When Florentina Holzinger’s opera Sancta was staged in Stuttgart recently, chaos ensued. Based on Hindemith’s 1921 opera Sancta Susanna, Holzinger’s new work featured unsimulated lesbian sex, naked roller-skating nuns and real blood, triggering outrage. Staff at Staatsoper Stuttgart reported that no fewer than 18 audience members had to be offered medical assistance for nausea and shock during the first two performances.
Holzinger herself has something of a reputation as an enfant terrible, but shocking scenes at the opera are nothing new. Right from the birth of the artform at the beginning of the 17th century, opera has had the power to disturb, disgust, terrify and unnerve in equal measure. Here are six of the best examples.
Scariest moments in opera
Weber Der Freischütz (1821)
Any opera that involves characters selling their souls to the Devil is likely to be a little unsettling, and Carl Maria von Weber takes this sinister theme to the max in the famous ‘Wolf’s Glen Scene’ in Act II of Der Freischütz from 1821. Tolling bells and hooting owls introduce us to the mysterious and moonlit craggy glen that is the location for a midnight meeting between Kaspar, who has already done his dark Demonic deal, and Max, who is being unwittingly tricked by Kaspar into doing so.
As the pair forge seven magic bullets in preparation for a shooting match the following day, they are surrounded by a succession of supernatural phenomena – storms, evil birds, apparitions, the ride of the Wild Hunt – culminating in the appearance of the Devil (Samiel) himself. Be very afraid.
Britten The Turn of the Screw (1954)
More supernatural goings-on in Benjamin Britten’s Henry James-inspired 1954 opera. The British composer had already proved himself a master manipulator of the mind in his previous operas Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, and here added ghosts to the equation, as a Governess is sent to Bly, a large, shadowy country house, to look after two children.
While there is a sense of lingering unease throughout, it is the moment where the Governess sees the face of an unknown man looking in at her through the window that really sends shivers down the spine. That it happens just after the children have been indulging in a jolly rendition of ‘Tom, Tom, the Piper’s son’ in the same room somehow makes the moment even creepier – it’s that feeling of being watched. At this stage, no-one other than her is aware of the ghostly presence, and we share in her fear.
Richard Strauss Salome (1905)
The bible has more than its fair share of horrifying incidents, and it is one of these, by way of Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name, that Richard Strauss drew on for Salome in 1905. In some productions, the title character’s garment-divesting Dance of the Seven Veils may already be sufficient to raise eyebrows (and pulses), but it is what follows that really has the capacity to shock.
Rewarded for her efforts with the severed head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) on a plate, Salomé proceeds to serenade it and kiss it on the lips. The moment proves too much for her father Herod, who orders her execution, and the whole opera fell foul of the censors in various countries at the time of its premiere.
Strauss himself was not too worried, however, later pointing out that the success of his boundary-pushing masterpiece had enabled him to buy his large house in the Alps.
Three more scariest moments in opera
Poulenc Les dialogues des Carmélites (1956)
Naked roller-skating aside, nuns don’t tend to fare too well in opera. Puccini’s Suor Angelica, for instance, puts an end to her years of misery by poisoning herself, while in the shocking conclusion to Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel (1927), Renata is burned at the stake, accused of corrupting the convent with her deluded visions.
And then there is the horrifying fate of Blanche and her fellow sisters at the Compiègne convent in Francis Poulenc’s Les dialogues des Carmélites. Amid the bloodthirstiness of The Terror following the French Revolution, the convent is declared unlawful and the nuns are sentenced to death, which they accept with characteristic stoicism.
Though they themselves are unshakeable in their religious belief, singing a hymn as they file one-by-one towards the guillotine, the sound of the blade repeatedly dropping is nonetheless deeply disturbing.
Wagner Götterdämmerung
Horror film writers and directors are well aware that nothing freaks viewers out more effectively that having the hand of a theoretically deceased character suddenly sticking out from beyond the grave – check out Carrie or Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance.
More than a century before that, Richard Wagner worked the same trick towards the end of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final opera from his monumental Ring Cycle. Having literally stabbed Siegfried in the back, the unlovable Hagen makes his move to steal the Ring from his corpse – only for the former’s arm to raise up menacingly and prevent him.
By this stage in the Ring, Wagner has already put his audience through the emotional wringer with more that 14 hours’ worth of heroism, treachery, death, destruction and much besides. So, why not leave them traumatised too?
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- Great Requiems: how composers have portrayed death and the afterlife
Halévy La Juive
Over its 400-year history, opera has come up with many varied and imaginative ways to kill off its characters. Being dropped into a cauldron of boiling water in front of a baying crowd, as happens to the goldsmith Eléazar and his daughter Rachel at the end of Halévy’s 1835 grand opera La Juive (The Jewess), is one of the more gruesome examples.
As in several other operas, their grim fate comes as a result of its victims refusal to recant their religious beliefs – though in this instance, a startling last-minute twist in the plot turns the whole premise of La Juive on its head…
