Puccini makes me happy

...but Calixto Bieito does not.

Neither, for that matter, do Joachim Herz or Klaus Schlegel. This weekend, I went to see Puccini's Madame Butterfly at the third opera house in Berlin. Third, because the Komische Oper is the third one I went to, after visiting the National Opera and the German Opera. Anyways, I like Puccini, and I like Italian opera, but I do not like it when a couple of Germans and a Spaniard get together and ruin it. The Germans, Herrs Herz and Schlegel, should just be ashamed of themselves for rewriting the (originally Italian) libretto. Putting it in German just gave it more fricatives; it did not make it prettier, or even understandable for a German audience. I have native speakers to back me up on this! The director, Bieito, should be ashamed of himself for more reasons than I care to name here, but mostly for taking a lovely, if not socially critical enough, piece of art and turning it into an extremely violent, flourescent-lit, and thoroughly boring bloodbath/orgy.

I am really tired of art, theater especially, which abuses its audience. I feel like it's so overdone as to actually be a little kitschy, and I certainly don't think it inspires any positive change in whatever it is criticizing. To sidestep the question of the purpose of art, I'd like to see some kind of inspired change be the purpose of more of the critique in this city. Sometimes it just seems like a lot of pointless bitching. Then again, maybe I've been spending too much time with embittered teachers lately....