I went last week to a production of Rigoletto, the revival of a production first staged in 2001. A criticism that I read in advance informed me that the initial orgy scene had been toned down somewhat by comparison with what had gone seventeen years before. Was this progress or regression? The critic did not venture an opinion on this vital question; he merely recorded the change as a fact.
It seems that all opera productions these days need an orgy scene, just as doctoral theses in the Soviet Union used to need at least one quotation from Lenin. There was a time when an orgy would have been censored, but now it is obligatory — no opera without one. There was a brief orgy scene in the last Flying Dutchman that I saw, and it was a bit of a relief when they got it over with because I knew that it must be coming and tension mounted until it did. It was a bit like childhood diseases in the old days: The sooner you had them, the quicker you got over them.
The problem with orgies is that once you’ve see one, you’ve seen them all, and these days they are staged literally rather than suggestively, as if the aging audience has to be reminded of what sex actually is. Moreover, they are staged like a tableau of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the fin de siècle compendium of what used to be called, in those far-off judgmental days, perversions. The implicit, however, is more powerful than the explicit, or it used to be. The explicit, in fact, is the enemy of the voluptuous.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Adding Injury to Insult”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-01-20
November 22, 2022
QotD: The obligatory orgy scene
Comments Off on QotD: The obligatory orgy scene
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
