The most memorable moment in “Monster’s Paradise,” Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek’s Grand Guignol-style sendup of today’s politics and crises, isn’t when a character reminiscent of President Trump flushes the golden toilet that serves as his throne. Nor is it when he, after feasting on piles of McDonald’s takeout, inflates to fill the stage, wearing nothing but a diaper and a crown.
Instead of all that, it’s a moment that seems to come at the end of the world. A makeshift raft drifts on the oceanic surface of a flood, carrying a couple of vampiresses and a piano. The instrument is out of tune, but they play some music by Schubert anyway. Eventually the keys take over, pressing themselves as the women look out toward an uncertain future.
Is it a statement about the power of art, or about its futility? Probably both, but it made me think, above all, about its necessity: the creative drive that gives a work like Annea Lockwood’s “Piano Drowning” its urgency, with a musician defiantly playing the instrument while it slowly sinks; or that motivates a famous Bertolt Brecht poem supposing there will be singing in dark times, “about the dark times.”
If only that bit of apocalyptic Schubert came earlier than the last minutes of “Monster’s Paradise,” which is finishing its premiere run at the Hamburg State Opera this week before traveling to the Zurich Opera House next month. Everything that precedes the scene is a fascinating but frustrating mess, brilliantly crafted yet grasping at topical satire in an age when news tends to move faster than comedy.
New operas, at least those commissioned on the level of a major institution, are not really equipped to comment on the news. These works are developed long before they premiere, so “Monster’s Paradise” is a product of the Biden years, more a response to the first Trump presidency and slogans like “Stop the steal!” than anything that has happened recently.
It is in some ways prophetic. And certain characters, like a pair of deranged Mickey Mouse sycophants (excellently sung by the countertenors Andrew Watts and Eric Jurenas), hint at observations about tyranny broader than President Trump. Still, the opera’s obsession with entropy was resonant when I saw it; earlier that day Friedrich Merz, the chancellor of Germany, had said in a speech, “The international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed.” Maybe it also isn’t a stretch to caricature a Trump-like leader with a crown when the president is now posting memes of that himself.
But how will the opera read in a year, in a month even? This art form can certainly be political, though it is often less successful or lasting when it has the blunt, reactive sensibility of protest signs and bumper stickers. Luigi Nono’s combative “Intolleranza 1960” is mostly a curiosity today. Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” a resistance tale for any age, endures.
There are elements of timelessness in “Monster’s Paradise.” Its leads are Vampi and Bampi, vampiresses who, in this Tobias Kratzer production, are doppelgängers of Jelinek and Neuwirth, commenting on world events from above and afar, like the Norns in Wagner’s “Ring.” (They are played by two pairs of performers: the operatic singers Sarah Defrise and Kristina Stanek, and the occasionally singing actors Sylvie Rohrer and Ruth Rosenfeld.) And the role of a giant monster named Gorgonzilla (not to be confused with Godzilla, though at times it is called “Gott Zilla,” German for “God Zilla”) is plucked from the annals of immortal pop culture.
But the things Vampi and Bampi observe could have been taken at random from headlines and memes. There are references to artificial intelligence; a lamp in the oval-shaped office of the King-President is just a woman standing still, light coming down from a wide-brimmed hat like those worn by Melania Trump; the tyrannical leader, who gets around by golf cart and chugs bottles of Diet Coke, rules as if judging a reality show.
If that sounds like a lot, “Monster’s Paradise” is really a lot. Jelinek’s libretto, Neuwirth’s score and Kratzer’s direction are whirlpools of cultural history, and anything is bound to surface and disappear within seconds. To mention just a few: Miss Piggy wielding an assault rifle, rampaging Kermit the Frogs, Disney princesses dressed as cheerleaders, a chorus of zombies, video projections of a goddess played by Charlotte Rampling.
Jelinek surrounds the King-President with loaded words like “Kampf” (as in “Mein Kampf”) and “führen” (as in the Führer), but she also invokes the idealism of Schiller and Beethoven as Bampi shouts, “Seid umschlungen, Millionen!” (“Be embraced, you millions!”), from the “Ode to Joy.” At her least artful, she has Gorgonzilla say the phrase “not my president”; at her most strangely inspired, she has Rampling’s goddess intone soothing platitudes along the lines of “It’s not the worst as long as it’s said this is the worst.”
The prevailing aesthetic of Kratzer’s production is trash, but smart trash, and the same could be said of Neuwirth’s music. It doesn’t discriminate between high and low culture, with echoes of the classical canon, avant-gardism and rock, sometimes dizzyingly layered, as if hearing Netflix, Spotify and TikTok all at once. Luciano Berio was a defining composer of the information age; Neuwirth may be the same for our era of the attention economy.
In Hamburg, all this has been handled deftly, with subtle control by the conductor Titus Engel and with bravery by the cast. The baritone Georg Nigl tosses off swinging, sliding notes as the King-President (a role like someone out of “Wozzeck” on stimulants) while playing his tie, a washboard percussion instrument. Gorgonzilla (Anna Clementi, whose voice is deepened and distorted by live electronics) also has a signature sound, wielding Kagura bells and declaiming in the style of Noh theater.
Taken individually, all these elements of “Monster’s Paradise” are interesting, but together they aren’t quite entertaining, or even provocative. Every scene is too long, and the night I attended, the audience barely laughed at the political satire. And why should they, when it’s just an exaggerated version of the news, and when mocking humor isn’t much of a weapon against an administration whose vice president dressed as a meme of himself for Halloween?
It may be that the years it takes to create an opera provide a helpful distance from world events, no matter how fast they spin toward mayhem. That is why Schubert’s music at the end of “Monster’s Paradise” is so moving. The flood, a kind of equalizing force, makes everything that came before seem pointless. Time can work in similar ways. And as the waters recede, we still have art.
Joshua Barone is an editor for The Times covering classical music and dance. He also writes criticism about classical music and opera.
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