Ulrike Hartung and Kornelius Paede – singing your own arias to the circumstances

Ulrike Hartung and Kornelius Paede have added the somewhat more well-behaved and yet insightful subtitle “Aesthetic Reformatting and Social Contradictions” to their book with the beautiful, appealing title “Oper Out!”. It is actually self-evident that content and form are mutually dependent in the arts, that it should be the task of critical art to bring the circumstances onto the stage, and that the reality of the 21st century must ask new questions about the old art form of opera. However, anyone who enters an opera house from time to time knows that not all musical theater producers share this view. And so the anthology is a handout for those – be it on or behind the stage, be it in the stalls – that opera does not have to remain the elite project of the last millennium, but can artistically negotiate the antagonisms of late-stage capitalism.

»Opera out!« is a hybrid of practical report and insight into contemporary (music) theater discourses. Hartung works as a scientist; Paede is chief dramaturge in the musical theater department at the Staatstheater Kassel, which has developed a reputation as an experimental place for opera in recent years. It is therefore not surprising that numerous contributions come from artistic employees of the State Theater. In fact, the texts that specifically identify imbalances in the performing arts and show possible ways out of a purely museum-based art are particularly strong.

The fact that the old musical theater is far from obsolete and still has its justification and appeal even in its traditional and evolved form does not hide the countless anachronisms. The contributions advocate for new theater spaces, advocate that canonical works be viewed primarily as material and, so to speak, relegate director’s theater, that bogeyman from the last century, to the closet. The virulent debate about representation, the visibility of marginalized groups and questions of casting are applied – if not always completely convincingly – to the field of musical theater.

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You don’t have to follow every suggestion. How useful the exile of the performing arts in the digital space is remains to be seen. Nevertheless, one reads gratefully about the various attempts not to sell art below its value and to insist on its social relevance by breaking new ground.

Hartung and Paede, for example, advocate seeing the renovations and new buildings of opera houses as well as the alternative venues, which often forcibly wean the audience from the proscenium stage and give them new perspectives, as an opportunity and invitation for fundamental renewal. This is also what the phrase “Oper out!” stands for. In fact, such structural measures are currently an issue not only in Kassel, but also in Munich, Frankfurt am Main and Vienna, among others. The editors counter resistance to expensive investments in cultural heritage with their belief in the opportunity to “open up productive exceptional states for new visual and listening experiments and, not least, to question the feudal hierarchies of the opera temples.” Something that one hardly dares to hope for in Berlin, where a stop to the construction work on the Komische Oper was imposed in the neoliberal austerity madness.

Ulrike Hartung, Kornelius Paede (ed.): Opera out! Aesthetic reformatting and social contradictions. Utz-Verlag, 290 pages, br., 84 €.

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