Eighteen opera-goers treated for severe nausea after opera of live sex, nuns and blood

Sancta Staatsoper Stuttgart. Picture: Youtube

By Will Padfield

Naked nuns, live sex and real blood. If you were expecting a civilised night at the opera, you would be forgiven for wondering if you had got the right venue...

Eighteen audience members required medical treatment after being faced with naked roller-skating nuns, real blood and a handful of explicit lesbian sex scenes during an opera performance in Stuttgart, Germany.

Sancta, a work by Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger, combines Paul Hindemith’s one act opera Sancta Susanna with elements of the Catholic liturgy to create a radical vision of the Holy Mass ritual.

For many, the opera was so alarming that they had to be treated for severe nausea, and three cases required a doctor to be called to help.

“On Saturday we had eight and on Sunday we had 10 people who had to be looked after by our visitor service,” said the opera’s spokesperson, Sebastian Ebling, after the performances that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse and both fake and real blood. 

Trailer: SANCTA | Staatsoper Stuttgart

Florentina Holzinger – the work’s creator – has made a name for herself as someone with a penchant for pushing boundaries to the extreme, with a strong emphasis on reimagining different modes of female representation.

Paul Hindemith’s opera provided the perfect vehicle for Holzinger, as the original work itself was so scandalous that it prompted Karl Grunsky, a contemporary critic, to write that the performance “signifies a desecration of our cultural institutions.” Pretty impressive, considering a typical performance of the one-act work lasts only around 30 minutes.

There have been over 25 revivals of the original opera since its Frankfurt premiere in 1922, but in Sancta, Holzinger takes the themes of Hindemith’s opera and ratchets them up to a whole new level.

"We recommend that all audience members once again very carefully read the warnings so they know what to expect,” Ebling told the Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspaper. “If you have questions, speak to the visitor service,” Ebling added. “And when in doubt during the performance, it might help to avert your gaze.”

With a strict age restriction of 18 and warnings about the graphic context, audiences should be prepared for a wild night which makes Tosca look like an episode of Father Brown.

Paul Hindemith. Picture: Getty

A new piece by Chopin has been discovered after almost 200 years

28 October 2024, 13:09 | Updated: 29 October 2024, 10:53

Chopin. Picture: Alamy

By Will Padfield

Star pianist Lang Lang has given the first performance of the previously unheard Chopin waltz. 

An unknown waltz by Frédéric Chopin has been discovered in a library in New York, leading to an outpouring of excitement across the classical music world.

According to the New York Times, Robinson McClellan was sorting through a collection of cultural memorabilia in the vault of the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan when he found a pockmarked manuscript the size of an index card with a distinctive name written on the top write corner: Chopin.

He shared a photo of his discovery with Jeffrey Kallberg, a leading Chopin scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

“My jaw dropped,” Kallberg told the Times. “I knew I had never seen this before.” 

After a thorough analysis of the paper, ink, handwriting and musical style, the Morgan Museum has concluded that the work is indeed an unknown waltz by the great Polish composer. The momentous discovery is the first of its kind in more than half a century.

Frederic Chopin by Wodzinska. Picture: Alamy

As reported in the New York Times, the manuscript is dated between 1830 and 1835, when Chopin was in his early 20s, and the music differs in many ways from the composer’s usual style.

Though believed to be complete, the work is shorter than Chopin’s other waltzes – only 48 measures long with a repeat, or about 80 seconds. The piece, in the key of A minor, has unusual dynamic markings, including a triple forte, signifying maximum volume, near the start.

Star pianist Lang Lang has given the first performance of the work. Picture: Getty

The star pianist Lang Lang, who has recently recorded the waltz for the Times at Steinway Hall in Manhattan has said the work felt like Chopin to him. The jarring opening, he said, evokes the harsh winters of the Polish countryside.

“This is not the most complicated music by Chopin,” he told the publication, “but it is one of the most authentic Chopin styles that you can imagine.”

Watch the first performance via The New York Times here.