We'll always have the scandal: Wagner and the curse of the "plot twist"

Barcelona"The artist has the right, even the duty, to shock if he deems it necessary," said British writer Anthony Burgess. He was quite scandalous when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned the novel into a film in 1971. A Clockwork Orange (1962). We will return later to Burgess, free will, and seemingly arbitrary violence. Today, scandal is on the decline because the true powers that be have long since learned to defuse, assimilate, and monetize the artist's subversive pretensions. In fact, when an institution is scandalized to the point of bringing out the sword of censorship, as the Macba did with a work by Ines Doujak, at the exhibition The Beast and the Sovereign (2015), or the art fair Arch with Political prisoners in contemporary Spain by Santiago Sierra, actually shows weakness and insecurity.

However, there will always be scandal, or a slight possibility of scandalizing, Katharina Wagner must have thought when she decided turn the moral argument of the opera on its head Lohengrin from his great-grandfather RichardSome audience members hissed at his proposal on March 17th at the premiere of this new production at the Liceu. Now, more than being scandalized, the audience was probably simply expressing disagreement with a poorly resolved idea, because the stage solution said one thing (that now the hero Lohengrin is the villain of the performance), and what the singers sang something quite different (that the villain is Ortrud). All of this generates more laziness than subversion, and that's surely how the audience members at the second and third performances, on the 19th and 21st, understood it, when there was no whistling. It wasn't necessary. It was more worthwhile to remember the good things, of which there are many, in this opera and this production, and to forget a quip that is more inconsistent than provocative.

In Richard Wagner's opera, Lohengrin is the immaculate hero who saves Elsa from a false accusation. But he hides a secret: he is the son of Parsifal, with all that implies belonging to the lineage linked to the Holy Grail. Katharina Wagner invents another secret in the opera's prelude: Lohengrin is a bastard who murdered Elsa's brother. Except for this prelude (more ridiculous than maddening) and the finale (a scenic nonsense with a dragged corpse and a remorseful suicide), the stage proposal of the German composer's great-granddaughter is quite interesting. As Lohengrin warns that he will leave if asked where he comes from, who he is, and what his lineage is, Katharina Wagner harbors suspicions. "Would you trust someone who doesn't want to say who they are?" suggests the stage director, echoing Ortrud's suspicions when she says that if Lohengrin is hiding a secret, perhaps "he's not so innocent."

To build a hero with a dark side, Katharina Wagner has Lohengrin grab Elsa's arm too tightly as they are about to get married, and in the scene after the wedding, when she asks the forbidden question, she places Lohengrin in a threatening position that suggests the... These details would have worked equally well in the conventional plot, would have enriched it, in fact, without what the viewer sees contradicting what they hear.

It is understandable that Katharina Wagner wants to confront the great-grandfather's Lohengrin from a feminist consciousness. As Alex Ross recalls in the book Wagnerism, German musicologist Eva Rieger believes that Richard Wagner "stigmatized Ortrud as a political woman in whom the instinct for love is replaced by murderous fanaticism." Furthermore, he made the rigor of the Christian faith represented by Lohengrin triumph by sadistically punishing poor Elsa's doubts. However, the great-granddaughter clumsily applies the amendment, granting Ortrud, the representative of the pagan gods, an implausible value: he wants to turn her into the moral axis that pursues the truth (unmasking Lohengrin), but she is hardly a power-hungry pagan Lady Macbeth waiting for it; and the sopranos who perform her at the Liceu cannot or do not know how to escape that context or the words they must sing. Nothing is untouchable, but if you decide to change the moral axis of the work without modifying either the score or the libretto, you will surely be doomed to botch work and ridicule.

The Case of Lady Macbeth

Every adaptation is both a small betrayal and a liberation. Some people are outraged by the omission of a character or a plot when a book is adapted for film, or by the nuances that are lost (or gained) in the transfer of literature to the stage. Many operas also receive more or less radical or bizarre stage treatments, but in most cases, beyond the scenic ostentation, the changes don't affect the core or change the story as Katharina Wagner does in Lohengrin. Or how Núria Espert did it at the Liceu in 1999 when she decided that Turandot It didn't end with the bittersweet triumph of love, but with the suicide of the protagonist.

In one of the most extreme cases of reversal, a short novel, an opera, and a film are involved. Nikolai Leskov wrote Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865), a story about a woman, Katerina Ismailova, neglected by her husband and abused by an overbearing father-in-law. She hopes to be saved by the love of Sergei, a not-so-trustworthy scoundrel, and in order to escape with him, she goes straight to the point where she kills her husband, her father-in-law, and a nephew... Arrested, tried, and exiled, she falls off the cliff of disillusionment and fatalistic tragedy. Russian literature and the fascination with catastrophic misfortunes.

When composer Dmitri Shostakovich and librettist Alexander Preis turned the story into an opera, they omitted the murder of the nephew to reinforce the idea that Katerina's homicidal despair is caused by oppression by men "in the nightmarish conditions of Russia." Shostakovich felt empathy for the character, and this was also reflected in the stage design ofÀlex Ollé who inaugurated the 2024-2025 Liceu season"It's important to empathize with Katerina to understand what she ends up doing, because the violence she exerts is the result of the helplessness she feels in the face of a hostile environment," said Ollé.

Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda revived infanticide in the film The Siberian Lady Macbeth (1962), but maintaining the moral landscape of the tragedy. However, when British author William Oldroyd adapted Leskov's story to film in 2016, he achieved a true Katharina Wagner quality. In the film Lady Macbeth, set in 19th-century rural England and starring a disturbing Florence Pugh, Oldroyd focuses on the first part of the story: the patriarchal humiliation, Katherine's dissatisfaction, her sublimated sexual desire with the servant, and the three murders, that of the nephew with the servant's complicity. He ignores the rest of the story and decides to end the film by pointing out Katherine's class monstrosity, who is so calm about accusing the servant and the maid of the crimes. From the possible feminist reading of revenge born of desperation, he goes on to show a psychopath who takes advantage of class privilege to condemn the maid and evade justice.

We return to Anthony Burgess. When he sent the manuscript of A Clockwork Orange The British and American publishers were given two options: to publish the novel with 20 or 21 chapters. The first option presented a pessimistic conclusion, according to which violence is inevitable and impossible to redeem. Chapter 21, on the other hand, was more optimistic, because it suggested that one can overcome violent behavior, that youthful violence is a stage that "is above politics," yes, but that is overcome when one becomes aware of being an adult. That's why the chapter was number 21, the age of majority in the United Kingdom in 1962. The British publisher chose his optimistic version, more "Kennedy," as Burgess himself said, and the American one the 20-chapter, more "Nixonian."

In a highly unusual case, the author himself proposed the possibility of inverting the moral axis, and the decision haunted him throughout his life, especially when Stanley Kubrick turned A Clockwork Orange in a film, ignoring Chapter 21 and emphasizing the key to arbitrary violence. The documentary addresses all of this. Anthony Burgess, beyond 'A Clockwork Orange' (Benoit Felici and Elisa Mantin, 2023), which is available on Filmin. Burgess lamented that "the misunderstanding," like the scandal, would haunt him until his death. However, he admitted that it was a novel about free will. Therefore, faced with the choice of the American publisher, he reflected with resignation: "Who am I to say they're wrong? After all, it's about making a choice."