into orbit. Frémaux knows this, and you get the sense he rather enjoys playing kingmaker.

Directors know the inestimable value of having their work play at Cannes. For smaller films in particular, the stakes have arguably never been higher. The festival still provides what no amount of clever marketing or streaming algorithms can: the instant, global prestige of selection — and, for the lucky few, the propulsion of a prize.

The 2025 main competition lineup runs 19 films deep and, as usual, it’s a cocktail of returning titans and fresh names. Wes Anderson is back with The Phoenician Scheme, and Ari Aster is in competition for the first time with his A24 production Eddington, which feels like a perfect fit given his flair for the operatic and unsettling.

Julia Ducournau, the Palme-winning director of Titane, returns with Alpha. Set in the 1980s, the film centers on an 11-year-old girl ostracized by her peers after rumors spread that she’s carrying a newly emerged disease. Early buzz on the film is that it’s “utterly divisive,” but Cannes is loyal to its past champions. Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague looks like a cinephile’s dream — the American indie master doing the Nouvelle Vague (in French) feels almost too on the nose, yet here we are. It’s Linklater’s second film this year, after Blue Moon, his sensational biopic of Lorenz Hart (a remarkable Ethan Hawke), debuted in Berlin in February. Kelly Reichardt (The Mastermind) and Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value) round out a solid list of Cannes regulars, while Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi brings A Simple Accident, a quietly thrilling inclusion given his continued repression back home.

Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa also returns to the Croisette with Two Prosecutors, about Stalin’s Great Purge in the late 1930s. And while not in competition, Kirill Serebrennikov — long a Cannes fixture — is back with a new film screening in Cannes Premiere, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, making him, once again, the only Russian filmmaker on earth kosher for major film festivals to program since his country invaded Ukraine three years ago.

Sharing the Cannes Premiere program with Serebrennikov is another period film, Fatih Akin’s Amrum, set on an island in the North Sea during the final days of World War Two. This is the German-Turkish director’s first time back at the festival since 2017’s In the Fade, a clunky thriller about right-wing extremist violence in modern-day Germany.

Six of the 19 competition films are directed by women. That’s roughly a third, not parity yet, but Cannes has seen worse years. Among them is Mascha Schilinski, whose sophomore feature, In die Sonne schauen, marks a wildcard entry, introducing a relatively young and unknown German director to the main competition.

Akinola Davies Jr. makes history as the first Nigerian director in the main competition with My Father’s Shadow — a long overdue debut, given Nigeria’s prolific cinema scene.

For every inclusion, however, there’s a telling omission. Some of the year’s most anticipated films are nowhere to be seen. No Yorgos Lanthimos, Luca Guadagnino, David Fincher, Greta Gerwig, Laszlo Nemes or Christian Petzold.

Maybe they’re holding for Venice, maybe they weren’t ready, or maybe — as Cannes increasingly looks for films that feel of the moment — they just didn’t make the cut. Still, the lineup skews conservative. Despite all the numbers, it doesn’t feel like a year where Frémaux swung for the fences.

There’s also a quieter disappointment in the regional breakdown. For all the talk of global representation, this year’s slate leans heavily on Western Europe and North America. East Asia and Eastern Europe feel oddly underrepresented.

As usual, out-of-competition is where the biggest crowd-pleasers wind up. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is bringing blockbuster energy to the Croisette, while Spike Lee is back with Highest 2 Lowest. And Bono will have a film based on his one-man stage show. Expect earsplitting music on the red carpet and sunglasses at night.

There’s plenty of star power in Un Certain Regard this year, including Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut with Eleanor the Great, a comedy-drama about late bloomers, and Harris Dickinson’s Urchin, also the actor’s first time behind the camera. UCR continues to be the space where careers quietly launch — think of it as Cannes’ proving ground. Indeed, UCR has launched many of the most successful international auteur titles of recent years, including How To Have Sex, Close, Corsage, Godland and the controversial Girl, a Belgian film about a transgendered ballerina.

As Kloboch said yesterday of films that make the cut for Cannes, “We fly them to the moon and then back to earth so they can light up cinemas.”

Michel Franco’s “Dreams,” screening in competition at the Berlinale, is an uncompromising and angry drama about wealth and privilege as well as a fable about an immigrant striver that turns into a horror story. Franco, a prolific Mexican director, exposes the cynicism and hypocrisy underneath the benevolent veneer of the elite world of philanthropy. Anchored by electrifying central performances, the film offers a stinging critique of an elite world where charity masks wanton self-interest. The film’s depiction of the moral rot of the ruling class rings especially true in an America well on its way to oligarchic rule.

Jennifer McCarthy (Jessica Chastain) is a high-society arts patron in San Francisco who manages a foundation funded by her father’s vast fortune. Immersed in a world of gallery openings, couture fashion, and gala performances, Jennifer inhabits the glittering and polite world of contemporary liberal elites. Yet beneath the carefully-curated existence is threatened by an amour fou.

Jessica has been having an affair with Fernando (Isaac Hernández) is a young ballet dancer at the academy in Mexico City supported by the McCarthy Foundation. One day he shows up at her sleek San Francisco apartment expecting a loving welcome. Jennifer eagerly shares her bed with him, yet refuses to let him be part of her life in a meaningful way. Fernando is proud and impetuous, and Hernández brings a raw physicality to the role, imbuing his every gesture - including plenty of virtuosic dancing (Hernández is a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre) –with fierce defiance and vulnerability. From the film’s opening moments—where Fernando is introduced amid the perilous backdrop of illegal border crossings—the viewer is drawn into a narrative that is fueled by sexual and artistic longing, and the lengths people will go to fulfill - or exploit- them.

Fernando’s journey from Mexico to San Francisco (a harrowing opening sequence that starts in the back of a truck) is emblematic of a deeper, more insidious crossing of boundaries. His arrival in American’s most expensive city is not merely a geographic dislocation, but a symbolic breach of the rigid social orders that Jennifer so carefully upholds. Their relationship, first kindled in the vibrant yet transient setting of a dance school in Mexico City, evolves into a collision of class and culture, where every encounter is fraught with tension. Jennifer, whose milieu is one of private jets and designer labels, is both enthralled and threatened by Fernando’s naked passion and untamed spirit.

Chastain’s Jennifer is a study in icy reserve and calculated emotion. She implacably captures the inner conflict of a woman who is both the custodian and the victim of her own privilege. Her interactions with Fernando are charged with an unsettling mix of desire and repulsion—a dance of power where every gesture is as much a display of entitlement as of fragility. In several scenes, Jennifer’s frustration at not speaking Spanish causes her to lash out at Fernando, underscoring her character’s arrogance and cultural insensitivity.

Chastain’s performance is brave, yet it is Hernández who elevates “Dreams” to an artful social critique. Boyish yet macho, Fernando dances the film’s themes of resilience, defiance, passion and striving for artistic excellence. His movements feel less like rehearsed choreography than a visceral rebuttal to a system that seeks to confine him within a narrow, predetermined role.

This is a film where the physical and the metaphorical are inextricably intertwined. Fernando’s lithe, impassioned movements and Jennifer’s cold, measured restraint serve stand for the broader cultural, social and economic forces that divide them.

“Dreams” is a film that elicits both an emotional and intellectual response. Franco’s direction is both austere and unflinching: he approaches this material with icy, even clinical, detachment. As the film hurtles toward its final act, the careful facade of Jennifer’s world begins to fracture under the weight of its own contradictions. Franco orchestrates a finale that strips away all pretense, delivering a sequence of violence and moral reckoning that is both abrupt and devastating. In these final moments, the consequences of unchecked desire and systemic hypocrisy are laid bare. In the past, Franco’s shock tactics have sometimes felt exploitative, but here the brutality is earned.

“Dreams” is not an easy film to watch, but at the beginning of this year’s Berlinale, it’s one of the festival’s best.

No one expects a masterpiece from a festival’s opening film, but at the start of the 75^th Berlinale, the event’s new leadership team, led by Tricia Tuttle, has chosen to inflict one of the year’s worst films on their audience.

That film, Tom Tykwer’s “Das Licht,” is a work of visionary ineptitude, staggering incoherence and unimaginable tedium.

From the carefully-orchestrated chaos of the opening sequence, which cross-cuts from Berlin in a downpour (it’s always raining in this Berlin, one of the film’s few witty touches), where a group of teenagers club the weekend away out of their minds on acid while an airplane en route from Nairobi to Berlin during a storm, to the endless denouement in an underwater dreamscape during a psychomagical family therapy session, “Das Licht” is a phony epic with nothing to say. What transpires in between those two cumbersome set pieces is so inchoate and nonsensical that I refuse to attempt a summary.

I will say this, though: the titular light is a high frequency LED lamp used by one of the main characters to enter a trace state. It so happens that this apparatus actually exists, and that the manufacturer is clever enough to advertise for it in the Berlinale’s official program.

“Das Licht” is a dysfunctional family saga, a refugee drama, a portrait of buried grief and an ode to the resilience of the human soul to surmount formidable obstacles. Did I mention it’s also a musical? That’s right. Tykwer channels his inner Jacques Audiard for five excruciating sequences where each member of the family gets to express themselves through song - usually while blocking traffic. The youngest son is obsessed with Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and belts it out (off-key) during a choreographed sequence at a central Berlin intersection.

A rare bright spot is Tala Al Deen (an actress at Schauspielhaus Wien) as Farrah, as a Syrian refugee making ends meet as a housekeeper, although the film doesn’t give her nearly enough to do.

Tykwer is the closest thing that Germany has to mainstream film royalty and it’s no wonder that the Berlinale is so gracious with him. “Das Licht” is his first feature film in nine years and one can only hope that he returns to making “Babylon Berlin,” the TV series that is the finest work of his career, very soon.

The last time Tykwer opened the Berlinale was with 2006’s “The International,” a big-budget English-language caper that starred Naomi Watts and Clive Owen and that, despite racing around the world (Berlin! Istanbul! New York! Lyon! Milan!), was in a great hurry to get nowhere. (My sole memory of that film was being trapped in the middle of a row and unable to escape and go to the bathroom.)

Bladders will be similarly inconvenienced by “Das Licht” and its 162-minute running-time.

162 minutes! That’s TWICE the length of Tykwer’s breakout 1998 feature, “Run Lola Run,” a film powered by pure adrenaline and exhilaration; a film that used speed as an organizing principle.

By contrast, the running, cycling and flying (yes, flying!) around in “Das Licht” serve little purpose, except to distract the viewer from the hollowness at the film’s center.

Only briefly does the film succeed in harnesses its energy: in a brief scene where Lars Eidinger and a coworker, biking home after work, race each other on Berlin’s glistening asphalt. After a few blocks they are surprised by two policewomen who slap them with hefty fines for running a red light (another Berlin detail that, like the miserable weather, rings true). When asked to show their IDs, the cyclists decide to give the cops the slip and tear off laughing through a nearby park. The unexpected getaway (a possible prelude to a tryst) is joyous and full of unforced excitement. After sharing the thrill of this nocturnal adventure with his colleague, Eidinger declines her invitation upstairs.

“The Light” leaves him, and us, in the dark.

A.J. Goldmann