Trenches. The endless wait for an absurd war. Gas masks, so as not to die poisoned. Thousands of bodies rotting in the mud. A generation exterminated. The end of an era. The Great War.
There is no longer any survivor of the so-called First World War, which confronted the main European powers and millions of citizens of their colonies, sent between 1914 and 1918 to the battlefronts as cannon fodder. It was the last war on horseback and with sabers and muskets. It was the first with tanks and planes. The first whose photos filled the pages of newspapers. The great war of pacifist poetry, written by the soldier-poets who fell like flies after reflecting the horror, like the great English poet Wilfred Owen, killed in a senseless attack in the last week of the war.
Then came the Second World War, Vietnam, the wars of liberation in Africa, Afghanistan… but the memory of the so-called Great War lives on and this year the Gran Teatre del Liceu will take over Alex Ollé’s staging of one of the most popular Giuseppe Verdi operas: Il trovatore.
The Verdi troubadour fights against an evil count in Aragon in the 1500s. Why set it in the 1910s?
In 2017, when he presented this production at the Rome Opera (it had already been premiered in Paris and Amsterdam), Ollé told the Efe agency that “the libretto is somewhat absurd (…) because there are situations of madness, very limit, which can only happen in a war context”, and added that in the First World War “a universe between past and present was generated that seemed interesting to us (…) with a very particular imaginary” thanks to the mixture of “gas masks, cuirasses and swords, chariots and horses”.
The set design by Alfons Flores plays with large solid plates that rise to become walls and fall to become trenches and tombs: the soldiers, with the typical gas masks that immediately transport us to that war, sing, fight and die as the background of the loving trio of the troubadour, the count and the woman they are both in love with.
Il trovatore’s action is absurd (a mother attempts to murder her enemy’s child, but throws her own baby into the fire), but for Ollé this becomes understandable in a context of war. And he chose the war that is still seen today as the ultimate example of conflict without noble causes, without heroes, an insane coven that was supposed to end all wars and began a century of horror.
Already many stage directors had traveled to the same stage to set very different operas. A decade ago, the German director Klaus Guth brought to the Liceu a version of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal set in the same war, although the action takes place in the Middle Ages and Wagner died at the end of the 19th century. The Grail Knights, in this version, were wounded and hallucinated from the war that crushed their souls.
Last year, Wolfgang Tillmans brought to the Rambla theater a version of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (a mass for the dead in Latin with poems by Owen in tribute to those who fell in World War II) set in the trenches of the Great War.
And in 2006, actor and film director Kenneth Branagh produced an ambitious Mozart’s The Magic Flute movie, which moves the action from a mythical ancient Egypt to the bloody battles of the Western Front. Instead of representing the opposing sides in that 1914, the army of the good-natured Sarastro was an underground brotherhood of pacifists who tried to end the pro-war side of the Queen of the Night, which included all the rulers of both factions. who sent their poor soldiers to their deaths.
Why in these times so many stage directors place dream stories in magical worlds or remote past in the most recognizable images of the First World War?
I believe that all the evils of war are concentrated and condensed in that conflict. It is not the same to denounce the horrors of war in a fight against Hitler, or for the liberation of oppressed peoples, than those of this absurd war. The pompous monarchs and generals of Prussia, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of the colonialist empires of France and Great Britain of the time do not provoke adhesions today: they are the symbol of the privileged classes sending the children of the poor to die for a little more than power.
And the aesthetics of that conflict is ideal for a stage: the trench as scenery and metaphor, the mountains of corpses and the masks against the lethal mustard gas, that dramatic mixture of the old and the new, the chivalry that perishes and the technology of the advancing horror. In its horror frozen in time, the Great War is alive as a nightmare and as an announcement of all the horrors to come.
In his criticism of this version of Il trovatore when it premiered in 2015 at the Dutch National Opera, Nicolas Nguyen wrote in the specialist magazine Bachtrack that viewers will not see the plot as ridiculous in the context of the First World War, or any war . Individual horror becomes understandable in the coven that sinks a civilization. The dark, monochromatic staging (away from the exuberance of the typical ‘fury’ staging) combines with the gravity of the story being told.
Just over a hundred years ago, humanity was immersed in a global conflict, and not for values ??such as life, freedom or democracy, but for profit and power. So appalling was the use of chemical weapons that since then, even in the worst conflicts, most of the contenders respect their prohibition. The poets had to invent a new language to tell such a calamity. When the curtain rises this month at the Liceu, the trenches of Flanders will be dyed red again to bring to our consciousness one of those mythical stories of traditional operas. And we will return to the horror of the trenches.
