IN OCTOBER,  I briefly wrote about the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca by Swiss director Luc Bondy, who succeeded in desecrating this lush tragedy with pornographic gestures and swipes at Christianity. If you recall, Bartlett Sher, director of another Met production, subsequently called the act of booing, which had been freely engaged in by fans at the Tosca opening, “a self-interested expression of ownership.” Bondy sniffed, “I didn’t know that Tosca was like the Bible in New York.”

For those interested in a more thorough examination of the production with similar criticisms, I recommend Daniel B. Gallagher’s piece in the Catholic magazine, New Oxford Review. (It costs $1.50 to read in its entirety.)

And, in today’s issue of The Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau, a commenter at TH, examines recent productions of Hector Berlioz’ Les Troyens, an epic based on Virgil’s Aeneid. Berlioz’ heroic themes are also transformed by postmodern nullity. Bertonneau looks at a production by conductor Sylvain Cambreling and scene-designer Herbert Wernicke in which the Trojan soldiers are dressed in what appear to be Nazi uniforms. Bertonneau writes:

Berlioz conceives of Carthage under Dido as a utopian project, with the people and their queen united to build up a new city free from the corruption of Tyre, whence Dido has fled after the murder of her husband by the usurper Pygmalion. As Berlioz writes his drama, the advent of the desperate Trojans on Tunisian shores and Dido’s betrayal in love by Aeneas disrupt the experiment in civic idealism. This is that “disparity between the real and the ideal” that Mellers remarks. Wernicke, for no discernible reason that might be related to Berlioz’ text, decided that the Carthaginians, far from being noble and idealistic, must be effete and cynical. He directs his actor-singers to comport themselves superciliously and nastily. He dresses them in black gowns and black business suits, adorning the women with elbow-length aquamarine gloves and built-up, atop-the-head, “beehive” coiffures, making them somewhat risibly resemble the fearsome housewives in Gary Larson’s “Far Side” cartoons.

In the Cambreling-Wernicke conception of the three Carthaginian acts, Dido and her court are people who sip champagne cocktails from long-stemmed glasses while reclining torpidly on Tyrian-purple, gold-fringed cushions. They all give the impression that the proceedings bore them to the point of terminal ennui. Cambreling speaks rightly when he says of Les Troyens, “Ce n’est pas une pièce très optimiste,” but rather one that emphasizes “la ruine, la fin d’un monde.”

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