Sex and nudity intrigue opera fans

Up-and-coming French producer Olivier Py has shocked and intrigued Geneva's staid opera-goers with a raunchy interpretation of repertoire standard "The Tales of Hoffmann" as an indictment of capitalist society.
 
Full-frontal male and female nudity and a series of simulated on-stage lesbian and heterosexual couplings -- most notably between lovelorn poet Hoffmann and life-size doll Olympia as she trills her way through her main aria -- left audiences gasping, giggling or reduced to stunned silence.
 
Some indignant traditionalists marched their young offspring out of early performances at the Grand Theatre after the first act of what they had expected to be a holiday show suitable for the whole family.
 
Others who stayed to the end -- through an orgiastic third act set in a Venetian bordello rather than the usual canalside palace -- booed the 35-year-old Py at curtain call.
 
But their disapproval was promptly submerged in a wider storm of applause for what must be the most original performance in decades of the 120-year-old work.

The approval almost certainly had little to do with the message that the fiercely religious Roman Catholic Py set out in his programme notes: the destruction of real art and the artist in a godless society driven by technology, science and a mad race for personal gratification.

Rather it reflected appreciation for his innovative interpretation of 19th century composer Jacques Offenbach's opera of three stories by German author E.T.A. Hoffmann.

It was praise, too, for an amazingly versatile metal-scaffolding set by French designer Pierre-Andre Weitz and for some outstanding acting and singing.

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As Olympia, the second of four women wooed and lost by the poet in his fruitless search for the perfect soulmate, French soprano Patricia Petitbon seemed unperturbed by playing her role as a mechanical seductress clad only in a transparent body-stocking -- "a pure sex object with the provocative innocence of a doll without a soul," in Py's vision.
 
Belgian bass-baritone Jose Van Dam, 30 years a star on world stages, was a menacing, dark-voiced presence in four diabolic roles -- the businessman Lindorf, who carries off Hoffmann's last beloved Stella, the eye-maker Coppelius, evil Doctor Miracle and the magician Dapertutto of the Venetian episode.
 
For Py, staging only the second opera in his 13-year career as a writer, producer and actor with leading French theatrical companies, all four represent aspects of the decadence and brutalising modernisation brought to the mid-19th century Paris of the Second Empire, in whose cultural life Offenbach's earlier operettas, like "Gaite Parisienne", played an iconic role.
 
"The devil himself is not a spirit, but a secondary effect of capitalism; he is that very progress which completes the process of destroying the last enchantment the world can hold," he says -- making clear that one of his personal villains is Baron Georges Haussmann.
 
Under the Empire, Haussmann ripped out the heart of old Paris to build the vast open boulevards of today.
 
The producer also reads as an expiation "The Tales", the "serious" work German-born Offenbach had long dreamed of producing but which was unfinished when he died in 1880, just months before its first performance.
This is shown through the figure of the stricken singer Antonia who symbolises the tragedy of the artist in Emperor Louis Napoleon's France from 1850 to 1870.
 
Antonia, whose illness will kill her if she performs again but who will die if she cannot, embodies for Py the dilemma the composer faced in the Paris of those two decades.
 
He argues these confront the writer and artist even more today -- of conforming to what the dominant society demands or falling silent.
"The poet (Offenbach) either had to sing the praises of the end of enchantment or he would not be able to sing at all, and with him the entire society of the Second Empire joyfully quaffed the drug of debauchery and atheism," says Py.